Six days after the election I sat sipping red wine in an apartment in downtown Grand Rapids, overlooking the B.O.B. You know, normal college senior stuff.

I’m from the glorious, north-east, ivy-league, elite-liberal bastion that is New York, and I was talking to my friend Janine who has lived in Michigan, Florida and Colorado, and whose mom grew up on a farm in the Great Plains. Safe to say we have some philosophical differences.

I stopped myself from talking about politics for as long as possible, which was about five minutes, before we got into it. I started talking about how I couldn’t understand how the middle of the country could look past sexist, racist, xenophobic rhetoric and vote for Trump?

Janine looked at me with a mixture of pity and excitement like she was about to destroy my echo chamber. “Those people have seen their jobs bleed away thanks to trade deals that the democrats have signed like NAFTA,” which was actually a brainchild of Ronald Reagan, but I digress, “and they don’t know what else to do. They’re losing their livelihood.”

That I could understand and move past. My next question was how could people vote for an objectively worse candidate in Donald Trump, who displayed a lack of experience, understanding and knowledge about governance and the world in general, over perhaps the most qualified candidate of all time, and certainly in recent memory?

Janine’s answer was that people thought their beliefs and values were being threatened, so couldn’t be expected to react rationally. She referenced the North Carolina bathroom law and I almost lost it. There is no statistical evidence that shows an increased risk of sexual assault in places that let people use the bathroom corresponding to the gender they identify with.

I, of course, brought this up quickly, and I will never forget Janine’s response. “It doesn’t matter, people are scared.” That knocked me flat on my back. The idea of favoring a policy with no supporting statistical evidence goes against how I believe humans were meant to act.

I grew up in a non-denominational church that was big on Jesus but not so much on theological doctrine, ritual or tradition, so I didn’t know the CRC buzzwords when I came to Calvin. At the end of my four years I still don’t put a lot of stock in these technical ideas, but one that has stuck with me is the imago dei. In my mind, the “image of God” that resides in humanity is rationality. Our ability to reason, put aside feeling and act objectively is what separates humans from animals, that are slaves to their instincts and desires.

Yes, some Trump supporters voted for him rationally. They did a cost benefit analysis like the rest of us and said: “I agree with his policies more than I do with Hillary Clinton’s, so I am going to vote for him.” I don’t agree with this, but I can respect this. What I can’t respect is people who voted irrationally out of fear of an “other,” an outside group like Muslims or illegal immigrants that Trump intimated were coming to destroy our way of life.

Being an illegal immigrant doesn’t make you a rapist or a murderer. America and the West are not in a cultural war with Islam; the two cultures are not mutually exclusive. To think so is irrational and irresponsible, just like voting for Trump out of fear.