I am blessed to own a really nice car. And I like to keep it clean, which, living in the mountains, can be something of a challenge. So, a couple of years ago, I joined one of those car washes where you pay a monthly fee and can wash your vehicle as often as you like. That's where I met Kyle. Kyle (not his real name) is the attendant most days when I go. He routinely works twelve-hour days, often seven days a week. Kyle is my friend. He's 40 years old, originally from northern Iran, and a member of the Chaldean Catholic Church. Eight years ago, he legally immigrated to America with his wife and children. But there's a part of his story that doesn't come up in casual conversation. Before coming here, Kyle witnessed the horrors of religious extremism firsthand. Two of his brothers and a cousin were beheaded by radical Islamists because they were considered infidels. Read that again. Two brothers. A cousin. Three members of his family murdered for what they believed. Over the past two years, Kyle and I have had many conversations about life in the Middle East, religious persecution, and the circumstances that eventually brought his family to America. I've learned a great deal from him. And some of what I've learned is profoundly disturbing. Kyle describes a world in which religious identity can mean the difference between life and death. A world in which certain extremist movements regard peaceful coexistence with people of other faiths not as a virtue, but as a betrayal of their ideology. I once asked him whether showing extraordinary kindness to one of these extremists might change that person's attitude toward Christians. His answer stopped me cold. He told me that, in his experience, even saving such a person's life might not overcome an ideological commitment to killing those regarded as infidels. Kyle is particularly troubled by what he perceives as a growing willingness among some Americans to romanticize extremist movements whose actual beliefs and practices they know very little about. More than once, he's looked at me with genuine alarm and said, "They have no idea what they are embracing. They want to kill all of you." Now, there's an important distinction here, one Kyle himself has helped me understand. Islam is a religion practiced by nearly two billion people around the world, while Islamism is a political ideology that seeks to organize government and society according to particular interpretations of Islam whose most violent expressions have inflicted unimaginable suffering, including upon countless Muslims who reject their extremism. Those distinctions matter but so does the testimony of people who have lived under the shadow of those violent movements. And that brings me to the reason I'm writing this. We Americans have an extraordinary luxury. We can debate ideologies from the comfort of a country in which most of us have never experienced their worst consequences. We can romanticize revolutions we've never lived through and embrace slogans without understanding their origins or implications. We can defend political and religious movements without ever having met the people who fled from them. And sometimes, I fear, we mistake our distance from brutality for evidence that the brutality has been exaggerated. So here's my suggestion: Before you make up your mind about religious extremism, talk to someone who has survived it. Before you romanticize communism, talk to someone who escaped its repression in the Soviet Union, China, or elsewhere. Not just someone who has studied these things…someone who has lived them. Listen to their stories. Ask questions. Be willing to discover that the world is considerably more complicated, and sometimes more frightening, than the narratives we find most comfortable. And remember that the people who have escaped persecution are not merely statistics in somebody else's political argument. They are our neighbors. They work in our communities. They raise their children alongside ours. They contribute to the country that gave them refuge. Sometimes they work twelve-hour days, seven days a week, at the car wash down the road. And sometimes, if we're willing to listen, they have something important to teach us. My friend Kyle certainly has. I went there to get my car washed. I didn't expect to get an education.