Easter is mere days away, and millions of Americans are busy celebrating their Lord and Savior. They’re circulating images of him at the Last Supper, seated at the center of the table where Jesus sits in every version of that painting anyone has ever seen. They’re sharing paintings of him ascending into heaven, robed in light, angels arrayed around him. They’re offering prayers of gratitude for his sacrifice, for the wounds he absorbed and the persecution he endured so that they might be spared. They call him anointed. They call him sent.

And the candles they’re lighting have his face on them instead of Christ’s.

I’ve gone back and forth as to whether I should publish this. The moment someone like me argues that MAGA Christianity isn’t real Christianity, half the room simply checks out. I mean, I understand why — it reads like I’m running the same plays but from the liberal end of the field, swapping out proof texts and calling it theology. It’s a bit unseemly.

But I’ve been watching this movement for years now, and I can’t call it Christianity-gone-sideways anymore. What I’m seeing is an entirely different religion, one that has borrowed Christianity’s vocabulary and its imagery and its songs so completely that the theft is almost invisible from the inside. Just this week, with Pete Hegseth standing at a Pentagon podium asking God, in Jesus’s name, for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,” for “wicked souls delivered to eternal damnation,” the borrowed clothing finally slipped, and what was underneath looked nothing like the faith I recognize.

When a movement takes Christianity’s liturgies while hollowing out its substance, the biblical writers have a word for it: idolatry. Yes, that sounds like a flannel-board Sunday school lesson about ancient people bowing before golden statues, but the biblical understanding actually runs much deeper than that, and cuts closer to home. Idolatry is what happens when you give your deepest loyalty to something that isn't God, and then call that thing God anyway. It warps your sense of who you are, what history is for, and what you owe your enemies. The prophet Isaiah mocked the whole business with real bite, describing a man who cuts down a tree, burns half of it to keep warm, carves the other half into an idol, and then bows before something he built with his own hands. The man’s blind to what he’s done, and that’s Isaiah’s whole point. Idolatry works precisely because the idolater never recognizes it as such.

Donald Trump has told white evangelical audiences that he is “taking the bullets, taking the arrows — I’m taking ‘em for you.” He’s using the logic of substitutionary atonement (the theological claim that an innocent person absorbs the punishment everyone else deserved) and he’s used it in those terms more than once. He’s shared posts comparing his legal troubles to Christ’s passion, while fans share images on social media depicting him beside Jesus at the Last Supper or surrounded by angels and ascending into the clouds. His face even appears on prayer candles sold by the thousands. At the Liberty Ball following his second inauguration, a worship artist painted his portrait live while the crowd sang hymns, lifting her arms between brushstrokes as though asking God to guide her hand. Millions of people watched and wept. For them, it was worship, and not in some loose metaphorical sense.

The movement built around that worship has everything a religion needs: a vision of restored paradise (a golden age stolen by enemies, waiting to be reclaimed), sacred sites and martyrs (January 6 chief among them), and now a holy war, prosecuted in the Middle East in Jesus’s name by a Defense Secretary who has declared “no quarter” for America’s enemies, a declaration the Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual explicitly prohibits, and who asked the American people to pray for their soldiers “in the name of Jesus Christ.” It has a savior and a gospel and a cross. What it doesn’t have, and what it has never had, is Christ.

If you want to see how far the distance is between Pete Hegseth’s god and the real one, Palm Sunday is where it becomes impossible to miss.

The crowd that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem was desperate for a military deliverer. They’d lived under Roman occupation long enough to imagine liberation only in violent terms, and they lined the road and waved branches and shouted the old words for national salvation. Jesus rode in on a donkey, pointedly, in a deliberate refusal of the warhorse everyone expected. Then he went to the Temple and wept in grief for the city that would call for his execution by Friday. “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace.” He’s mourning for the very people who are about to kill him.

Jesus carried that posture all the way to the cross, where humanity poured its worst onto an innocent person and he absorbed it without even a word of retribution. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” Jesus prayed while being nailed to wood. Hegseth’s prayer, meanwhile, asked for wicked souls to be delivered to damnation, and for enemies to be shown no mercy. Every word of it inverts Christ’s prayer.

Pope Leo XIV seemed to have the same thought. Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war,” he said, “but rejects them.”

I already hear the pushback, so let’s just address it outright. Yes, the Psalms contain violent language. Yes, David prayed against his enemies. Yes, Hegseth quoted Scripture directly (Psalm 18: “I pursued my enemies and overtook them.”) Fair enough. But the person Hegseth claims to be praying to isn’t David, it’s Jesus, and Jesus was explicit about how we’re to treat our enemies.

In the Sermon on the Mount, he says: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” And then he explains why, in the very next breath, because God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” To be like God, which is what the whole biblical tradition holds up as the point of human life, means extending grace to people who haven’t earned it and may never return it. Blessed are the merciful. Blessed are the peacemakers.

There is no road from the Sermon on the Mount to “no mercy.” You simply can’t get there from here. You have to leave the building entirely, find a different building, and put a cross on top of it. Which, frankly, is what MAGA has done.

The Jesus of the gospels rode a donkey into Jerusalem while the crowd begged for a warrior. He wept over the people who would kill him and prayed forgiveness while they drove the nails in. The god Pete Hegseth addressed at the Pentagon this week asked for every round to find its mark.

They are different gods. And you can only serve one.

Easter is less than a week away. The whole liturgical claim of the season is that death doesn’t get the last word and that it’s possible to start again even after the worst thing has already happened. Christians have believed that for two thousand years. If it’s true, then it’s true for you, too. If you’ve spent years inside a faith that taught you to worship power and call it Jesus, the tomb is open. You can walk out.

That might mean leaving a church, or it might mean staying in one and fighting for it. It will almost certainly mean grief, because letting go of a god you loved, even a false one, costs something. But the Jesus who wept over Jerusalem is still there, waiting on the donkey while the crowd screams for war, mourning for the people who don’t yet know what they’ve lost. He’s always been there. And if this is the week you find your way back to him, you won’t be the first person to do it on Easter.

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I love this country. I feel a need to state that plainly, because what follows will sound to some people like I don’t.

I love the idea of America. I love what she has declared herself to be, even and especially when she fails to live up to it. The promise, though, was always aspirational. “All men are created equal” was written by a slaveholder who went home each evening to a plantation worked by people he owned; the Constitution that enshrined liberty counted Black bodies as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional apportionment; and the country that defeated fascism abroad came home and told Black soldiers they couldn’t drink from the same water fountains as the people they’d fought beside.

None of this is news, and none of it negates the promise. It complicates it, the way any honest reckoning complicates the things we love. I don’t love my country less for knowing its failures; I love it the way you love a person whose potential you can see clearly and whose self-destruction you refuse to accept. That kind of love isn’t comfortable, though, and it doesn’t get to look away. It demands something of you. It demands honesty.

So here’s the honest part: what I find most remarkable about the American experiment isn’t where we’ve succeeded; it’s where we’ve failed again and again and kept correcting. Slowly, usually. Reluctantly, nearly always. And almost never without the people most affected by the failure having to drag the rest of us forward.

The Thirteenth Amendment didn’t arrive because our country had a change of heart; it arrived because nearly 700,000 people died in a war and a president was willing to spend political capital on an outcome most of the nation wasn’t ready for. Women didn’t receive the vote because men suddenly discovered their conscience; they won it because women organized, marched, were arrested, went on hunger strikes, and were force-fed in prison until the moral weight of their suffering became heavier than the convenience of their silence. The Civil Rights Act didn’t pass because white America was persuaded by argument; it passed because Black Americans sat at lunch counters and were beaten on bridges and filled jail cells until the evening news made it impossible for the rest of the country to pretend nothing was happening.

Every expansion of American liberty has followed the same pattern: people in power resist, people without power insist, and the promise inches closer to meaning what it says. Love demanded each of those generations’ presence in the gap between who we are and who we said we’d be.

However, this pattern doesn’t only move in one direction. The arc may bend toward justice because people bend it, but when they stop, or when fear overtakes the bending, the arc can snap back with devastating speed.

We are living now through one of those snapbacks.

I don’t believe most of the people driving this are evil, but I do think they’re afraid. Afraid of an economy that no longer guarantees what their parents had, and a culture shifting faster than their frameworks can accommodate. The world they understood is changing, and the certainties that held it together are dissolving, and that’s terrifying. Fear is a legitimate emotion, and I won’t pretend I don’t understand it. I grew up conservative and Republican in Ohio; I know what it feels like to watch the cultural ground shift beneath your feet and conclude that something precious is being taken from you.

But fear, left unexamined, becomes cruelty. It rarely happens on purpose, and almost never with full awareness of what it’s doing, but the result is reliable. When people are frightened enough, they will accept almost any target for their anxiety, and the people most often chosen as targets are the ones with the least power to fight back. This has always been true. It was true when Japanese Americans were interned during World War II, not because they posed any real threat but because fear needed a face and a body to contain it. It was true when McCarthy convinced half the country that their neighbors were secret communists. It was true when states passed anti-sodomy laws that criminalized the private lives of gay Americans well into the twenty-first century, long after most of the country had stopped caring who loved whom.

Fear asks nothing of us except surrender. Love asks everything. And right now, love is asking us to pay attention.

Nearly 23,000 books have been pulled from public school libraries since 2021, most of them for the crime of acknowledging that race, sexuality, and gender exist in forms that make some of us uncomfortable. Utah and South Carolina have created statewide “no read” lists that ban titles from every public school at once. The federal government removed nearly 600 books from schools on military bases under executive orders targeting what it called “un-American” thinking, including Maya Angelou’s classic I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Federal workers have been fired simply for having once held positions with the words “diversity” or “equity” in their titles, even after they’d moved to entirely different roles.

Elsewhere, ICE has rescinded the longstanding policy that kept immigration agents out of schools, churches, and hospitals, and student absences in California’s Central Valley spiked 22 percent after raids swept through farming communities where parents were afraid to drive their children to class. In Charlotte, North Carolina, more than 30,000 students stayed home in a single day while a federal enforcement operation swept through their city. Thirty-two people died in ICE custody in 2025 alone, the agency’s deadliest year since 2004.

And then there’s Kansas, which may be the most precise illustration of what this snapback looks like when it reaches the level of individual lives.

Today, transgender people across the state are receiving letters from the Kansas Division of Vehicles informing them that their driver’s licenses are no longer valid. Not suspended or under review; invalid. Effective immediately, with no grace period, because the state legislature didn’t bother to include one.

Senate Bill 244, which Governor Laura Kelly vetoed and which the Republican supermajority overrode, requires all Kansas-issued identification documents to reflect sex assigned at birth. It retroactively invalidates every gender marker change made since 2007, revoking roughly 1,700 driver’s licenses overnight and nullifying just as many birth certificates. The bill was rushed through using a procedural maneuver called “gut and go” that bypassed nearly all public input on its key provisions. The people most affected by the law had almost no opportunity to speak before it was passed.

Revocation, though, is only the beginning. The law also creates what critics have called a “bathroom bounty” system, deputizing ordinary citizens as enforcers of restroom use in government buildings. Anyone who believes a transgender person used the wrong facility can file a complaint and collect a thousand dollars in damages. As one trans woman in Wichita told reporters: “It turns Kansas residents into Dog the Bounty Hunter. So now I have to worry about people watching me walk into the ladies’ room.”

Take a moment and consider what this means in the texture of someone’s Thursday morning. A woman in Topeka who has lived as herself for twenty years, whose coworkers know her, whose neighbors know her, whose children call her Mom, now carries an ID that says she’s someone else. Every traffic stop becomes a potential confrontation. Every job application becomes a forced outing. She can’t renew her car registration without presenting a document that contradicts the person standing at the counter. And if she’s pulled over without a valid license, she faces a class B misdemeanor carrying up to six months in jail (in a state that requires its county jails to house inmates by sex assigned at birth).

If you love this country, you have to be willing to look at that and call it what it is. It’s not governance. It is the machinery of erasure, dressed in bureaucratic language and given the force of law.

Love demands more than grief at these sort of injustices, though. It demands we remember that history cuts both ways.

Every one of these snapbacks has eventually broken. Japanese internment ended, and decades later the country apologized and paid reparations, inadequate though they were. McCarthyism collapsed under the weight of its own cruelty when Joseph Welch looked at the senator on live television and asked, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” Anti-sodomy laws fell in 2003 when the Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that the state has no business in the bedrooms of consenting adults. Marriage equality, which seemed politically impossible in 2004 when state after state passed constitutional amendments against it, became the law of the land eleven years later. The distance between impossible and inevitable turned out to be shorter than anyone imagined.

They broke because people did what love demanded of them, and what love has always demanded: they showed up. They showed up when it was inconvenient and when it seemed pointless. They sat at counters and marched into fire hoses. They came out to their families over Thanksgiving dinner. They refused, in a thousand small ways, to let the distance between America’s promise and America’s reality become something they could live with.

And you’ll find it happening right now, if you look closely enough. Thirteen states have passed anti-book-ban laws since 2023, protecting librarians and codifying the right to read. Teachers in Chicago and Denver and Charlotte are refusing to hand student records to immigration agents, putting their own jobs on the line to protect children in their care. A teacher in San Diego told reporters she’d sent three students to mental health counselors in a single week because they were terrified their parents would be deported; she kept showing up the next week, and the week after that. In Topeka, the Reverend Dr. Mandy Todd and Rabbi Moti Rieber stood together outside the Kansas Senate chamber in protest of SB 244. In New Jersey, a librarian named Martha Hickson was called a pedophile at a school board meeting, had her car vandalized, received death threats…and kept fighting until her state passed a Freedom to Read Act.

So this is how the arc bends and we become who we promised to be: through the accumulated weight of ordinary people who decide they aren’t willing to look away.

And what is it we’re showing up for? What’s on the other side of this, if we do the work?

I think about that sometimes, simply as an act of moral imagination. The kind that every generation before us needed in order to keep going.

The country we keep promising to be would be one where a woman in Topeka doesn’t have to choose between driving to work and risking arrest. Where a child in California’s Central Valley doesn’t stay home from school because her father is afraid to start the car. Where a librarian in New Jersey can protect a book without risking her family’s safety. Where the phrase “all men are created equal” isn’t an aspiration we shrug at but a debt we’re actively repaying.

It would be a country that tells the truth about its past and lets that truth make it more generous instead of more defensive. A country where fear doesn’t get to choose the targets, where difference is met with curiosity instead of legislation, and where we measure our greatness by how seriously we take the dignity of the most vulnerable among us.

We are not that country. Not yet. We have never been that country. And yet every generation has moved us closer, and every generation has done it the same way: by caring about this place enough to demand more of it.

Because still, after everything, we love her. Still, we show up. Still, America.

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There’s a seduction at work in white America, rarely named but widely felt. It promises meaning to those who feel forgotten, belonging to those who feel displaced, and righteousness to those who feel aggrieved. It takes the chaos of lives that haven’t gone the way anyone expected and offers a new story. And in that story, the seduced aren’t failing; they’re being targeted. They aren’t losing; they’re being robbed. They aren’t becoming obsolete; they’re being pushed out.

These two stories present starkly different realities to live inside. One is pure tragedy, while the other is persecution…and persecution comes with a community of fellow sufferers who see what you see and feel what you feel. It comes with both an enemy and a fight. It comes with grievance.

Grievance, in turn, reinforces belonging. There’s warmth in this circle, even if it’s warmth generated by friction against an outsider. Shared enemies bond people faster than shared hopes ever will. When you’re nursing the same wound and pointing at the same culprits, you don’t have to explain yourself. You’re understood.

Grievance also offers identity. When the old markers of who you are start slipping away, when your job and your town and your place in the culture no longer feel secure, grievance gives you something to hold onto. You know who you are by knowing who’s against you. You know your worth by knowing who’s trying to diminish it.

And grievance offers righteousness. Your anger stops feeling like a personal failing and starts feeling like a moral stance. You’re not bitter; you’re awake. You’re not resentful; you’re refusing to be silenced. The dopamine of righteous anger is neurologically and chemically real. Outrage activates us in ways that grief and self-examination simply don’t.

That, then, is the allure. And we have to understand this grievance isn’t borne from ignorance, nor malice. It’s a genuine offer of meaning, belonging, identity, and righteousness all rolled into one. And until we reckon with the truth of what that gives people, we’ll never understand why it’s so hard to let go of.

This sense of grievance also didn’t emerge from nothing. There’s a real wound underneath the weaponization, and it needs to be named.

Starting in the mid-1970s, the postwar social contract began to unravel. Wages decoupled from productivity, and union membership collapsed from a third of the workforce to less than ten percent today. Manufacturing jobs—the kind that let a high school graduate in Youngstown or Flint or rural Kentucky buy a house, raise a family, send kids to college, and retire with a pension—disappeared or moved overseas or got automated out of existence.

Then the communities built around those jobs hollowed out. Main streets died, and opioids filled the void. Life expectancy for white Americans without college degrees actually started declining, something almost unprecedented in a developed nation. Suicide, overdose, and alcohol-related liver failure all began trending upward. “Deaths of despair,” they called them.

By the numbers, real wages for non-college-educated men have essentially flatlined since the 1970s. Healthcare costs, housing costs, and education costs have all outpaced wage growth dramatically. The floor dropped out for millions of people, and the safety net that might have caught them had been systematically shredded ever since Reagan assured us that government was the problem. And we mustn’t let Democrats off the hook; the party's turn toward neoliberalism and credentialed technocracy in the 1990s left many of these same communities feeling abandoned by both sides, and made the racialized story even easier to sell.

This all hit white working-class communities hard, and it hit them in ways that felt like betrayal. They’d played by the rules, showed up, worked hard, didn’t complain too much…and then someone changed the rules. The American Dream, it turned out, had only been a limited-time offer.

Please understand that I’m not romanticizing this. Plenty of communities have suffered worse for longer with far fewer resources and far less attention. But suffering isn’t a competition. The sense that your children will have less than you did, that your hopes are unattainable and the future you’d planned is slipping away—those things are wounds. None of that makes anyone a hero, but it’s real, and it requires an explanation. The explanations on offer, however, are not created equal.

The first potential explanation is systemic: Deregulation gutted worker protections. Financialization rewarded shareholders over employees. Union-busting became standard corporate practice. Tax policy tilted toward capital and away from labor. Trade deals were negotiated by lobbyists who didn’t particularly care about workers in either country. Wealth concentrated at the top while wages stagnated at the bottom.

All of that is factual; it’s also abstract. It doesn’t give you anyone to blame. You can’t yell at financialization, or rough up a policy paper for your closed factory.

The second potential explanation is “other-ized”: Your jobs went to China. Your taxes go to welfare queens. Immigrants are undercutting your wages and stealing your jobs. Affirmative action gave your kid’s college spot to someone less qualified. The coastal elites care more about Black Lives Matter than about your dying town.

This explanation is simpler, more visceral, and, more importantly, it gives you a face. It gives you someone to point at, someone to curse at, someone to resent. It’s also, wouldn’t you know, the explanation that got funded by think tanks, political campaigns, and media empires with money to make and power to consolidate.

So how did we end up here? It was all part of the plan.

The so-called “Southern Strategy” wasn’t subtle. Richard Nixon and his strategists looked at the civil rights gains of the 1960s and saw an opportunity. White working-class voters, many of them former New Deal Democrats, were unsettled by integration, cultural changes, and a world that seemed to be leaving them behind. Instead of addressing their economic concerns directly, the strategy was to channel that anxiety into racial resentment and wed that resentment to the Republican Party.

Lee Atwater, one of Reagan’s key strategists, explained it with brutal honesty in a 1981 interview. “You start out in 1954 by saying, 'n*****, n*****, n*****.' By 1968 you can't say 'n*****'—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like ‘forced busing,’ ‘states' rights’ and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

LBJ, even while coming from the other side of the aisle, put it plainly: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

This was the misdirection. Real economic pain, caused by policies that favored the wealthy and powerful, got channeled into resentment toward Black people, immigrants, and the poor. The people who actually shipped jobs overseas, who actually busted unions and wrote the trade deals and the tax codes, funded the campaigns that taught white workers to blame their neighbors instead.

And it worked! Not because white workers are stupid; no, it worked because the racialized story was easier to feel, easier to act on, and because the people telling that story had access to airwaves and advertising budgets and political machines that the people telling the systemic story simply didn’t have.

But once grievance takes root, it’s genuinely hard to release. That’s simply how human psychology works.

There’s real relief in righteous anger. Sadness turns inward; anger turns outward and energizes. And there’s something darker: when people feel their worldview threatened, when the culture no longer reflects them back as central, it triggers existential dread. Psychologists call it mortality salience, which is a fancy name for the perception that your way of life, your people, and your story might not persist. Grievance defends against that terror. The alternative (that the world is moving on, and that your grandchildren will inherit something unrecognizable) is too frightening to sit with.

Our chosen communities—especially in this brave new world of social media and influence—reinforce the trap. When everyone around us shares the same narrative, questioning it means risking that belonging. The social cost of rethinking is enormous.

All of that is to say: changing a mind is not as simple as winning an argument. We can’t just throw facts at people and hope they’ll “see the light.” You can show people economic data demonstrating that immigrants don’t actually take their jobs, that Black families receive less government assistance per capita than white families, that the trade deals were signed by politicians they voted for, and it simply doesn’t matter. Grievance isn’t primarily an intellectual position; it’s an emotional and social and psychological one. The question isn’t whether the facts support it but what people would have to feel if they let it go.

And what they’d have to feel is grief. Real grief, for real losses. Grief for the town that died, the job that disappeared, and the future that will never come. Grief without an enemy, without anyone to blame. That’s so much harder than anger.

And let’s be honest, churches have played an important role in this, too, and particularly those of a white evangelical bent. Not all of them; certainly, there are those who've fought this current, sometimes suffering mightily for it. But enough have capitulated that the pattern demands examination. So, just how did these churches become complicit in this? How did a faith tradition that worships a brown-skinned refugee executed by the state become the spiritual home of white grievance politics?

The answer is that certain strains of American Christianity provided the perfect theological infrastructure for grievance to flourish.

The “prosperity gospel” laid the groundwork: if God blesses the faithful with material success, then material struggle must mean something. Either you lack faith, which is too painful to accept, or someone is blocking your blessing. The prosperity gospel created a theology where economic anxiety becomes spiritual warfare. Your financial struggles aren’t the result of policy decisions made by powerful people; they’re the result of spiritual enemies trying to steal what God promised you.

The persecution narrative, meanwhile, was already in place. White American evangelicalism has been cultivating a sense of embattlement for decades: the War on Christmas, the removal of prayer from schools, the secular humanist agenda, etc., etc. Long before economic anxiety reached its current pitch, churches were teaching their members that Christians were the real victims in American society, that their faith put them at odds with a hostile culture, and that faithfulness would cost them.

This was always somewhat strange given that Christians have been and remain the overwhelming majority in America. Christian politicians dominate government, churches are tax-exempt, and “In God We Trust” is even printed on our currency. But theological narratives needn’t be accurate to be powerful. When economic decline arrived, the persecution framework was ready and waiting. It just needed new content.

So, Christian nationalism stepped in to provide that. The idea that America was founded as a Christian nation, and that it has a special covenant with God, makes any loss of cultural centrality feel like cosmic theft. If America is ours by divine right, then demographic change is an assault on God’s plan. If the founders were doing God’s work, then those who want to reinterpret or move past the founding vision aren’t political opponents; they’re enemies of the faith.

Christian nationalism gave white grievance a sacred canopy. It transformed political resentment into holy obligation and made the defense of white Christian cultural dominance feel like faithfulness to God.

The theology of spiritual warfare, in turn, personalized the enemies. When you believe that the world is a battleground between God and Satan, and that demonic forces are actively working against the faithful, political opponents stop being fellow citizens with different views and become agents of the Enemy. They become evil incarnate. Compromise becomes capitulation to darkness, and coexistence becomes collaboration with the demonic.

This is why people who claim to follow Jesus can support policies of stunning cruelty toward immigrants, toward the poor, and toward the vulnerable, and feel righteous while doing it. The theology has sacralized the grievance. The resentment has been baptized.

And now we’ve arrived at the place where all of this cashes out: a political arena where economics became identity, identity became politics, and politics has become a kind of religion unto itself.

For millions of white evangelicals, politics now performs the functions that faith used to serve. It provides meaning, community, identity, moral clarity, a narrative of good versus evil, and a vision of salvation and damnation. It has its saints and martyrs, its sacred texts, and its rituals and revivals.

And into this environment walked Donald Trump. Trump didn’t create white grievance, to be sure, but he propelled himself to power by recognizing it, naming it, and offering himself as its vessel.

Where previous Republican candidates spoke in dog whistles and policy abstractions, Trump spoke plainly: You’re being screwed. They’re laughing at you. They think you’re deplorable. I’m the only one who sees you, and I’m your revenge.

His isn’t a policy platform; it’s an emotional transaction. And it works because the grievance was already there, already theologized, already sacralized, and just waiting for someone shameless enough to say it out loud.

Trump amplifies grievance. Every rally, every post, and every manufactured outrage reinforces the sense that the faithful are under siege, that enemies are everywhere, and that only he stands between his people and annihilation. The persecution narrative requires constant feeding, so he provides constant enemies: the media, immigrants, Democrats, RINOs, the deep state, trans people, universities, prosecutors. The list regenerates endlessly because the grievance can never actually be satisfied, only stoked.

This, you see, is why his legal troubles strengthen him with his base. Every indictment is proof of persecution. The worse things get, the more it confirms the narrative. If they’re coming after him this hard, he must be a threat to them. If he’s a threat to them, he must be on our side.

This is all genuinely dangerous for democracy, because democracy requires certain baseline assumptions to function. It requires believing that we share a country with people who disagree with us. It requires accepting that losing an election isn’t an existential catastrophe, and that institutions can mediate disputes fairly. But grievance politics corrodes all of that.

If elections you lose are “stolen,” then only your victories are legitimate. If institutions that rule against you are “corrupt,” then the only trustworthy institution is the leader himself.

What we are watching now, in real time, is a textbook example of how democracies die. Tanks in the street were never required…it’s all just a slow hollowing out of the norms and mutual trust that make self-governance possible. When politics becomes apocalyptic, and every election is a battle between light and darkness, the whole experiment becomes untenable.

For many white evangelicals, Trump has been theologized in ways that make this even more intractable. He’s been cast as Cyrus, the flawed vessel God uses to protect His people. He’s the last line of defense against an America where Christians are persecuted, children are corrupted, and everything our grandparents built is dismantled.

That framing turns political opposition into the ultimate battle. It turns questioning the leader into apostasy. It turns January 6th from a coup attempt into a righteous stand. When your politics has become your religion, you simply can’t afford to be wrong about it. The stakes are eternal.

This is how the seduction works, and it comes with a steep cost.

Grievance costs us the truth. When your sense of self depends on a particular narrative of persecution, facts that contradict that narrative become threatening. The capacity for honest self-examination, always fragile, becomes nearly impossible. You can’t ask “What if we’re wrong?” because being wrong would unravel absolutely everything.

Grievance costs us our neighbors. The tragic irony is that white working-class communities and communities of color share substantially overlapping economic interests. They’ve been hurt by the same policies, and the same concentration of wealth, and the same hollowing out of public investment. A multiracial working-class coalition would be politically formidable, which is precisely why so much money has been spent making sure it never forms. When Black and white farmers briefly united in the 1890s Populist movement, the response was Jim Crow, and a deliberate shattering of exactly the kind of cooperative alliance that might have demanded something different. Grievance served—and serves—as the wedge. As long as white workers can be convinced that their enemies are Black and brown, they won’t notice who’s actually picking their pockets.

Grievance costs us our souls. To live in a state of perpetual resentment is corrosive. It narrows the heart, and makes us smaller, meaner, and more afraid. It turns us into people who can watch children separated from their parents at the border and feel righteous about it. It transforms a faith that says “love your enemies” into permission to break them.

Grievance costs us the future. When all our energy goes into defending what we feel we’re losing, we have nothing left to build what might be possible. Grievance is fundamentally backward-looking: we want what we had; we want what they took. It has no vision for what could be, only resentment for what was lost.

And grievance, ultimately, doesn’t deliver what it promises. The meaning it offers is borrowed from the enemy and disappears when the enemy does. The identity it provides is rooted in fictions. The community it builds is bonded by anger, not love, which means it devours its own when enemies run short. The righteousness it offers is counterfeit; it satisfies in the moment, but is hollow at the core. Grievance promises to honor your pain, but exploits it instead.

So what breaks the cycle?

I don’t fully know. I don’t have a policy proposal that fixes this, or a magic five-step process that’ll make everything right. The forces that created this are vast and they’ve been building for fifty years. They won’t be dismantled by a Substack essay.

But there are things we can do. We can grieve with people instead of at them. We can name the actual villains (not as conspiracy, but as documented history) so that anger has somewhere to go that isn’t a neighbor. We can keep building the multiracial coalitions that the grievance economy depends on shattering. We can starve the outrage machine by refusing to participate in cycles designed to keep us angry and divided.

And there are things institutions of faith could do, if they wanted to.

After all, the gospel certainly has resources. Profound ones. It offers an identity grounded in belovedness. You don’t need to be better than anyone to be precious in God’s sight. It offers a story that doesn’t require enemies to make sense; Jesus consistently refused to play the us-versus-them game, even when his followers desperately wanted him to. It offers a hope that isn’t threatened by demographic change or cultural evolution, because it was never dependent on cultural dominance in the first place.

The early Christians, remember, were a marginalized minority in a hostile empire. They had no political power, no cultural centrality, and no demographic majority. Yet somehow they built communities that transformed the ancient world by simply embodying an alternative. They shared resources across ethnic and class lines, cared for the sick during plagues when everyone else fled, and treated women and slaves with a dignity that scandalized respectable society.

These early Christians weren’t grievance-driven. They were hope-driven, but not by a hope to get back what they’d lost; their hope was rooted in a vision of what God was making possible now and to come.

Today’s churches could be doing this work. Should be doing this work. Some corners of it are, and have been all along. Black churches have largely refused the racialized narrative, for obvious reasons. Mainline Protestants and progressive Catholics have pushed back, sometimes at great cost. Even within evangelicalism, there are voices calling for repentance. But too much of white American Christianity has made a different choice: to baptize the grievance, to bless the resentment, to ride this wave of Christian nationalism instead of naming it as the idolatry it is.

And all of that’s a choice. But it’s not inevitable. It can be chosen differently. I don’t know if it will be, but I do know that despair is a luxury we can’t afford and that the gospel I believe in has outlasted empires before.

So here’s your invitation: refuse to fight in the culture war. Stop needing an enemy. Build something that doesn't depend on loss to know itself.

Understand that the seduction of grievance is real. What it offers is real. The pain underneath it is real.

But so, too, is the possibility of something else.

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There’s a quiet cruelty buried beneath the Church’s obsession with healing. It’s rarely spoken aloud, and almost certainly never intended, but it pulses beneath our songs, our prayers, our testimonies, and our liturgies. It’s the assumption that frailty must be corrected in order to be holy, and that disability is a temporary condition awaiting divine reversal. It’s an insistence that bodies which don’t function according to cultural norms aren’t yet fully telling the truth of God’s love.

This becomes particularly painful for families raising children with disabilities, or for individuals who live daily with conditions that prayer hasn’t removed. They find themselves caught between competing theological messages: told they’re fearfully and wonderfully made, yet constantly placed on prayer lists for healing; assured that God has a plan for their lives, yet subtly encouraged to view that plan as incomplete until healing arrives.

But scripture tells a more disruptive story, one that resists the equation of disability with deficiency and insists that the presence of God is most clearly seen where the world would least expect it.

In John 9, Jesus and His disciples encounter a man blind from birth. The disciples’ question is immediate: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” It’s the oldest of interpretive instincts, to seek causality in suffering, to place blame on bodies that deviate from the norm. Jesus rejects the premise outright. “Neither,” He says. And in that moment, He’s dismantling an entire framework. The man’s blindness isn’t a moral failure, nor is it a punishment. There is no puzzle that needs to be explained. It’s simply part of his reality, and Jesus doesn’t ask him to justify it.

What He offers, first and foremost, is presence. The glory of God isn’t always found in the cure; sometimes it’s found in the company.

That company, too, didn’t end at the cross. Disability theologian Nancy Eiesland reimagines the resurrected Christ as One whose body remains marked by crucifixion. The risen Jesus, she argues, is a disabled God—scarred, wounded, and still holy. This insight revolutionizes how we think about bodies and divine presence. If the resurrected Christ retains His scars, then disability can’t be opposed to the image of God.

Eiesland’s disabled God challenges the church’s ableist assumptions at their foundation. When we pray for someone’s healing, are we praying for their flourishing, or are we praying for them to conform to our narrow vision of what bodies should be? When we speak of “making people whole,” whose definition of wholeness are we using? And when we imagine the eschaton, the final restoration of all things, are we envisioning a place where all bodies are “fixed” according to some abstract standard, or a place where all bodies are received in fullness, just as they are?

We are allowed to want relief. There is nothing wrong with praying for healing, with longing for a body that doesn’t hurt or a mind that doesn’t struggle. But resurrection is not the triumph of normalcy; it is the transfiguration of love.

Amos Yong, a Pentecostal theologian whose brother was born with Down syndrome, has argued that disability is an opportunity to reframe theology entirely. In The Bible, Disability, and the Church, Yong insists that we must stop viewing disability through the lens of healing and start viewing it through the lens of hospitality. Instead of asking whether someone might one day be “made whole,” we should ask whether our communities are prepared to receive them as they are. Not hypothetically. Not after enough prayer. Right now.

This shift from healing to hospitality means accessibility becomes more than an accommodation; it becomes a theological imperative. It means that inclusive language stops being about political correctness and starts being about biblical faithfulness. It means that when someone’s body or mind works differently, our first response should be to examine our own barriers instead of praying for their change.

After all, what if inclusion isn't about making room for the disabled person to sit at the edge of a community built by and for the able-bodied? What if it's about recognizing that we're all limited and vulnerable in some way (physically, cognitively, emotionally, socially) and that to be human is to be interdependent? Thomas Reynolds explores this in Vulnerable Communion, writing as both theologian and father to a son with multiple disabilities. The body of Christ, he reminds us, was never meant to be homogenous. Its very power lies in difference.

Paul says this directly in 1 Corinthians 12. “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you.’” He's not describing a body that merely makes room for its weaker members. He's describing one that can't function without them. The value of a person in the kingdom of God isn’t based on their productivity, their social polish, or their resemblance to some imagined ideal; it’s based on their presence, their belovedness, and their indwelling of the Spirit of Christ.

Disability doesn’t need to be redeemed in order to be sacred. It doesn’t need to be transformed in order to reflect Christ, or to be hidden behind metaphors or softened by euphemism. It needs to be seen, welcomed, and named as part of the body of Christ that already is.

And we don't need churches where disability is prayed away; we need churches where it's honored. Where ramps are not just installed, they're used. Where language doesn't infantilize or erase, where leadership is shared, and where testimony includes the ache that never lifts. Where the Eucharist is offered by hands that tremble. Where the kingdom of God comes through embrace.

Because if Christ is still wounded, then there’s nothing incompatible between brokenness and glory. And if the image of God includes the body of Christ, then the image of God includes every scar, every difference, every limp, every stutter, every delay, and every part of us we were told disqualified us from being whole.

It was never our bodies, you see, that needed healing. It was only our vision.

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“Watch as Donald Trump takes over the world! Get your seat today for just $1 billion dollars!”

That sales pitch may be made up, but it’s not (entirely) satire. It is, in a nutshell, the idea behind something called the “Board of Peace,” an organization of nation states that Trump now chairs personally, where he retains veto authority over all decisions, final say over interpreting the rules, and apparently direct control over all the money. Countries invited to join get temporary three-year memberships unless they pay at least $1 billion, at which point they become permanent members. The UN Security Council endorsed this arrangement in November 2025.

In the hustle and bustle of the holiday season, most of us missed the announcement. This all came about under the guise of Gaza reconstruction, after all, something that sounds technical and specialized, the kind of diplomatic machinery that hums along after ceasefires without requiring our attention. But here’s what the new organization’s leaked charter says: member states can vote on decisions, but all decisions are “subject to veto by the Chairman at any time thereafter.” The Chairman (Trump) is designated as “the final authority regarding the meaning, interpretation, and application of this Charter.” He decides who gets invited. He approves the agenda. He can remove members. He designates his own successor. He is the sole arbiter of every action (or inaction) undertaken by nations who sign on.

And the terrifying part isn’t that this sounds corrupt or absurd. The terrifying part is that it makes perfect sense once you understand what Trump is building: the replacement architecture for NATO, ready to deploy the moment the old alliance collapses.

Because it’s going to collapse. And Trump is going to collapse it.

NATO has survived for 75 years on a single promise: an attack on one member is an attack on all. Article 5 has been invoked exactly once, by the United States after September 11th, when allies deployed to Afghanistan in support of American operations. But what happens when the most powerful nation decides it isn’t bound by that promise?

Consider Greenland. It’s part of the Kingdom of Denmark, which means it’s technically NATO territory. Trump has publicly discussed wanting to acquire Greenland, sometimes framing it as a purchase, sometimes more ambiguously implying the potential for military action. Let’s say he decides to simply take it. What happens?

Denmark would, presumably, invoke Article 5. There would be emergency meetings in Brussels, strongly worded statements, diplomatic efforts to find an off-ramp. And then…what? Do other NATO members declare war on the United States? Impose sanctions on their own security guarantor? Deploy troops to resist American forces?

Of course not. The moment America becomes the aggressor, the alliance collapses functionally if not formally. For countries like Estonia, Latvia, and Poland (nations that joined specifically because they feared Russian aggression), the message would be unmistakable: the alliance is only as reliable as American restraint, and American restraint is conditional.

Trump doesn’t need to invade Greenland to destroy NATO. He just needs to make clear that he could, that Article 5 doesn’t constrain American action, and that the treaty means whatever he decides it means. Once that’s clear, every member state faces a question: what now?

This is where the “Board of Peace” stops sounding like a bizarre sideshow and starts looking like deliberate design, because here’s what happens when NATO becomes functionally meaningless: the security guarantee that has defined the post-war order evaporates. Smaller nations that depended on American protection through treaty obligation suddenly find themselves vulnerable. European powers scramble to coordinate alternative arrangements (good luck building a European army quickly). Regional powers like Russia and China recognize the opportunity. Then, into that vacuum steps an already-existing alternative, charter drafted, membership terms established, chairman in place.

Think about the incentive structure for a country like Estonia once Article 5 becomes unenforceable. They basically have three options:

• Try to build new security arrangements without American involvement. This means coordinating with European allies who have spent decades outsourcing defense spending to the United States, who lack unified command structures, and who can’t agree on threat assessment or strategic priorities. Possible in theory. Unlikely in practice, at least not quickly enough to matter.

• Accept vulnerability. Hope that Russia respects your borders out of goodwill or international pressure. Hope that regional powers decide conquest isn’t worth the trouble. Hope that you can negotiate neutrality that satisfies everyone. This is the option nations choose when they have no other choice.

• Join the “Board of Peace.” Pay the billion-dollar membership fee. Maintain good relations with Trump personally. Accept that he retains veto authority over any collective decision, that he interprets the rules, that he can remove members who displease him. Accept that your security no longer rests on treaty obligations among equals but on maintaining Trump’s favor and keeping your subscription current.

Option three suddenly begins to look rational when the alternative is worse.

And let’s be clear about what this is: a protection racket. The mafia, of course, pioneered the model. You pay for “protection” (primarily from the people you’re paying). You maintain good relations with the don. You accept that the protection is conditional on continued payment and favor. You understand that falling behind on payments or showing disrespect means you become the target instead of the protected, because the don decides who gets protected and on what terms. The don’s word is final. Cross him and discover that the same power that defended you can destroy you every bit as easily.

Trump’s “Board of Peace” operates on identical principles, just scaled up from Brooklyn to the world stage. Pay the billion-dollar membership fee (your protection money). Maintain good relations with the Chairman (keep “the Don” happy). Accept that protection is conditional on his favor (miss a payment or show disrespect and see what happens). Understand that American power can threaten just as easily as it can defend (the protection is from us, ultimately). The only real difference is that the mafia had the decency not to call it “the Board of Peace” or get UN Security Council endorsement, instead just calling it what it was: how power works when it’s unbound by law. FAFO, as American Secretary of War Pete Hegseth might say.

Here’s what’s being dismantled, and why it matters beyond geopolitics and alliance structures.

The post-war order, for all its profound flaws and hypocrisies, rested on a particular moral claim: that even the powerful would bind themselves to commitments, that military alliances could be built on something more than raw force and national self-interest, and that mutual obligation, however imperfectly honored, could constrain behavior and create predictability. The claim wasn’t that nations always kept their promises (they didn’t, of course) or that treaty obligations prevented all aggression (also didn’t). The claim was that binding yourself to promises mattered, that the constraint itself had value, and that there was moral significance in saying “we will defend you because we promised” rather than “we will defend you if we feel like it.”

Treaties aren’t perfect expressions of mutual obligation, but they at least gesture toward something beyond pure transaction. They create obligations that transcend immediate advantage, and establish that breaking a promise carries strategic (and, frankly, moral) consequences. They assert that even the powerful should be held to the rules they help create.

Trump’s new organization dispenses with obligation. There’s no mutual binding, no constraint on the powerful, nothing meaningful that holds when circumstances change. Just: pay the fee, maintain favor, accept subordination, receive protection (maybe).

The moral difference isn’t subtle. “We will defend you because we made a commitment, and breaking that promise would violate something we claim to value” creates a very different world than “we will defend you if you pay us a billion dollars and stay on our good side.”

And once you abandon your obligation for security alliances, you’ve abandoned obligation everywhere. If the most powerful nation can’t be held to treaties, and every agreement is negotiable based on personal whims and financial incentives, what’s the basis for any international agreement? The foundational principle becomes “the powerful do what they want, and everyone else pays for access.” That’s not governance; it’s a racket with subscription tiers.

Human political orders have always been imperfect, marked by hypocrisy and selective enforcement. But the existence of treaties, international law, and binding commitments at least created the possibility of accountability. They established that nations could be held to standards they claimed to uphold, and made it harder (not impossible, but harder) for the powerful to simply do whatever they wanted without consequence.

The “Board of Peace” does more than ignore these constraints. It formalizes their absence. It announces that the new international order will be built on purchased subordination to personal authority, and makes clear that American power is no longer constrained by the commitments it made when it built the post-war system.

While writing this essay, the argument stopped being theoretical. Today (January 19, 2026) the Kremlin confirmed that Vladimir Putin has been invited to join Trump’s “Board of Peace.” The invitation was extended even as Russia’s war on Ukraine approaches its fourth anniversary, with hundreds of thousands dead and peace negotiations stalled.

Think about that. Trump is inviting the leader actively waging a war of territorial conquest to join his “peace” organization, to sit on the board that will oversee reconstruction and governance. The man who violated Ukraine’s sovereignty, and has made clear that treaty obligations and international law mean nothing when they conflict with Russian interests, is being offered a seat at the table where Trump decides who gets protection and on what terms.

This isn’t a bug in the system. This is the system working exactly as designed. The “Board of Peace” was never about peace; it’s about power unbound by obligation, and it’s about replacing treaty commitments with purchased access to Trump’s favor. If Putin pays the billion dollars, if he accepts Trump’s authority as Chairman, if he’s willing to operate within the structure Trump has built, then his war on Ukraine becomes just another detail to be managed, another issue to be negotiated based on Trump’s personal discretion versus international law.

The post-war international order didn’t just rest on the idea that the powerful could bind themselves. It rested on the idea that aggression itself carried consequences, and violating sovereignty meant isolation and accountability. Trump’s invitation to Putin announces that those consequences are over. Pay the fee, accept the hierarchy, and all is forgiven.

The “Board of Peace” is real, and operational. The charter exists, the UN Security Council endorsed it, countries have been invited. Trump’s authority isn’t speculation; it’s written into the governing document.

And NATO, as we discussed, is dying. Trump has made that clear: the alliance is obsolete, a bad deal, a constraint he won’t accept. Whether he invades Greenland or simply refuses to honor Article 5 doesn’t matter. The end is coming.

So here’s the choice facing every country that depends on American security guarantees: when the old alliance collapses, do you pay the billion dollars or accept vulnerability?

Some won’t pay. But some will. Because when you’re Latvia or Estonia or Poland, and Russia is next door, and Article 5 just became unenforceable, a billion dollars for American protection starts to sound reasonable.

That’s the calculation Trump is counting on. And once enough countries make it, once the “Board of Peace” proves functional, why would it stop at security policy? Trade deals can operate the same way. Climate agreements. Development aid. Every domain of international cooperation restructured around the same principle: pay Trump for access to his decision-making authority, accept his veto, maintain his favor, receive benefits conditionally.

This isn’t the end of American hegemony. It’s the transformation of American hegemony from a system constrained (however imperfectly) by law and treaty into a system constrained by nothing except Trump’s personal discretion and one’s willingness to keep paying.

The post-war international order is ending. The replacement is already built. Active aggressors are getting their invitations.

And seats are still available. Just $1 billion, please.

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If you’re a news junkie like I am (and perhaps even if you’re not), you’ll know that a University of Oklahoma student recently received a zero on a psychology essay after writing that “society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders” is “demonic and severely harms American youth.” The assignment asked students to react to an article about gender roles and peer pressure, sharing their personal opinions, connecting the research to their own experiences, that sort of thing.

Samantha Fulnecky, a junior psychology major, wrote that she believes gender roles reflect God’s original plan for humanity and that teaching children otherwise constitutes spiritual harm. Fair enough! Lots of Christians believe something similar. But here’s what strikes me: she cited no specific biblical passages, and no sources beyond the assigned article. When her graduate instructor gave her a zero for not meeting the assignment’s requirements, Fulnecky filed a discrimination complaint, the instructor was placed on administrative leave, and conservative media outlets turned the whole thing into a referendum on religious freedom in higher education. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt even weighed in!

But let’s be clear about something: this isn’t primarily a story about academic freedom or grading rubrics. It’s a story about what happens when cultural assumptions dress themselves up in religious language, theological certainty replaces biblical literacy, and saying “the Bible says” functions to end conversation instead of inviting us to actually open the book and see what’s there.

In her essay, Fulnecky gestured toward the Bible, and claimed its authority without ever engaging with what scripture says about gender, bodies, or the complexity of human identity. That omission matters, because what the Bible says about these questions is far more complicated and surprising than culture war talking points allow.

When Christians claim biblical authority for gender essentialism, they almost always begin with Genesis. “God created them male and female” becomes the mic drop, the end of discussion. Fulnecky’s essay does exactly this, asserting that “God made male and female and made us differently from each other on purpose and for a purpose.”

But Genesis 1 and 2 aren’t scientific textbooks or comprehensive anthropological treatises. They’re ancient Near Eastern liturgical poetry, beautiful and profound statements about God creating, creation being good, and humans bearing God’s image. The “male and female” language in Genesis 1:27 is primarily about procreation and partnership, not an exhaustive taxonomy of every possible form of human gender and sexual differentiation.

Consider what Genesis doesn’t say. It doesn’t discuss intersex conditions, which (depending on how you define them) may affect anywhere from 0.02% to 1.7% of births. It doesn’t address hormonal variations, chromosomal differences beyond XX and XY, or any of the documented biological complexity that challenges tidy binary categories. It doesn’t provide guidance on how communities should respond to people whose bodies don’t fit neatly into “male” or “female” boxes. Put simply, the text isn’t trying to do the work that modern Christians keep asking it to do.

Ancient Israel wasn’t naive about sexual and gender complexity. The Hebrew Bible itself contains multiple categories for people who didn’t fit conventional male/female classification. The terms saris (often translated as “eunuch”) and seris (sometimes rendered as “barren woman” but referring more broadly to those unable to reproduce) appear throughout scripture, referring to those who existed outside standard gender categories. These weren’t theoretical concepts but described real people who lived in Israelite communities, went to church, and showed up in biblical narratives without anybody calling them demonic.

Indeed, these categories were central to Israel’s religious life. Eunuchs held positions of power and trust throughout scripture and are featured prominently in stories about God’s inclusive love.

In Isaiah 56, God speaks directly to eunuchs who feel excluded from the assembly. The context here matters: Deuteronomy 23:1 explicitly barred eunuchs from entering “the assembly of the Lord.” This was law, clear and unambiguous. But Isaiah records God reversing that exclusion:

“Let no eunuch say, ‘I am only a dry tree.’ For this is what the Lord says: ‘To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me and hold fast to my covenant—to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will endure forever.’”

Here, God doesn’t just permit exceptions to the law but overturns it entirely. People who were legally barred from worship are now promised honor within the temple itself. Those who couldn’t fulfill traditional roles of marriage and procreation receive “a name better than sons and daughters.” The text explicitly welcomes people who exist outside conventional categories of male and female into the very heart of the covenant community.

These aren’t peripheral details. They’re central to the biblical witness about who belongs in God’s community and how that community should respond to people whose bodies and identities challenge our categories.

Christians, too, seldom mention what Jesus himself taught on the subjects of gender and sexuality. In Matthew 19, we find Jesus discussing marriage and divorce. His teaching is strict, declaring that divorce is permitted only for sexual immorality. His disciples respond with frustration and suggest it might be better not to marry at all.

But instead of doubling down on the marriage imperative, Jesus does something unexpected. He opens the door wider:

“Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For there are eunuchs who were born that way, there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”

Jesus explicitly acknowledges that not everyone fits into conventional categories of male and female, married and procreating. He names three types of eunuchs: those born that way, those made that way by others, those who choose it. And notice, he doesn’t call any of these categories sinful or contrary to God’s plan. He simply acknowledges their existence and suggests that the kingdom of heaven has room for all of them.

It’s equally important what Jesus doesn’t say. He doesn’t call these conditions tragic or temporary or in need of correction. He doesn’t promise that in the resurrection everyone will be “normal.” He acknowledges that some people exist outside the categories his culture assumed were universal, and he’s fine with it. “The one who can accept this should accept it.”

This isn’t some fringe text or obscure reference. It’s Jesus speaking directly about people who exist outside traditional gender categories, and he does so with matter-of-fact acceptance, not condemnation.

Perhaps the most troubling part of Fulnecky’s essay isn’t what she gets wrong about scripture; it’s what she gets wrong about theology. When she writes that believing in multiple genders is “demonic,” she’s making a profound theological claim that deserves scrutiny.

In Christian theology, to call something demonic is to identify it with powers that actively oppose God, that seek to destroy what God has made, and/or that spread deception and death. She’s not expressing mild disapproval or theological disagreement; it’s spiritual warfare language, the vocabulary of cosmic evil.

So when you call transgender people, or those who affirm transgender identity, demonic, you’re making a specific claim: that these humans (people made in God’s image, people for whom Christ died, people whom God loves) embody or serve forces of evil. You’re suggesting that their existence itself constitutes rebellion against God.

Think about that. If transgender people are demonic, then the image of God cannot be present in their bodies. If gender nonconformity is demonic, then Jesus’s incarnation failed to extend to bodies like theirs. If acknowledging gender diversity is demonic, then God’s creative work is more limited than Genesis suggests.

This isn’t just offensive; it’s theologically incoherent. The doctrine of the incarnation insists that God became human in Jesus Christ, taking on flesh and dignifying human bodies by inhabiting one. The doctrine of the imago dei insists that every human being bears God’s image. These are non-negotiable doctrines central to Christian faith, and you can’t affirm them while simultaneously declaring that an entire category of human beings is demonic.

As Christians, this should horrify us. It weaponizes the language of spiritual warfare to justify treating image-bearers of God as enemies. It looks at people who are often vulnerable, marginalized, and suffering, and declares them agents of evil. The gospel doesn’t permit or condone that kind of violence.

I want to be clear about something else: I don’t think Samantha Fulnecky is a villain. I think she’s a young woman who learned a truncated version of Christianity that handed her conclusions without teaching her to read. She can invoke “the Bible says” but apparently was never taught to actually cite scripture, and can claim God’s authority but wasn’t equipped to engage with what God actually says. She knows the culture war talking points but not the biblical texts that complicate them.

And that’s tragic, because it means she’s been set up to fail academically and spiritually. She’s been handed a faith that can’t accommodate complexity, that collapses under gentle scrutiny, and requires her to denigrate people in order to defend what she’s been told God demands. That’s not a gift. That’s a burden, and it’s one that many who grew up in evangelical spaces know intimately.

The real failure here isn’t Fulnecky’s. It’s the failure of communities that never modeled a faith strong enough to acknowledge ambiguity and generous enough to extend dignity even in disagreement.

That kind of formation—the kind that produces theological certainty without biblical depth, conviction without wisdom, and boldness without charity—creates people who are perpetually at war and perpetually defensive. It creates Christians who can write essays calling others demonic without any apparent awareness of how far that language diverges from the Jesus who ate with tax collectors, touched the untouchable, and welcomed outcasts into God’s kingdom.

So what would it look like to approach questions of gender and identity with both theological seriousness and biblical humility? What would it mean to engage with scripture instead of just invoking it?

It would mean reading Genesis carefully and recognizing what the text does and doesn’t claim, taking seriously the biblical witness about eunuchs and God’s explicit welcome to people whom religious communities often exclude, and letting Jesus’s own words about those born outside conventional categories shape our theology instead of pretending he never said them. It would mean acknowledging that biological sex is more complicated than we’ve been told, that gender identity doesn’t always align neatly with anatomy, and that real human beings live in bodies and hold identities that challenge our neat categories. And most importantly, it would mean refusing to use theological language as a weapon. Calling people demonic, claiming they oppose God’s plan, suggesting their existence constitutes spiritual warfare—this kind of rhetoric doesn’t just “speak truth in love” but inflicts real harm on real people, many of whom are already bearing the weight of rejection, discrimination, and violence.

The Christianity I’m interested in reclaiming isn’t one that requires less conviction or settles for theological mush, but one that takes scripture seriously enough to actually read it, wrestles honestly with complexity, and extends the same radical welcome that Jesus offered to everyone the religious establishment wanted to exclude.

Adhering to that faith isn’t easy; it’s certainly harder than subscribing to the one that reduces everything to sound bites and culture war skirmishes. But it also hews more closely to the God who overturned religious law to extend welcome, to the Jesus who acknowledged people living outside conventional categories, and to the gospel that doesn’t need to tear anyone down to protect God’s honor.

That’s a Christianity worth defending, and a witness that’s worth the cost.

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For the book I’m presently working on, Reclaiming Christianity, that’s people rebuilding faith after the church has failed them. They’ve been condescended to enough. They don’t need material dumbed down, but they also don’t need a graduate seminar. They need substance that trusts their intelligence while respecting that they’re exhausted. They need a door to walk through, not a lecture on the architecture of doors.

The trick isn’t choosing between depth and accessibility; it’s finding the balance that honors both their hunger and their humanity.

Over the past several days I’ve been wrestling with exactly this while working on a chapter about atonement theology. Specifically, I’ve been trying to explain apokatastasis—the early church belief in universal reconciliation—without either flattening it into a soundbite or burying it in academic apparatus.

Let me show you what I landed on, and then I’ll break down exactly how the structure works. Even if you have zero interest in early church theology, the craft moves here apply to any writing that deals with complex, contested material for readers who deserve better than they’ve gotten.

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Since last Thursday, I’ve been home recovering from surgery with little to do besides surf the internet. That’s how I ended up on r/Christianity and being taken aback by what I encountered there:

“Please pray for me. I’m tired of my life.”

“God has abandoned me. Can God forgive suicide? My situation is... desperate, i ve hit rock bottom and i honestly dont know what to do or why this is happening.”

There are hundreds of posts like these. People asking questions, sharing struggles, looking for someone to tell them they’re not alone.

“My Christian parents kicked me out for being gay.”

“So my dad is threatening not to walk me down the aisle because of my dress.”

These are things people can’t ask in church. It’s not that they’re inappropriate; it’s that the institution has made it clear there are certain questions that mark you as struggling, doubting. divisive, or dangerous. Ask if God still loves you and you’ll get a meeting with the pastor. Wonder out loud if you’re still Christian because you’re struggling with faith even while you believe in Jesus, and you’ll become a prayer request. Admit you’re tired of your life and you’ll get concerned looks, referrals to counselors, and the quiet sense that your honesty is making everyone uncomfortable.

So people come here instead, to Reddit, to strangers with cartoon avatars and anonymous usernames, to a community of people they’ll never meet, who live in different cities and hold different theologies and probably disagree about half of everything, and they ask their real questions. Can I be gay and Christian? Can I want to die and still be forgiven? Can I believe in Jesus but reject Christian nationalism? Can I love God and still be angry about what the church has done?

And you know what’s remarkable? The community responds. Not always perfectly, and not always wisely. But they show up, bear witness, and say “me too.” They offer reflection and personal stories and sometimes just presence—the virtual equivalent of sitting with someone in their pain without trying to fix it or explain it away. This is the body of Christ doing what the body of Christ is supposed to be doing: bearing one another’s burdens, confessing to one another, and reminding one another that they’re loved. It just doesn’t look like what we thought church was supposed to look like.

Here’s someone asking strangers on the internet if God can forgive them for contemplating suicide. They’ve hit rock bottom, and they’re not going to their pastor or small group because they already know how those conversations will go: the concerned expressions, the gentle but firm reminders about God’s plan, the verses about not losing hope, the subtle implication that real faith wouldn’t ask this question. So they post on Reddit instead, where at least there’s a chance someone will be honest with them, that they might say “I’ve been there” instead of “have you tried praying more,” where responses might include actual theology about a God who understands despair instead of platitudes about joy being a choice.

In a different post, a young woman can’t ask her faith community why her father is threatening to abandon her over a wedding dress. She already knows the answer: modesty matters. Dad is protecting her from causing others to stumble, because this is what godly fathers do. The dress becomes another test of her submission, another way to measure whether she’s really committed to biblical womanhood. So she posts a photo on Reddit and asks: is there actually something wrong with my dress? Is it truly immodest? Am I sinning? And the community, full of strangers who will never attend her wedding, offers something her church can’t: permission to be angry, validation that this is wrong, reassurance that her father’s control isn’t godliness.

Elsewhere, someone’s parents have kicked them out and can’t understand why their gay child is “abandoning God.” They were good parents, after all. They took their kid to church every Sunday, made sure faith was central, did everything right. But somewhere along the way, “everything right” meant choosing purity culture over their own flesh and blood, and now that child is posting on Reddit asking if it’s possible to believe in Jesus without being part of Christianity. The parents still believe the problem is their child’s sin, not the faith that taught them love has limits.

And then over here we have a lesbian who believes in Jesus, yet can’t ask her church why there’s so much judgment. She knows the verses will come out—those verses, the “clobber verses.” The “love the sinner, hate the sin” framework will get deployed, and someone will say they’re just trying to protect her soul. So she asks Reddit instead: why can’t I hold both things together? Why does the church make me choose between my faith and who I am? And strangers—many of whom disagree with her, many of whom hold different views on sexuality and scripture—respond with something her church never offered: the acknowledgment that she’s asking a real question, that her struggle is legitimate, that her faith is genuine even if they don’t share her conclusions.

These are ecclesial questions. These are questions about belonging, about community, about what it means to follow Jesus. People are asking them on the internet because the church has made it clear there’s only one acceptable answer…and that answer requires them to deny their feelings, distrust their experiences, and submit to authority instead of wrestling with what’s holy.

We’ve talked here before about how Americans have stopped going to church. About how Sunday morning used to mean one thing, but now it means brunch or the farmer’s market or sleeping in or scrolling through r/christianity. The Sabbath has been replaced by a dozen other rituals, other rhythms, and other ways of marking the week. And there’s real loss in that. The church once carried people through joy and grief and everything in between, connecting them to something larger than themselves, and giving them language for mystery and transcendence and hope.

But maybe people aren’t leaving because they don’t want community or liturgy or practice; maybe they’re leaving because the church stopped being those things. Maybe it’s no longer a place where people can be honest, where doubt is part of faith, and where you can bring your whole self and still be told you belong. The church’s most basic calling was never to be right about doctrine or to safeguard sexual purity or to win the culture wars; its calling was simpler and harder. To love people. To create space where people could breathe. To bind up the brokenhearted. To comfort those who mourn. To point toward a God who looks like Jesus, the One who touched lepers and ate with sinners and welcomed children and told stories about fathers who run toward their wayward children, not away from them.

Instead, the church has taught people to be afraid—of hell, of demons, of their bodies, of their questions, of the wrong kind of love. It’s taught them that belonging requires conformity, that grace has conditions, and that some people need to change before they’re welcome. So now people are looking for fellowship on Reddit, gathering in web-based spaces to do what the institution wouldn’t let them do: to be real, and to discover they’re not alone.

I scroll on. Someone is asking if their church values the smoke machine more than people. Another is asking if it’s a sin to play Dungeons & Dragons. Someone shares a prayer request for their mother’s cancer treatment. Another asks how to distinguish between God’s leading and religious OCD. Someone celebrates six months sober. Another asks if God still loves them. The ordinary and the desperate, side by side. People trying to navigate faith, doubt, fear, and hope, looking for community, looking for answers, looking for someone to tell them they’re going to be okay…and finding it here, in this strange, screen-bound gathering of people who have nothing in common except the vulnerability they can’t bring anywhere else.

This feels like Saturday morning to me. Not literally, but spiritually: what theologian Shelly Rambo calls the “in-between” time, the day after the crucifixion and before the resurrection, when nothing is resolved and you’re just sitting with the wreckage and wondering what comes next. The day when the disciples are hiding behind locked doors, trying to make sense of what just happened. The day when hope feels foolish and despair feels honest.

Come Sunday, some of these people will go to church, sing the songs and say the prayers and try to find something that feels like hope. Some will stay home, unable to reconcile the Jesus they believe in with the Christianity they’ve experienced. Some will keep scrolling through r/christianity, asking folks they’ve never met if there’s any way to follow Jesus that doesn’t require them to become part of what Christianity has become.

Honestly, I don’t know what happens next. I don’t know if the institutional church can recover from decades of choosing power over mercy, certainty over mystery, and control over grace. I don’t know if the brick-and-mortar buildings can become places where people can ask their real questions again, or if something new is being born online. Perhaps what we’re witnessing here is a reconstruction, a new way to become ecclesia (the called-out ones, the gathered people) in whatever spaces will hold us. Maybe church isn’t a building or a Sunday morning service or even a shared theology, but just people showing up for each other and bearing witness to each other’s pain. Maybe it’s strangers on Reddit telling someone who’s tired of their life that they’re praying for them, that they matter, and that they’re loved.

For the moment, though, we’re still here in Saturday. The damage being done is real, and it’s persistent. So people keep asking their questions in cyberspaces because the church won’t let them ask in physical ones. Parents are still choosing questionable doctrine over their own children. The grieving are still asking if God has abandoned them. And somewhere, in a subreddit with a cartoon robot avatar, someone is typing out a reply: “You’re not alone.”

This is what church looks like now for a growing number of Christians. And Sunday morning is coming, whether anyone shows up to the old buildings or not.

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I woke up today later than normal, roused by sunlight streaming through the window. There was no rush to get ready, no schedule to meet, no place I needed to be by a certain time. Just the quiet of the house, the smell of coffee brewing, and the morning stretching out with all its possibilities and no particular plan for what to do with them.

This is what Sundays look like for me now—and for most Americans, if we’re being honest. Church pews are emptying, sanctuaries are quieter, and the morning has become something else entirely. Not sacred time set apart for worship, but open time. Free time. Time we get to decide what to do with, which sounds like freedom until you start to pay attention.

When I was growing up, Sunday meant heading downtown for the weekly service. Not as a choice but as a given, the way Saturday morning meant cartoons and Friday night meant staying up late. It was the day you got dressed in clothes that were slightly uncomfortable, sat in a sanctuary that was slightly too cold or too hot, sang hymns you’d known since childhood, and listened to a sermon that sometimes moved you and sometimes didn’t. Either way, you were there.

It wasn’t always meaningful, and sometimes it was downright boring. It often felt like obligation more than inspiration, ritual without revelation, and going through motions that had lost whatever power they once held. But it was something. A rhythm. A practice. A way of marking time as distinct.

And then, for various reasons, many of us have simply stopped going. Some of us gradually, our attendance getting spottier until it stopped altogether. Some of us dramatically, walking out after a final disappointment or disagreement. Some of us quietly, just drifting away until one day we realized it had been months since we’d been inside a church and we didn’t particularly miss it.

But the morning has remained, and Sundays still carry the echo of being special, even after we’ve stopped filling them with prayer. There’s something about the day itself that makes it feel like this time should matter, that we should be using it in ways that carry weight.

So we try. We’ve just replaced church with other things.

These are the new liturgies, the practices we’ve chosen, consciously or unconsciously, to fill the space that Sunday service used to occupy. And like all liturgies, they’re transforming us.

Youth sports leagues have become religion for a generation of families, creating a certain kind of community centered around children’s activities and achievement. Soccer games and baseball tournaments require the same early rising and gathering that church once did, the same crowd of other parents standing on sidelines, the same rhythm week after week. Parents schedule their entire lives around these commitments with a dedication once reserved for the sacred. There’s genuine connection there, real relationships built on sidelines and in bleachers. But there’s also competition, comparison, the endless pursuit of the next level, the next team, the next tournament. It’s community, but it’s community organized around performance.

Brunch, too, has become its own ritual, forming us into people who value leisurely connection, who prioritize relationships and good food and unhurried conversation. The leisurely meal stretches from late morning into early afternoon, the gathering with friends around tables laden with food that’s more indulgent than what you’d eat on a weekday. The mimosas mark the time as special and celebratory. The conversation meanders naturally, offering the luxury of time spent together without having to rush to the next thing. There’s something genuinely restorative about gathering around a table without agenda, about having time for each other that weekday mornings don’t allow. But it’s also selective, limited to people we already know and like. It’s the comfortable intimacy of chosen family rather than the sometimes uncomfortable breadth of a church congregation that includes people we wouldn’t necessarily choose.

Some of us use the morning to catch up on everything we didn’t have time for during the week: errands and grocery shopping and cleaning the house, practical tasks that Sunday finally provides the space for. The morning becomes utilitarian instead of holy, productive rather than restorative. We become people who are always working, always catching up, and always using available time to accomplish tasks. There’s nothing wrong with productivity, but when even our free time becomes functional and we can’t let a morning just be without filling it with achievement, we’re cultivating a restlessness that can’t tolerate being still.

Others of us sleep in, reclaiming the rest that the work week stole from us. We treat it as permission to do nothing, to let our bodies recover, to simply be horizontal and unconscious for as long as our bodies will allow. This makes us perpetually tired, operating on a sleep debt that one morning a week can’t quite repay. There’s a deliciousness in sleeping late, but there’s also avoidance in the way sleep becomes escape, the morning we spend unconscious rather than facing whatever it is we’re trying not to face.

And many of us scroll through news feeds and social media, through the outrage and anxiety and entertainment that we consume every other morning. But on Sunday it feels different somehow, more desperate maybe, or more empty, like we know this isn’t what we should be doing with this time but we do it anyway because we don’t know what else to do. We are always somewhere else, always consuming, always monitoring what’s happening in the wider world while missing what’s happening in the room where we’re sitting. It’s the opposite of sacred time, the opposite of being present, the opposite of rest. It’s just more of what we do every other morning, the compulsion that follows us even when the morning itself once held different meaning.

I don’t attend church anymore, and I haven’t for a long time. I miss it sometimes, in ways that surprise me. It’s not the specific theology or doctrines, not the sermons or the liturgy or even the worship. What I miss is the rhythm of it, the way it marked time as special, the gathering of people who wouldn’t necessarily choose each other but showed up anyway, the sense that we were all there for something bigger than ourselves even if we couldn’t quite name what that something was.

What I miss is having that one morning a week that felt set apart. That meant something.

We’re all still searching for what that morning used to provide. We’re hungry for renewal that’s deeper than sleeping in. For community that’s broader than our chosen circles. For meaning that stretches beyond our individual lives. For time that feels sacred.

The practices we’ve chosen might satisfy some of that hunger, but I’m not sure they satisfy all of it.

I’m not arguing that we should all go back to church. I can’t go back, not to the church I grew up in, not to institutions that keep failing people in ways I can’t ignore. And I suspect many of you can’t either, for your own good reasons, your own breaking points, your own realizations that you can’t keep pretending to believe things you don’t believe or support structures that hurt people you love.

But I am wondering if we’re being intentional about what we practice on Sundays. If we’re paying attention to how our new liturgies are sculpting us, and whether they are molding us into people we actually want to become.

I don’t have an answer to that. I’m still figuring out what it should be now that it isn’t what it was. But I know this much: we’re practicing something every Sunday whether we mean to or not. And what we practice matters.

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Your phone was the first thing you touched this morning.

Not your partner. Not your coffee mug. Not even your own face to confirm you were still alive. Your hand moved before your eyes were fully open, reaching for the nightstand with the muscle memory of someone who’s done this ten thousand times before. Unlock. Check email, texts, news, Instagram, back to email. All of this before you’d said good morning to anyone, before you’d registered whether you were tired or rested or anxious or calm, before you’d had a single coherent thought about the day ahead.

You did it yesterday too. And the day before that. And if we’re honest, you’ll do it tomorrow, and the day after, and every day for the foreseeable future, because at this point it’s less a choice than a reflex, like blinking or breathing, something your body does without first consulting your brain.

Welcome to the liturgy you didn’t know you were practicing.

Here’s what your morning looks like if we’re watching from the outside: you reach for your phone approximately seven seconds after your alarm goes off. You scroll through notifications while still lying in bed, your brain barely online but already processing twenty different inputs. You check the news (something terrible has happened overnight, something always happens overnight) and feel that familiar tightness in your chest that you’ve learned to interpret as “being informed.” You swipe over to Instagram and see that someone you went to high school with is on vacation in Greece, and for just a moment you feel that weird cocktail of happiness for them and vague dissatisfaction with your own life. You’re not out of bed yet.

You check your email. Three things need your immediate attention, though if you really thought about it you’d realize none of them are actually urgent and two of them aren’t even important. But urgency has stopped meaning what it used to mean. Everything feels urgent now. Everything requires a response. You’ve trained yourself to believe that checking is the same as caring, that awareness equals engagement, that scrolling through the catastrophes of the world while lying in your underwear is somehow a meaningful way to be a citizen.

You finally get up, but the phone comes with you. To the bathroom, because why experience a moment of silence and relief when you could be checking your email again? To the kitchen, scrolling through news while the coffee brews, because apparently you can’t tolerate sixty seconds of just standing there, waiting, being present to the aroma filling the room and the morning light and the rattle of heat through the registers. You sit down for breakfast and the phone sits next to your plate, face up, because even though you’re trying to eat breakfast like a civilized human being, you also need to know the instant someone needs something from you or the world produces a new thing to be anxious about.

It’s not even 8 AM.

The rest of the day follows the same pattern. Red lights. Waiting rooms. Elevators. Those weird in-between moments when you’re walking from one place to another and you’ve got thirty seconds with nothing specific to do. Every gap gets filled. Every pause becomes an opportunity to check, to scroll, to see what you’re missing, which is always something, because there’s always something to miss, and the feeling of missing something has become more familiar than the feeling of being where you actually are.

You’re having lunch with a friend and the phone is on the table between you, face down this time because you’re trying to be polite, but it buzzes and your eyes flick toward it involuntarily, and you lose the thread of what your friend was saying. They notice. You notice them noticing. You both pretend this is fine, this is normal, this is just how we live now.

Later, you’re trying to read a book but you can’t focus for more than a page before your hand reaches for your phone. The reason doesn’t matter. You’re not expecting something important. It’s just…because. Your brain has been trained to need the dopamine hit of checking, the tiny reward of new information, the relief of knowing what’s happening in the world even though knowing what’s happening in the world mostly just makes you anxious and angry and powerless. You check anyway. You always check.

You’re having a conversation with your kid and your phone buzzes in your pocket. You don’t even take it out—you’re not that rude!—but you’re also not fully present anymore because part of your brain is wondering what the notification was, whether it’s important, whether you should check. Your kid can tell you’re not entirely there. You can tell you’re not entirely there. Nobody says anything.

It’s nighttime, and you’re tired. You should go to bed. Instead, you’re scrolling through social media for the third time in an hour, seeing the same posts you already saw, clicking on articles you don’t actually want to read, watching videos that make you feel worse about yourself or the world or both. It’s not enjoyable. You’re not even sure it’s interesting. But you can’t stop, because stopping would mean being alone with yourself, with your thoughts, with the silence, and you’ve forgotten how to do that. Or maybe you never learned. Either way, the phone is easier.

You tell yourself you’ll just check one more thing. Twenty minutes later, you’re still scrolling. You finally put the phone down, plug it in, try to sleep. But even in the dark, even with your eyes closed, you can feel it there on the nightstand, six inches from your head, ready and waiting for the moment you wake up and reach for it again.

Which you will. Tomorrow morning. Seven seconds after the alarm.

Here’s what nobody tells you about the things we do on repeat: they mold you whether you’re paying attention or not. What you do over and over, without thinking, shapes who you become more powerfully than what you believe or intend or hope to be. You can believe in presence, in focus, or in deep attention, but if what you actually practice is fragmentation and distraction, then fragmented and distracted is what you’re becoming.

Your phone isn’t forcing you to check it. You’re choosing to, dozens or hundreds of times a day, and that choice you keep making is turning you into someone who can’t quite be where you are. Someone who’s always somewhere else, always aware that the thing in your pocket might have something more interesting or urgent or important going on than the reality you’re currently inhabiting.

After enough practice, you start to forget what it feels like to be truly present. To sit through dinner without the glow of your phone on your face. To read a book without the ding! of an incoming text message. To have a conversation where you’re fully there, where the person in front of you has your complete attention instead of competing with everyone else who might need you, might have texted you, might have posted something you need to see right now.

The anxiety becomes baseline. The distance becomes normal. The inability to tolerate silence or stillness or your own thoughts becomes just how you are.

Look, I’m not trying to shame you. I do this, too. We all do. The phone is designed to make us do it, engineered by very smart people who understand how to hack human psychology and create compulsion through variable reward schedules and social pressure and the fear of missing out. It’s less a moral failing, and more what happens when we’ve allowed ourselves to be reprogrammed by devices created to own our attention.

But here’s the thing: once we start noticing what we’re doing, once we pay attention to the pattern instead of just living inside it, we can begin to ask whether this is what we actually want. Whether the person we’re becoming is the person we want to be.

But the hardest question to wrestle with isn’t about what this is doing to us individually; it’s what it’s doing to the people around us. To our spouses, trying to tell us about their day while we can’t take our eyes off our phones. Our children, learning that whatever’s on that screen is more important than whatever they want to show us. The friend across the table who knows we’re only half-listening because another friend in another place posted about some other thing going on.

I can’t offer a solution. The truth is that I’m still figuring this out myself, still catching my hand reaching for my phone before I’m fully awake, still noticing how my chest tightens when I scroll through the news, still trying to remember what it feels like to sit with my own thoughts without immediately reaching for distraction.

But I’m starting to pay attention. Starting to notice the pattern. Starting to recognize that what I practice is what I become, and maybe, just maybe, I want to become something other than someone who can’t stop checking his phone.

Tomorrow morning, seven seconds after the alarm, my hand will reach for the nightstand. What happens next is up to me.

And you.

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But liturgy extends far beyond sanctuary walls. There’s liturgy in how we practice democracy, in the civic rituals that form us as citizens. There’s liturgy in what we consume daily, the media we scroll through each morning before coffee, the shows we watch to unwind at night. There’s liturgy in our political engagement, in who we trust and who we dismiss, in what outrages us and what we ignore. All of these are repeated practices that form who we’re becoming, whether we’re paying attention or not.

The question isn’t whether we have liturgy. The question is whether we’re aware of what our liturgies are making us into.

And what happens when the institutions that promised to form us in truth and grace fail? When the church that advertised open doors shows certain people the exit? When the democracy we were taught to trust reveals itself as something else entirely? When the culture that promised to make us whole leaves us fragmented and exhausted?

This is where “elsewhere” comes in. Elsewhere isn’t exile, though it can feel like it at first. Elsewhere is what happens when you can’t stay in the institutions that formed you, when you’ve been pushed to the margins or when you’ve walked away because staying would have required betraying something essential about who you are. Elsewhere is where you discover what you’ve actually been practicing all along, beneath the official liturgy, in the spaces the institution couldn’t control. It’s where you build new practices or recover old ones the institution abandoned or create liturgies the institution was never brave enough to imagine.

I’m writing from Elsewhere. And if you’re reading this, you’re probably sitting in Elsewhere, too.

Let me tell you briefly who I am, because it matters for understanding why this project exists.

I grew up in the United Methodist Church in Columbus, Ohio. Three generations of my family were formed by that place. I was baptized there as an infant, confirmed as a teenager, married there in my twenties. The church was home in the deepest sense, until it wasn’t. The contradictions between what the church advertised and what it actually practiced became too large to ignore. I eventually found my way to a progressive congregation that I loved, but it was never quite home. Once you’ve been pushed out of the place that formed you, you can’t fully trust in the same way again.

I also grew up politically conservative. I was deeply involved in politics as a teenager, attended Boys State and Boys Nation, met presidents and senators, believed I understood how the world worked. I campaigned for Republicans, voted Republican, identified as Republican. And then, slowly, my understanding began to shift. It’s not that I rejected everything I’d been taught, but because I started asking questions that led me to different conclusions. I voted for Obama in 2008 and have voted Democrat ever since.

But here’s what matters: I didn’t turn on the people I grew up with. I grew, and my convictions changed, but I still understand the worldview I came from. I know what it’s like to believe what conservative institutions teach you, to trust that framework, to see the world through that lens. I feel genuine kinship with people who still vote Republican, even as I disagree with many of their conclusions. There’s no animosity, just different paths from similar starting points.

I’m also not neatly liberal. I care deeply about social justice, but I’m also a gun owner who supports the military and takes my Christian faith seriously. I don’t fit cleanly into either political tribe, which means I’ve learned to think for myself rather than defaulting to whatever my team is supposed to believe.

I’m married to my high school sweetheart. We’ve been together since she was fourteen and I was sixteen, married now for over twenty years. We have two kids who are teaching me more about courage and authenticity than I ever taught them.

I’m working on a book called Reclaiming Christianity: A Companion for the Wounded, the Weary, and the Wanderers. It’s an attempt to recover Christian faith with historical rigor and pastoral honesty, to discover what’s worth keeping and name what needs to be left behind. This publication is where I work out ideas in public, where I test arguments and explore questions and think through what it means to practice faith and politics and culture when you can’t trust the institutions anymore.

Here’s what you can expect from Liturgy of Elsewhere: essays that explore theology, politics, and culture through the lens of practice and formation. What are we becoming through the things we do repeatedly? Are we okay with that? And if not, what should we practice instead?

On theology: I’ll write about prayer and doubt, about what faith becomes when certainty collapses, about how to practice Christianity when the church has failed you. I care about Scripture and tradition, about what the early church understood that we’ve forgotten, about how theology actually matters for living. But I’m done with the kind of faith that demands you choose between your integrity and your belonging, that treats honest questions as threats to be managed. I’m interested in theology that makes space for complexity, that acknowledges mystery, that trusts people enough to tell them the truth.

On politics: I’ll write about how our civic practices form us, about what we’re becoming through our political engagement. How does the way we consume news shape us? What does it mean to practice democracy when democratic institutions feel broken? How do we hold together love for neighbor with principled disagreement? I know what it’s like to change political convictions, to arrive at different conclusions than the people who formed you. I also know what it’s like to still understand where they’re coming from, to feel connected to people whose votes look different than mine, to refuse the tribalism that demands you demonize everyone on the other side. I mourn what American politics has become and the ways it’s destroying our capacity for genuine disagreement without hatred.

On culture: I’ll write about the everyday liturgies that form us without our awareness. The phones we check compulsively, the shows we binge to numb ourselves, the social media platforms that train us in outrage and comparison. I’ll explore how pop culture functions as civic religion, how consumerism shapes desire, how the things we pay attention to determine who we become. Culture isn’t trivial. It’s the water we swim in, shaping us constantly through practices we rarely examine.

These three tracks overlap constantly, because life isn’t neatly divided into religious, political, and cultural compartments. The way you practice faith affects how you practice citizenship. Your political liturgies shape your spiritual life. Your cultural consumption forms both your theology and your politics. I’ll move between these domains fluidly, following the connections wherever they lead.

This space is for people rebuilding faith when the church has failed them. For people rethinking politics when democracy feels broken. For people reclaiming their imagination when the culture they trusted reveals itself as something else entirely. It’s for people figuring out what to practice when institutional liturgies betray their advertised values.

If you’ve been pushed to the margins of institutions that claimed to be about love, if you’re tired of the gap between what institutions say and what they do, if you’re trying to figure out what practices will actually form you into who you want to become, this is for you.

I don’t have all the answers. I’m not sure anyone does. But I’m willing to do the work, to sit with the questions, to try new things and see what forms. And I’m inviting you to do that alongside me.

I aim to publish weekly. While some essays will be deeply theological, some will be cultural criticism, and some will wade into politics, all of them will ask the same question: what are we becoming through what we practice, and are we okay with that?

Read when you can. Reply when something strikes you. Share what resonates. This project works when it’s a conversation, not a broadcast.

Welcome to Elsewhere. I’m glad you’re here.

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