There Are No Churches Inside Google

How a 2020 College Paper Became a Lens for Understanding Human Trust

This idea didn’t begin as a philosophy. It began as homework.

In 2020, I wrote a paper for a cybersecurity course — one of those assignments you expect to finish, submit, and forget. But this one didn’t fade. It lodged itself somewhere deeper, because it was the first time a technical model mapped cleanly onto something I’d lived long before I ever touched a network diagram.

The paper was about Zero Trust.
The memory it pulled from was about church.

Growing up, church was one of the few places where trust wasn’t earned — it was assumed. The doors stayed open, the smiles came easy, and the entire environment ran on a quiet premise: the people inside these walls mean well. As a kid, I believed that. Most kids do.

But sanctuaries are also where the long game thrives.

I learned early — painfully early — that not everyone who walks through an open door arrives with good intentions. And the people who do harm often rely on the fact that no one is looking for it. That realization didn’t feel philosophical at the time. It felt like a breach.

And to be clear: churches didn’t fail me. That one church did.
Churches today — including the ones my parents attend — have vetting processes, background checks, and structured safeguards that simply didn’t exist when I was a kid. My experience was specific, not universal.

Years later, when I encountered Google’s BeyondCorp model, something clicked. Here was a system that refused to build sanctuaries. No implied safe zones. No “trusted” insiders. No assumption that proximity equals safety. Every request, every device, every packet treated as potentially hostile — not out of paranoia, but out of clarity.

It was the opposite of the church mindset.
And it made sense.

Google’s approach wasn’t to build a taller wall or a stronger perimeter. They did something counterintuitive: they removed the idea of a “safe inside” entirely. A YubiKey isn’t just a second factor — it’s a reminder:

You don’t get to assume safety here. You prove it.

Forget your key? You don’t authenticate.
Not because Google is cruel, but because the system refuses to make exceptions based on sentiment. Zero Trust is the opposite of “I know this person, let them in.” It’s the opposite of the sanctuary model.

It’s a system built for the world as it is, not the world as we wish it were.

Segmentation reinforces that philosophy. One compromised device doesn’t cascade into a full breach because nothing inside the network implicitly trusts its neighbor. Every node is wary. Every connection is interrogated. Every assumption is challenged.

It’s the architectural equivalent of learning — painfully — that danger doesn’t always announce itself.

Inventorying everything, authenticating everything, dropping anything that doesn’t meet the criteria… it’s not elegant. It’s not frictionless. It’s not “efficient” in the way humans instinctively crave. But it’s effective. And effectiveness is what you choose when you stop pretending the world is safer than it is.

Zero Trust isn’t cynical. It’s honest.

And honesty, especially about human nature, is uncomfortable. We want shortcuts. We want to believe good intentions are enough. We want sanctuaries that stay sanctuaries forever. But systems — whether networks or communities — don’t stay safe because we hope they will. They stay safe because we design them to withstand the reality of human behavior.

That 2020 paper was the first time I realized that security architecture and human behavior share the same blind spots. The same misplaced trust. The same desire for simplicity over accuracy. The same vulnerability to the long game.

Dr. Seuss said it better than any whitepaper ever could:
“Step with care and great tact; remember that life’s a great balancing act.”

Zero Trust is that balancing act.
And so is growing up.

Biblical Notes & Context

This reflection isn’t meant to vilify churches or people of faith. The church I grew up in operated in a different era, before many of the vetting processes and safety protocols that are common today. My experience was specific, not universal.

And the core idea — that trust should be paired with discernment — is actually deeply biblical:

• Matthew 10:16 — Jesus instructs his followers to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves,” a balance of openness and caution.
• Proverbs 14:15 — The prudent “give thought to their steps,” rather than assuming everything is safe by default.
• 1 John 4:1 — Believers are told to “test the spirits,” not to accept every claim or person without examination.
• Acts 20:29 — Paul warns that harmful people can enter even trusted communities, urging vigilance.

These passages aren’t about fear — they’re about discernment.
They echo the same principle Zero Trust is built on: good intentions don’t replace good safeguards.