Whether that vote is cast joyfully or with trepidation or begrudgingly or without all the information or as a protest, it makes the same bold statements:This is my choice.I am with this person.I consent to their conduct.I co-sign their actions.I endorse them.

A vote doesn’t have qualifiers or caveats or escape clauses. It simply says Yes or No.

And as we’re witnessing a rapid and expansive dismantling of our nation’s systems, a complete mockery of our Cabinet positions, a pervasive chaos enveloping everything from our social services to our healthcare to our Military to our essential needs to our standing in the world, the one question I keep wanting to ask those of you who voted for him is:

Is this really what you wanted?

Did you want prices on groceries and gas to rise stratospherically as he taunts our long-time allies?Did you want a senseless and unwinnable war of choice in Iran that is depleting our financial resources and throwing the world into unnecessary turmoil?Did you want to live under an oppressive police surveillance state, to have every intimate aspect of your life monitored by the Government, to have surrendered any sense of privacy or personal freedom?Did you intend for immigrant families to be terrorized in their workplaces, schools, and homes, with no regard for due process or for legal and human rights?

Did you vote for the Epstein Files to be hidden from view, protecting the absolute most vile predators and pedophiles?Did you vote for the selling off and destruction of protected natural lands, for concentration camps, for screaming, water-guzzling data centers swallowing up your community? Did you vote for the elimination of programs that provide veterans their benefits, poor children a school lunch, the elderly their hard-earned retirement?Did you want us alienated from the world and removed from every global humanitarian and diplomatic partnership we have participated in for decades?Did you vote for massive, opulent ballrooms, gaudy vanity arches, ego-stroking building alterations, and wasteful reflecting pool renovations?

Is this what you voted for?Because if this isn’t what you voted for, you need to be vocal now.

Silence is not a luxury anyone can afford in days like these.

To be silent now, after voting so loudly, is irresponsible and unhelpful.Your silence doesn’t protect refugees or avoid disastrous Cabinet appointees or pay treatment bills for the now uninsured.It doesn’t shield marginalized communities from hate crimes or protect America’s farmers or care for the disabled or challenge the President’s flagrant nepotism.

Your silence doesn’t encourage lawmakers to push against their party even if they feel they should, and it doesn’t show solidarity with activists in the streets spending themselves to advocate for equality and justice.It doesn’t discourage the President and his spokespeople from rolling out an unrelenting stream of lies or attacking those doing real, Constitution-guarding journalism.It doesn’t hold those in the highest levels of power and influence accountable for disregarding every procedure, rule of law, and safeguard established to ensure that every citizen is protected from those governing them.

Your silence doesn’t do anything right now but allow you to divorce yourself from your vote, to avoid any accountability for the man you’ve chosen, and to perpetuate the erratic, reckless, criminal behavior that is endangering every human being here.

What this means, friend, is that if you are indeed regretting your vote in any way, this would be the time to stand up and say so. Millions of us are out here doing the work of pushing back and speaking for the marginalized and poor and disregarded (including Trump voters), and we’re marching, and we’re calling our elected officials, and we’re busting our butts to keep our Constitution intact.And all the while, the narrative the President is selling is that this is a partisan, Liberal Media-created mirage. He’s attempting to manufacture a political civil war via social media to divert attention from the insidious stuff happening right now that should be horrifying all of us.And every day you say nothing, our Republic is more and more vulnerable, more and more compromised, more and more in danger of losing the very essence of its freedoms and liberties.

All this to say, I’m really sorry for your embarrassment or your guilt or your feeling foolish, but even more concerned about your silence.

I hear that many people are leaving MAGA, that they are tired of this waste, this recklessness, this greed, this incompetence. Maybe you’re one of those people. I just hope you won’t leave quietly.

Your vote in 2024, for whatever reason you cast it, was loud.

And if you regret that vote or if you don’t consent to what you are seeing from this man and this Administration, your volume and your vote now is necessary, too.

Please join those of us who are resisting together because we love America more than a political party, because this isn’t about any of us; it’s about all of us.

Please speak, and speak loudly.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The sedative haze of sleep slowly begins to lift, and my conscious mind starts taking inventory and assembling the data and reporting back its initial findings:

I’m in bed… I’m awake… I’m alive… It’s Wednesday…

But most of the time, that’s about as far as I get when I am suddenly assaulted with another, far more sobering realization:

I’m in America…

… s**t.

And, in a disorienting few seconds, I’m violently ripped from any sense of peace or rest by the lengthy litany of atrocities from the previous day: the Constitutional crises, the acts of unthinkable brutality, the falling away of systemic safeguards, the metastasizing mass of sycophantic cultists.

A jolt of adrenaline comes flooding in as my barely awakened body senses imminent danger without me needing to do a thing other than remember the lawlessness of our President, the complicity of his party, the bent knees of the billionaires, the genuflecting of the Church, the capitulation of the Press, and the snarling brainwashed rabble of once-reasonable, decent human beings with whom I used to feel at home.

And just like that, mere minutes after returning to the waking world, I want to go back to sleep, already exhausted, already disheartened, already grief-stricken.

It gives me absolutely no joy to say that on most days now, I hate waking up in this country. I confess to regularly daydreaming about being an expat: of putting new roots into foreign soil and reclaiming somewhere else what it feels like we’ve lost here.

I find myself imagining what it would be like to greet the day in another country, someplace where racism wasn’t celebrated, where empathy wasn’t a character flaw, where corruption wasn’t so prolific, where hatred didn’t find such safe harbor from its leaders and their disciples.

Yet, I know the reality is that some of this is me lamenting the devil I know: that while seeing America with a microscope and the rest of the world with a telescope, my vision is not as clear as it could be.

Yes, there are certainly a myriad of places on this planet where gun violence is not ubiquitous, where predators are not protected, where illness does not bring bankruptcy, where Science is not assailed, where religion is not legislated, where diversity is not reviled, where education is not under siege, and where democracy is not evaporating. But these places have their own dangers and demons, and both time and proximity would surely reveal them.

So, while I do hate waking up in this country and I do dream of waking up in another one, perhaps it isn’t about my geography changing but about me changing the geography I find myself in.

Maybe I don’t want to wake up in another country but in a more just, more beautiful, more compassionate version of this one; an America that embodies the greatest of its aspirations, one that more fully becomes what the songs and anthems promised we could be, one that would be worth someone else inheriting.

I’m not going to pretend I’m sure that such a place is still possible. It may be that the systemic damage we’ve sustained in the last eighteen months is irreparable. Our collective bloodstream may be so poisoned with tribalism and prejudice that we cannot recover. The unholy marriage of Church and State may indeed be too far along to drive a wedge between.

But I suppose that’s why they call it a dream.

And while I am beginning yet another day here exhausted, disheartened, and grief-stricken, I am going to find a way to step out into it and do all I can with the light and the hours I have before darkness and sleep arrive.

And if millions of us all do the same, maybe one morning in the future (maybe in November), we will find ourselves greeting the dawn not with sadness but with jubilation, not with dread but with hope.

Right now, I hate waking up in this America.

I want to wake up in a better one.

Do you struggle with the reality of the nation you wake up in? Is it difficult to find the resolve to keep going? How are you holding the tension between wanting to leave and wanting to stay and fight? Let me know in the comments.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Your guy really handed our rear ends to us this time.

I can see why you’re pounding your chest and dunking on us liberals on social media about this Lake America business. You all finally put Canada and all of us woke idiots in our places.

I mean, sure, you can barely afford groceries at this point.

And yeah, even if you happen to be able to, there’s a high likelihood that what you eat will kill you, shred your stomach lining, or leave you with explosive diarrhea.

No worries, though; at least you’ll be able to get the absolute bare minimum of healthcare that you’ll need to get a second mortgage on your house to afford, providing you aren’t underwater on the first one.

Hopefully you don’t miss any work, though, because your PTO is basically nonexistent, but hey, you get to taunt all us leftist losers with a big ol’ “Lake America” middle finger.

That’s gotta cushion the blow of the stratospheric bills that you’re going home to (Enjoy filling the gas tank on your F-150, by the way).

The important thing is that you’re winning.

Yes, our Federal Government has weaponized our armed forces against entire cities, inciting violence, disrupting the local economy, and terrorizing innocent human beings for exercising their freedoms of speech, expression, and assembly.

No matter, those elemental, Constitutionally guaranteed personal liberties and many others are essentially null and void at this point anyway.

And sure, the separation between Church and State has now been rendered nonexistent, with a religion of compulsion now being legislated for tens of millions of people who do not adhere to those teachings.

And yeah, our Government is enabling not one, but two violent, genocidal eradications of entire populations.

Our systems of education, human health, and national security are under the control of unqualified, ill-prepared, and mentally unstable grifters whose allegiances are to a person and not our Constitution.

The President has declared war on half of the population of this nation, using the power of his platform to perpetuate lies, stoke division, sow chaos, and escalate conflict.

We’re also now alienated from nearly all our global allies, and decades of carefully crafted partnerships have been destroyed in a matter of months.

And yes, your kids will be more susceptible to preventable illness, the food you’ll be eating will have fewer safeguards, your wages will continue to decrease, and your personal freedoms will gradually vanish.

But the bottom line, MAGA friends, is that you’ve won the war over a body of water’s branding (too bad you can’t say the same about the never-ending war in Iran that you’re currently paying out the nose for).

With your party controlling the presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court, America must now be as great as you’ve been telling us for years that it would be, and so you have no cause to be concerned or reason to be miserable.

You must be happy right now with the economy, your paycheck, your healthcare premiums, food safety, the level of gun violence, the wars of choice you’re funding, and the prospects you have for growth, health, career advancement, and financial opportunities.

So, congratulations, Trump supporters, you’ve renamed a lake—and all it’s cost you is a functioning government, a working democracy, human rights, national peace, economic stability, affordable groceries, affordable healthcare, qualified leaders, and global standing.

Personally, as a card-carrying Lib, I feel fully and completely owned.

I’m sure all those poor Canadians your guy stuck it to this week feel truly defeated, as they retreat to their peaceful nation where they have affordable groceries, excellent healthcare, a living wage, national pride, global respect, and leaders who aren’t felons and rapists.

I hope your Lake America t-shirt makes you feel like the winners you are…

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

For the love of God and all that’s good and beautiful, haven’t you had enough, America?

Enough book bans,culture wars,bathroom bills,family separations,poisoned food,renamed lakes,unrelenting surveillance,tax-funded genocides,and wars of choice?Haven’t you had enough of terrorized refugees,billionaire techbros,hospital room ICE raids,protected predators,ignored lynchings,kleptocratic malpractice,legislated religion,and of being helmed by a lecherous, drug-addled, vile, barely literate serial predator and career criminal?Haven’t you had enough of brutal assaults on the rights of women,on immigrants,on transgender teens,on unarmed black men,on affordable healthcare,on free speech,on our Military?Have you had enough of relentless attacks on the poor,on the disabled,on the environment,on peaceful protestors,on the electoral process,on the US Postal Service,on objective truth,on empathy,on diversity as an idea?

Haven’t you had enough nonsensical conspiracies,denials of Science,mockery of expertise,ignored climate change,silencing of doctors,stoked racism,polluted courts?

Haven’t you had enough cruelty,enough bigotry,enough criminality,enough divisiveness,enough malevolence,enough hatred,enough ugliness?Haven’t you had enough needless suffering,enough unnecessary death,enough Constitutional crises,enough curated conflict,enough manufactured emergencies,enough presidential tweet tantrums,enough intentional chaos?

Maybe it’s just me.

Maybe you’re fine with it all; maybe this is good enough for you; maybe you’ve resigned yourself to this dystopian white nationalist fever dream as inevitable. I sure as hell haven’t.

I’ve had enough of this frenetic circus of sociopathy over the past ten years to last a thousand lifetimes. I’m sick to my stomach of the nation we are, and I’m in-the-marrow-of-my-bones tired of being embarrassed of and grieving over the place I call home.

I want something better.

I want equity pursued.I want bigotry shouted down.I want justice escorted in.I want compassion to trend.I want kindness to go viral.I want diversity to be celebrated.I want the poor, tired, huddled masses to breathe again here.I want ceremonial American “greatness” to give way to actual common goodness.I want to stop being at the mercy of sadistic, hateful human beings who have contempt for everything and everyone.

What the hell do you want for this place, and are you willing to do whatever is necessary to get it?

November is coming, and there’s no way to overstate the reality that this is the last stand for all of it, for all of us. What we do over the coming weeks will initiate our rebirth or write our epitaph as a Republic.

You and I have this moment to end what we’ve had enough of and to usher in what we want to see more of; to demand what we cannot live without and to condemn what we will not abide.We have this moment to create a home for ourselves and our children, and for other people’s children, for everyone who lives here and for all those who dream of living here.We have this moment to leave something for the vast multitude on the horizon of history who will inherit this place; this moment, between the America that is and the America that could be—and for better or for worse, will be.

And it is all in our hands.Regardless of their gerrymandering and suppression and intimidation and lawlessness, We The Pissed-Off People can wield our numbers to defy and defeat them together.We simply have to decide to put aside our purity tests and our excuses and our infighting and our minor differences and our apathy, and do the damn work together instead of bickering, complaining, and distracting ourselves into fascism.

No politician is likely to move people who are still inexplicably undecided; those still stuck in laziness, hopelessness, or ignorance; those who still aren’t planning to use their voices.

Only you can do that.

Only you can reach people in the trenches of your relationships with them: in your home and your neighborhood and at your school and at work and on your timelines. You can be the difference in the day.

What have you had enough of over the last ten exhausting, disorienting, heartbreaking years?What do you want to leave for those who will follow us?What will you do in the coming days in response?

America is not in the hands of a politician or a preacher or an athlete or a celebrity; it’s in our hands. Yes, it’s true, no one is coming to save us. The only question left is, will we save ourselves?

In the weeks ahead, may you leverage your voice, your time, your resources, your circle of influence, your network, and your community, and may you do all you can to transform the America that is into the America that could be.

This will be the dawn or the death of the nation we dream of making.

In November, may we wake up in that hopeful, beautiful, glorious place of possibility again.

I have had enough of this divided, corrosive, violent, failing America.

Have you?

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I see you out here today, trying to claim Dolly Parton as your own, as if she were one of you, as if you and she were kindred spirits, as if your heart and hers were aligned.

Just stop it.

Dolly was far too kind to tell you this while she was alive, so I will: you and she had little in common. Oh sure, from a distance, it might seem that way, but get a little closer and dig a little deeper and the differences could not be greater…

Dolly loved people, all people.

Unlike you, she loved without qualifiers, catches, caveats, or conditions. Her love did not come with strings or theological hoops or political litmus tests. In Dolly’s no one had to stand outside or prove their worth or earn her decency.

Dolly loved America, real America.

She wasn’t about that flag-waving, Don’t Tread On Me, America First, Christian Nationalism, Send Them Back nonsense you continually peddle as patriotism. Her America was diverse, open-armed, inclusive, and kind; a place where everyone deserved to feel at home.

Dolly was a Christian, a Jesus Christian.

Her deep and abiding faith did not need to be loudly broadcast or worn as a costume. It did not seek to bend anyone to its will. It was not something she wielded like a hammer in forced compliance. Her faith simply and clearly showed up, in an unrestrained love for neighbor that reflected the open-handed, open-hearted compassion of Christ that you mock as toxic.

Dolly believed in family, every family.

A faithful, passionate supporter of the LGBTQ community, Dolly’s advocacy of family was not confined to some rigid, White Evangelical monument to straightness and whiteness. She understood something in the core of her being you never will: that love cannot be limited and will not be hemmed in.

Dolly Parton was not MAGA in any way; she was its beautiful counterpoint.

She was a vaccine-supporting, nature-preserving, book-loving, trans-defending gay icon, and nearly everything she stood for flies fully in the face of the cruel, sneering, exclusionary narcissism of your vile, bloviating, spray-tanned messiah and his hateful movement, which you so joyfully partner in.

Dolly Parton showed respect to every single human being who ever had the good fortune of being in her orbit, whether at arm’s length or from thousands of miles away.

She left everyone feeling seen and heard and loved and respected, regardless of orientation, pigmentation, nation of origin, or any other qualifier.

She never saw anyone as an enemy to be defeated, never attempted to gatekeep blessings or opportunity, never demanded that someone earn her decency, and never dehumanized a single soul.

Dolly was an American, a Christian, and a human, but using those words alone does not guarantee similarity or affinity. In the specificity of a life lived, that’s where patriotism, faith, and humanity reveal themselves. As they say, God is in the details. Yes, you should aspire to emulate her and endeavor to replicate the generosity and unconditional love she so easily moved through this life with.

And you’re welcome to show her respect and gratitude; in fact, you should.

But please, don’t try to claim her as yours today, MAGA.

She simply wasn’t.Note: By the way, Dolly loved you as much as she loved anyone, because that’s who she was. She respected you, believed you should be free to be exactly who you are, to believe that you believe, and to support who you support politically, but that doesn’t change the reality that your support of MAGA Republicans’ platform runs counter to so much of what Dolly stood for, cared about, and gave her money and time to.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This planet has lost so much with the passing of Dolly Parton that it’s difficult to even find a foothold for the grief, a place to begin to process all that she was and all that she gave us.In the coming days, there will be countless, well-deserved tributes devoted to her seismic songwriting and singing career, her formidable business acumen, her indefatigable optimism, and her easy, infectious joy.

Dolly will be rightly eulogized for the effortless grace she moved through the world with, for the gentleness she extended to every person in her path, and for the humility she somehow managed to hold onto despite reaching near-sainthood status among fans, admirers, and peers alike.

Her life and career have and will provide an inexhaustible treasure trove of lessons for those of us who remain—and for those on the horizon of history who will not have had the great fortune to live here while she did.

Far more eloquent people than I will find ways to capture in words her ineffable spirit and the limitless wisdom they will glean from her in matters of faith, songcraft, and empire-building.

All I can say is that Dolly Parton knew how to be human better than just about anyone I can think of.

For me, one of the biggest takeaways of Dolly’s passing is the way she reminded us what wealth and influence can do when they are in the hands of someone whose life is oriented outward, someone who remembers what it is to lack, someone who values being human over being a billionaire.

With a staggering personal portfolio of publishing royalties, tour revenue, licensing deals, business ventures, property investments, and the spoils of a lifetime in the highest echelons of the entertainment business, Dolly Parton could have had more with very little effort.

She could have followed the lead of the Musks and the Bezoses and the Zuckerbergs and the Ellisons. She could have hoarded her fortune, growing more narcissistic and tight-fisted. She could have partnered with the legion of malevolent power-holders, motivated only by the insatiable allure of more. She could have exploited the influence she acquired to amass even greater fortune.

Instead, Dolly Parton spent her life giving her wealth away.She started the nonprofit Dollywood Foundation, marshaling her resources and influence to fight illiteracy in her beloved Tennessee community.

She created Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which to date has donated over 300 million books to children all over the world.

She raised money for the American Red Cross and HIV/AIDS-related charities.

She helped fund cancer centers and hospitals.

She donated a million dollars during the throes of COVID to expedite vaccine development.

She provided wildfire relief following the Great Smoky Mountain Wildfires, financially supported victims of Hurricane Helene, and worked to preserve the American Bald Eagle.

Living in a country music ecosystem often populated by homophobia and racism, she risked losing financial opportunities and fan support by advocating for the LGBTQ community and for people of color.

Over and over again, Dolly Parton reminded us that money and power do not alter character but reveal it. She leaves this planet as an enduring folk hero and a universally beloved national treasure because she never allowed her lofty place in the culture, her legend status as a performer, or her considerable riches to make her forget where she came from or why she was here.

We’ve gotten so used to seeing the wealthiest people on the planet being the least compassionate, the most unapologetically cruel; rejecting their better angels and courting their inner demons. We’ve watched them partner with despots, devour the vulnerable, and pillage the planet to further the gap between themselves and the disparate humanity they end up in contempt of.

Dolly Parton was the antithesis of this. We could always count on her to get it right, to do the decent thing, to model dignity, to always pass the good human test. That’s why her loss hits so hard, and why we owe it to her to remember what she taught us about the point of being here: to stay human.

Whether we have five bucks to our name or we’ve amassed a small fortune, whether we toil in obscurity or receive the praise of multitudes, Dolly Parton’s life stands as a reminder that we are not our achievements or our accolades or our net worth. We are not our career successes or our social standing or the kudos we merit.

As she so eloquently testified for 80 glorious years, the measure of a life is in what we do with what we are entrusted with, how we treat people around us, and the person we are in both lack and abundance.

Among the countless roles and titles at which Dolly Parton has so excelled, her single greatest performance was as a human being.

That has made her among the richest people to ever grace this planet.

Share your memories and gratitude for Dolly in the comments.

If you loved, respected Dolly and want to celebrate her extraordinary life, please support her Imagination Library.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I know what I’m supposed to believe.

I’m supposed to believe that America is still in its infancy, that it is a beautiful but complicated idea, that we simply haven’t become what we can and will become.

I’m supposed to remember that history is cyclical, that all barbaric regimes are temporary, and that every evil empire invariably falls.

I’m supposed to hold fast to the dream that we will emerge from this scalding present crucible, transformed and made better by the conflict.

I know that I’m supposed to believe that we have still not seen our best days yet, and that when we eventually do, it will be worth all the struggle we’ve endured to claim the nation our forebears dreamed of.

In the past, I’ve often believed that. I’ve written it. I’ve preached it.

Now, I’m not so sure.

250 years into our collective lifespan, we are as afflicted with systemic racism as we’ve ever been, white nationalism has completely infected the entirety of one of our political parties, and we are teetering perilously close to extremist minority rule that will in effect, permanently silence the voices and votes of the vast majority.

With every bit of the planet’s accumulated information now literally in the palms of our hands, too many of our people are still believing easily disprovable falsehoods, still falling victim to nonsensical conspiracies, still vulnerable to baseless lies about their neighbors.

Even with the benefits of hindsight of our shameful and bloody history, a toxic cocktail of overt racism, neanderthal theology, intellectual ignorance, and self-preservation has rendered a large swath of America hostile to Science, terrified of diversity, and irrationally violent toward vulnerable people.

And perhaps worst of all, a substantial portion of this nation remains emotionally tethered to one of the single most reprehensible human beings on the planet, despite a decade of prolific lawlessness and unrepentant moral filth. His ineptitude, narcissism, predation, and criminality have not proven to be dealbreakers but selling points.

How are decent, reasonable people supposed to work with this?How do we find common ground with those who insist on dehumanization of those who are different?How can we engage in constructive conversation or honest dialogue with people whose reality is so arbitrary, whose truth is so malleable, whose moral goalposts are forever shifting?How can we forge a new and more equitable America, while so many Americans live perpetually backwards, pining for a bygone day when fewer people had a voice or a vote?How can we coexist with those who would rewind this nation to a time when women, people of color, and LGBTQ human beings had their value determined, their options dictated, and their futures defined by straight, white men?

If our families and friendships and workplaces and churches and political systems are all still this saturated with supremacy, can an interdependent community of disparate humanity with equitable access to life, liberty, and happiness ever be a reality here?

Romanticism and misplaced optimism aside, is America as we envision it still possible, with MAGA’s poison having infected its bloodstream?

It may of course still be possible, yet with every year I think it becomes less and less probable. The longer we live as a nation with these untreated collective cancers of heart and mind, the greater opportunity they have to metastasize exponentially and the less chance we have of eradicating them for good.

History reminds us that the more we abide brutality and tolerate discrimination, the more normal they become, the more difficult they are to excise. Our present normal is not sustainable if we’re ever going to grow into something truly beautiful.

I want this nation to become what the songs and the anthems declare we can be, but I’m not sure we all share that desire. I think many of us want the ugliest atrocities of our past to be our future, and that may be a disease too invasive to be healed of for the rest of us.

There’s an old saying: when the horse is dead, dismount.

The ride may be over for America.

Maybe this horse is beyond saving.

Yes, I’ll show up again today, leveraging my time, my resources, and my voice in the cause of equality and empathy; to do all I can let freedom ring and let justice roll down like a river, though I admit, it feels like a fool’s errand.

Still, I want to know I left this life doing everything I could to help us get well, and that’s what will propel me back out into the fray once again.

I’m waking up in this America that is, and will be fighting like hell to craft the America that could be, as futile as that sometimes seems.

For ten interminable, exhausting years, MAGA has been an invasive, insidious national cancer.

I wonder if we can survive it. What about you? How do you view the damage of the last decade? Do you see our demise as a foregone conclusion, or do you feel hopeful that transformation can and will come? Let me know in the comments.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Friends, these days will kill you if you’re not careful.

As we find ourselves fully engulfed in the Category 5 s**t storm that is a second Trump term, two things are irrefutably clear: it’s much worse than we thought it would be, and it’s gonna get much worse before it gets better.

At this point, even the most pessimistic post-2024 election predictions have woefully underestimated the scope and velocity of the carnage to our systems of protection, our long-established structural institutions, and the elemental freedoms we’ve counted as givens.

The emotional whiplash of a relentless stream of diabolical Executive Orders, unrestrained sociopathy, stratospheric economic malpractice, and pathological attacks on vulnerable people is enough to level even the most measured and otherwise imperturbable among us.

In other words, our nervous systems weren’t built for this very special kind of homegrown hell.

What that means, in rubber-meets-the-road practicality, is that all the normal tried-and-true avenues of self-care may likely prove insufficient.

Even if you are somehow able in this disorienting, perpetual state of national emergencies and existential crises to actually keep a strict regimen of sleep, good nutrition, hydration, exercise, meditation, prayer, time in nature, relational connection, artistic pursuits, therapy, and limited media exposure—you might still feel like you’re about a millisecond from completely losing it in any given moment. (I know that I am.)

Now, you definitely don’t want to abandon the above practices, as they’ll surely help tether you to health and sanity, but I want to suggest that you might want to philosophically make other alterations in light of the gravity of these days; some new daily commitments you can make to yourself to navigate the nightmare. Consider these:

Burn bridges to toxic people. It’s a noble thing to want to reach across lines of tribalism and to try and stay connected with those whose opinions differ from ours, but there’s a limit to what is healthy, or called for, or even hunamly possible. Recently, our friends, family members, neighbors, and co-workers have revealed with great clarity who they are, what is stored up in their hearts. At this point, it’s perfectly fine to determine that some people, even people we know well and love, are morally incompatible with us.Have the damn dessert. Yeah, we all know that as a rule, emotional eating is a bad idea and that intentionally overindulging won’t be good long-term, but given the number of historic implosions happening right now and the uncertainty of so many things, it’s a good idea to treat yourself to some comfort food or a libation or some small sensory pleasure, to remind yourself of the beauty found in simplicity. (Now, what wine pairs well with the fall of a Republic?)

Stop procrastinating away happiness. If you’ve been postponing a dream trip, holding off on writing your novel, or putting off a new project, cut that crap out, now. It isn’t trivial to attend to such things when disaster hits, but essential. One of the greatest forms of resistance is to live fully, joyfully, and creatively. Yes, it may all be hitting the fan right now, but you can put on a poncho and press on. Don’t wait for permission to really live, because fascists will not provide it.

Ask anything and say everything. One of the blessings of destabilizing, consequential moments like the ones that we’re in is that they help us clarify who we are and precisely what is worth living for; the causes and people that matter to us. Over the last two years you’ve likely learned a great deal about yourself, or you’ve been reminded of stuff that you forgot. And if things are all going sideways anyway, it’s a great time to be exactly who you are without apology or editing.

Stop giving a damn what people think. Repeat after me: someone else’s opinion of me is none of my business. Unbelievably, there are still people who are so addled by some toxic cocktail of denial, wishful thinking, ignorance, and American exceptionalism that they insist on tone policing those of us who are sounding the alarm and announcing the sky’s plummeting toward us. Those people do not deserve your time or emotional bandwidth. Refuse to be burdened by their expectations or bound by their sensibilities; you have a nation to save.

Please understand that I’m not minimizing what we’re going through collectively and what you’re enduring individually or what’s ahead for all of us. These are sobering, harrowing, dangerous times, and we will be pressed up against threats and worries many of us have never faced before. That’s all the more reason to live the hell out of single every day.

So yes, friends, please take good care of your physical, spiritual, mental, emotional, and relational health by adopting practices and patterns that can provide a buffer between you and the terrifying hellscapes on your timeline, outside your window, and in your head.

But beyond that, in what feels like (and may indeed be) the worst-case scenario, make it a priority to radically care for yourself by refusing to compromise or deny yourself simple pleasures or postpone your dreams or silence your own voice.

The world may indeed be falling apart, but we don’t have to.

What are some self-care rules you’ve adopted recently that you’d add to my list? Please share in the comments.

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The Christian Right has been right.

For decades they tried to tell us that the sky was falling, that devils and demons were walking among us, that the end of all we love was so very nigh.

For decades they lamented our imminent moral devastation, trying to prepare us (as good prophets do) for the quickly encroaching enemy coming to enslave decent people to their sadistic religious perversions.

They pounded their pulpits with ferocity and thumped their Bibles with abandon, forecasting this country’s certain doom at the hands of violent, self-righteous extremists, and we refused to listen.

We rolled our eyes and dismissed them as conspiratorial cultists whose hold on reality was tenuous, at best. And yet, they had it right all along.

It turns out that every single one of their raw-throated, brimstone-breathing prophecies was true:

The wolves would come to devour the innocent in the name of their God.There would be a twisting of religious texts to justify vile evil of every kind.Women, LGBTQ people, and immigrants would be terrorized by a radical minority claiming divine authority.Marginalized, oppressed, and vulnerable human beings would be discarded, hounded, and brutalized.Good people in America would be preyed upon by opportunistic monsters wielding scripture like a hammer.

These sage Evangelical prognosticators had everything about the approaching disaster correct—except its source. Conservative Christians neglected to predict the actual genesis of this great decimation, and all they had to do was look in the mirror.

You see, it isn’t and will not be some supposed Islamic horde running amok through our nation with a violent, theocratic religion of coercion meant to enslave people to their draconian moral code. Radical Muslims are not an existential threat to our nation, bringing some punitive pestilence upon this nation. They are not here waging an unrelenting holy war on those in America who do not share their beliefs.

The real religious extremists have already breached the border.

The thick, black shadow of theocracy is already upon us.

White Christian Nationalists are here right now.

Evangelicals are the greatest existential threat to this diverse nation, and it isn’t even close.

For years the Christian Right has been warning us about Godless hordes coming to destroy America, and it turns out this was true; it’s just that the words were autobiographical.

As a longtime pastor and lifelong Christian, I’ve had a sick sense of déjà vu watching politicians professing to be followers of Jesus dismantling every program designed to care for the vulnerable and the hurting, seeing the way the corrupt are being awarded greater power, watching empathy vanishing and hatred skyrocketing, witnessing people legislating their antiquated theology upon everyone else.

I’ve heard this story a million times before; proclaimed from pulpits on Sunday mornings, unleashed in religious social media rants, and shouted through bullhorns on street corners—with one notable twist.

I knew this was coming, or at least I should have. We all should have. These harbingers of doom were absolutely right to warn us, and ironically they were the approaching pestilence. In the sickest kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, they were the plague of these days that they have long said would come.

It would be the Christian preachers and the evangelists abandoning the compassionate heart of their faith tradition, perverting the words of their scriptures for their agenda, and selling their souls for a high place overlooking the world.

They would be the very false prophets they told us that we should like hell run from. These supposed disciples of Jesus would be the ones to betray him with a kiss and send him to a bloody, undignified end.

We are approaching an election, and the monsters need a distraction. They need to press into the irrational fear of those who are not awake and alert enough to see clearly, and Islamophobia is on the menu.

Don’t be fooled by White Evangelicals who are spending every waking moment dehumanizing and demonizing our Muslim brothers and sisters.

Pay attention to where America is right now, to what is happening here in this moment in the name of God, to the oppressive marriage of Church and State currently being consummated, to the unthinkable harm being done this very day by professed righteous soldiers in the army of the Lord.

Yes, the Christian Right was right; evil was going to viciously assail America, terrorize the lives of good people, and make a mockery of God.

It was just going to be an inside job.

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Ignorance is not a compelling argument at this point.

We’ve all heard the theories for the last ten years: people still supporting Donald Trump are unwitting victims of the partisan media and Evangelical alternate reality that they’ve been raised in and are still captives of. We’re told that they’re continually surrounded by bad theology, fake news, and endless conspiracy, and so they aren’t bad people; they just aren’t seeing what we are seeing, and we need all to be more understanding.

We’re a decade into this madness. This just isn’t acceptable anymore.

There isn’t a sufficient excuse for being an adult so sheltered from facts and so truth-deprived that you can’t see Trump’s complete sociopathy and you can’t discern the existential threat he and his party are to this nation.

His supporters aren’t being asked to dig beneath some complex, brilliantly crafted ruse perpetrated by Conservative media and religious conglomerates working in concert. If you can read Trump’s own social media feed or listen to the bile he spews in front of the cameras at female reporters and political opponents, and not be fully disgusted to the point of vomiting, you aren’t a reasonable human being. Either that, or you are willingly choosing to engage in wild intellectual and theological gymnastics to avoid a reality that makes you uncomfortable, intentionally avoiding some really vile stuff that he and his collaborators aren’t even attempting to conceal anymore.

I’m fully convinced that nearly everyone still supporting Donald Trump knows he is a reprehensible human being; guilty of high crimes against this nation, atrocities against women, and war crimes around the globe. But they can’t admit to themselves or anyone else they made a mistake, and so, in an act of self-preservation, they are doubling down again and again.

They’re not stupid; they’re just willing to let America die on the altar of their pride, which may be far worse.

Being an adult means being responsible for ferreting out what is real and what isn’t, and for making good decisions with the available information. This is what we demand from our children, isn’t it? We only let their ignorance be an excuse for so long, and then we remove that option because we expect them to be smarter than that at some point. And if we realize that they are smart enough to know better, then it becomes an indictment of their character.

If grown men and women aren’t willing or able to sift information and choose wisely because of their media choices or their circle of friends or their mental effort, thenet result is the same: they are enabling and protecting reprehensible behavior that places people in great danger.

If Fox News creates your reality, you’re going to be hateful toward lots of people: Muslims, LGBTQ people, immigrants, people of color, refugees—and on and on and on. And if you’ve been on the planet for a few decades, you should have developed the critical thinking not to allow a network that brokers in fantasy and fiction to be your baseline for truth. That’s a you problem.

If The Religious Right defines for you what it means to be a Christian, your Christianity is going to look nothing like the actual teachings of Christ. It’s going to be an angry, violent thing devoid of compassion and gentleness. That isn’t your preacher’s fault, it isn’t Franklin Graham’s fault, and it isn’t the Devil’s fault. As a thinking Christian who supposedly reads the words of Jesus and reflects on them regularly—you should see through this sham in a hot minute and soundly reject it.

If the brazen, unapologetic racism and xenophobia and misogyny on display right now is too subtle for your sensibilities, and if Nazis marching through town squares, supremacist politicians, and election interference fall beneath your radar, you either intentionally have your head in the sand or it isn’t on straight to begin with—and either is a crisis.

Many of my white Evangelical friends supporting Trump aren’t as much stupid or unaware as they are cowardly. They held their noses in 2016, voted in anger or haste or error, and then quickly got out of the politics business, choosing to escape the consequences of their decision on other people. So Newsmax and the Conservative Christian Church have become convenient places of sanctuary for people with privilege wanting to hide from the results of their vote.

Again, they aren’t ignorant of reality; they just are opting out of it altogether. If it is stupidity, the affliction is highly selective, extremely localized, and very convenient. And if that’s the case, are we supposed to expect in year eleven or twelve they’re going to finally have a magical epiphany and part with him?

It’s time we stopped giving adult human beings the benefit of the doubt, simply because we think they’re not smart enough not to be fooled by religious shysters, fake news peddlers, and political snake oil salesmen. If that is true, then they’re also not smart or mentally capable enough to be presented with objective data or compelling arguments and to filter them responsibly. They are, practically speaking, unreachable with rational measures.

I’m tired of having to treat people like children when they aren’t capable or willing to see what even a child can see, what my children can see. They know hatred and bullying without needing to read a think piece or do online research or unpack layers of religion and history.

I’m over justifying bigotry and racism and the horrible stuff happening in the country, and giving people who perpetuate it a pass because they supposedly don’t realize they’re supporting a monster—when most of the watching world seems to get it.

In a time when information is available at our fingertips and when conversation and study and exploration are limitless, I’m through excusing supposed adults for not being able to make a decision that is based in reality, simply because they’re in some hateful, self-righteous, nationalistic bubble. That’s their fault, not ours.

I don’t hate these people, but I’m also not going to coddle them and encourage their ignorance anymore because lots of people are damaged when that happens.

Sooner or later we adults all have to own our supposed stupidity–and choose to be wiser

.

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To the Ministers in America,

I’ve been where you are.

For nearly 30 years, I stood in the pulpits and on the platforms where you now stand.

I know the difficulties of the work you do that many people don’t think about: the collective expectations of the people you serve, the incredible pressures that come from both above and around you, the number of opinions you have to respectfully sift through. And I know the tumult that often creates within you.

I understand the dizzying high-wire walk of trying to carry your personal convictions as well as the virtues and values you’re entrusted to steward as part of your position, and I’ve felt the fierce internal whirlwind when those things don’t align.

And I also know how easy it is to find your voice gradually silenced, to grow beholden to a congregation or a denomination; to let the practical fears of losing your job or your health insurance or your livelihood slowly force you to make tiny concessions, usually without even realizing it.

I’ve felt what it feels like to soften your delivery, to edit your messages, to start talking around issues that you know will create conflict or bring turbulence or slow things down, and how tempting it is to rationalize why this is simply part of doing ministry.

And above all, I know that you didn’t begin this work wanting to become a compromised people-pleaser with watered-down words, unspoken passions, and feet of clay.

Because of this, I need to ask you: why exactly did you begin this work?

What is preventing you from doing the one thing spiritual leaders are here to do: letting your faith speak unequivocally, pushback, conflict, and retribution be damned?

What is keeping you from centering the poor and the outcast and oppressed in that way that Jesus calls his followers to do?

Like him, you are here to be Good Shepherds: loving caregivers to the harassed and helpless sheep in your care and the fierce opposition to the wolves who would devour them, wherever they show up and however much influence they have.

It feels like those ministers are a swiftly dwindling species nearing the brink of extinction; like courageous prophets speaking truth to corrupt power are rapidly disappearing.I’m afraid that we are running out of Christian leaders who will stand against the hatred having its renaissance here in the name of God—and I need you to prove me wrong.

The American Church needs you to prove me wrong.

The American people need you to.

Immigrants and trans kids and Muslim families and young black men need you to.

This weary, beleaguered, terrified nation in the throes of Christian nationalism needs you to draw deep from your reservoirs of faith, to clarify your calling again, to ask yourself why you do what you do.

And after doing that, it needs you to find your singular voice and to speak in such a way that the heavens shake and powerful people stagger and sleeping people are roused awake to the urgency of the moment.

All faithful people here need to be reminded what that faith requires of them, so that they can be similarly courageous where they are.Non-religious people here need to know that believers aren’t all wall-builders and book-banners; that many are moved by their better angels to acts of beauty and kindness and generosity, not exclusion and cruelty.

This world has enough ministers who’ve been content to stay silent and become complicit in the weaponizing of religion and the ascension of bigotry. We don’t need any more of those. America is at capacity for sanctified cowards who forever straddle the fence of neutrality.

I would never be cavalier with your life or your work. I don’t know your ministry setting, your family situation, your financial condition, or your faith journey. All I know is that if you consider yourself a spiritual leader of any kind, the one thing you have, the only thing of real value, is your authentic voice birthed by your spiritual convictions: not your church’s, not your supervisor’s, not your loudest church members.’

Your singular, irreplaceable gift is your personal burden to heal and help and lead—and your willingness to make that burden known without dilution.

The voices of the religious frauds and performative hypocrites are deafening right now. They are drowning out the compassionate, fiercely loving voice of Jesus, and it is your calling and your responsibility to be a steward of that voice. If you refuse to do that, no matter what reason you give to justify it, you have no business calling yourself a minister.

You don’t need to speak in a way that intentionally harms, that willfully divides, or that resonates nationally, but you can speak to the small world entrusted to you, and with unmistakable clarity you can plead for mercy, demand justice, advocate for compassion, and beg for audacious love to be what believers are known by in these days.

Sunday is coming, friends.

May you greet it with courage.

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Well, here we are, or more accurately, here you are.

I’d like to say I’m surprised, though that would be a lie.

We all saw this coming for you (well, those of us not indoctrinated into a treasonous predator’s mindless death cult). Like Pam and Tulsi and Kristi, and countless women before, you were destined to find yourself here.

This was always how this was going to end: with you finally understanding that you were never of any value to him, that you were always a tool; simply another expendable woman that he used for his pleasure and unceremoniously discarded.

This is the inevitable reality when one tethers themselves to a monster.

Good people tried to warn you from the very first day you stood in front of a podium and confidently spoke words that were bereft of truth and harmful to millions, but once you sign away your soul, you have to ride the thing out to the end.

I wonder how you ended up here.

I wonder if you know.

I wonder, if in the quiet places, away from the lights and the bombast and the attention, you can now rewind through your story and see the thousands of small moral failures that led you to this place; the endless stream of seemingly insignificant concessions that began to overtake you.

I wonder if you can look back and see precisely where you lost the plot of the faith you so loudly profess; how you completely abandoned the compassionate, kind, loving Jesus of your religion and instead, willfully lied for a living on behalf of serial predator.

As you stood before the American people day after day, trafficking in untruth, justifying brutality, and celebrating prolific violence, all while wearing the cross of a dark-skinned foreigner who preached love for neighbor, did alarms of hypocrisy go off inside your head, or were the money and proximity to power too loud for you to hear?

But more than anything else, Karoline, I wonder if you feel like whatever you got for your soul was worth it.

Did eighteen months of rented importance, racists’ applause, and the public praise of a despot profit you enough to justify all that you sacrificed to get it?

When you realize that History has recorded every lie you uttered, documented each act of treason, and preserved each word of effusive praise for a war criminal, does that worry you at all?

When your young children grow up and learn that their mother was the strident mouthpiece for one of the most despicable human beings to ever walk the planet, will all of this have been worth it?

I can’t answer that for you—but from where I’m standing, it wasn’t.

It wasn’t worth the people beaten, abducted, and murdered by ICE.It wasn’t worth the lives of children blown apart in Gaza and Ukraine and Iran and Lebanon.It wasn’t worth the grief of families who’ve lost healthcare and their homes and their businesses, and their livelihoods.It wasn’t worth the pain of trans teenagers, Latino mothers, and black men who’ve been terrorized by their neighbors and their Government.It wasn’t worth a nation riddled with conspiracy, decimated by tribalism, and assailed by suffering.Because, while you were not the author of this chaos and death, you were its spokesperson, Karoline. You were its voice. You woke up every single day, and you legitimized it, championed it, defended it, and sold all of it—and so it is on your hands, as well.

As a woman and a mother and a wife and a Christian and a human being, maybe auctioning off your soul was worth all of that to you.

And if so, I feel really sorry for you.

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This should be easy.

We are now two years into the most openly corrupt, inept, and relentlessly predatory presidential administration in our nation’s history.

We have watched an extremist minority commandeer Congress, the Justice Department, our Military, and the highest court in our nation, mounting an unprecedented repeal of the rights of women, of environmental protections, of voting rights, of elemental liberties.

Republican leadership across this country has declared open war on diversity, on education, on the legitimacy of our elections. Our checks and balances are nonfunctioning, our systems of protection have been compromised—and we are warring with one another.

We should be easily coalescing around our collective values, but we are not.The upcoming midterms should be the slam dunk of the century, but they aren’t.We should be rising together to eradicate this fascism en masse, but we’re not.

Some establishment Dems are formulating plans to combat rising Democratic Socialist candidates instead of asking why those people and platforms are resonating with voters, or what might be learned about their party’s weaknesses.

Far-Left activists incessantly push out strident, baby-with-bathwater objections to moderate candidates, disqualifying them for past behavior, one-time verbal gaffes, single-issue stances, or previous political positions.

Longtime party moderates are operating as if the former rules of engagement still exist, too paralyzed by fear and scarcity to do anything but what they’ve always done, while burn-it-all-down anarchists want to turn a massive tanker on a dime without acknowledging the diversity of thought among the voting bloc they seek and need.

From the center to the fringes, we liberals war with potential allies, allowing no gray space of compromise, no personal evolution for people, and no possibility of future alignment with those who do not currently check every possible box. In doing so, we passionately partner in the work of our adversaries. We easily find ourselves violently fighting with one another over matters that are in fact trivial, when compared with all that hangs in the balance.

Put simply, the Left has a purity problem, and if we don’t get over it, it’s going to destroy us.

Meanwhile, despite some fracturing in the MAGA monolith, the other side is simply circling the wagons, making concessions, consolidating power, and gaining traction—spirituality and morality and virtue be damned. This is why we’re where we are today.

For all their sermonizing, Conservatives have never allowed their personal morality to get in the way of a political win. That has been the story for the past few years here: millions of people on the Right trading in their personal and religious values for the coming of a kleptocratic kingdom they will all benefit from. They have sacrificed their individual convictions on the altar of the bigger win, or at least, what seems like victory in the moment.

Now, I’m not asking moderates, progressives, liberals, and Left-leaning believers to do that. I’m not suggesting we collectively sell our souls the way our counterparts have. I’m not advocating for a collective treason against what we value.

We are different from our political and religious adversaries, precisely because we are more committed to our personal convictions than to purchasing influence.We do stand for something greater than empty pulpit pounding and phony patriotic histrionics about Christianity and America under attack or returning to our days of former supremacist glory.We are driven by moral and spiritual prompts that refuse to align with monsters or horde a consuming power that will corrupt us.We aren’t fueled by a contempt that would snap its fingers and wipe out everyone else.

But if we can’t lay down our all-or-nothing, my-candidate-or-no-candidate absolutism and set aside our arrogant virtue to stand shoulder-to-shoulder against a formidable threat, we’re soon going to find ourselves with no voice whatsoever.

Longtime rank-and-file Democrats, this is bigger than you.Frustrated Progressives, this is bigger than you.Democratic Socialist advocates, this is bigger than you.Defiant Third Party holdouts, this is bigger than you.Exhausted abstainers, this is bigger than you.Ambivalent moderates of all parties, this is bigger than you.Everybody needs to take a breath, find some humility, and talk to—not at or about one another.

We all need to understand how urgent these moments are. We need to stop killing our allies with friendly fire, and we need to discard the inconsequential battles of preference so that we can win the singularly vital war of which we all will prosper.

When our Republic is secured, and our essential liberties are restored, then we can go about the necessary and very attainable work of navigating our differences to renovate America into something we all can take pride in, something better than it has been.

But if we fail to confront this existential threat because we are distracted and divided by moral litmus tests, lazy squabbling, and performative purity politics, we will have all squandered the moment in front of us.

The Right is pushing America to the brink of theocracy and fascism, and we on the Left need to stop helping them.

We need to win together because when we win, life and the planet and the future does too.

It’s time we pulled ourselves together.

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A full decade into one of the darkest chapters in our nation’s history, white people in this country need to be honest about something: White Christians ruined everything.

Over the last ten years, self-identified followers of Jesus have almost singlehandedly destroyed all that was good and decent and beautiful in America by hitching themselves to a monster and refusing to let go, no matter how unrepentantly evil he has proven himself to be.

I mean, think about it:

If not for them, his vile Access Hollywood video confession of assault is a deal breaker in 2016.If not for them, his ridiculing of a disabled reporter is a bridge too far.If not for them, he isn’t declared a Christian.If not for them, he isn’t elected or reelected.If not for them, there are no stomach-turning photo ops of opportunistic religious sycophants laying hands on him.If not for them, thousands of brown-skinned families aren’t violated, terrorized, and treated like animals.If not for them, no one breaches the Capitol on January 6th and throws our electoral process into chaos.

We are living in a completely different timeline, now, because of them.

If not for white, alleged Christians in our government, sick people aren’t creating GoFundMe pages to get routine medical care,our elections aren’t polluted by techbro oligarchs.women aren’t losing their fundamental liberties,and ICE isn’t murdering people in cold blood and without accountability.If not for White Evangelicals, his unhinged, racist vanity rallies are empty.If not for them, climate change isn’t dismissed, science isn’t opposed, expertise isn’t mocked, and sound medicine isn’t disregarded,If not for them, gun violence victims get more than #thoughtsandprayers platitudes.If not for them, every pedophile and rapist in the Epstein Files is facing a legal reckoning right now.If not for these Christians, MAGA is the extremist fringe movement it should always have been.

Talk about losing the plot. Talk about mission drift. Talk about gaining the world and losing your soul. Talk about effing everything up for this monster... for this human garbage… for this loveless, joyless, empty, vacant nothing.

If not for the professed followers of Jesus, throughout this country, bigots aren’t emboldened to proudly parade their hatred in the light of day.Sexual assault survivors aren’t belittled and traumatized anew.Every one of his lies is named and condemned.He is held accountable for his crimes and his immorality and his trampling of the Constitution.If not for them, this planet is safer, more compassionate, and more just—period.

As a white person who grew up in the Church and pastored for decades, that’s a tough pill to force down.

Ironically, despite all their sanctimonious sermonizing, finger-wagging condemnation, and sky-is-falling histrionics, the white Evangelical Church has enabled, nurtured, and championed more inequity and more misery in these days than any other entity, and there is no close second.

For the disparate masses of the world, American Christians have become a barrier to belonging, a sanctuary for supremacy, and a hostile presence for the least of these.By its marriage to a politics of exclusion, the Conservative Church has failed the poor, women, people of color, gender fluid human beings, the disabled, and non-heteronormative people.It’s failed immigrants and refugees and foreigners; vulnerable and marginalized communities; non-religious and non-Christian human people.It has failed everyone outside the tiny gated community of the white and the wealthy.This is indeed a tragedy.

But more than anyone, the White Evangelical Church has failed Jesus.

They have misappropriated his likeness, hijacked his name, and weaponized his message into something grotesque and oppressive—and it is rightfully repelling good people.

As someone still aspiring to a life of faith and still trying to speak into my religious tradition, it’s sobering to admit that we’re not here as a nation in this brutal battle for our existential life, we’re not at the precipice of authoritarianism, and we’re not steeped in this unapologetic supremacy, if not for people claiming to be devoted to the same Jesus I’ve grown up trying to emulate.

There are tens of millions of white people here, both Christian and non-Christian, who wake up every day working to be agents of kindness and generosity in this world, who are driven to sickness by the irreparable harm being done to this nation, to humanity, to the planet in the name of God.

And we, not people of color, not immigrants, we white people, are going to need to be the ones to make our presence felt in our neighborhoods, on social media, in school board meetings, and at the polls, and drive these charlatans and frauds out of power and influence, and into the places of irrelevance and shame they so richly deserve.

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As I sat in a small cafe overlooking a sun-dappled Florentine piazza, that thought floated in with the evening breeze, bringing a protracted exhale that surprised me, as if I’d suddenly remembered how to breathe again.

It had taken me nearly five full days away from America to begin to realize how very unwell I’d been, how physically and emotionally depleted the past eighteen months had left me, and most alarming of all—how normal that exhaustion had become. It was as if someone interrupted the ubiquitous chaos I’d grown accustomed to and softly said, “Yeah, you don’t have to live like that.”

Little by little, with 4,500 miles and nearly a week now separating me from my beleagured home, all my recent symptoms had suddenly become clear: the jagged irritability bubbling always beneath the surface, the ever-present knot in the pit of my stomach, the low-grade dread hovering in the periphery of my thoughts, the pervasive hopelessness I’d gotten used to, the slow but certain attrition to my joy that no longer alarmed me.

Leaving America showed me how sick America has made me.

But it wasn’t just the change of scenery that had revealed the maladies afflicting me, afflicting us; it was the dozens of human beings I’d shared conversations with, people who reminded me that there are other ways to exist that I’d forgotten about.

Everywhere I went, shop owners, servers, Uber drivers, and other travelers from the disparate corners of this planet routinely verified how abnormal our daily life actually is:

Not everyone wakes up each day feeling they need to marshal every available resource to protect themselves from their elected officials.

Not everyone fears a routine surgery will bankrupt them.

Not everyone has masked, Government-funded goons murdering innocent people in their streets.

Not everyone has a career criminal and serial predator as a Head of State.

Not everyone is helmed by theocratic, conspiratorial Christian zealots.

Not everyone is watching every fundamental liberty evaporating.

Not everyone is feeling as though their nation’s best days are behind them.

And honestly, that all felt a bit shocking.

That’s how insidious the sickness of living in this iteration of America is, how commonplace the brutality now is, how the monstrous now seems normal. We have been immersed for so long in a state of sustained urgency and unrelenting suffering that it no longer occurs to us that these are not the default settings of a civilized nation, that we are not supposed to be this deprived of optimism. We are gradually becoming acclimated to nightmarish realities that no decent human beings should ever make peace with.

My profound privilege is not lost on me. I know that many people here don’t have the good fortune of a respite from the horrors for 10 minutes, let alone 10 days. Most Americans can’t place geographic space between themselves and this country and have the precious white space of mental rest it yields, yet that doesn’t make the reckoning of the toll this place has taken on me, on all of us, any easier to accept.

I’m now back in the country I call home, and I’m trying like hell not to forget what I learned while I was away; the terrible afflictions that come from living here inside this unfettered epidemic of corruption and hatred. I want to remember how heartsick I’ve been, so that I can keep from sliding further into the abyss, so that I do not allow America to render me devoid of joy or bereft of hope.

If there’s anything I can give you as a memento of my travels, it’s confirmation that none of this is normal, that we deserve something more than this dystopian bigot fever dream we’ve grown ever more comfortable with, that this leaden nihilism does not have to be our destiny, unless we allow it to be.

Maybe you’ve started to accept the unacceptable, maybe you’ve been emotionally numbed by the unrelenting atrocities, or maybe you’ve grown so weary from fighting that you’ve stopped remembering what it’s like to breathe. If so, may you be reminded that these are symptoms of illness, but they do not need to be a death sentence.

The only way we can help retain our sanity and stay tethered to our humanity is to not succumb to the sickness surrounding us, to not let this parasitic regime destroy us, to refuse to be swallowed up by the cancer of cruelty our leadership has released into our bloodstream.

To every American who is being sickened by America: take heart, keep going. We can get well together. We will.

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The conversation turned toward the alleged bright spot found in the reality of many of Trump's supporters joining the Leaving MAGA movement; finally being roused from the ten-year stupor of cultic adoration enough to see with lucid assessment that they have tethered themselves to a monster.

Some suggested with tentative optimism that after a confounding, infuriating decade of sycophantic devotion, they might finally be putting aside their fierce tribalism and joining the rest of the reasonable people in opposing this rapidly unfolding coup.

At first, I co-signed such a possibility as a sign of hope, but quickly realized that it was misplaced optimism. That’s probably not what we’re seeing at all right now.

The fact of the matter is, with very few exceptions, people who voted for Trump in 2024 (many for the third time) and who are beginning to come around enough to move them to action, have not had their humanity awakened watching his and his Administration’s violent, illegal weaponizing of I.C.E. against immigrants, both documented and undocumented.

They have not tapped into heretofore unaccessed reservoirs of compassion for LGBTQ people facing unlawful and unprovoked legislative and personal attacks by his surrogates in Congress, school board meetings, and in the streets.

They aren’t having their once-stone hearts broken by the abject horrors of the Epstein Files and moved to demand the unredacted contents be revealed, so that accountability for every monster and justice for every survivor would come.

They haven’t experienced a miraculous, biblical Road to Emmaus spiritual awakening, realizing how many ways Trump has already violated the poor, withheld food from the hungry, visited injury on already suffering people, or urinated on the teachings of Jesus.

They aren’t being overtaken by some newfound responsibility as global citizens, feeling a sudden rush of affinity for the persecuted people of Ukraine, or Gaza, or Iran, or Lebanon.

No, the only reason Trump supporters are forming any kind of oppositional response to Trump is that the pain has become personal.

As they abruptly lose their jobs, see their companies move overseas, watch their 401(k)s evaporate, reckon with the skyrocketing grocery and gas prices, find their own voices silenced, and see their healthcare options dissolve, they are magically finding themselves becoming the resistance that decent human beings have been for a decade now.

Their rebellion is not born out of true contrition for their damaging alliances, genuine regret for being complicit in empowering a fascist, or a sincere desire to partner with the disparate human beings already united in saving our Republic and our planet.

As MAGA Americans realize that they, too, are victims of the criminality and predation they initially hoped would only be for those despised others (the immigrant, the gay, the brown, the black, the woke, the blue staters), it is finally becoming a bridge too far. As their feet are finally put to the fire they wished upon so many others, suddenly immorality and overreach are becoming objectionable.

And this will continue to happen in the coming weeks and months with the people around us. We will see more and more conversions of convenience.

The moment members of Trump’s genuflecting multitude are jarred awake by the sobering truth that their whiteness and their party affiliation and their church attendance and their red hats won’t save them from the disaster they have helped create, then and only then will they care in the slightest bit.

I’d like to be wrong, but sadly, I don’t believe I will be.

And though it will still be a small consolation to see a larger swath of this nation find out that this president’s sociopathy will spare no one, it would have been nice if they’d been internally transformed by love for their fellow human beings instead of just for themselves.

The real victory would have been if they’d been moved by self-examination and not just self-preservation.

I could have celebrated their empathy, but I can’t celebrate their selfishness.

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So began the tearful confession of a middle-aged woman who approached me after an event in Lincoln, Nebraska. She paused for a second, exhaled loudly, and then continued, her voice shaking:

“I’m ashamed to say that I find myself wishing these terrible people would just... disappear, so that they can’t hurt us anymore.” She said, “I just feel like I’m waiting for them to get old and die off. What do I do with this anger?”

I knew what I was supposed to tell her, what I was expected to tell her, what I wanted to tell her.

I wanted to tell her that these impulses were wrong, that such feelings were unhealthy, that this kind of consuming hatred toward another human being was dangerously toxic.I wanted to remind her that this level of contempt for a stranger was the very thing she abhorred in the people she feels this way toward.I wanted to steer her from such negative energy… but I couldn’t do any of these things.I understood her.Her desperation and hopelessness made perfect sense.Her terrifying headspace hit home.This is a natural human response to unchecked brutality and unrelenting cruelty: wanting it all to end.You don’t actually wish harm to people; you just wish harmful people would stop harming other people, and there seems to be nothing in them that will move them to stop, other than expiring.

When we see powerful human beings willfully doing damage to other people or to the planet, this rage is our heart’s alarm; it is our very humanity protesting against unspeakable violence that we feel powerless to do anything about. Imagining a world without predators and bullies and malevolent people is a way to stay tethered to our sanity; a defense mechanism against complete emotional collapse. Of course, we don’t desire violence or wish catastrophe, but we understand our past enough to know that sometimes injustice and hatred are generational: bigotry experiences a Renaissance, has a brief prolific period, and then passes. It seems like we are in the middle of that kind of brutal rebirth right now, and we want it to end.

Throughout the history of the planet, when the powerful have viciously assailed mankind, there have been good people whose stomachs have been turned and whose blood has boiled in response, people who loved and cared and healed and prayed and worked, and who knew they might have to wait for change to fully come, through young people who rejected such hatred wholesale.

And that’s the pivot that needs to happen in our hearts when we feel that scalding anger at people who are presently evil: we look forward to what might be born on the horizon of history. We pour ourselves into the lives of young people, we work to change the hearts we can, we seek compromise and common ground with those who disagree with us, and we do everything in our power to prep the ground for the equality, diversity, and justice that will inevitably grow.

Of course, I’d never wish physical harm on another human being or ever rejoice in anyone’s early demise, but I confess that in these days I take some solace in the reality that we are all temporary: that everything shifts, that all tyrants pass away, that all evil empires fall, that all hateful movements die out, that all monuments to inequity eventually crumble.

I rest in the knowledge that the people here who seem singularly burdened to injure others will one day naturally cease to be. I don’t hope for that day, and I don’t hasten that day. I simply pray that when it does come, when the hateful people doing such unrestrained damage finally depart this place, that compassionate, kindhearted, loving people are born to occupy the space they leave.

I pray for a new Renaissance of empathy for this place, and trust that it will come.

No, I am not waiting for bad people to die; I’m doing all the good that I can while I live.

America is dying.

I’m not referring to the systemic collapse of our Republic or the slow suffocation of Democracy here, though these are certainly not unlikely outcomes at this point.

This is far deeper than the seats of power or a congressional alignment, more than the structural implosion of this nation.

The greatest, most grievous failure of America in this moment isn’t legislative but moral.

The soul of this place is dying in screams and silences.

The brown-skinned screams rise from our collective home:

The anguished cries of a young mother being violently torn from her children on their front lawn.

The frantic pleas of a father of four dragged from his worksite by lawless masked mercenaries.

The inconsolable sobs of a woman whose husband will never see his daughter grow up.

The weary moans of devoted fathers, loving spouses, beloved uncles, and cherished nieces shackled in a stifling death camp.

The screams rise from half a world away:The desperate, terrified wails of a Palestinian toddler left buried in the rubble of what seconds ago was the only home she’s ever known.The guttural howl of an Iranian father, holding the unrecognizable body of his teenage daughter.The unheeded shrieks of a young couple assassinated in front of their children. The tortured shouts of a Gazan family slowly being starved to death.

This horrific noise is the soundtrack of waking nightmares; the raw-throated echoing of the vilest of history repeating. They are sounds that shake decent human beings to their core.

But those screams are only half of this tragedy.

Equally devastating is the white-skinned silence; the contagious moral laryngitis afflicting people of profound privilege who avert their eyes and cover their ears.

It is the breathtaking quiet of human beings who have retreated into the cloistered places of temporary comfort and imagined safety; those who quickly scroll away from the videos because they do not want to hear the screams, because that would leave them culpable for their inaction and their stilled voices.

White America, we need to lean into the screams of brown-skinned people, to invite them inside, to let them break our hearts and boil our blood, until the fury within us rises and erupts in a fierce and sustained roar that violently disrupts the inhumanity that will not stop unless we make it stop.

White friends, what exactly are you waiting for?How much suffering do you need to see?What terrible sounds will finally awaken your voices?What line still needs to be crossed for you to declare it unacceptable?

What good is it if you claim morality or conscience, if these result in you saying nothing while our neighbors are brutalized?

How real is your professed faith if it yields no measurable opposition to the greatest violations of human life?

How much is your patriotism worth if the disregard for the elemental liberties of this nation leaves you speechless?

If ethnic cleansing and genocide do not stir your fury and your vocal cords, what is the point of you being here?

Your silence won’t save you, anyway; it will only postpone your suffering as you abdicate the elemental parts of your humanity during the interim. That is a coward’s path and one I refuse to take.

The only way we can endure as a nation is if we all find the courage to speak with clarity, if we allow ourselves to be heard here and now.

White friends, the cost of using your voice is nothing compared to the price of your silence.

Let your life say something before it’s too late.

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They will do so joyously.

They will do so confidently.

They will do so believing they are righteous.

It will be another hollow procession of fervent disciples of a felon-predator who have again spent the past week applauding the abuse and degradation of the poorest and most vulnerable among us.

They will proudly carry their Bibles, while evangelizing for a man, a party, and a movement that are antithetical to its contents regarding what it means to love people as God does.

Without a hint of self-awareness, they will take their seats in front of a cross symbolizing sacrifice, after another seven days amplifying a greed that will drive millions of people further into illness, food scarcity, and despair.

They will feign love for their neighbors, while breathlessly supporting a regime doing all it can to make sure those neighbors will experience poverty, have reduced access to education, and lives that will be far more painful and far shorter than they needed to be.

They will try and pretend they give a damn about Jesus, while celebrating the relentless violent persecution of immigrants, refugees, and anyone with brown skin who their repugnant cult leader’s goon squad decides to round up from worksites, graduation ceremonies, and church services.

They will have the God-mocking audacity to sing songs about a Creator who sets the captives free, even as they pump their chests and post social media taunts about concentration camps that will be a blazing, miserable final destination for human beings whose lives and stories they will never care to know.

They will imagine themselves faithful soldiers in the Army of the Lord, while rejoicing in the protection of human traffickers and rapists, among whom is likely the man they claim is anointed by God to lead them.

These are the hypocrites and pretenders Jesus warned about. They are the fraudulent, performative predators he spent his entire life and ministry rejecting.

The only reason they should be entering a church at all is to fall to their knees in repentance, asking for forgiveness for so perverting Jesus’ love your neighbor message into something that dehumanizes the human beings in their path, something that only wounds and expels, something that is the very embodiment of evil.

As a former pastor, I wish I could be in these buildings this Sunday, so I could look these people in the eyes and hold the compassionate, gentle, generous words of Jesus up to them like a mirror in a way their spiritual leaders won’t, because they, too, are morally compromised.

I’d love to shove Jesus’ commands to love the least, to care for the most vulnerable, to welcome the stranger in their faces and watch them squirm and rationalize and desperately engage in theological gymnastics to try and avoid accountability for urinating on the loving, healing, helping, immigrant Christ.

I wish I could confront them with the truth, that if Jesus were to show up in the flesh in their midst, they’d have him cast out for his woke theology, removed from their gatherings for daring to preach an empathy they now find detestable, and capriciously tossed into some prison for no other reason than the color of his skin or his nation of origin.

Every decent human being, whether they claim faith or not, sees what a gross and empty Sunday parade these self-identified Christians are making into buildings where they will surround themselves with the trappings of goodness and faithfulness, all the while making life for so many outside the building a living hell.

I don’t expect a single one of these MAGA acolytes to step into their churches and actually hear the words of Jesus in a way that softens their hearts, moves them to repentance, and sends them out into a nation they have done such irreparable harm to in order to bring any kind of healing or equity or restoration. This is mostly because they no longer have any need for Jesus.

In fact, I’m really hoping Jesus doesn’t show up in their gatherings.

He wouldn’t be safe.

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I’m just gonna come right out and say it: I’ve had it with people right now.

OK, it’s probably not particularly healthy to have a grievance with an entire species, so let me narrow that down a bit…

I’m angry with everyone who isn’t angry.

I’m having a really hard time with the unbothered people, the “everything is gonna be fine” people, the people who are acting as though they are above those of us who are blowing gaskets, breaking down, and freaking out.

You know who I’m talking about: those friends, family members, coworkers, classmates, and social media acquaintances who tone-police us for surveying the monumental destruction being inflicted upon our fragile Republic and its people and being livid. Those people.

I’ve arrived at my breaking point with human beings around me who are still averting their eyes, avoiding the news, and anesthetizing themselves on a mind-numbing cocktail of wishful thinking, retail therapy, self-preservation, and American exceptionalism.

I’ve reached the limit of my tolerance for people who have seemingly spent the past year poo-pooing hundreds of atrocities and illegalities, any one of which would be an alarm-tripping red flag for a nation sliding swiftly into fascism.

And I’ve really had it with people who are still criticizing the emotionality of those of us who’ve been told for a decade that we’re overreacting, while we’ve watched every single supposedly impossible prediction come to pass.

I don’t think laissez-faire wait-and-seers who are banking on a simple November midterm resurrection are particularly helpful right now.

Look, I believe in being rational and level-headed whenever possible, in offering a measured response to most kinds of adversity, to being strategic and sober of mind in the face of many struggles.

But right now, circumstances are such that we could use a lot more furious human beings. We need people who have seen, heard, and have had enough: enough injustice, enough lawlessness, enough dehumanization, and who aren’t afraid to be labeled too loud, too pissed off, and too passionate.

There is a time and place for self-control, for tolerance, for listening and bearing with people, for breathing and being still. But there is also a time and place when the gravity of the moment calls for something fierce and unwieldy; a wildness of heart that isn’t interested in decorum or social norms. I suggest that now is such a time, and here is precisely the place.

Authoritarianism has overtaken America.Our president is a sociopath.His Cabinet is sycophantic.His party is complicit.They are at war with the world.They are ignoring law and morality.They are building concentration camps.They are murdering protestors.They are silencing journalists.The media are bending the knee.

This Congress is neutered.The Supreme Court is compromised.The checks and balances are disappearing.The systems are failing.People are being arrested for existing.People are being targeted for who they love.

These are not hyperbolic rantings of overly emotional crepe-hangers; they are the clear-headed conclusions of those of us who are paying attention, who’ve read the files, who’ve waded into the minutiae of the legislation, and who don’t scroll away from things that turn our stomachs and break our hearts.

I’m not advocating for an aimless, reckless assembly of panicked people running around like headless chickens, but some urgency and a little ferocity from a lot more people would be a good start. Ignorance is bliss until it’s deadly.

If you’re already furious, fed up, and losing your filters and your f***s, celebrate that. We need a lot more fire and a lot less chill.

Right now, it’s a sign of your humanity, of your sanity, and of your soul, to look around at it all and say, “I’ve had it… I’m furious.”

Note: If you’ve had it and want to know how to productively and strategically wield your exasperation with other similarly pissed-off people, start by contacting your local Indivisible group, connecting with the ACLU, and partnering with Remove Coalition or Red, Wine, & Blue. You can also research progressive faith communities, nonprofits, and candidates, and ask them where they can use your help.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I may not know you but I know what you’re thinking.

I know you feel something breaking inside lately; an invisible fracture that only you’re fully aware of.

I know the way you walk away from conversations with people you once relied on for wisdom and clarity and compassion, doubting your own sanity because you no longer recognize those things in them and worry you may be overreacting.

I know the way you feel internally estranged from the friends, coworkers, family members, and neighbors you used to find affinity with, and you wonder if you’re losing your mind.

I understand how you stare at the perpetual parade of horrible scrolling past you, from the second you wake up prematurely in the early morning until the stretched out nighttime moments you try unsuccessfully to fall asleep, and how you question the grip you have on reality.

I know the disbelief you feel in the presence of loved ones and ministers and leaders who now seem to be speaking some strange foreign tongue that you can’t make any sense of anymore.

I hear the nagging question you ask inside your head a few hundred times a day: “Is it me, or has a huge portion of this country lost its mind?”

It isn’t you.

You’re quite fine, and this is of course both good and terrible news—because of what it says about you and about the place you find yourself.

The fact that you see how wrong this all is, means your faculties are intact, your mind is fully right, and your heart is working properly. It’s all confirmation that you still have a soul doing what souls are supposed to do: keep you deeply human in profoundly inhumane times.

This is why you need to hold tightly to that soul, because it is more rare and valuable than ever.It’s why you need to embrace this holy unrest in the center of your belly; because it is the greatest weapon against the present epidemic of apathy.It’s why you can’t allow your right mind to make peace with such abject madness.

If enough time passes, an otherwise healthy person can start to get used to sickness. They can slowly begin to convince themselves that almost any horrifying, toxic, painful, twisted reality is acceptable.Little by little they can gradually allow themselves to acclimate to the nightmare, to come to see it as normal.Either that, or they determine that they’re actually out of their minds and they collapse inside.

This is a reminder that what is happening in America right now is not at all normal and that you are right to feel this disorientation.

I need you to hear this, friend:You’re okay.You’re not crazy.You’re also in good company.

Right now, there is a massive army of similarly walking wounded sharing this place with you; fellow exhausted souls who realize that none of this makes any sense—people concluding that for their health, they will need to create distance from people they once allowed proximity.There are millions of good people out here still looking to be the kind of people the world needs; those committed to doing no harm, burdened to bring something decent where it is missing.

Many of us who see what you see:We can see that this movement in our nation is a bastardization of humanity, a rebellion against goodness, a mutiny against sanity.We can see that those sanctioning and defending and co-signing it are similarly unwell, equally disconnected from anything benevolent, similarly propelled by fear and greed and bitterness.

And that’s why we need to keep resisting it.

You need to push back against the surrounding insanity that tries to convince you that you’ve gone mad.

You need to refuse to be gaslit by people when they try to diminish your worries, mock your anxiety, or tell you you’re being overly emotional—even when that person is the one staring back at you in the mirror.

You need to press on, because in days when evil is normalized, goodness matters most.

Right now, work to find your people, those who are as heartbroken and furious as you are, and begin find ways to care for human beings in duress, to organize against the legislative assaults, and to be strengthened by loving community.

In times when truth and news are pliable, truth-tellers are worth more than gold.

You’re not crazy, but these days surely are.

You’re not upside down right now, friend—a good portion of this place is.

Loving resistance is a world-turner.

People of faith, morality, and conscience together, from every corner of this nation, will right-side it.

Be encouraged.

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This President has been many things since descending an escalator a decade ago: a national embarrassment, a global punchline, an environmental disaster, a divider of people, a prolific murderer of the English language, not to mention countless human beings.

But he’s also been a floodlight.

He’s fully exposed millions of people who’d kept themselves carefully concealed, many of whom I thought I knew. I can see them now in ways I never could previously. It’s all out in the open.

Intellectually, I always knew that racism was deeply embedded into the fabric of our nation. Still, I’d convinced myself that it had slowly but certainly begun to unravel, that we weren’t as hopelessly bound by it as our ancestors had been. As a pastor in largely white churches in the South over the past two decades, I told myself the story that the Church, like this nation, was changing. It may have been a combination of privilege, ignorance, and wishful thinking, but I truly thought that we were getting better, that the arc of the moral universe was again bending toward justice

I surely never imagined that so many people I loved, lived with, worshipped alongside, or worked next to were as afflicted with supremacy as they have revealed themselves to be. I never fathomed that so many people claiming to love Jesus would so resent foreigners, so worship America, and so abhor diverse humanity. The people around me were either really good at pretending, or, in my naivety, I was just willing to believe the lie.

I saw the cracks in their facades begin to show when Barack Obama was elected; their carefully coded hate speech, their ever more antagonistic social media posts from fringe sources, their incessant, desperate search for something to be outraged about, their inability to give him any credit or acknowledge his goodness. They grew more entrenched in their positions, more tribal in their tone.

But even then, they kept their prejudices and phobias close to the vest, never really tipping their hand, always dancing around the words without really saying them. The mask was splitting and sliding off, but they would not fully show themselves because it was socially unacceptable (they would call it “politically correct.”)

Then he arrived a decade ago: someone who gave them what they needed to abandon the performance completely: permission to be horrible; someone who erased any semblance of decorum, any expectation of decency, any level of accountability. After so many years of pretending, they finally received white Presidential consent to be outwardly racist—and now, in his second coming, the dam of their suppressed bigotry has burst, and they are letting the toxic hatred flow freely.

White pastors now lob it through incendiary sermons into their congregations, white politicians plaster it upon campaign billboards, white police officers send it out in group emails, white teachers wave it in front of their students, white civilians spit it out in viral videos at coffee shops and public parks, white terrorists parade it unmasked through city streets.

And my white friends, family members, and neighbors are rejoicing in this Renaissance of open ugliness—and I never saw it coming, even if I should have.

And this has been the most disorienting, stomach-turning, sickening part of this terrible season in America: the realization that I have lived near, worked alongside, and ministered around people who claimed to believe in Jesus while harboring such corrosive hearts—and that I was oblivious to it all. I am both angry at them and disappointed in myself.

But now, their open contempt for immigrants, their apathy in the face of his corruption, and their callousness toward suffering people all testify to their hearts.

And I suppose that is the small bit of gratitude I have for this malignancy of a movement here; the way it has fully revealed people—and this is an unwelcome but invaluable gift.

I know what I didn’t know before.I can’t excuse the truth away.I no longer give them the benefit of a doubt that they have fully removed.My eyes are clear and open widely, and now I’m responsible for what I do and say in response to who they are.We all are.

Regardless of what happens in the future or how the political landscape may change or who we have helming our nation, what has been revealed about us as is going to remain, and we’re going to have to deal with the unmasked, unearthed, illuminated hatred that we are this violently afflicted with.

That might be this President’s only worthy legacy.

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My social media feed is filled with photos and videos gleefully documenting the markers of his physical deterioration, with rising hope as his public appearances grow more sporadic, with almost giddy prognostications of his departure date from this place. People are posting their plans as if preparing for New Year’s Eve or a World Series Championship.

I am not exactly one of those people.

Yes, he has been an odious blight upon this planet and a cancerous presence to this nation. He is, without question, one of the single most objectively horrible human beings our species has produced.

Setting aside the reality that his passing would elevate a successor who is smarter, shrewder, less impulsive, and potentially far more effective in accelerating this country’s slide into theocracy, authoritarianism, and economic devastation for everyone but the billionaire cadre of amoral tech bro vampires who elevated him to the platform to begin with.

But I don’t wish for his death.

I wish he’d never been born.

If he departs this mortal sphere as I type this, it will do nothing to undo all the evil that his now bruised hands have wrought, to erase every vile thing his presence has exposed as he ascended politically.

It will not rewind the years of those who lived in squalor and poverty in New York City, on whose backs he built his jittery, hollow empire.

His death will not bring financial restitution to the thousands of workers and contractors left abandoned by the many bankruptcies that emancipated him from responsibility.

It won’t give back wholeness and healing to the girls and women he violated in secret or maligned in public.

It will not reverse the irreparable damage he has done to a political party whose members individually and collectively abandoned every legal and moral expectation to fall prostrate before him.

It will not elicit repentance in a white Evangelical Church that parted ways with the compassionate, loving namesake of its faith tradition and fashioned a vicious, sneering, profane, God-mocking idol out of his antithesis and bowed down before it.

His passing now could not allow us to unsee the repugnant grievance cult he unleashed here; the historically hateful movement of miserable people who’ve spent the last decade reveling in an unrepentant ugliness because he gave them consent.

It will not remove the legion of incompetent, predatory, corrupt sycophants he poisoned our government with; people who have and will continue to dismantle and pervert our systems of care and legal oversight.

And his death, as much as it would feel like an initial reprieve from the chaos he has engineered and the unfathomable suffering he has spearheaded, would do nothing to conceal the vile sickness he exposed within the people around us: the long-simmering racism, the scalding contempt for foreigners, the phobic hatred of human beings for their gender identity or sexual orientation.

Long after he is gone, we will be left with what we now know about our family members and friends and neighbors; about the people in our churches, about the parents of our children’s friends; about the pillars of our communities, about those we trust to govern us, protect, and serve us.

These atrocities, sadly, will all long outlive him.

He lived, and his life has done its brutal, irreversible damage.

And with that being true, I do not wish for his death; not yet.

I hope and pray that he lives long enough to face legal accountability for his crimes; that he will not depart this place before escaping consequences for the willful disregard he has spent 80 years showing for the laws of our land, for the disparate humanity that has called this place home, and for the sacred and powerful platform he never deserved to begin with.

I want him to be humiliated, to be broken, to see his vile empire crumbled, to see his name erased from the places he disfigured with it.

I want him to live long enough to face a cell before he faces his maker; to rot in prison before he rots in the ground.

And I want to live long enough to see it.

That will be cause for true celebration.

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They know they can’t win in November.

They’re shouting with absolute clarity that they know they can’t.

They’re declaring it through their unceasing attempts to gerrymander millions of people’s voices out of the political process.

They’re confessing as much through nonsensical word salad press conferences, condemning mythical past election fraud with invisible proof and non-existent evidence.

They’re telling us through unrelenting Fox News fictions about thousands of supposed illegal immigrants somehow voting Democrat.They are preemptively admitting defeat in the Fall as they eliminate voting sites, oppose absentee ballots, weaponize the Postal Service, and conjure up ever more restrictive voter ID requirements.

Most of all, they’ve admitted they cannot win a free and fair election by making no attempts to construct a political platform of any kind to address the economic and social sicknesses of this nation (most of which they have authored), because they have no interest in governing, only in holding power.

Trump and his GOP acolytes have never run on substantive ideas or concrete solutions. In ten years, they have produced no healthcare plan, launched no programs to improve wages, and crafted no legislation to help working-class people. They have made no attempts to give more people access to education, financial security, home ownership, or opportunity.

They have been a violent, greedy, parasitic movement of systemic destruction: a toxic sludge of fear porn, billionaire sodomy, racist dog whistles, and human rights and environmental protection rollbacks.

Republicans are evil, and they’re treasonous, but they’re not stupid. They have the data. They’ve seen their grim poll numbers. They’re aware that Donald Trump’s approval rating is in the lowest depths of the toilet of history.

They know they are hopelessly underwater on astronomical grocery and gas prices, on multiple wars we have no business participating in, on partnership in multiple genocides, on the Epstein Files, on ICE’s unrelenting barbarism, on an America where no one outside of the tiniest fraction of the wealthiest people feels good about their prospects for the future.

For all of these reasons, we need to stop pretending that November will bring some magical emancipation from these Christo-fascists and tech bro oligarchs. We need to prepare our collective response to their inevitable refusal to relinquish their stranglehold on our barely-breathing Republic.

There is no time to waste in believing we only need to show up at the polls and wait for Election Night. Yes, we must continue to canvass and support candidates and drive people to the polls in numbers that theoretically are too great to manipulate—but we also need to understand that this isn’t going to be a clean transfer of power, because Republicans are going to fight it by any means necessary. January 6th will seem benign compared to what they have prepared.

Back in June, Speaker (and soulless bootlicking coward) Mike Johnson declared: “If we were to lose the midterms, heaven forbid, these Democrats, y’all impeachment’s not even the big concern.”

Johnson continued: “They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the cabinet, his donors and friends; half of you in this room will be targeted. I run the protection program. I’ll take care of you. We’re going to win the midterms.”

There it is.

There are only two ways November plays out: Republicans conjure a “win” at the polls through every kind of technological malfeasance at their disposal, or, they are victims of a political bloodbath at the hands of the people and then flatly refuse to abide by the results. The worst thing any of us can do right now is to operate under any delusions that we are going to experience anything resembling a normal midterm election.

The time to decide how we’re going to respond to Republicans’ current and promised lawlessness isn’t the day after the election; it’s right now.

Find ways to support election security in your local community.Connect with organizations who are already actively pushing back against Trump’s corrupt regime, like Indivisible, Common Cause, Flare USA, Democracy Forward, Democracy Docket, and Removal Coalition.

Educate people around you who are still sedated on a cocktail of wishful thinking, ignorance, and American exceptionalism, so that they understand what is coming in November.Build partnerships across lines of ideology, race, theology, and preference, knowing that we will only survive this coming assault on our Constitution by leveraging our collective power, in both bodies and dollars.

Talk to your families and friends about how you will specifically respond when Trump and his Congressional sycophants follow through with what they are forecasting.

Republicans are telling us they can’t win in November, but that they must and will win.

The rest of us, the people who truly love this nation and the people who call it home or wish to, need to believe them.

How are you specifically preparing for November? What organizations have you connected to? What work, voices, strategies are you finding helpful? Let me know in the comments.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The religion of my childhood drew a sharp, clear line between the saved and the damned. All that mattered was making sure someone found themselves on the better side of this line, and the Atheists, Humanists, and Democrats didn’t have a shot.

In light of this supposed truth, the heart of the faith (I was told) was to live in a way that reflected the character and love of Jesus so vividly, so beautifully, that others were compelled to follow after him; that a Christian’s living testimony might be the catalyst for someone’s conversion. The Bible called it “making disciples,” and it was the heart of our tradition. As the venerable hymn declared, people were supposed to know we are Christians by our love.

What a difference a couple of decades make.

Just ask around, now.

People outside the Church will tell you: love is no longer our calling card here in America. It is now condemnation, bigotry, judgment, and hypocrisy. In fact, the Christianity prevalent in so much of America right now isn’t just failing to draw others to Christ; it is actively repelling them from him. By operating in a way that is in full opposition to the life and ministry of Jesus, that counterfeit religion is understandably producing people fully opposed to the faith that bears his name.

In record numbers, the Conservative American Church is consistently and surely making Atheists—or at the very least, it is making former Christians—people who no longer consider organized religion an option because the Jesus they recognize is absent. With its sky-is-falling hand-wringing, its political bed-making, and its constant venom toward diversity, it is giving people no alternative but to conclude that, based on the evidence of people professing to be Godly, God is of little use. This God may, in fact, be terribly toxic.

And that’s the greatest irony of it all: that the very Evangelicals who’ve spent the last 60 years in this country demonizing those who reject Jesus are now the single most compelling reason for them to do so. They are giving people who suspect that all Christians are self-righteous, hateful hypocrites all the evidence they need. The Church is confirming the outside world’s most dire suspicions about itself.

People rejecting White Evangelical Christian nationalism aren’t stupid. They realize that bigotry, even when it is wrapped in religion or justified by the Bible or spoken from a pulpit, is still bigotry. They can smell the putrid stench of phony religion from a mile away—and this MAGA version of the Church, frankly, reeks of it. People are steering clear in droves, choosing to find meaning and community and something that resembles love outside its gatherings.

With every persecution of the LGBTQ community, with every unprovoked attack on immigrants, with every planet-wrecking decision, with every defense of a serial predator, with every regressive civil rights assault, with every attempt at theocracy by these professed believers, the flight from Christianity rightly continues. Meanwhile, the celebrity preachers and professional Christians publicly feign disbelief about the multitudes walking away from God, oblivious to the fact that they are the impetus for the exodus.

And one day soon, these same Conservative religious folks will look around, lamenting the empty buildings and the irrelevance of the Church and a world that has no use for it, and they’ll wonder how this happened. They’ll blame a corrupt culture, or the woke liberal media, or a wholesale rejection of Biblical values, or the devil himself—but it will be none of those things.

No, the reason the Church soon will be teetering on the verge of extinction and irrelevance will be because those entrusted to perpetuate the love of Jesus in the world lost the plot so horribly, and gave the world no other option but to look elsewhere for goodness, purpose, and truth.

Soon, these Evangelicals will ask why so much of America has rejected Jesus, and we will remind them of these days and assure these people haven’t rejected Jesus at all.

They just found no evidence of Jesus in them.

In the comments, share the ways the hatred and hypocrisy of professed Christians have shaken your faith, driven you from the Church, or reinforced your opposition to organized religion.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The current President is a court-adjudicated rapist who recently paid nearly 6 million dollars in damages for sexual assault and defamation.

His name appears tens of thousands of times in the Epstein Files, and he has been credibly accused by dozens of women of sexual assault and harassment.

He is a 34-count felon, indicted four separate times, with 88 charges, ranging from fraud to election interference.

The only reason he is not in prison right now is that he has assumed the Presidency and marshalled the vast resources of the office to pervert our judicial and legal processes.Despite all of this, we still have family members, friends, former friends, and neighbors who would vote for him again right now.

In what universe, in what iteration of this nation over the last 250 years, would a being this bereft of human decency have been tolerated in office, let alone passionately embraced?

In what legitimate political movement would rape and treason not be dealbreakers?

The answer is none.

This isn’t a political fracture.

I wish it were, though, as that would be relatively easy to navigate.

We are not a nation, as we’ve often thought, simply positioned on either side of the aisle working to craft reasonable, good-faith compromise somewhere in the humane middle. Sadly, that ship left the port a long time ago.

We aren’t even contending with a blind political tribalism that sees party over country, as the GOP of a decade ago has long since been rendered unrecognizable, abandoning its calls for a limited Government in exchange for unabashed authoritarianism.

The prevailing narrative of the last decade is that America has been fractured by political ideologies, bunkered down in disagreement on what path will most serve the common good. This is a dangerous fiction we need to discard once and for all.

The dividing lines in America have nothing to do with party affiliation anymore.

Just open up your phone, eavesdrop at the checkout line, or talk to your neighbor, and you’ll see the lines along which we now find ourselves:

One side celebrates innocent people being assassinated in front of their children, without due process.

One side rejoices in strangers going without food or medical care or housing, without knowing a single one of their stories.

One side applauds the bombing of foreign school children and the destruction of entire populations.

One side blindly despises other people for their gender identity, despite it having no impact on their lives whatsoever.

One side reduces an entire population to terrorists and drug dealers to justify their swift eradication.

One side conflates whiteness with righteousness.

One side defends the protection of pedophiles.

One side steadfastly worships a felonious, treasonous rapist.

And none of this is about politics; it’s about when faced with the suffering and injustice in our path, whether we will default to compassion or to cruelty.

America’s present divide reveals the orientation of our hearts as we move through the world, the story we tell ourselves about other people, and what we want our lives to be marked by.

Will we be bleeding-heart empaths who err on the side of love toward all our neighbors, or callous, f your feelings sociopaths who rejoice in the pain of others because we’ve dehumanized them to the point that their lives are worthless to us?

Will we see empathy as our highest calling as human beings, or as a character flaw needing to be discarded?

One of the greatest lies we’re asked to accept as gospel is that all opinions are valid, that every position is somehow equally worthy of merit and deserving of consideration. We’re often led to believe that in every situation where an impasse is reached, the most humane response is to “agree to disagree”.

Of course, we can disagree on all sorts of issues without that disagreement being a relationship killer, but there are some things that, as people of faith, morality, and conscience, we simply will not allow—and these things transcend politics.

The days ahead are going to require us to dig beneath the surface skirmishes and into the bedrock of what’s really happening here so that we don’t waste a second fighting fruitless battles that miss the point entirely.

Refuse to be gaslit and guilted for allowing “politics” to get in the way of your relationships because that’s not what’s happening here. This is an effort by people around us to sidestep conversations that call them to accountability for their beliefs, choices, and alignments.

It’s time we stopped pretending that our current national crisis is political, as that only serves to distract us from the far more worrisome truth that we need to reckon with:

We’re not politically divided; we are morally fractured.

We are not fighting legislative battles but a war to stay human or abandon our humanity altogether.

No election result will change that.

No power balance in Congress will remedy it.

No dictator’s expulsion will heal the brokenness of the people around us.

The question is, what will?

Do you agree or disagree that the divides here are beyond politics? What do you see as the path forward for our nation and for each of us who call it home? Let me know in the comments.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

To Our Loved Ones,

To Our Grandparents, Parents, Uncles, Aunts, Cousins, and Older Siblings,

We’re aware of what you think of us, either because you’ve told us during explosive, room-clearing conversations, over terse Cold War text exchanges, or in second-hand words passed through the people who now serve as the sole intermediaries between us.

You believe that we’re lost.

You believe we’ve changed.

You think we’ve become radicalized.

You think we’ve abandoned our faith, our families, and our nation, and you’re disappointed with us.

And we need you to know that you’re largely responsible.

Much of this is your fault.

You say that we’ve changed, and we have: we’ve become the people you taught us to become when we were growing up.

people who are deeply offended by inequity,

people who look out for the underdog,

people who grieve the suffering of others,

people who find the beauty in the diversity around us,

people who want others to have enough,

people who are aware of how fortunate we are to live here,

people trying to love our neighbors as ourselves,

people who detest liars, predators, and con men,

people who abhor bullies and bigots and braggarts,

And the people that we’ve become, in large part because of the wisdom and compassion you poured into us as children, can’t fathom, as adults, how you’ve voted for Donald Trump three times and how you still support him now.

It would have been unthinkable to those younger versions of us (and the younger version of you, for that matter), that you would have embraced this man: his cruelty, his depravity, his petty, vengeful, unloving heart.

That’s not the way you raised us, and so whatever issues you have with us now, you need to understand:

You made us this way.

You have radicalized us into loving, compassionate human beings, and we can’t fathom how that can be a problem for you.

We’re really proud of the people we are today, and grateful for the time you spent with us; the lessons you taught us about seeing all people as inherently valuable,about being a person of your word,about telling the truth even when it’s costly,about admitting your mistakes,

about taking responsibility for your actions,

about valuing people over money,

about how we treat people, being what defines us,

We were paying attention in history class.

We were paying attention in Sunday School.

We were paying attention around the dinner table.

We were listening.

We believed you.

We did what you told us to do and became who you told us to become—and so now we care about the world, and we despise evil, and we live open-hearted and open-handed.

And that’s why we’ve found ourselves standing here wondering how you’ve become people we no longer recognize, how you’ve embraced the embodiment of the ugliness you warned us to avoid, how you stopped taking your own advice somewhere along the way.

You say that you only support the party or the policies and not the man—but we remember you telling us that we are known by the company we keep, that the ends don’t always justify the means, and that we can’t gain the world (or a Supreme Court seat) and lose our souls. Back then, you wouldn’t have tolerated those flimsy excuses for aligning with someone horrible, and we won’t tolerate them from you now.

As children, we looked up to you, and that part of us will continue to love you dearly and be grateful to you.But as adults, we now see you eye to eye, and we grieve the loss of the people we imagined you were when you were teaching us how to be good human beings.

By continuing to support this man, you have gone against everything you told us was important growing up: decency, honesty, fairness, maturity, and empathy.

Either you were lying then, or you’re wrong now.

Which one is it?

The children we were and the adults we’ve become both want to know.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Hey, good human. (Yeah, you.)

I wanted to remind you of some things that you might have lost sight of lately:

The exhaustion you feel right now?The heavy sadness that you can’t seem to shake?The sense of dread that hovers over you like a drone?The Resting WTF Face you walk around with every day?The scalding rage bubbling just beneath the surface?

This is all by design.

This is intentional.

This is the monsters’ master plan.

The entire point of the curated chaos is to disorient you, to dishearten you, to choke the hope from within you until you stop fighting.

All terrorism is ultimately emotional.

Yes, they are rolling back decades of civil rights.Yes, they are trying to take healthcare away from tens of millions of our most vulnerable.Yes, they are waging legislative war on the poor and hungry.Yes, they are weaponizing the highest court against us.Yes, they are obliterating our systems of education and national security.Yes, they are purging brown-skinned people from our nation.

But these stomach-turning atrocities are all just means to an end, and that end is to crush the spirits of good people like you, and you need to remember that.

Your capacity to care for strangers is a threat to them.Your ability to have your heart broken by the suffering of others is a weapon.Your refusal to abandon the right thing, even when that makes your path more turbulent, terrifies them.Your decency makes you dangerous.

A nation isn’t destroyed when its systems are bulldozed or its laws are perverted, but when its collective compassion is eradicated—and you and I are here in these dark, bleak, unthinkably painful days to protect it; to hold it close to our chests and to make sure that it survives.

Fascists don’t win when they dismantle the scaffolding of government, when they wage war on the Arts and Sciences, or when they eradicate long-standing rights under the law.

They win when good people give up; when they become too tired to push back, when apathy and hopelessness snuff out the spark inside them, when the emotional cost of giving a sh*t feels too high.

They want you to become as nihilistic, miserable, and internally broken as they are—and so you need to refuse: over and over again.

Look, I’m not going to minimize the horrors being conjured up by these vampires or ignore the scale of the sorrow they’re generating or peddle some toxic positivity that pretends everything is going to be OK.

But I know that if you’re still reading this, you haven’t fully surrendered yet.

Despite the 24-7 Category 5 s**t storm the monsters have been throwing at you for the past eighteen months, you haven’t completely packed it in, and I guess I just want to say thank you and to ask you to stay in the fight another day if you can.

There is too much beauty at stake, too much of priceless value to lose, too many people whose futures are tethered to what we do right now.

I’m not a blind optimist, and I don’t traffic in cheap hope. I’m not pretending the historical signs aren’t grim or that the existential threat isn’t very real.

I just recognize that right now, some irredeemably terrible people are working incredibly hard to crush our spirits, and I’m stubborn enough to say, “To hell with that.” I won’t give them the satisfaction of my submission or my hopelessness.

My life will be an annoying, brazen, defiantly joyful middle finger in their fascist faces, and if you still feel up to it, maybe yours can be, too.

Good people, these monsters are trying to break you because when they do, they win.

So, don’t let them.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is not a celebration; it is a lament.

The moment any human being leaves this planet, it is almost always an occasion to mourn.

When death arrives, it is a permanent interruption, an unexpected or unwanted end to a complIcated life in progress. There is an incompleteness that comes: work left undone, plans abandoned, journeys ceased.

In nearly every case, in the wake of someone’s passing, so many possibilities die as well.

This is no different.

Lindsey Graham has passed away, and regardless of our politics, today we should grieve over the loss of the man and the leader he might have been, had he never crossed paths with Donald Trump.

It is a day to wonder how he could have altered this nation for the better, the good he might have authored in the lofty position he occupied.

It is a day to rewind through one person’s very public story and watch how a soul can be sold off in a thousand tiny moral transactions long before their body expires.

Lindsey Graham’s moral collapse over the last decade has been staggering to witness:

In 2015, he called Donald Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot" and a “jackass” who did not deserve to be President.

In 2016, he said of the Republican Party, “If we nominate Donald Trump, we will get destroyed… and we will deserve it.”In 2021, following the January 6th assault on our Capitol, Graham seemingly cut ties with Trump, commenting, “All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.”

And in June of 2026, just weeks before his sudden death, at a victory speech that preserved his Senate seat, Lindsey Graham gushed, "I want to thank the big guy, God, Trump comes later. Mr. President, you're not far behind God, but we're going to start with him.”

That, in itself, should merit profound grieving across this nation.

It’s difficult for younger people to understand how Lindsey Graham was viewed before Trump’s arrival. He was largely regarded as a reasonable, level-headed politician, always willing and capable of collaboration across the aisle. For those nearly twenty-five years prior, he forged friendships, built alliances, and crafted compromises in ways that became all but impossible for him in his final years.

While campaigning in 2015, Graham famously said of Joe Biden: “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, you’ve got a problem. He’s the nicest person I’ve ever met in politics. As good a man as God ever created.”

I grieve the death of that man; the one capable of seeing the humanity across the aisle, the one who was human first, politician second.

Every one of us should.

I think, deep down, we all do, because we know what it feels like to lose someone long before they die.

We all have Lindsey Grahams in our lives: people whose humanity we have watched erode since the escalator descent of a morally vacant career criminal a decade ago.

We’ve all looked on in helpless disbelief as their bedrock values began to shift, their hard moral lines were erased and redrawn, and their once soft hearts became calloused and closed.

We have all had someone we love die a shell of who they once were, because of their allegiance to a serial grifter whose cultic hold slowly poisoned them. That’s why his death hits close to home.

Lindsey Graham’s ethical implosion is perhaps more understandable than that of the people in our lives, as his proximity to Trump’s power (or the fear of that power being weaponized against him) was likely too great a temptation to withstand. The kind of wealth and influence he had access to probably seemed well worth the moral compromises and severed ties.

For our family members and former friends, it’s much harder to make sense of how it’s all happened; how they were seduced and duped into such a sycophantic tribal allegiance to a man they’d have openly condemned a decade ago. That transformation isn’t as easy to unpack, and many of us will spend the rest of our lives wondering who the people we love might have been.

This week, death took Lindsey Graham’s body.

Trump took his soul and the man he might have been long ago.

For most of us, that kind of grief feels all too familiar.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

They are four, once-in-history, never-to-be-repeated human beings assassinated by empowered sociopaths who feel no accountability to the laws of this land or of any higher laws.

And for each of these, there are thousands upon thousands of human beings whose stories have been invaded, whose bodies have been violated, whose hearts have been stopped.

They are the unseen fathers, favorite aunts, grandmothers, and older brothers brutalized in secret, abducted under the cover of darkness, pulled from their vehicles, viciously assaulted, raped, shackled like animals, and certainly worse.

They are human beings living alongside all of us, who in these very moments are being held without charges, imprisoned without cause, denied due process, representation, healthcare, meals, and human decency—and not to make us safer, not to address illegal immigration, not for anything but to satisfy the bloodlust of racists and bigots.This should be the final straw for us, America.

Compassionate human beings should not tolerate this.

People who claim to be pro-life should be brought to tears.

Those espousing family values should be fully incensed.

Anyone with children of their own whom they love should be sick to their stomachs.

Men and women of every faith should be unequivocally condemning this.

People of conscience and morality should be unable to sleep.

Good people ought to be fully heartbroken.

This is a sharp line in the sand, and we all have to make our choice in this moment.

There is no neutral middle ground here; no hedging or justifying or entertaining of both sides.

There is no valid human opinion that makes this OK.

You either permit the brutality or you don’t.You either make peace with the madness or you push back hard against it.You either assign equal value to people or you don’t.You either hear the cries of a child pleading for her family and realize we’ve lost the plot, or you declare this is the story you’re comfortable co-writing.

I don’t want to hear about your politics; this is about your heart.

What I.C.E. is doing under the guidance of this Administration is a human rights violation unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes.

It is a direct assault upon the very bedrock of the human experience.

It intentionally traumatizes people by violently severing the absolute most precious tether there is in this life: to safety in one’s own skin.

To willingly and repeatedly violate people under the guise of legitimate government is an act of abuse on the most horrifying of scales; one that illustrates the inhumanity of the perpetrator and the dehumanization of their victims.

There is no difference between this moment and all the others we see in the rearview mirror of history and look back upon in disgust.

Our complacency is the same.Our apathy is the same.Our silence is the same.Our culpability is the same.

This isn’t about the laws of the land (though even those are being ignored), it is about those higher laws: of human dignity, of an elemental regard for life, of a basic level of empathy.

If we cannot come together around such things, we have no business pretending we’re a civilized nation. If we can’t transcend our theology and our politics to defend the most vulnerable among us, we forfeit our morality altogether.

A country that endures this kind of disregard for human life does not deserve people to stand when its anthem is sung.It merits no allegiance from decent people.It discards its pretense of welcoming the poor and tired.It abdicates any moral high ground in the world.A country that allows this kind of cruelty cannot claim greatness, and worse, it jettisons its goodness.It cannot imagine that it is a place of liberty or equality or justice.

America, we are in the glaring spotlight of History in these moments. We are crafting our legacy in real time.

If we abide this, if we rationalize it away, if we ignore it, if we turn our heads from it, then we deserve the terrible place we’re creating, the moral cancer our children inherit, and the hell that is waiting for us.

We need to come to our collective senses, to inhale deeply and then clearly speak in one voice, the words that will allow us to heal this shared sickness and be the best of ourselves:

What I.C.E is doing to brown-skinned people is a crime.It’s a sin.It’s intentionally cruel.It is blatantly inhumane.It’s not pro-life.It’s not Christian.It’s not making America great.

It is evil by any measure decent people use.

And the good people here should not tolerate it a single second longer.

SUPPORT THESE ORGANIZATIONS:Freedom for Immigrants - Advocate for the abolition of immigration detention:

Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC) - Legal tools & policy advocacy

Immigrant Justice Network - Coalition pushing for systemic reform:

National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) - Legal services & defense:

Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) - Advocacy, rapid response & legal supports:

CASA - National immigrant community power organization:

UndocuBlack Network - Advocates for Black immigrants:

United We Dream - Immigrant youth advocacy network:

Unión del Barrio - Latino-focused immigrant justice activism:

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In those internal autobiographies, we all tell ourselves that we’re one of the good ones, that our presence on this planet is yielding something beautiful, something that will leave this place better than when we arrived. In those stories, we are the heroes, the helpers, the saviors, or at the very least, we’re decent people just doing our best.

That self-reverential story has a way of bleeding over into the place we call home, the nation we claim as our own. There is a poisonous exceptionalism that most of us were born into; a curated mythology inherited by our parents, our politicians, our pastors that convinced us that as a collective, we were good or godly.

Some of us live our entire lives believing we’re better than we are, that our nation is better than it is, until we are faced with irrefutable evidence to the contrary. Suddenly, we realize that we might be the villains, the terrorists, the monsters, the accomplices.

We all grew up in this country learning of the horrors of the Holocaust, reading stories of Hitler’s unthinkable brutality against the Jewish people. We stared in disbelief at the images of walking corpses, emancipated from the concentration camps at the very precipice of death. We nearly vomited seeing jittery black and white newsreels of naked, indistinguishable human beings, stacked like cord wood. We read of an unrelenting barbarism against an entire group of human beings, whose only crime was existing in their skin.

And when faced with this sprawling inhumanity that defied our ability to hold it all, invariably we all thought about the German people, and we all asked ourselves, “What kind of human beings would allow this?”

We wondered what kind of morally broken people could stand by and watch generations of mothers, fathers, and children eradicated from existence, their communities razed to rubble, their cultures erased, their very humanity discarded.

From the safety of hindsight and the buffers of our own false stories, we’ve interrogated ordinary Germans from eighty years ago, lamenting their silence and inaction in the face of such horrors; condemning them as, at best, gutless cowards, and at worst, willing collaborators.

With stratospheric arrogance, we’ve told ourselves that we’d never have consented to such evil, that we’d have pushed back against it, that the abject terror unleashed on the Jewish people would never have happened on our watch.

And yet, there is Gaza.

Day after day, she testifies against us, documenting our indifference, recording our apathy, inventorying our inaction. She lifts our hands in front of us and shows us that her blood is all over them. She burns up the comforting fictions of our goodness. She reminds us how easy it is for a nation to abandon its humanity, silence by silence, justification by justification, averted eye by averted eye.

Gaza is indicting the American people, and Iran and Lebanon are joining her (as are immigrant populations in the US). They are holding a mirror up to us as a nation, revealing exactly who we are— the truth about what we believe, about what we will abide, and what we will not stand for— and we should be ashamed and driven to our knees in repentance.

It would be damning enough to declare that many Americans now are as reprehensible as many Germans in the 1940s, but that wouldn’t be accurate; we are far worse.

We have access to America's and Israel’s every vile deed in the palm of our hands. Donald Trump’s and Benjamin Netanyahu’s sociopathy floods our timelines. With the swipe of a finger, we can traverse thousands of miles and see the annihilation of a people in real-time. Unlike the German people in the shadow of Hitler, we cannot even attempt to plead ignorance. Through tiny screens that we are rarely more than inches from, we are 24-7 bystanders to the slaughter of children, to the bombing of hospitals, to the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people. We know exactly where the money is going, the politicians whose empires have been funded by terrorism, and the scale of the mass murders our tax dollars are funding.

And we are culpable for all that we allow or refuse to oppose.

One day, eighty years from now, generations of children all over the world will ask what kind of people would have allowed the genocide in Gaza to happen.

And it should break our hearts and boil our blood to know that unless we alter our course immediately and fiercely, we will be that kind.

There’s no way around it.

Politically speaking, for those of us on the Left, losing a candidate who carried the Democrats’ hopes of finally unseating Susan Collins in Maine and shifting the balance of power in the Senate this late in the game and in this manner is devastating. There’s no spin here that can make this good news, at least not in the political arena.

But from a human perspective, this is where we should be today as a movement and a people. This is where we have to be if we’re going to prevail as a civilized society, if we’re going to differentiate ourselves from the ever-deepening moral cesspool across the aisle that has grieved and infuriated us.

We cannot allow power to become the end by which all means are defensible, and Platner’s campaign, had it proceeded, was in danger of beginning our collective slide into the abyss. We could easily have started down the steep and greased path toward becoming a people who choose the immediate intoxication of a political victory over the far more difficult and costly long game of staying human.

As a growing list of troubling revelations about Platner surfaced in recent months, a concerning number of people on the Left began to do exactly what we’ve spent a decade lamenting about the Right: minimize the severity, engage in whataboutism, move the goalposts, and talk about the importance of “the win” over everything else.

We know where that all leads, the way that cancer moves through the bloodstream, how ambition devours people from the inside, how it paves the road to a deeper excavation into the depths of inhumanity. Over the past ten years, we’ve watched in disbelief as tens of millions of our family members, friends, and neighbors have abandoned every alleged conviction and denied every professed value in order to engineer the ascension of a useful monster. They’ve shelved their morals, denied their religion, and imprisoned their better angels to secure a presidency. They’ve gained a world of SCOTUS seats and legislative carte blanche and lost their collective souls, and we’ve rightly condemned it.

On the Left, there’s a sickening deva vu, as we’ve seen this movie before: a promising political candidate or sitting lawmaker voluntarily withdrawing or succumbing to public pressure to do so—all while the other side makes concessions, holds their noses, and banks more political victories.

That cannot be who we become, no matter how we want to justify it, no matter how much good we aspire to do with the political capital we’re chasing, regardless of the story we tell ourselves of our lofty aspirations.

We can’t say that we believe women up until the point at which believing women becomes politically costly.

We can’t loudly crusade against a voting bloc for covering for a serial predator and then bear with the sexual sins of candidates who can lead us to the promised land of Congressional control.

We can’t claim or hold moral high ground over the Right if we find ourselves ignoring the red flags, dismissing lawlessness, or turning a blind eye to brutality as they have become so comfortable doing.

And while we don’t want to fall into a purity politics that sets an impossible standard for the people we choose to represent us, we can and should have dealbreakers, red lines that we simply refuse to cross because if we don’t, we will become exactly like the people we’re trying to dislodge from power right now.

Given his past, Graham Platner should never have chosen to run in the first place, and there were disgraceful failures in the vetting process that should have disqualified him before his campaign ever began. Those are matters for another time

But today is a good day to remind ourselves that these moments always feel like losses, but in the most important ways, they aren’t.

As the Democrats scramble to choose his replacement and try to salvage a victory in Maine, progressives, liberals, and moderates who are crestfallen today need to remember that in the loftier spaces that transcend politics, this is still a win.

Choosing not to align with indecency always is.

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Once it finds its way into the bloodstream, it gradually begins destroying a human being from the inside out. It does its work almost imperceptibly, driving out critical thinking, eradicating empathy, and hardening the heart.

Since October 7, 1996, hundreds of millions of the people we love and live alongside have been hourly exposed to a corrosive, cancerous toxin that has rendered them shells of the people they were before. We all have the stories of the people we’ve lost and the moments we realized they’d been polluted.

A couple of years ago, my family and I walked into an older relative’s house unannounced. They’d been expecting us that day from out of town, but we’d arrived thirty minutes earlier than we’d planned, so we knocked lightly and walked in. The small TV on the kitchen counter was playing Fox News.

When one of them came down the stairs, almost in the middle of greeting us, our relative walked hurriedly over to the sink, grabbed the remote, and turned off the TV, looking like a teenager caught watching porn by their parents.

Suddenly, everything made sense.

All the dots connected.

Over the last couple of years, we’d noticed this couple changing. They’d become more and more outspoken on things like immigration and women’s reproductive rights and police shootings, surprising us with the intolerance and cruelty of off-the-cuff comments that seemed out of character for them. We questioned whether we were just being overly sensitive or projecting our fears onto them.

But after the surprise peek into their viewing habits, it was clear: they were merely following the script. They’d been pulled into the false story. The indoctrination had begun. The poison had taken hold.

Now, we could rewind over the previous months and see all the alarmist talking points in their words at family gatherings and on social media: open borders letting in floods of dark-skinned rapists, baby-killing Democrats coming to take their guns, terrorist Muslims bringing our demise, Transgender perverts lurking in public restrooms, and violent black men threatening police at traffic stops.

Their growing tolerance for cruelty suddenly made sense.

Their social media feeds became increasingly littered with fictional horror stories about vaccine dangers, LGBTQ people converting their children, space lasers, and immigrants eating pets: the kind of garbage they’d have easily spotted and rejected before.

The moral alteration in an unthinkable expanse of people who call this place home has been stunning in its velocity and stomach-turning in its depths, and the worst part is that we can’t reach them in the ways reasonable human beings can be reached. Before Fox News, Franklin Graham, and MAGA propaganda, we could meet the people around us on the common ground of our shared faith in Jesus, our respect for the Constitution, the clarity of objective truth, or shared compassion for vulnerable people. Now, they no longer have use or tolerance for such things.

The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ counter-cultural, counterintuitive manifesto of humility, gentleness, and love, has been replaced by venomous, incendiary Sean Hannity supremacist propaganda and Laura Ingraham white fear porn.

The barrier-breaking, table-expanding hospitality of Christ has morphed into sneering Trump rally rant rhetoric about violent illegals and foreign predators, and callous “build that wall” refrains.

These people used to know better. They were good-hearted, generous human beings who aspired to love their neighbors. They flatly rejected bigotry and defended vulnerable communities. They were people I could count on for rational, level-headed decency. They once instantly recognized men like Donald Trump as the antithesis of Jesus.

But this is what happens when decent, intelligent people become radicalized: they get polluted by the things they watch and the sermons they sit through and the nonsense they read, and they surround themselves with an echo chamber made of equally deluded, equally terrified people, until one day they are the hateful extremists that they always used to warn you about.

Those of us who’ve lost people we love to this curated pestilence should file a class-action suit against Fox News and Rupert Murdoch for thirty years of malpractice and murder: for the relationships they’ve destroyed, the deaths they’ve been complicit in, the betrayal of the public trust, and for purposefully killing the goodness in human beings who will never be who they might have been otherwise.

We’ll never know exactly how our nation or the people around us would be different had this venom never been allowed into our systems, but it would have been a hell of a lot more compassionate, loving, and equitable. It would be a whole lot closer to anything resembling greatness—or better yet, goodness.

It’s infuriating to know that right now, in nursing home common rooms, in car repair waiting rooms, on kitchen countertop TVs, and in the palms of their hands, they are being unrelentingly eaten alive, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it and rescue them.

I still love my relatives, my former church members, my high school friends, and my neighbors, but I grieve what has happened to them. I lament the poisoning of their once-soft hearts, the way Jesus has been all but squeezed out of their religion. I fear that they’ll never fully recover from the corrosive narrative that has been continually injected into their brains about the world and about disparate people and about the expansive, lavish, audacious love Jesus calls us to extend.

I only hope these moms and ministers and nurses and schoolteachers and football coaches and favorite relatives get a truer story or meet someone who wakes them up, or that they rediscover Jesus enough that they change the channel, turn off the TV, escape this hateful cult, and find the truth that truly sets them free:

Donald Trump is filth.

Hatred is a waste.

Empathy is the antidote.The world is bigger than America.We are our brother’s keeper.Kindness is the better path.If they’re going to join a cult, I wish it were that kind.

In the comments, share your stories of the ways Fox News poisoned someone you love, fractured your relationships, or polluted our Republic.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The steady stream of vitriol I receive from professed Christians who identify as MAGA is understandable.

As they fire off threatening texts, furiously tap out expletive-laden emails, and break into violent, performative histrionics on social media, I genuinely feel for them. They’re often getting some really bad news that blows up the story they’ve spent a long time telling themselves and depend on to validate and justify the way they treat other people and the planet.

They’re coming face to face with the sobering reality that they are antithetical to Jesus. Worse than that, they aren’t hearing that news from me; they’re hearing it from Jesus.

Few things confound and infuriate Conservative Christians quite like the simple, clear, unadorned words of Jesus as documented in the Bible they so loudly and frequently claim to love, believe in, and live by, but seemingly never read. It’s almost miraculous.

Jesus said: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Matthew 5:9

When you’re part of an antagonistic movement built almost exclusively on a self-righteous battle posture: on a theology and politics that require an enemy, an adversary, an encroaching danger, a culture war foe to be defeated—the idea of being a peacemaker really pisses you off. MAGAs don’t like peace. They refuse to coexist with it. They cannot abide it. It’s not a compatible idea.

Jesus said: Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me. Matthew 25:45

The poor, the outcast, the hurting, the hungry, the homeless, the lonely. Jesus said he literally inhabits the most vulnerable among us, and that the way we treat them is the way we treat Jesus himself. That’s gotta be a really disturbing reality when you spend so much of your time denying people healthcare and cutting social programs and assaulting voting rights and legislatively attacking people for their sexuality or their nation of origin or their pigmentation. The news that, according to Jesus, you devote a great deal of your life treating him like garbage tends not to be received too well.

Jesus said: For God so loved the world... John 3:16

The world. God loves the world. That includes the planet, the climate around it, the resources within it, the disparate humanity, and the expansive life upon it. No America First. No “Go back where you came from” nationalistic bluster. No, “Don’t Tread on Me” middle-finger defiance. If you love the world as God does, you fight for diversity, you welcome immigrants and foreigners, you demand environmental responsibility, you want more people to have a voice, not fewer. When America becomes your world, you’re opposing Jesus.

Jesus said: “Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword. Matthew 26:52

That’s the part of the oft-quoted story that gun-loving Christians never want to read: the part where Jesus reprimands his disciple who uses a weapon to defend him, reminding him and those listening that his people will not be a people of retributive violence, that they will be those who shun force and turn the other cheek and resist harming others and de-escalate conflict. That is a really hard truth for the NRA, God and Guns, Come and Take It crowd, who really want Jesus to be cool with their instigating, posturing bloodlust—and who have to hear straight from Jesus that he isn’t.

‘Jesus said: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. Matthew 22:37-39

Loving your neighbor. Jesus says unequivocally that this is the priority and the point, and the way we show our love for God: the way we treat other human beings. When Conservative Christians realize that this includes their Muslim neighbor, their transgender neighbor, their Jewish neighbor, their Liberal neighbor, their uninsured neighbor, their undocumented neighbor, their black neighbor—they usually don’t react very well. When you aren’t able or willing to practically or tangibly extend love to such a vast portion of your neighbors in any meaningful way, that is a difficult theological pill to swallow.

Honestly, I feel sorry for people who want to be both Christian and MAGA, who think they can be devoted to Jesus and to Donald Trump simultaneously, who labor under the false assumption that their bastardized, territorial, self-centered white nationalist GOP version of Christianity is remotely of God.

And I know that the actual words of Jesus are the most triggering of any they could be faced with, and so the venom these generate isn’t surprising, and neither is their scalding rage toward those of us who regularly share those words with them.

I’m not saying this Republican theocracy built on power, exclusion, and subjugation that white Evangelicals are tethered to is anti-Jesus; Jesus is saying that.

MAGA Christians really don’t take that well. It makes them want to shoot the messenger.

That’s been going on for two thousand years.

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Life is exhausting these days for lots of us, and I think I’ve figured out why.

I think it’s having to sit through the pretending.

You see, it’s bad enough watching over a third of our nation becoming fully indoctrinated into a sycophantic cult of personality of the very worst kind of person, to see once reasonable people abandon any semblance of benevolence toward diverse humanity.

It’s rightly heartbreaking to see those we love so seduced by power, addled by racism, and deluded by tribalism that they’ve declared war on immigrants and vaccines and gay kids and the electoral process.

And yes, it’s infuriating witnessing tens of millions of Americans having their minds slowly poisoned by Fox News to the point they defend a domestic act of terror at the Capitol or take the side of a murderous regime’s genocide or celebrate their neighbors being thrown into concentration camps.

As wearying as all that is, it’s so much worse having them invoke love of God and country in the process.

That’s what makes these days so difficult for so many of us: not merely coming to terms with the beliefs and prejudices and phobias of those we are daily surrounded by here, but having to contend with their constant projection about us and their refusal to simply own who they are. It’s the nonstop, hypocritical, farcical performance art.

Good people are so tired of traitors masquerading as patriots, of the treasonous continually waving the flag, of hateful people peddling a God of love.They’re tired of human beings with no empathy pretending they care about the sanctity of life, of the loudest prophets of America First having the least regard for so many Americans, of the self-righteous sermonizers defending a serial predator.

Where are the selflessness, generosity, and hospitality that were supposed to mark the lovers of God and country?Where are the lives that replicate the embrace of the poor, huddled masses affixed to the foundation of Liberty?Where are those who emulate the love of disparate neighbors at the heart of the Gospels?

Patriot. Christian. American.

These words have all lost their meaning: words that used to cost something to claim, labels that once came with even a modicum of transformation, and self-identifiers that had previously required a measure of evidence displayed in one’s life.

The flag and the cross that used to hold such meaning to so many of us are now just stolen iconography wielded by the immigrant-hating wall-builders and the violent anti-abortion zealots.

Using these words and wearing these symbols has become more and more difficult for us, as they now align us with the very antithesis of our moral convictions and guiding principles.

People who truly love this country, those who earnestly seek a faith expressed in love, human beings who are burdened to make America worthy of the speeches and anthems—we find ourselves branded heretics and traitors and apostates, forcefully displaced from religion and country by these angry squatters who have taken up residence in them.

True patriots should want all Americans to vote, they should oppose would-be dictators, they should yield to the Constitution, and they should demand a nation that is offered to everyone equally.

Actual followers of Jesus should defend the vulnerable, they should give comfort to the sick, food to the hungry, welcome to the immigrant, and love to the least among us.

And while the masqueraders and pretenders parade around in grand performative acts of love of God and country while willfully betraying both—the rest of us are going to have to fight to hold on to our nation and our religion, and to care for a world that needs desperately authentic people of faith, morality, and conscience who simply live a love that doesn’t need to declare itself loving.

As far as patriotism and faith go, this nation needs the real thing again.How are you experiencing, wrestling with, and expressing patriotism or faith right now?

Are you feeling the exhaustion I talk about here?Let me know in the comments.

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I am a lifelong aspiring straight LGBTQ ally.

For the past few decades, I’ve worked to be a good listener, to be willing to have my blind spots revealed, to be open to changing a deeply held assumption, to be willing to reckon with my profound privilege. My journey over this time has placed me in the path of millions of beautiful human beings who’ve shaped my understanding of sexuality up close and from a distance: scholars, pastors, physicians, activists, artists, family members, friends, and strangers.

What these disparate teachers have collectively helped open my eyes to is the vast expanse of sexual identity and expression; of the limitless ways in which human beings find their sense of self and their place in the world; how they experience safety, companionship, love, and pleasure.

Yet, as much as I work to be a responsible ally to the LGBTQ+ community, I am fully aware that I will never be a member of that community. By virtue of my identity and orientation, I am forever operating with limited information. As well-intentioned as my words might be on matters of equality and justice for my LGBTQ+ friends, I will never be speaking for anyone other than myself, which is where I begin today.On the last day of Pride Month, author Matthew Vines published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he declares his identity as a gay man, as opposed to a queer man. Further, he alleges that the “queer” label and those who embrace it have contributed to decreasing support for the gay community, especially among Conservatives.

Vines states in his piece that he believes the word queer “carries an adversarial charge that ‘gay’ does not,” as it has come to embody a broader, more politically engaged progressive activism; that it displays a confrontational posture that is essentially putting straight people off and rewinding the progress of the gay community. This feels somewhat shortsighted.

Vines is a former Evangelical and author of the incredibly important book God and the Gay Christian, which eloquently made the Biblical case for same-sex relationships. It was a game-changer that helped foster vitally important conversations within the Church. As an LGBTQ-affirming pastor, when it arrived, it was invaluable in giving me a place to meet people in my churches for substantive conversations about sexuality. This all makes Matthew’s words in the Times concerning. He knows the Bible, and he knows the Christians who wield it like a hammer, and for some reason, he seems to be overestimating them.

Over the last two days, I’ve been poring over comment sections, watching videos, and reading nuanced essays that reflect the diversity of the LGBTQ+ experience regarding the word queer. Some were raised in a time when it was a dehumanizing slur, and as a result, will always carry negative connotations and always be triggering. Others claim both gay and queer, depending on the context, choosing to speak to their individual experience and their members as part of a collective. Still others have come to embrace queer as a massive umbrella, embodying the sweeping scope of sexual identity and expression. Many others use queer to embody not just identity and orientation, but the vast intersectionality of all vulnerable, oppressed, historically marginalized communities. None of these perspectives is more right than any other, but each comes with costs.

In the comment section of my friend, Pastor Brandan Robertson, a gay man wrote: Gay men don’t identify as queer. You need to respect that. We have nothing in common with nonbinary or trans people. It is insulting to have decades of fighting for gay rights coopted by communities that have nothing to do with being gay. Gay rights are not fringe rights.

This is precisely the worrisome sentiment I find in Vine’s opinion piece: the idea that liberation ever happens in a vacuum.

The truth is, gay men do have something in common with nonbinary and trans people and queer people (and every non-conforming human being): the Republican Evangelical Right despises them and wants to take away their fundamental freedoms simply because of their identity and orientation, just as much as it wants to take them from the noisier, messier queer people.This violent Christian Nationalist movement in America will not allow any non-cisgender-heterosexual expression, and Matthew seems to be in denial about that. Right now, this christo-fascist GOP regime is loudly targeting the transgender community because that is the easiest way to rally their phobic base. Articles like Matthew's seem to be throwing nonbinary and trans people under the bus, believing they are somehow preventing the acceptance of him in the minds of people that will never come.As someone who aspires to be a responsible ally, I respect every human being's personal perspective on these words and how they impact their own experience, Matthew Vines’ included. I completely respect his position regarding his own life and the way he wishes to exist in the world. I would never question that for him or anyone. We are all the authorities over our own humanity. I would never ask him to embrace queerness as a label any more than I would ask him to embrace heterosexuality.

Yet, I do feel that his words about the queer community seem to be born out of the misplaced feeling that he can somehow evade the Right's disdain and their punitive violence by distancing himself from supposedly "less palatable" expressions of sexuality, but that seems myopic to me. As a white gay man, Vines may feel he is distinct from a black trans woman (and of course he is), but to the hateful Evangelicals steering us into theocracy, there is no difference whatsoever.To these phobic zealots, trans people are nonbinary people, are gay people, are nonconforming people, are lesbian people, are bisexual people. Further, they are immigrant people and black people and poor people and women. It seems as though Matthew is choosing to lean away from the collective liberation of all marginalized people in the hopes of finding safety in the sexual and political expression of least resistance.

To all members of the LGBTQIA+ community, your voices here truly matter. How do you feel about Matthew’s Op-Ed, my reaction to it, or the label of queer? I would greatly appreciate your perspective. Thank you!

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Donald Trump is a court-adjudicated rapist.

This is not speculation.

It is not conjecture.

It’s not a Left-Wing talking point.

This is documented, established fact.

It was unequivocally declared by a judge.

It has been repeatedly upheld in the courts.

He is a rapist.

And to any decent human being, that would have been a deal-breaker.

It wasn’t for them.

Donald Trump’s name is listed tens of thousands of times in the files documenting one of the most prolific and vile child trafficking rings in history, orchestrated by a man with whom he was a close friend and collaborator, one he traveled with. partied with, and corresponded with.

For people with normal ethical standards, this would be a stark, uncrossable red line.

For them, it proved not to be.

Donald Trump has been accused by dozens of women of rape, sexual abuse, and physical violence, including a woman who testified before the FBI that Trump raped her when she was just 13 years old.

For actual followers of Jesus, this would all be stomach-turning and condemned as the darkest kind of evil.

For them, it hasn’t been.

For tens of millions of our family members, lifelong friends, neighbors, coworkers, and classmates, none of this has mattered. His well-documented brutality has never been a liability.

Despite a vast and reprehensible body of work, filled with proven sexual assault, alleged pedophilia, boasts about forced affection, credible accusations, and vicious public verbal attacks on women, he still receives their undying allegiance.

Instead of joining decent humanity in dragging him and his accomplices into the raking light of legal accountability for their atrocities against the most vulnerable, they obfuscate, they feign ignorance, they move the goalposts, and they slander the victims.

For all their performative sermonizing about protecting girls and young women, Trump’s supporters have shown through their silence, through their refusal to acknowledge reality, and through their steadfast adoration no matter how disgusting the revelations that they simply don’t give a damn.

Unthinkable violence against children, sadistic degradation of women, absolutely monstrous allegations of assault; they’re all trumped by the pathetic cultic affection they have for a man who in any other sphere of life would be a pariah where good people gather.

They have put political wins, Supreme Court Seats, and the cheap high they get off hurting people vicariously through him above the dignity and safety of other human beings. In the face of legal reckoning, he has received the protection of the highest seat of power in this nation, one they’ve helped him retain.

They know what he’s done, and it has not dampened their passion.

And this, perhaps as much as any moral or ethical malpractice they’ve engaged in to support him (and there has been so much), cannot be something we let them off the hook for, no matter what they say after he is no longer in power or no longer walking this earth.

When time and justice catch up to him, when his cancerous regime is finally dismantled, and some kind of normalcy and stability return to our nation, their breathless worship of a violent, sadistic sexual deviant will be their legacy.

One day soon, they will deny their affiliations, try to gaslight us into thinking we didn’t see what we saw, and plead ignorance of what has always been clear. We must never let them forget.

He is who he is, and his supporters are who they are.

Donald Trump is a rapist.

He will always be a rapist.

His supporters will always have passionately supported a rapist.

They cannot be excused for that.

They cannot be forgiven for that.

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The second offering in the James Gunn-curated DCU didn’t burn up on its entry into theaters. It was killed by a thousand Kryptonite darts in the weeks and months preceding, by an increasingly crowded YouTube/TikTok/IG landscape of monetized fandom that, as in every other facet of media, now runs on vitriol and negativity. Supergirl became its latest and perhaps most predictable target.

The film’s lead, House of Dragons alum Milly Alcock, was dogged from the moment her casting was announced, with a disturbing amount of venom hurled at her physical appearance (something that has reached a disgraceful zenith since the film’s release). Add to that a female screenwriter in Ana Nogueira (along with the rabid disdain for Gunn’s supposed “woke agenda” from aspiring alpha male online gatekeepers), and from the beginning, the Manosphere was simply not going to allow it to succeed.

A fierce torrent of dudebro think pieces, panel conversations, and supposed scoops flooded social media, each one working to one-up the others with sky-is-falling histrionics, Yellow-Sun-hot takes, and click-garnering thumbnails. More than any superhero movie since the first Captain Marvel film, have performative fragile males worked so hard to poison public sentiment before a second of footage was released.

Alcock especially has been hounded by criticism over her physicality and her perceived lack of enthusiasm on the press circuit (Serious, “Maybe you should smile more” vibes). YouTube accounts such as Nerdrotic Daily and Geeks + Gamers, whose stable of mortally insecure, insufferable incels have been among those most ruthlessly attacking the actress in an effort to grow their already massive viewership among other easily-lured young men weaned on Conservative sexism and toxic masculinity.

And, then, of course, there are the legions of perpetually lathered-up, zealous Zach Snyder fanboys who have been sitting vigil for the last couple of decades, and who want so desperately for the DCU to fail so that they can once again work themselves into a public frenzy to restore their beloved auteur to the lofty place they believe he alone deserves.

But it isn’t easily intimidated conservative men only, as plenty of female content creators gleefully joined in the incessant crepe-hanging over the last few months, proving that it isn’t just the guys who are capable of manufacturing misogyny or being driven to corrosivity by declining revenue streams and oversaturated online spaces. To curry the favor of their largely male audiences, many women in these spaces have face-shamed Alcock with juvenile AI-generated caricatures.

And let’s be clear: art’s interpretation is subjective, and there’s nothing wrong with criticisms grounded in substance, or admonishments about straying from the source material ( as happened here), but that’s not what this is, as evidenced by the giddy celebrations of the film’s financial failure among the men largely filling these spaces.

Supergirl is a flawed yet well-crafted comic book movie. Alcock, especially, does wonderful work embodying the titular character and deserves to get further chances to bring Kara Zor-El to audiences. While it by no means reaches the stratospheric heights of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, or the Russo Brothers’ Infinity War, it sure as heck isn’t Morbius, Black Adam, or Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, either.

The sad truth is that even in comic book spaces that should be more evolved than other media landscapes, women actors, writers, artists, and directors still have to do three times the work to get a fraction of the credit, and in an exponentially expanding virtual landscape where the lowest common denominator is courted and women are targeted, we’re going to continue to see these stories play out.

Supergirl is a perfect example of how toxic content creators have ruined the experience of anticipating and seeing a comic book movie, spewing out a steady stream of negativity, speculation, rumor-mongering, and doom forecasting.

By constantly needing to compete in the oversaturated market, they build their brands on grievance, creating ever-more incendiary content and engendering so much hatred toward a film before it’s even out that it doesn’t have a chance to be received on its merits.

Combine that with the reality that 90 percent of these creators are dudes or women trying to draw their gaze, and a female-led superhero movie faces impossible scrutiny.Supergirl didn’t fall, at least not completely.

She simply burned up in the Manosphere.

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When the highest court in a nation is compromised to the point that it disregards the law and becomes predatory toward its citizenry, what recourse does that citizenry have?

What happens when the most powerful minority in a country weaponizes the very systems designed to protect its most vulnerable?

America is about to find out.

Despite his and his party’s relentless efforts, Donald Trump could not quite successfully manage a bloodless or bloody coup in the wake of the 2020 Presidential election, but it turns out they didn’t need to. They’d already done mortal damage to the Republic from the inside.

Over the last two decades, through a perfect storm of Republican opposition, Democratic Party malpractice, a prolonged political imbalance in Congress, and the untimely death of a Justice, Trump and his party have commandeered the Supreme Court and are rapidly rewinding the clock of human and civil rights here to a place that would have been unthinkable to many, just a decade ago.

With only a few months before the most pivotal midterm elections in our lifetimes, the reproductive rights of women, the fates of hundreds of thousands of immigrants and naturalized citizens, environmental protections, the marriages and freedoms of LGBTQ people, and the viability of elections are all near or at the precipice. The velocity and scale of the losses are beyond what most people’s minds can fathom.

Every day people ask me what we can do to stop the coming flood of fascism, and far wiser human beings than myself struggle with answers, especially if November doesn’t manage to catalyze the majority into the voting booth in numbers that we haven’t seen before. If the theocracy being built right now is solidified in Congress later this year, we will be in uncharted territory that none of us can predict or imagine. It may require personal sacrifices, legal consequences, and relational schisms that our nation hasn’t had to face since the Civil War.

So what are we who are here and grieving all this, supposed to do with our grief and our outrage over what this nation is and what we fear it could become? The answer is: everything we can.

People of faith, morality, and conscience each need to take stock of what we value here, of the freedoms we still do have, of the people and causes we care about, of the kind of place we don’t want it to become—and live boldly, fully, and passionately in light of all of it.

We also need to make our presence felt by these treasonous, compromised Justices who have chosen to abandon the law, abdicate their responsibility, disregard the common good, and do the bidding of a traitorous, felonious wannabe dictator. Within the limits of what is lawful, we should never allow these people to have a moment’s peace in public. Short of anything illegal or violent, they should become pariahs in the places decent, patriotic Americans gather, and their shame should be preserved by all of us and by the history books.

November is not yet here, which means there is still time to write a better story if we are willing to spend ourselves on behalf of that story; to stay in the small and the close and to embody the America we believe is worth fighting for and the nation we dream of living in.

If we recognize our interdependence, disparate Americans need to move together despite our relatively small differences, to push back an existential threat to all of us. In the face of a Supreme Court that no longer operates in the interest of the law or the people, and of a political party whose collective soul has long been sold, the rest of us need to do our best to dissent. We need to embrace what is within our hands: our relationships, our work, our resources, our energy, our economic influence, our shared voice, our shared vote—and to leverage those things in the cause of life, liberty, and happiness as best we can and hope that these things are enough.

And if they prove not to be, we’ll need to wake up on that unimaginable day and keep fighting.

Humanity is worth it.

The planet is worth it.

And the America that still could be is worth it, too.

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For actual patriotic Americans, this July 4th isn’t a party; it’s a funeral.

There is nothing to celebrate here.

We shouldn’t be singing right now; we should be grieving.We should be sitting vigil for the country we could have had but may never see.We should be mourning over how little independence has trickled down to the people in the streets.We should be lamenting how commonplace hatred has become in this supposed “sweet land of Liberty.”

Most of all, we should be mortified that no matter how it happened, Democracy has all but died on our watch here.

For these reasons, we are the United States of Embarrassment.

As our nation nears the quarter millennium mark, we have collectively failed those who came before by allowing the ascension of the very fascism millions of our forebears courageously fought, bled, and died driving back into the sewers of history.

The moral cancer they defeated on the other side of the planet, we have allowed to make a home here.

Mass abductions by government-deputized goons are not relegated to some ancient, jittery black-and-white newsreels from half a world away; they unfold in live-streamed phone videos from the streets of this alleged land of the free, showing masked, traitorous cowards draped in the colors they aren’t worthy of wearing.

Death camps are not the crumbled carcasses of a foreign failure of humanity that serve as memorial sites, cautionary tales for decent people; they are the newly christened pride and joy of monstrous men and women who have the stratospheric gall to costume themselves in the flag that actual courageous lovers of this nation wore as they expired on our behalf.

The grim propaganda military parades of unrepentant sociopathic dictators aren’t trapped in the amber blocks of discolored textbook photos; they are real-time travesties disgracing our National Mall.

And all of it: the breathtaking brutality against our most vulnerable, the unthinkable Constitutional assaults, the collective moral collapse of an entire party, and the disregard for the laws of the land, is packaged in a facade of patriotism that would be laughable were it not a deadly, sinful, vomit-inducing farce.

This is the paradox that decent Americans find themselves in.

Our essential liberties have never been more at risk, our electoral process never more assailed, our national sovereignty never more tenuous, our elemental freedoms never more in doubt. And yet, the patriotic fervor by this felonious, soulless narcissist, his twisted cadre of cosplaying Christian ghouls, and their allegiance-pledging, flag-waving surrogates has never been greater.

This is by design.

Weaponized patriotism is an intoxicant for easily manipulated people whose identities are shaped by those they hate, the neighbors and strangers they’ve been convinced are threats to be eradicated and dangers to be sent away.

With enough star-spangled rhetoric, rockets’ red glare spectacle, and red, white, and blue dog-and-pony distractions, you can make such people believe that they are winning, even while they are being led down the parade route and straight into the slaughterhouse.

And so this year, the anthems will play, the flags will wave, the bottle rockets will ascend, the M-80s will go off, and Fascism will quietly enter through the side door while everyone is distracted by the spectacle. Everyone, except for those of us who still remember what the hell this beautiful experiment was reaching for to begin with.

This is why these songs of freedom will indeed ring hollow this July 4th, because those of us who love this country realize how far we are from incarnating the glory of the songs we will be unable to sing.

We will be grieving, not because this country deserves better than this party and the amoral monster gorging himself on our citizenry, but because right now it does deserve them; because we wish it to be something far greater than their ceremonial patriotism, ornamental religion, and phony pro-life zeal they wear when it benefits them.

We see what a farce this all is: watching a joyless, mindless death cult led by rapists, racists, and career criminals making a mockery of an America whose diversity, plurality, and liberty they despise and are actively eliminating.

So yes, we’ll be loving our country fiercely this July 4th and beyond by not letting it remain what it currently is and by opposing the fraudulence of their performative love of country.

We will be working and protesting and loving and building and caring and voting and pushing it to become a place deserving of the festivities and the fireworks.

When freedom rings for all of us, then we’ll sing, and then we’ll celebrate.

Until then, we will grieve the death of what might have been.

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This green, murky, algae-besieged pool on the National Mall is simply the latest sequel to the grotesque and now predictable ten-year body of work from this arrogant, incompetent, prolific bed-shitter.

The script is always the same:

1. Sense an encroaching political reckoning, be hounded by a damning news story that refuses to die, feel public support among your once-rabid but shrinking base waning, feel the winds of public opinion shifting.2. Identify a problem that does not exist (or greatly exaggerate one that does), forecasting doom, prophesying disaster, and declaring the sky to be imminently falling, trafficking in misinformation, hyperbole, and abject lies.3. Approach the invented emergency not with the care and expertise of those most equipped and trained to address the supposed threat, but instead, impulsively unleash a legion of the most inexperienced, least qualified, most morally inverted accomplices to wreak havoc.

4. Pull from among the vast, bottom-feeding cadre of grifters, convicts, and career sociopaths you’ve surrounded yourself with and become beholden to, rewarding them with the undeserved spoils of power and wealth, with no accountability or oversight.

5. Watch with perverse glee at the ensuing chaos of poor planning, bad decisions, wild overspending, and the wanton disregard for science, humanity, and common sense.

6. Continually declare a situation fully under control, while costs skyrocket, consequences metastasize, irreparable damage is done, and preventable destruction takes place.

7. Attempt an ever-more ridiculous and costly series of completely useless, if not downright mess-exacerbating solutions to the consequences you claim were impossible to foresee, though predicted by anyone with a fourth-grade reading level.

8. When the grim and embarrassing reality of your total failure can no longer be distracted from or covered by propaganda, pivot to blaming your political adversaries and dissenting citizens, cultivating conspiracy, stoking division, and perpetuating discord.

9. Watch as your cultic disciples fall over themselves in an effort to praise you for ending a crisis that you are the sole author of, celebrating the end of disastrous firestorms you set to begin with, basking in the adoration of the ignorant and hateful who’ve long ago abandoned critical thinking.

10. Begin preparing the next manufactured emergency to avoid the accountability and criticism that are coming for your latest curated disaster.

The Reflecting Pool debacle is not an aberration, and sadly, it is not going to be the curtain call for our lame duck wannabe dictator. It is simply the latest example of this vile, unrepentantly horrible planetary punchline doing something wasteful, stupid, and unnecessary, and trying to claim victory after spending vomit-inducing amounts of taxpayer money, only to leave everything much worse than it was before he arrived.

This 14-million-dollar exercise in governmental malpractice is tame by comparison to the other vast atrocities in his portfolio: the obscenely expensive and deadly wars of distraction, the Gestapoesque thugs unleashed as a diversion from his depravity, the stifling concentration camps housing unthinkable horrors, the nonsensical tariff wars with our allies, and the demolition of the White House campus.

The only small comfort is that, unlike a hundred other preventable disasters he has dragged this nation and the planet into for his own gain and self-preservation, at least there in the thick, green sea teaming with algae and dotted with garish blue paint iceberg slabs, no one will starve, or be tortured, or be murdered by a missile we paid for.

This time, we got off easy.

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As I write this, it’s Juneteenth, and all over America, from neighborhood social media sites all the way to Congress, profoundly bothered white people are engaged in wild histrionics over the fact that our nation acknowledges the event as a holiday.

Of course, this anger is a confession of sorts. It’s also an ironic and sad reminder that in the hearts of so many who call this place home, little has changed in 161 years. That’s the entire reason we’re here.

Juneteenth marks the day on June 19th, 1865, when Federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to declare the emancipation of all Americans, of every slave now being free. It shouldn’t even have been necessary. The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued two and a half years earlier by President Lincoln. Freedom under the law had arrived, yet because of the geographic fractures created by the war, many strongholds of institutionalized racism existed. Texas was the final area of this nation to surrender to this particular bend of the arc of the moral universe toward racial justice—and someone had to forcefully bring them the news they’d refused to come to terms with: the war was over.

Enslaved black people had been free for nearly three years, but this news had been withheld from them by a group of white Americans who did not want them to know that they were free and did not want them to be free. The truth was being held captive by people for whom racial equality was not a destination they wanted us to collectively reach, and so they fought to prevent progress and suspend national renovation.

Today, we might look at much of Texas and wonder if any time has actually passed, if the news of freedom ever reached some folks at all. 163 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, there are still people there and in Wisconsin and Iowa and Tennessee, and all over this country, who are trying to rewind the clock of national progress to a place where black people’s freedom is not a reality. There remains here an ignorant army of white bigots fighting to return to supposed American “greatness,” where the rights of people of color to live freely and determine their destination and have their voices heard are yet a long way off.

White supremacy is still working to ensure that black liberation is not complete. On this collective journey toward a just and fair nation, one where the universal worth of every human being is honored, the disheartening news is that we clearly are not all free yet.

But the good news (and it is very good news), is that we are not passive passengers on this trip. Each of us has proximity and agency and the expansive space of our choices. We have our individual wills and our circles of influence and our daily decisions and our social media profiles to usher in the news of equality’s truth.

Not only that, but we have our collective voices and our shared resources and our chosen communities to incarnate a place where more people experience the reality of their liberation.

161 years after the events of Juneteenth, in cul-de-sacs, on city streets, and in the halls of Congress, racists are still working tirelessly to silence people of color in the name of saving America, and the rest of us cannot give them an unimpeded path, especially those of us who share their pigmentation.

We need to continue marching into the fortified strongholds of racism and to the last holdouts against justice; in our homes and neighborhoods and schools and churches, and then to the polls. We need to declare unequivocally that all people are not yet free and deserve to be free. We need to forcefully confront the perverted theology, poisonous politics, irrational fear, and unacknowledged privilege that maintain this sickening status quo.

Until this happens, the cancer of racism will remain, and slavery will not be only in our shameful past, but in our grievous present and our uncertain future.

Every human being here deserves to find joy and to be truly free in their shoes and their skin and their heads, and until we see that day, the work of good people remains unfinished.

May we be a nation where racists and bigots finally realize they have lost the war for good.

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History has a way of revealing the truth, eventually.

Like the sun gradually coming up over the horizon and burning away the darkness concealing everything around it, the unfolding years chase away the noisy bombast of social media rhetoric, knee-jerk think pieces, and in-the-moment emotion, leaving us with the unvarnished reality of people and their lives.

This will be true of you, and your service, and of the mark you have left upon the world, too. Your beautiful, brilliant body of work will testify loudly on your behalf far beyond these days, and in this way, your legacies are secure, both individually and as a couple.

But what may be less apparent looking back from the distance of time will be something that is less easily quantifiable: character.

Over the past two decades, I’ve watched you.

I’ve watched you absorb a billion body blows from your critics—brutal words that run far deeper than policy or platform; monstrous thoughts assembled within poisoned minds long before you served a single day in office.

I’ve watched you hounded by the Molotov cocktails of thinly veiled or overt racism claiming to be objective opposition.

I’ve watched you and your children attacked with a ferocity and cruelty that defy any sense of decency, and that certainly have no precedent.

I’ve watched your birthplace called into question, your personal faith ridiculed, your patriotism mocked, your gender contested, and your very humanity discounted.

I’ve watched you endure the incessant, bitter venom of those for whom the color of your skin was always going to be a problem.

And through all of it, I’ve watched you be the better humans, always going high despite their sickening depths.

In the face of a sustained, spitting, violent, raw-throated hatred, you’ve never responded in kind.

You never allowed yourselves to be defined by the bigotry of your enemies, and you never dehumanized them or let them win by becoming them.

This, Mr. and Mrs. Obama, is perhaps your greatest legacy: the way you retained your dignity in the midst of the most undignified behavior of your adversaries.

The truth is, good, honest people here understand that the White Evangelicals, Republican leaders, and far too many of our white family members, friends, and neighbors were simply never going to be okay with a couple of color leading them and succeeding—and yet you have done both.

Two decades later, those same people still strain to bait you into a reciprocating bitterness so that you would fulfill their toxic prophecies of you, while you simply continue to do what you do with nobility, compassion, good humor, and steadfast, unapologetic conviction.

You live the tangible love for neighbor that so many of your professed Christian critics preach but rarely model.

As a father, I realize that my children are always watching me, always taking cues from the way I treat people, from how I respond to adversity, from how I care for those in pain, from how I face mistreatment. I know that for them, my words will always be secondary to my conduct; that how I live will always trump what I say.

This is where I find my deepest gratitude for you both in these days, and I know I’m not alone. There are tens of millions of Americans who feel the way I feel.

Today, as much as ever, your unceasing humanity is spurring us on to speak and move and work for the inherent value of all people, regardless of the cost or the wounds or the attacks from those who would deny it.

We are chasing equality and justice together, unfettered by the words of our detractors.

We are trying to live fiercely yet honorably.

We are working to stand upon principles and never upon people.

We are seeing the way you continue to live and are moved to live similarly.

You are still pointing us to our highest ideas and appealing to our better angels.

So, please forgive me if I speak informally right now, and if I use words so often brandished sardonically by your detractors to try and ridicule the work you’ve done and the life you’ve lived and the grace you’ve shown.

Without a trace of irony or sarcasm, let me simply say:

Thanks, Obamas.

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His head wrapped in an American flag and flanked by Joe Rogan, the bottom-feeding patron saint for mediocre white men who’ve failed up in Trump’s America, Hokit expelled a sickening slur that encompasses the racism, misogyny, and queer-phobia the entire MAGA ecosystem runs on.

After pretending to vomit on himself (or purposefully doing it), during his weigh-in a day earlier, the 28-year-old proceeded to gleefully regurgitate the kind of reckless, moronic moral sewage that Trump has cultivated and curated over the last ten years, the kind he himself has regularly trafficked in. It was unprovoked, vicious, and embarrassing.

And it would be easy to dismiss Hokit as a professional buffoon, a jacked-up, brain-battered, ignorant caricature with no connection to reality, if not for the fact that he’s pretty much a typical MAGA man, without the skin-tight leotard, greased-up pecs, and proximity to a president. Guys like Hokit are everywhere.

Have a conversation with any random group of guys still supporting Trump, whether in your neighborhood, a local bar, or online, and you’ll find similar violent contempt for women, for immigrants, for trans people. Sit down with garden-variety America First dudebros, and you’ll likely have a front-row seat to the kind of fragility and aggression that explain precisely why a male loneliness epidemic should exist.

That the same performative males who never shut up about protecting children and women are so silent on the Epstein files and still so emotionally tethered to a sexual predator like Donald Trump reminds us how morally adrift they are, how rudderless they have become. Or worse, maybe it reminds us that this is exactly who they are because they willfully choose to be. Either way, it’s a national manhood emergency.

The urgent crisis of MAGA masculinity isn’t revealed by a performative clown like Josh Hokit; it’s revealed in the guys who are defending him in comment sections right now. It’s revealed in the dudes who laugh off his abject filth as a supposed “joke” that the oversensitive Left can’t take. It’s revealed in men who spend their days echoing his verbal diarrhea around their wives, girlfriends and children.

The toxic manosphere may be headlined by guys like Trump, Rogan, and Hokit, but it’s the massive undercard of tens of millions of perpetually enraged, emotionally unsteady, podcast-addled disciples that should alarm the rest of us. It isn’t just the poisoned minds of the guys at the top that are cause for alarm, but the trickle-down ignorance that has reached our families, friends, co-workers, classmates, church friends, and neighbors

Last week, I walked past a few conservative guys in our neighborhood having a typically louder-than-necessary front porch conversation. Normally, when I pass by, I crank up my earbuds to drown out the steady torrent of liquor-lubricated, nonsensical, right-wing talking points sure to be loudly propelled into the ether, but on that night, I heard the word “transgender.” I decided to listen in, knowing that it wasn’t going to be good. It wasn’t.

There was little to differentiate their words from Hokit’s. They reflected the same uninformed phobia, the same irresponsible slurs, and the same dehumanizing hatred the fighter hurled at Michelle Obama from the White House lawn.

Black women will tell you that they are no strangers to slurs like the ones Hokit hurled at the former First Lady. Queer people will confirm that the UFC fighter is not an aberration. This attack isn’t an isolated exception; it’s the consistent party line.

And this same tired charade is playing out all over this country right now. MAGA America has created an entire generation of terrified white man-children who are so intimidated by diversity, so threatened by competition, and so convinced that they’re oppressed that they lash out with a violence that has no regard for its repercussions.

Conservative men’s lives are riddled with pleas for attention, signaling, overcompensation, and an insatiable need to be reassured. For all their baseless attacks on women they claim are men, they’re the ones with the identity crisis.

So, yes, we can see Hokit for what he is: a paid provocateur whose mindless, incendiary comments were intended to incite anger. Still, we can’t ignore the fact that his intended audience is larger and closer than any of us should be comfortable with.

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How did we get here?

I’m not talking about the perfect storm of corruption, toxic religion, and white nationalism that has resulted in the unthinkable ascension to power of one of the most reprehensible, festering sacks of organic matter to ever leave his putrid slime trails on the planet.

Greater minds can unpack the complex historical and social explanations for the inexplicable sequel given to the greatest single collective electoral error in our history.

What I want to know is how, at the precipice of our two hundred and fiftieth year as a Republic, have we devolved into the disgraceful public urination that took place at our nation’s Capitol.

If you took every stereotype of the Ugly American, the most monstrously exaggerated caricatures of us as a people, the absolute worst clichés of this nation at our most base, most ignorant, and most vile, and you fed it into an AI program with the prompt: “Make something truly disgusting.”—this is what you’d have ended up with.

We should be the United States of Embarrassment today. There should be nonpartisan vomiting and facepalming all across this nation after witnessing this wasteful, 60-million-dollar, star-spangled, asinine, white supremacist dudebro circle jerk on the lawn of the People’s House, our house.

Watching this garish Temu Roman Colosseum cosplay filled with grifters, predators, and criminals should infuriate every single American who has a shred of self-respect or love of country left.

In any other iteration of our country, this would not stand. Knowing that their taxes were funding an opulent, violent, phobic birthday party for a cognitively failing serial pedophile would propeled our proud and patriotic forebears into a complete overthrow of those in power.

In a time when people have to choose between paying their rent, or affording routine healthcare, when families can’t afford groceries or to fill their gas tanks, when we’re funding foreign genocides and domestic concentration camps, when we’re told we can’t afford to house or feed or care for the most vulnerable—this should make our blood boil.

More than that, it should wake us all the hell up: conservative, moderate, or liberal; Democrat, Independent, or Republican; straight or queer, well off or struggling, native born or immigrant, to the reality that we are all being played.

The billionaires (and the trillionaire) are mocking us all right now; dismantling the systems and protections designed to care for each of us, ignoring the Constitution, discarding morality, hoarding the wealth that was meant to be shared, devouring our natural resources, turning us against one another—and giving us a sweaty, bloated 60-million-dollar middle finger to us in the process.

November should be a reckoning for these narcissistic vampires once and for all, but we shouldn’t wait that long. Last night should be enough. This should be the final straw for every human being who calls this place home, rousing each of us out of whatever apathy, denial, political tribalism, wishful thinking, or American exceptionalism that has kept us on the sidelines.

The white trash, classless stupidity on the White House lawn last night was a microcosm of the prolific mockery of America that this President and his accomplices have made for ten years now.

These people believe that we’re ignorant, that we’re lazy, that we’re too distracted and soft to give a damn about the fact that they’re fleecing us, that all we need is a the easy high of fireworks and faux patriotism to lull us into inaction.

If we allow them to prevail, we’ll have proven them right.

Who are we going to be, America?

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We’re all suffering from information poisoning.

The more we know about what’s really happening in this country: the depths of our fractures, the audacity of our leaders, and the failing of our systems the greater our sense of despair can become.

Our noble efforts to stay informed are locking us into an emotional state of fight, flight, or freeze that isn’t helpful or sustainable; our sober situational awareness is destroying our mental health.

I confess to envying people who, by nature or by choice, don’t have a clue what’s going on: people who’ve opted out of knowing anymore. They don’t read the news; they’ve checked out of social media, and they avoid or refuse to believe any information that conflicts with the story they tell themselves of everything being fine.

I know that attempting to live inside such a heavily redacted reality is an irresponsible act of privilege, but they seem so happy in their blissful bubble of not-knowing. They rarely feel the dread I experience on a regular basis. They don’t lose a minute of sleep worrying about the stuff that keeps me up at night. They’re never visited by the grief that feels like such a constant companion here in my heart.

Some days, I want to be like them; care-free, weightless, and fully unburdened because of all they choose not to know, but that’s how we got here. This current national disaster is the byproduct of millions of people who’ve spent a decade refusing facts or data or truth when those things carried discomfort. The sedatives of denial and distraction do nothing to change the truth. They don’t make us any safer. They don’t decrease the peril our nation is in. They don’t help any of the people who are in danger right now—which is all of them… all of us.

The only way through this historic, catastrophic s**t show is to face and confront reality, as ugly and disheartening as it is, and try to change that reality, alongside people who also care deeply because they too understand how sideways it’s all gone.

Too much exposure to the scale and velocity of the suffering, and we’ll eventually sink beneath it, physically or emotionally breaking down; too little exposure, and we end up complicit in the damage.

The challenge is to live somewhere safely between a constant, complete immersion in the terrors that will surely overwhelm us and completely checking out to avoid the reality of how jacked up everything is. With the relentless sensory media flood around us, we need the discipline and restraint to know the difference between awareness and self-harm.

I don’t want to know how bad it is anymore, but I do.I don’t want to grieve the horrible reality anymore, but I do.I don’t want to care anymore, but I do.This may not feel at all good, but it is still a good thing.

Some things that may help you stay in balance:- Limit daily media exposure, setting time constraints and certain times of day, and stick to them.- Spend some time each day in silence, nature, rest, exercise, and in community to offset the heavy information you're absorbing.- Try to mark off time first thing in the morning and just before bed so you can begin and end the day grounded and centered on the agency you always have.- When taking in the news, continually ask yourself: what of this is mine to carry and what can I and should I let go of?

Knowledge of the urgency of our situation may indeed be a hazard, but it is still one of the most powerful weapons we have in the fight to stay human in inhumane times. Right now, knowing what’s happening will help us know who we want to be in the middle of it.

Be encouraged today.What strategies are you using to be selective in the way you take in information and care for your mental health in the process? Let me know in the comments.

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I know you’re waking up today disappointed that you won’t get the sweep you were hoping for, that you’ll need to postpone your long-delayed celebration at least a few more days.

I realize this wasn’t the script you’d written in your head for Game 3, and this morning you’re probably not in the mood to hear about moral victories.

Still, I need you to hear something: the game may not have gone your way, but you won last night.

You won with the thunderous chorus of boos you rained down upon that cognitively-addled malignant narcissist from every inch of the Garden’s hallowed ground.

You won with the glorious middle finger curbside receiving line you greeted his street-clearing, party-trampling motorcade with.

You won as you showered him with expletive-laden, f-bomb defiance, denying him the cheap ego stroke he disrupted a multitude in desperate search of.

You won as you loudly and unequivocally reminded him once again that he will never be as respected and beloved as Barack Obama.

You won by not letting him suck the oxygen from the room or the spirit from your souls.

As he has done for decades, he once again returned to your beautiful city to manufacture chaos, squelch joy, and center himself, and as you have done for decades, you told him where to stick it—and a weary nation thanks you.

You were all of us, last night: pissed off, fed up, and sick to our stomachs of this needy, repugnant, self-obsessed megalomaniac. You stood as our repulsed proxy, saying to his face what every truly patriotic American dreams of saying.

I’ve always marveled at your city’s courage in the face of tragedy, your unflappable resolve through unimaginable adversity, and your absolute refusal to take any s**t from a two-bit tyrant like him. You’ve never rolled over, never surrendered, and never backed down from a fight, and the rest of America watched you last night, and we were cheering you on like one of our own, because you are.

As a former longtime Philadelphia resident (and confessed Sixers fan), I’m rooting for your Knickerbockers, but more than that, I’m rooting for you and your city. I think most of this nation is.

You are the fierce, radiant, beautifully diverse place that has always persevered through the darkest seasons of this nation, and last night you reminded us that we’re going to make it through these incredibly black days, too. You pointed us to something bigger than sports last night, and we’re grateful.

As he quickly dozed off, crestfallen and embarrassed after failing to command unearned respect and undeserved adoration, you all did what you’ve always done: you carried on.

And yeah, in the books this will go down as an “L” for your team, and that’s gotta sting this morning. Still, I hope you find some comfort in knowing that in the eyes of tens of millions of patriotic Americans throughout this nation who have had it with this self-absorbed professional parasite, you won.So, NYC, from the vast, thankful multitude this morning who were lifted by your truly inspiring performance last night: f*ck Trump, f*ck ICE, God Bless America… and Knicks in 5.

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I get it: this feels like it’s never going to end, like this oppressive darkness will never lift, like the disorienting chaos of these days is now our default setting.

This is understandable.

For the last decade, we’ve been living in dog years, friends; pummeled by a century’s worth of Constitutional crises, systemic failures, war crimes, and human moral collapses.

The atrocities have accumulated, the legislative losses have piled up, and perhaps, most of all, the list of people we loved and once respected who’ve abandoned compassion and reason has grown beyond what we can fathom.

To put it another way: we’ve been knocked on our asses for ten straight years, and that’s gonna leave a mark on our nation, on our relationships, and on our psyches.

We are collectively experiencing the PTSD of a prolonged daily existence that our nervous systems were never designed to sustain. That kind of unceasing emotional trauma has rendered all of us deprived of hope, physically exhausted, and a hair’s breadth from a breakdown.

In light of all of this, we can be forgiven for believing that we’re never getting out of this, that our Republic is cooked, that 250 years will end up being the lifespan of our flawed but once-promising experiment in liberty.

But we’d be wrong.

Our present condition is not permanent, America. One way or another, a shift is coming.

He is not long for this earth, and he is not long for the presidency.

One day, soon, either nature or the Constitution is going to take him, and when it does, there will be rejoicing throughout this planet that we have not seen in 80 years. Humanity will feel the cathartic jubilation it should feel when tyrants meet their demise, and whether he ends first in the ground or in a cell, we all need to make sure we’re here to celebrate together.

We cannot be so overwhelmed by the recent sorrows and current threats that we slip into apathy and resignation; that we allow ourselves to be gaslighted into believing our presence counts for nothing, that our work is fruitless, that our efforts are wasted.

We need to remember that the toll of proximity and the lies of the present can distort reality.

We’re here right now, on the bloodied and broken ground with our faces pressed into the jagged, unrelenting horrors on our timelines and in our neighborhoods. Presently, it’s impossible to rise to 30,000 feet and see that our current struggles, though formidable, are not unprecedented. Humanity has always persevered beyond the evil visited upon it.

If we lean on History, she will remind us that all violent regimes crumble, all malevolent movements dissolve, and all tyrants fall, and this will be true for this nation and the monstrosity in front of us. Our job as decent human beings is to allow our individual and collective presence to hasten the arrival of such times.

It may feel illogical, but we are closer to ending this nightmare than we imagine.

As quickly as it arrived, it can be driven out if, instead of throwing our hands up and accepting our shared fate in these moments, we transform all the despair and the anger we’ve amassed into a fierce and unrelenting resistance.

But that is the caveat here: we cannot wish this hatred away, and we cannot do nothing and hope it extinguishes itself. Violent, power-mad, parasitic people never voluntarily abdicate power once they have it; courageous, compassionate humanity has always needed to work together to take it from them.

We can be that beautiful plot-twisting presence right now.

And no, the ugliness his ascension has unearthed in our neighbors, the unthinkable damage he has done to our systems, and the cruelty he has authored will not magically disappear with his death or imprisonment, but there will be a massive gap left.

The terrible status quo will be interrupted.

Through the polls or through protest, instability will come to this seemingly unstoppable behemoth.

As they always do, time and effort will ensure that what is right now will not always be.

Friends, our calling as empathetic humans, good citizens of this nation, and caretakers of the planet, through sustained effort, personal sacrifice, and steadfast, focused fury, is to make sure that the nation we become will be greater than the nation we are, and far sooner than if we had never been here.

Take heart, America, we will outlive him.

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This year, they’re even trying to meme-manifest a “Nuclear Family Month,” which is about as asinine an idea as advocating for “White History Month” every February. Of all the Conservative Christian commentary you’ll ever hear, this is among the most ridiculous: that LGBTQ people marrying somehow devalues a straight, heteronormative couple’s marriage, like a foreclosed house down the street driving down property values in the neighborhood.

Marriage isn’t a community exercise or a collective endeavor; it’s a lifelong agreement between two people before the Law and before friends and loved ones as witnesses. It is a legal document, not a spiritual covenant (unless that couple claims faith). The fact that we don’t get to superimpose our religious beliefs on anyone else’s partnership is only a problem for people who also believe they get to police other people’s bodies, bathrooms, and sexual activity.

The two people making their vows to one another are not beholden to anyone but their spouse in honoring, nurturing, or preserving that union after their wedding day. Married people don’t have a Board of Directors or a group of spousal shareholders to answer to here. They have their husband or wife, and the family they create together. They alone get to govern their agreement.

I’ve been married for 32 years now, and during all that time, exactly two people on the planet have had a direct impact on the strength and sanctity of my marriage. Every single day, my wife and I work together diligently to have a vital, honest, loving relationship, and we’re the only ones who can make that happen or keep it from happening—period. The idea that anyone else’s marriage affects ours is fairly ridiculous to both of us, and it should be to anyone fully invested in honoring their own marital vows.

Ultimately, this isn’t about theology; it’s about the fading fine art of minding your own damn business.

For years, I worked as a personal trainer in a boxing gym, and at first, many new clients came in worried about being embarrassed in front of other more fit, more experienced people. I assured them by reminding them that when those people are on the floor, they are so focused on what they’re doing and working so hard that they don’t have the time or energy to be concerned about anyone else; they’re just trying to survive.

It’s too bad more straight Christians don’t seem to give half as much time to attending to their own marriages as they do to overseeing others’. Maybe they wouldn’t be failing 42 percent of the time.

Interestingly, the same folks claiming that gay people are damaging marriage aren’t nearly as vocal about the rampant infidelity, abuse, and divorce out there in so many heterosexual Christian marriages. Magically, they don’t view those people as a threat to the Institution and are quite able to separate themselves from the greater married world when it suits them.

A Facebook acquaintance recently lamented the fact that “the queer agenda is tearing apart the family unit”. I wondered whose “family unit” he was referring to. I know it isn’t mine. My family unit is pretty spectacular and secure because it exists independently of those outside my house, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or any other possible variable. I have authority and direct influence regarding only one family unit on the planet. That’s how this life works.

To all the perpetually outraged straight Christian couples out there this PRIDE Month, a few reminders for you:

Even if you believe that same-gender marriage is sinful or immoral, claiming that it does any sort of residual collateral damage to you or your spouse or your family says more about the fragility and possibly fraudulence of your relationship than it does about the LGBTQ community as a viable threat.

As much as you claim you want to protect the family unit, the reality is that queer people have family units, too: caring, imperfect, loving, flawed, beautiful ones. They daily navigate complicated relationships with siblings, parents, children, spouses, (and, even, In-Laws). They live lives together in deep community marked by all the compassion, frustration, intimacy, laughter, heartache, and richness that you share with your family.

If you can’t admit and respect that, and if you find yourself somehow threatened by any other person’s pursuit of happiness or expression of family, that’s likely a you problem. There’s something incredibly troublesome when we as people of faith require others to believe what we believe, or worse, when we act as if their refusal to believe what we believe or practice what we practice in any way diminishes our faith experience or somehow taints our religion.

Straight Christians, when you got married, you didn’t make those flowery vows to all married people, before or since. You didn’t profess your undying love and commitment to an institution. You didn’t expectantly join the ranks of a club or fraternity or corporation. You didn’t get married to Marriage.

You pledged to a person, promising to love your spouse as faithfully, passionately, and completely as you could for the rest of your life. That’s all you are obligated, expected, and most importantly, qualified to do.

The bottom line is that if your marriage is adversely affected by anyone else’s marriage (straight or queer), you probably have a pretty crappy marriage.

That should be cause for great worry, and it’s probably something you should pray on.

Outside of your spouse, the only person who can really damage or devalue your marriage is you.

So, Happy Pride Month, and Happy Mind Your Own Damn Business Month.

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I’ve been trying to place the heaviness within me these days; the nagging sickness that resides in the pit of my stomach every morning, regardless of what I do to try and push it away.

It isn’t merely the growing nihilism that comes from realizing how quickly the bedrock of our Republic is dissolving.

It isn’t just the black despair from watching the rapid and seemingly inexorable erosion of human and civil rights.

It isn’t only the leaden grief that comes from witnessing so much unnecessary suffering, so much preventable pain, so much manufactured chaos.

Along with all of that, I think the real heart sickness comes from realizing my complicity in crimes against humanity.

As a taxpaying American, I am partnering in the genocide in Gaza.

I see the breath-stealing videos of Palestinian children torn apart by AIPAC-funded drone strikes, of elderly people executed by IDF soldiers, of Israeli political leaders applauding the barbaric destruction of Gaza, and I know that my taxable income is funding the carnage.

As a taxpaying American, I am murdering the people of Iran, Lebanon, Cuba, and Ukraine.

Watching our leadership waging or permitting deadly, wasteful, and unprovoked wars of greed, distraction, and geography all over the planet, and knowing that I am in some way aiding and abetting them is cause for mourning.

As a taxpaying American, I am starving people to death in New Jersey.

The tortured souls languishing inside the hellscape of Delaney Hall, forced to eat maggot-infested food, denied basic healthcare, shown no human comfort, enduring a deadly squalor that has no reason to exist other than the cruelty of the sociopaths who constructed it with the resources of my life’s work.

As a taxpaying American, I am assaulting girls and young women in Texas.

Realizing that the horrors inside an inaccessible compound in San Benito and the unthinkable brutality that is being visited upon the most vulnerable and helpless there do not happen without my unwitting, yet still real, financial assistance.

As a taxpaying American, I am viciously terrorizing immigrants.

Watching a masked Gestapo-esque army of perverse monsters relentlessly hounding my black and brown neighbors in the places they work, study, worship, and raise their families is made all the worse by the knowledge that the sweat of my brow is fueling them.

As a taxpaying American, I am violently persecuting queer people.

It breaks my heart to know that despite my work to try and be an LGBTQ ally and to advocate for the inherent worth of every human being, my taxes are bankrolling the homophobic and transphobic legislative assaults on transgender teens, on gay couples, on marriage equality.

Like most people who call this place home, I was weaned on a story of this nation that was part curated myth, part racist whitewashing, part genuine aspiration, and part American exceptionalism that steadfastly refused to admit culpability for inhumanity.

The central narrative I inherited from my pastors, teachers, parents, media, and politicians was that the United States was a place that, though terribly flawed, still endeavored to be a brilliant beacon for the vulnerable, hungry, and hurting of the world.

It may have been a mix of ignorance, privilege, and wishful thinking, but I bought into the lie, and it’s sobering enough to realize that this story was never true. That’s enough of an existential gut punch.

And it’s another matter altogether to realize that for your entire life, but profoundly in these present days, your work and creativity have funded the very hatred, inequity, and brutality you’ve spent a lifetime intending to eradicate.

There’s a futility that comes from when that truth settles in; when you are a person of peace who is subsidizing war. I think that’s what’s so hard for so many of us right now. We’re trying to fight for and with our country simultaneously.

I know that we are not powerless in these moments, but I confess that the road out of this is unclear.

All I can say for certain is that as a taxpaying American who loves humanity and who hates the nation we have become, it’s hard living with so much blood on my hands.Note: Of course, we aren’t willfully participating in these atrocities, but it’s impossible to divorce ourselves from what our leadership does in our name, and this is the struggle so many of us find ourselves in.

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June is Pride Month, and straight people who consider themselves allies to our queer neighbors need to understand the implications for us in this iteration of America.

Yes, allyship is about rainbow flags, social media posts, and parade events, but it’s about a hell of a lot more than that.

To be a true LGBTQ ally right now means visibly and forcefully pushing back against the quickly metastasizing hatred throughout this country; the toxic flood of intellectual ignorance, archaic dogma, phobic fear, and inherited stupidity all being curated by the MAGA Republican Party.

The ACLU is currently tracking 530 anti-LGBTQ bills across the United States.

They range from healthcare barriers to school sports bans to curriculum censorship to forced outings in schools to so-called religious exemptions to drag bans to attacks on expression and visibility for the queer community.

These proposed draconian laws amount to a government-sanctioned, legislative legitimizing of discrimination, designed to silence, erase, and punish human beings for their gender identity and sexual orientation. They represent a rejection of science, a discarding of common sense, and the complete, perverse consummation of the sickening marriage between Church and State.

As with other historically marginalized and oppressed populations in this country (people of color, immigrants, women, Muslims), LGBTQ human beings are seeing their hard-fought legal protections vanishing in recent months. Long-decided laws protecting them are being furiously challenged. Malicious theology targeting them is taking hold in churches. They are being painted as immoral existential threats and bathroom-lurking monsters for gullible, easily-manipulated, hate-addled Americans who have abandoned the Golden Rule, discarded the Constitution, and rejected the call to love their neighbors.

At the highest levels of leadership in our government, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, nonbinary, non-conforming human beings are being slandered and dehumanized, fomenting the mindless rage of their cultic base.

And it is into this swirling storm of prejudice, disinformation, and rising violence that we who imagine ourselves friends and advocates of queer people are being called to step this Pride month. We are being invited to do far more than simply throw on a t-shirt, attend a drag show, or share a think piece on social media, as nice as those things are.

In these perilous days for LGBTQ human beings, to be a straight ally is to risk profound turbulence within our circles of influence. It’s intentionally stepping into the path of verbal and physical violence. It’s loudly outing oneself as a human being who will not permit hatred in their midst. It’s being willing to make bigots uncomfortable.

If we end this month without finding ourselves in a difficult conversation with an uninformed family member, without experiencing a coldness from our transphobic neighbors, without bringing tension to our churches, without facing the insults and threats queer people sustain just for waking up and living, we will have failed as allies.

The fight against LGBTQ discrimination is not the fight of the LGBTQ community alone. They should not have to continually make the case for their humanity, or incessantly fight to be treated with dignity and decency, or to brave the taunts and brutality of the deceived and dumb around them. We should be fighting alongside them.

Straight allies need to be a fierce, steadfast, unflinching obstacle to those who still somehow believe that anyone else’s gender, orientation, body, or marriage are any of their damn business.

In our churches and schools and workplaces and town halls and neighborhoods, we need to show up for our queer friends by placing ourselves between them and the emboldened bullies who think that they will face no resistance.

It’s time that would-be LGBTQ allies in the United States stood up for the people we claim to love by making their hateful assailants know what it’s like to be outnumbered, to be reminded that they are not going to drag this nation back to the Stone Age on our watch.

Pride has always been a protest as much as a celebration.

And for those of us who truly aspire to stand with the queer community, it must be a clear declaration of war against the emboldened bigots who believe they can erase queer human beings from this nation, a war they will not win.

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And even in the moments when the words do come, they almost immediately feel obsolete. It’s become nearly impossible to wake up and comment on any specific human rights atrocity, any precise illegality, any single bastardization of the Christian faith, any individual act of Congressional malpractice. In the time it takes to assess one unprecedented act of governmental malfeasance, stop the spinning storm inside my head, and string together something resembling coherent thoughts, a half dozen infuriating, nauseating, heretofore nonexistent abominations will have already swallowed them up.

This is, of course, by design, yet knowing this doesn’t make it any easier to navigate.

There’s very little that comes with any surety these days. The only thing I am certain of as I watch and listen and walk through this season alongside my 342 million neighbors is that there is mourning in America.

The grief is ever-present, sitting like a boulder on our chests, crushing our hearts and rendering our breathing shallow. A heavy dread hovers in the background of our nervous systems, leaving us continually ping-ponging between fight, flight, and freeze.We vacillate wildly from heartbreak to outrage to hopelessness, battered by manufactured crises, curated madness, and genuine emergencies.

And that’s just the damage coming from above, from the repugnant legion of sociopaths and predators who’ve hijacked the very sacred halls that their treasonous foot soldiers desecrated on a January afternoon. In any other iteration of our nation, those helming it would at least have feigned decency, offered some ceremonial lip service of unity, and provided a modicum of care for its constituents. Those days feel like a lifetime ago.

The entirety of a Presidential Cabinet and its gutless Congressional coconspirators have abandoned any allegiance to the Constitution, to morality, to the common good. They are professional parasites, voraciously sucking every bit of progress and promise from this flawed but beautiful beacon of Democracy that the world once aspired to emulate.

Bearing this alone would all be difficult enough. It would be a Herculean task to endure such prolific brutality from our alleged leadership and remain tethered to sanity.

But then we look to our left and to our right; to the people around us who are, at best, silent enablers of this violent historic farce, or, at worst, willing collaborators. We inventory the ever-expanding list of human beings we share holiday tables with, make small talk with over the fence, work, study, and worship alongside, and once felt an easy affinity with, mourning the blackened hearts we’ve come to realize they harbor.

And perhaps most devastating of all, there are the people who raised us to be human beings of empathy, who taught us to love our neighbors, who instilled us with a respect for the Rule of Law, who called us to lean upon our better angels. Over the past ten years, we have watched them abandon every ideal and precept they passed down to us, jettisoning God and Country, while continually broadcasting their supposed allegiance to both. We now find ourselves ridiculed, shunned, and demonized for becoming the very loving, open-hearted, generous humans they told us to become.

The wreckage of this relational warfare is everywhere:

In the room-clearing arguments, the protracted emotional cold wars, the social media disconnections, the text chain ghostings, the slow but now undeniable attrition of affection, the silences and empty holiday chairs. These are as heartbreaking injuries as anything this white supremacist vampire colony at the Capitol has thrown at us.

I don’t know quite what to say to those of you reading this who grieve America as we approach its 250th year, because on most days, I’m not even sure what to tell myself. I wish there were words in our lexicon that I could string together that would magically lift the burdens from your shoulders, quiet the chaos in your mind, and swiftly usher peace into the warzones of your heart. All I can do today with any honesty is to name the grief and hope that will bring some comfort. Naming it helps me.

In fact, perhaps, that shared sorrow is the connective tissue that will hold us all together as we endure this impossible to fathom or describe nightmare. Maybe, our collective tears over the America that is will water the seeds of the America we can still be.

This morning, despite the losses that seem endless, I cling to the hope that we, the multitudes who lament how far we’ve fallen as a nation, will find a way to pull us from the seemingly endless darkness we’re immersed in and into the dawn of better days.

To every American mourning, know you do not grieve alone.

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Well, at least, we're certainly being led to believe it is.

The message is everywhere right now.

It’s coming from tone-deaf University commencement addresses,from soulless techbro vampire startups,from morally bankrupt data center builders, from myopic local politicians,from woefully lazy journalists,and from massive organizations that have gutted their creative departments.

They want us to believe that the mighty horse of progress has left the barn; that the inexorable march toward the future has begun, and we’re either gonna figure out how to ride it or be trampled to death trying to stop it. I’m calling BS on that.

Yes, artificial Intelligence’s existence is guaranteed, but humanity’s response to it is still well within our hands, and that response will determine whether we allow our ethical and moral convictions to bear on the technology or remain silent and be swallowed up.

Will we value the already-fragile environment enough to fight the fatal blow the current proposed proliferation of data centers presents?Will we continue to cheapen the work of human creators, whose art we’ve gradually been conditioned to believe we should get for free?Will we allow ourselves to be lured into the seductive shortcuts and quick solutions generative AI provides, or will we honor the creative process and the slower road to discovery?

Artificial Intelligence evangelists insist that we’re afraid of this technology, but they’re misreading the situation and our response. I’m not afraid of generative AI; I’m morally opposed to it, and there’s a big difference.

I don’t resist progress, but I do resist technological movements that pillage our natural resources, devalue human beings, harvest their creativity without compensating them, and enable talentless parasites to profit from the work of billions of flesh-and-blood people, who since the dawn of time have spent themselves on behalf of their art.

Pushing back against the unethical rise of Artificial Intelligence isn’t as complicated as we’re led to believe. Some steps you can take right now:

Stop sucking up thousands of gallons of drinking water just to turn your dad’s texts into a song for a 90-second Instagram reel.

Turn off the AI assists on your search engines and email portals.Stop using ChatGPT, Claude, or other platforms to find information you already have near-immediate access to.If you’re a student, stop trying to cheat your way to knowledge and experience. Enjoy the long, often meandering but ultimately fruitful road of study, failure, and exploration.

If you’re in charge of a creative project for a business, church, or organization seek out actual qualified, experienced human beings who’ve devoted their lives to their craft; investing in people who’ve earned their expertise and their price tag.

Find out where data centers are being proposed in your area, and show up at town halls, board meetings, politicians’ offices, and wield your power as a resident and taxpayer.Stop using generative AI to make a meme that’s no one’s going to care about thirty seconds after they’ve seen it.Use your brain instead of your thumbs. A few quick prompts will give you immediate ideas which can be seductive, but it’s fool’s gold. Part of the creative process is to sit with the empty page, the frustrating silence, and the blinking cursor; the invaluable times when the wrestling and the waiting force you to go deeper than an Internet search.

Partner with advocacy groups to hold CEOs, executives, employers, developers, and lawmakers accountable to the human beings in their midst. Financially support artists whose humanity feeds your soul. If you reject the threat of AI to creativity, one of the ways you can fight it is to support flesh-and-blood creators. If there are bands, writers, comedians, journalists, painters, jewelry makers, small businesses, or songwriters who make life more beautiful or bearable, please tangibly partner with them as you can. If financial support is not possible, please leverage your social media platform to share their work and help them break out of the prisons of the algorithms.Artificial Intelligence, like any new technology, can either be a useful tool or a deadly weapon. We shouldn’t be afraid of progress, but we should be very worried about sacrificing one another and ourselves on the altar of that supposed progress.

AI’s replacement of humanity is not inevitable, but the greed, ignorance, and short-sightedness of human beings are, which means we’re all going to push back against it with urgency and ferocity to ensure that we don’t gain some time and a little ease, and lose our souls.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a fully human, non-AI, reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Imagine them wherever they took their final breath on this planet:

Jumping into churning, frozen foreign seas in a screaming storm of artillery fire.

Shivering in a filthy trench in the terrifying blackness of an insect-blanketed jungle floor.

Leaping from a fire-engulfed plane into a disorienting maelstrom of explosions.

Crouched in the blazing sun within the crosshairs of a sniper perched 500 meters away.

Slowly withering away from malnutrition in anonymity and solitude.

Try to place yourself in the company of one of the hundreds of thousands of eldest sons, sisters, husbands, fathers, wives, best friends, and favorite uncles, who, with a courage and selflessness we will never fathom, placed themselves in the path of bullets, bombs, torture, and brutality in the cause of America.

Now, imagine telling those brave servicemen and women just before they gave their very lives for this nation, that it would one day be placed in the hands of a treasonous felon with abject disregard for the laws of this land; a man lacking a single noble impulse or patriotic thought.

Imagine breaking the news to those beautiful souls facing certain death, that five or twenty or sixty or one hundred years later, America would be helmed by a billionaire insurrectionist who would ridicule their bravery, make a mockery of their sacrifice, and place those who followed them in harm’s way, by allowing a disgraced TV personality to oversee them.

I wonder if they’d have reconsidered their path, if they’d have declared themselves conscientious objectors in his coming war on the Constitution, if they would have abandoned the road that would bring their lives to a premature and violent termination.

Given their unfathomable courage, I don’t imagine they would, but as someone standing here today and living through this historic farce, I sure as hell wouldn’t have blamed them. We have allowed ourselves to have our freedom suffocated by the very fascism our forebears leveraged their very beings trying to defeat.

Watching our current service members being unnecessarily placed in peril in Iran, used as disposable pawns in a reckless and illegal war of distraction by a morally bankrupt parasite, should be enough to make any actually patriotic American sick to their stomachs. As we witness our children being carelessly thrown into half a dozen conflicts around the world designed to pad the portfolios of billionaires and swallow up oil-rich real estate, we should be mourning our shared failure as U.S. citizens.

By allowing our Military to be at the whims of this traitorous felon, we have failed our veterans; squandering their service and wasting their sacrifice. Donald Trump’s seditious presidency, his undeserved occupation of the Oval Office, and his very repugnant presence in the highest seat of power in America are a slap in the face of those we honor on Memorial Day who died so that we could endure.

His kleptocratic Administration, populated by grifters and foreign assets, serves as a massive middle finger to the millions who lost years and careers and futures and limbs trying to protect a Republic that is now teetering on the edge of the abyss.

And whether on Memorial Day or Veterans Day or Independence Day, or any day we wake up with such a small, cowardly, petty disgrace of a man leading this nation, we should be livid at the insult he is to those who truly loved and love America. We should collectively grieve our part in this mockery that is being made of their sacrifice, and openly and loudly stand in opposition to him as a way of properly honoring them.

With our voices and circles of influence and financial resources and votes, we should stand on the front lines of our lives to continue their brave, sacrificial work of protecting this beautiful but beleaguered nation.

It is the very least we can do for them, knowing they did the most they could do for us.

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After 11 years and over 1,800 episodes, the final installment aired this week to great fanfare and emotion. The show’s premature demise was, of course, the direct result of Donald Trump’s eggshell-fragile ego and his complete inability to withstand criticism of any kind.

The joyless, narcissistic Man-Child-In-Chief has always despised people like Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and Jon Stewart; guys who possess a comfort in their own skin that he will never know, a razor wit that will always escape him, and an easy humanity that he is simply incapable of. Though he positions himself as an overconfident Alpha Male, his raging insecurity and naked resentment have always exposed him as a terrified fraud who knows he doesn’t measure up.

Trump has spent an embarrassing amount of time and energy during his two presidential terms trying to silence and de-platform any members of the media who do not bend the knee and kiss the ring: leveraging his social media platform, weaponizing the FCC, and begging his billionaire buddies to purge the airwaves of dissension or critique.

With his surrogates now overseeing CBS, the thin-skinned wannabe despot was finally able to shutter The Late Show, something his similarly morose disciples have hailed as a kind of righteous victory. In reality, though, all it really did was illustrate why MAGA will always lose: it is a misery movement of deeply unhappy human beings.

Colbert began his series finale with a poignant, heartfelt monologue, addressing the home and studio audiences simultaneously about the genuine gratitude he felt for those who have traveled this journey with him.

Speaking about the small army of collaborators responsible for making The Late Show possible five nights a week for over a decade (writers, booking agents, crew members, musicians, artists), the host described their collective endeavor as ‘The Joy Machine,’ saying: ”We call it the Joy Machine, because to do this many shows, it has to be a machine, but the thing is, if you choose to do it with joy, it doesn’t hurt as much when your fingers get caught in the gears.”

Manufacturing joy.

When you hear Stephen Colbert deliver that simple, elegant mission statement, you can rewind through those 1,800 shows and realize that this is exactly what he and his team have been doing all along. The Late Show helped us all face the terrifying, infuriating, grief-worth reality around us by making sure we stayed emotionally buoyant enough to laugh at the absurdity of it all. Colbert, leading by example, never let his hateful adversaries win by becoming them. It has been his resiliency and optimism that have made him the perennially sanguine counterpoint to Trump’s unceasing nihilism.

Continuing, the host said of his team:

“I cannot adequately explain to you what the people who work here have done for each other and how much we mean to each other.”

Joy. Gratitude. Affection. In just over two minutes, Colbert exhibited the kind of quiet, confident humanity that the current president has never had access to.

Over the last decade, though he has quite literally never shut up, Donald Trump has never expressed any kind of genuine appreciation for other people, never centered anyone but himself, and never offered humility of any kind. He has never been anything but a sad, insult-hurling, grievance-wielding malcontent who will never find peace in this life because his self-hatred will not allow it.

And this unrelenting unhappiness is something his followers are similarly afflicted with. It’s the reason that, although they have their president in the White House, a chokehold on Congress, a compromised Supreme Court, and a near-complete monopoly on the media, they are all still miserable. They continue to be in perpetual war with the world, and the rest of us need to pay attention.

Yes, while Colbert’s cancellation is certainly a sad milestone, another tangible sign that we are approaching the throes of authoritarianism, we can take heart in being reminded that in inhumane times such as these, victory is found in holding onto our humanity. We are not fully defeated when we lose platforms, have rights stripped away, or face corrupt power’s persecution, but when we forfeit the love of life and of the people around us, that Trump and MAGA’s misery movement have long since discarded.

Trump can continue to abuse his office to attempt to silence criticism. He can leverage the power of the presidency to try to steamroll dissenters. He can marshal every resource at his disposal to remove voices that ridicule him, and his hateful acolytes across this country can celebrate all of it.

But none of these things will deter those of us who refuse to fall prostrate before him.

They will not break us down or shut us up.

We will continue to traffic in laughter and beauty and connection.

We will continue to dance and dream and create.

We will continue to give and celebrate and embrace.

We will not become as miserable as the people who seek our demise.

Friends, be encouraged, be courageous, stay human… and let the Joy Machine roll on.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

A lot happened while we were sleeping.

Our prolonged repose actually began in November of 2008.

Back then, we basked in the warm glow of what seemed like the dawn’s long-delayed arrival. Reveling in the once unthinkable reality of a black President, we all grew comfortable, nestling into a seductive complacency that only the blind spots of privilege and ignorance provide.

The unfettered joy of that moment became a slow-acting emotional sedative that slowly squeezed the urgency from us, gradually dulling our senses and clouding our judgment. Day by day, naive jubilation numbed us into believing we may have finally arrived together at Martin’s glorious mountaintop, that the arc of the moral universe had bent permanently toward justice. If we had taken the time to ask black and brown people, they’d have warned us not to fall asleep, but we didn’t.

Instead, we believed that the aspirational “we shall overcomes” that rang out over decades had become a fixed and unchangeable present. We exhaled too deeply; collectively, settling into that cozy space where the heart rate slows, and the limbs and eyelids grow heavy; where, without realizing it, slumber suddenly overtakes you: one blink awake, the next blink asleep.

And for the next eight years, we sleepwalked through the world, physically here but not fully present, not entirely lucid, not truly seeing; caught between the actual and the unreal worlds, between the real nightmare and the imagined dream. Yes, we still planned and marched and campaigned and worked, but we did so slightly sedated in the haze of bad stories, willful ignorance, and wishful thinking.

Meanwhile, the bigots were the ones who really woke up.

Shaken violently from their sleep in November 2008 by the reality of what decades of irrational fear, inherited racism, and perverted theology taught them was the absolute worst place they could find themselves, they began to mount a fierce counterattack.

They created news outlets and social media platforms designed to filter out everything except that which would fully trigger terror within the hearts of their intended targets and would-be allies:fantastical stories of a pervasive and coordinated Gay Agenda coming to convert their children;of violent, heavily armed, brown-skinned drug gangs overrunning our borders;of godless, abortion-mad progressives having indiscriminate sex without concern or care;of Muslim terrorist hordes infiltrating our neighborhoods and bodegas;of America-hating Democrats coming for their jobs and flags and prayers and guns.

And we were still sleeping.

They played the long game of local political wins, incrementally gaining footholds in the spaces where legislatures are commandeered, supermajorities are formed, districts are redrawn, courts are polluted, and democracy is slowly suffocated.

And on we slept.

The bigots leveraged thousands of Christian pulpits, where every seven days they’d wildly stoke the fires of people’s phobias and fears, weaponize the Scriptures against queer people and migrants and Muslims, and pervert the expansive Gospel of Jesus into a gated white community of rabid nationalism. Sermon by sermon, the opportunistic pulpit predators enlisted them all into service as passionate soldiers in the Army of the straight, white, American, male Lord.

And we kept on sleeping.

And then, in 2016, to inculcate the terror fully, they propped up an amoral sideshow carnival barker as their chosen one; a barren, narcissistic, empty husk of a man with no discernible moral convictions of his own. They recognized they could use this breathing void as a flesh-and-blood avatar to embody their grievances and perpetuate their phobias.

The bigots erected a vile, blustery false idol of greatness and whiteness around which their easily-manipulated rank and file would fall prostrate; a shameless grifter who would daily dig into the putrid muck to find an ever-deepening moral bottom. In the sleep-induced state we were in we thought it was a joke at first. We laughed ourselves back into a dreamworld where everything would be fine and where decency would prevail and where the system would work; so much so that one hundred million of us slept all the way through an election cycle.

You’d have thought that would be our ultimate wake-up call.

Yet, somehow, over the next decade, despite horrors and abominations never visited upon America, though we imagined ourselves rightly woke, we still could not coalesce and leverage our voices and our influence enough to avoid our nation making this grievous, likely fatal error a second time.

And here we are perilously close to theocracy, a hair’s breadth from authoritarianism, within inches of our Republic’s collapse, and still, I wonder if we’re fully awake now.

I wonder if we’re ready to cast off the cobwebs of our complacency and enter fully into the bloody fray in front of us.

I wonder if we’re willing to rouse ourselves into lucidity and step into the jagged trenches of the fight of our lives and for the disparate swath of humanity that we’ve let down.

I wonder if we’re prepared to face our culpability and admit our failures and make amends with our time and our resources and our votes.

I wonder if we have the intestinal fortitude to face what is ahead and what it will require from us.

Or maybe we’ll just find another way to anesthetize; distracting ourselves with retail therapy and mindless scrolling, soothing ourselves with false hope, sedating our systems with American exceptionalism. Will we somehow find a way to again retreat into the comfortable places and once more grow so tired that we’ll nestle back into a deadly slumber?

I wonder if there’s still time to undo the present nightmare.

The only way we’ll have a chance to know is if we wake up and stay awake.

It’s morning in America.

There’s mourning in America.

Time to rise and shine.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

There’s a niche panic rising across America right now, a collective desperation among an increasingly jittery demographic who call this place home; people who, up until recently, have been continually handed limitless opportunity and prosperity without ever needing to do much beyond the bare minimum of showing up.

This pigment-specific terror shows up in a myriad of ways: in bottom-feeding dudebro podcast rants, in antagonizing racist influencers, in performative banners at baseball games, in violent xenophobic town hall tirades. You can see the distinct male-pattern hysteria in shamefully gerrymandered maps, in DEI program elimination, in truck and bicep overcompensation, in sky-is-falling megachurch sermons, and in shocking civil rights rollbacks.

Throughout this ever-diversifying land, mediocre white men are petrified, and for good reason: America is passing them by, and they know it. As you can imagine, they’re not taking it well, either.

Recently, I was contacted by a staff member at one of my host churches in advance of a speaking date there.

She’d received a call from a man with a thick southern drawl, who said he wanted to know why they’d invited someone like me to their congregation, saying, “You know he supports white genocide, right?”

Who knew? I certainly didn’t.

After my emotional, anonymous Aryan admirer was rightly dismissed, I wondered if the call soothed him at all. I wonder if it stopped the sinking feeling in his gut that he carries around every day, if it quelled his rising and quite warranted sense of Imposter Syndrome, if it quieted the ubiquitous rage always bedeviling him and men like him.

Something tells me it didn’t help. He’s likely beyond real comfort at this point. Most of these guys are. They’ve watched more and more people gain access to what they’ve been assured all their lives was their sole birthright, and this progress feels like persecution.

And so, rather than leveling up, widening their understanding of the world, or, God forbid, looking in the mirror, they’ve created a new coping narrative that tells them everyone else is the problem. It’s the immigrants. It’s their black and brown neighbors. It’s transgender people. It’s women. It’s Muslims. It’s the Liberals. It’s the media. It’s the ever-present ghost of President Obama residing rent-free in their heads. Convinced that the entire world has conspired against them, they are responding with a steady torrent of emotional outbursts and mindless violence.

In fact, living in the United States right now is what I imagine is what it would have been like observing dinosaurs in the days leading up to their extinction: seeing a frantic-but-surely-doomed species wildly thrashing and flailing about, all while being rapidly obscured by the shadow of a massive meteor of evolution plummeting toward them.

Uninteresting, nondescript, base-level white guys who, for the past 250 years, have been the beneficiaries of every privilege and advantage their pigmentation and pronouns afford, are watching time, progress, and the inexorable demographic changes coming to swallow them up.

Entitled, builder-grade man-children who’ve had the run of the house since exiting the birth canal into a land their great-great-grandaddies stole, subjugated, and murdered for, are starting to read the room and recognize that they are perilously close to losing their free pass to prosperity.

After having failed up from the day they were born, they are facing the grim prospects of finally having to participate in a meritocracy, and they’re looking to drive everyone else out so as not to be humiliated by just how poorly they measure up when competition appears.

It turns out that spending every waking moment buffered by privilege rots your brain, steals your ambition, and renders you incapable of doing the work to grow, evolve, or improve, which is why generations of low-melanin underachievers are now scrambling to cram for an exam they’ve always been handed the answers to.

Having spent decades in the cloistered cocoon of white American maleness, these emotionally stunted, barely literate, Chud The Builder acolytes never learned how to apply themselves, never needed to do any real introspection, and certainly never were expected to earn their keep. This is why these Confederacy nostalgics are trying to resuscitate Jim Crow, scapegoat immigrants, and rewind the clock to a nation where their numbers ensured their dominance, but it’s all gonna be for not.

If free and fair midterm elections happen here, the shifting populations and changing mores will prove their worry was justified, and the balance of power here may tip away from them for good. But even if a final, violent campaign of malfeasance and illegality allows them a few more days with the unearned spoils of this land, it will only be postponing the inevitable.

As the playing fields here level and the pool of participation widens, they are naturally becoming obsolete, proven to have little to offer a world that no longer falls in line or bows in reverence. The days when this nation was their participation trophy are coming to an end, and instead of lashing out, they should turn inward. Instead of picking up protest signs and arms, they should try picking up a book. Instead of playing the victim, they should ask themselves why educated, hardworking human beings feel like a threat.

This white fright isn’t unwarranted, but it is misplaced. It isn’t a targeted attack; it’s a self-inflicted wound. There is no coordinated effort to replace unremarkable white men in the United States, but an evolving, increasingly diverse nation is transcending them.

And they have no one to blame but themselves.

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You see, I used to think I was a Christian.

I was raised in a Christian home and went to a Christian school. After a few meandering spiritual wilderness years, I attended a Christian seminary, became a Christian pastor, and served in Christian churches for most of the past thirty-five years of my life.

I’ve read and studied and preached the Scriptures extensively, led community Bible studies and student retreats and overseas mission trips, ministered in tiny rural chapels and massive gleaming megachurches.

As a result of these decades immersed in the Christian tradition both personally and vocationally, I thought I had at least the gist of Jesus.

Now, I think maybe I’ve been doing this wrong all these years.

For my entire life, I assumed something that perhaps I shouldn’t have: I thought Christians were supposed to care about people.

Not necessarily agree with them or believe what they believe or even like them, but see them each as specific and unique image-bearers of the divine, to want and to work for Shalom for them: wholeness, happiness, peace, safety, rest.

I grew up believing that one of the markers of a life emulating Jesus was a heart capable of being broken at the distress of other human beings around you: when they are hungry and hurting, when they are homeless and afraid, when they grieve and feel alone, when they believe they are unloved and forgotten, when tragedy befalls them, and when injustice assails them. These things are supposed to move the needle within us if Jesus is present.

And in all my years of criss-crossing the Gospels in both study and reflection, I never once found a Jesus who piled burdens on already burdened people or rejoiced in their despair or tossed off insults and told them to go back to where they came from.

I never read about a Jesus brandishing a “Don’t Tread On Me” bravado in the face of dire need.I didn’t see him lecturing the poor and the afflicted to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”I never found him inviting war or celebrating bloodshed or reveling in loss of life for any reason.I didn’t encounter him trolling people who expressed sadness, worry, or struggle.I didn’t see Jesus tossing off a defiant middle-finger contempt for those who came seeking refuge in him.I saw no arrogance that inflated his worth at the expense of someone else’s.

I never once encountered a Jesus who celebrated others’ suffering.

Which is why I simply can’t fathom Christians who are cruel and yet, I see so many of them right now.

I watch you continually boasting about “winning” alongside a loveless, lawless, serial predator.

I witness you repeatedly falling prostrate before the least Christlike person I’ve ever encountered.

I see you actively harming the most already marginalized among us.

I listen to your anti-immigrant chants of “mass deportations” and “send them back,” and I just have to ask you:

“Do you care about people?”

“Do you actually love your neighbor?”

”What is the point of your faith?”

“Just what Jesus do you claim to follow?”

I’m not talking about the beliefs you profess, the platitudes you proclaim, or the verses you parrot back, but the manner in which you treat other human beings: how you love or do not love your neighbor.

I see countless proudly unloving people claiming to be Christians, and it’s baffling.

If you profess to be a follower of Jesus, I’m not concerned with your politics, and I don’t care about your doctrine.

I’m not interested in the Scriptures you can recite or the prayers you utter out loud.

Show me a working theology of empathy.

Show me that you actually give a damn about people: not just Republican people or American people or Christian people or white people, but the disparate parade of human beings in every way you encounter them, in every condition they arrive, with whatever backstory they’ve lived through.

If you tell me you’re a Christian, be someone who (like Jesus) looks at the crowds and has a compassion for them that propels them into proximity with their pain.

Because if you aren’t deeply burdened to live from a place of expansive, sacrificial, selfless love toward your neighbor, not moved to alleviate anguish or reduce suffering, not compelled to leave people better than you found them, honestly, I’m not sure what the point of calling yourself a Christian is.

That’s what all my reading and prayer and ministering and living as a Christian have yielded: following Jesus should leave me more compassionate, not less. It’s really that simple.

As far as I can see, it’s ridiculous to say I care about Jesus while not caring for the people placed in my path. I am called to live the greatest commandment, not to make any single nation “great.”

I think most people walking the planet understand this, whether they’re Christians or not.

They, too, get the gist of Jesus, and they see there is no bullying or malice or violence there. They recognize the disconnect between love and enmity when it shows up in the neighborhoods and on the timelines and in their living rooms, and they smell the putrid stench of hypocrisy a mile away.

I believe in a God of abundance. I can’t comprehend a Christianity that sees others as in competition with me for jobs or healthcare or a home, because an infinite maker has infinite resources, and because I’m supposedly trying to emulate a Jesus who was the greatest expression of that abundance.

Jesus told those who followed him that whatever they do to the least of these, they do to him.

So maybe I’m wrong, and maybe I need to regroup on this whole Christianity thing.

I thought we were supposed to care about people.

I thought we were supposed to love our neighbors.

What am I missing?

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Dear David Byrne,

(I hope it’s OK that I call you David.)

You don’t know me, but I was row G, seat 112 at your performance in Durham on Monday night.

(By the way, this is not a concert review, but more of a thank-you note, and a bit of a confession.)

As you’re well aware, things here on the planet have been less than optimum lately for compassionate human beings. The cruelty has been unrelenting, the hatred never far away, the grief ever-present.

Like most people, for a while now I’ve been getting up every day, doing my little bit, making my contribution, trying to bring a little light to the dark places where I can, but honestly, I haven’t felt like it’s amounted to much lately. The losses have piled up, the suffering has accumulated, and it’s left me feeling listless and lost.

Fortunately, Me From A Few Months Ago had the foresight to know that Last Monday Me would need to find himself in that theater, on that night, in that seat, with my wife and daughter next to me, surrounded by a few thousand other similarly worn down souls.

The house lights faded to black, the curtain opened, and there you were, bathed in white light, flanked by three of the unthinkably talented cohorts you’ve been traveling with over the past year, whose faces are so familiar now they felt like old friends.

And in a millisecond, what struck me was the absolute silence in that space, as if an exhausted multitude had collectively leaned in to try and hear the whisper of hope beneath the ugly, hissing din of these days, and it came in the form of your voice, singing:

Everyone is trying to get to the bar. The name of the bar, the bar is called Heaven.

Tears welled up in my eyes and I heard myself exhale loudly. It’s been a while since I’ve done that.

As the song ended, you turned and faced an image of the earth, saying, “There she is: our Heaven; the only one we have,” and I remembered what this is all for, the gravity of these days, the urgency of living in such perilous moments.

Seconds later, you launched into “Everybody Laughs” and the full band assembled from the wings, we all rose to our feet, not in obligation but in the involuntary pull of hearts that have been starved for jubilation, and we danced ourselves alive again.

I often talk to people about art as activism, as a catalyst for social change, as inspiration and release, but there, for those two hours, I was reminded of art as medicine for the soul; the way words and melodies and voices and similarly-intentioned people can do the miraculous inside a human heart.

A dozen times throughout the night, I’d catch myself thinking, “I wish she could see this,” or, “I wish he were there." But then I would quickly reply, “But you’re here, now. Be here, now.”

You and your glorious ensemble didn’t give us an escape from the world outside, but the chance to hold all of it together: the grief and the fear, the celebrations and the sorrows. We appealed to our better angels while not turning away from the demons inside or around us.

Yes, the night was (as I had been promised by many online), a joyful, life-affirming collective artistic experience like few in my life, but it was more than that for me. It was a reminder of what humanity is here for, it was the road back to a version of me I’d lost, a lifeline in a season that has often rendered me lifeless.

I so wish the 8 billion other war-weary human beings on the planet could have found themselves in that theater, as I think it would have altered the trajectory of our shared journey. Yet, looking around at the radiant faces of the thousands surrounding me as the curtain closed and the houselights came up, it was clear that none of us were leaving as we arrived. I know i wasn’t.

I share this with you because even with all the success you’ve had and the places your gifts have taken you, I imagine, like the rest of us, you also have moments when it doesn’t seem like the work you do makes a difference, like the effort isn’t changing anything, but I wanted to let you know that this isn’t true.

In fact, David, that’s what I left the theater with on Monday: the assurance that doing my little bit matters, too, that it isn’t for nothing, that the efforts and offerings of every single weary but defiantly joyful person dancing around me haven’t been wasted.

I realized that we were a beaming, dancing microcosm of the billions of people on this planet who still wake every morning, courageously making the case for kindness in the small and close of their lives, people who are excavating goodness out of the broken rubble left in hatred’s wake.

One of the many lines I carry with me from the night is, “We're only tourists in this life, only tourists, but the view is nice.”Sometimes the view is nice.

Sometimes, it is breathtaking.

The path of my 56-year life led me to row G, seat 112 on that Monday night, and it was exactly the place I needed to be. I know you didn’t plan this entire tour for me, but it sure felt like it, which is the true gift of the artist.

So, thank you, David, for reminding me why my being here matters, why each of us matters, why the world, as ugly as it can be, has too much beauty to give up on.

I’ll keep getting up every day, doing my little bit, making my contribution, and trying to bring a little light to the dark places where I can.

I hope our paths cross again, maybe on a future tour stop or another theater, but if not, then hopefully at the bar called Heaven.I hope you’ll let me buy you a round.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

According to their latest propaganda performance art piece, The Trump Administration has announced a new “counterterrorism” strategy, targeting what they call “violent Left-Wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists.”

Not the Patriot Front or the Proud Boys. Not Neo-Nazis. Not the Evangelical thugs crashing Pride parades, health clinics, and civil rights protests. Not homegrown, white, Conservative males (who comprise the lion’s share of our mass shooters).

They’re coming for Americans who oppose fascism.

Let me say that again: An American presidency is openly declaring war on Americans who oppose fascism. If there’s ever a moment that should finally rouse the last of us out of the thick haze of laziness, wishful thinking, and American exceptionalism, it should be this one.

Career sociopath Sebastian Gorka, the administration’s senior director for counterterrorism, who authored the declaration, promises that they are setting their sights on what they describe as those whose ideology is “secular, anti-American, radically pro-transgender and anarchist.”

Let’s unpack that Right-Wing code language, a bit:

Secular, in other words, those people not fully indoctrinated into the extremist Evangelical fundamentalism that mocks empathy, worships war, eradicates vulnerable people, and pines for Armageddon so their Conservative White Daddy God can return.

Anti-American, as defined by a cadre of lawless grifters whose contempt for the Constitution is complete; traitorous insurrectionists with no allegiance to its precepts and no desire to uphold the elemental freedoms and inalienable rights it promises.

Radically pro-transgender, meaning anyone who believes that people’s bodies, bathrooms, and healthcare decisions aren’t anyone’s damn business but their own, and that queer people should be allowed to live in peace from Evangelical theocracy.

Anarchists, in other words, ordinary people who will not quietly comply with a brutal regime of supremacist White House squatters who are dragging this nation backwards, toward the days when women and people of color were legislatively and legally erased.

Here’s the thing, friends, if opposing fascism amounts to terrorism, we’re now all facing a fascist regime, and we’re all going to need to respond to it the way Americans have for the past 250 years: we’re gonna have to fight it.

I am anti-fascist, and I’m willing to bet that you are, too.

This is not a declaration of membership in some non-existent group that our leadership has declared a phony holy war on, but a collective statement of intent. We are not claiming affiliation with an imaginary organization, but testifying to our purpose here in this beautiful land that we love dearly.

We are fiercely, steadfastly, unapologetically anti-fascist, because Americans are supposed to be and have always been.

We’re anti-fascist because that’s the whole reason this nation exists to begin with, the oppressive crucible of coercion that our freedoms were first born out of.

We’re anti-fascist because the hundreds of thousands of our forebears who courageously fought and died on foreign soil were anti-fascist.

We’re anti-fascist because up until recently, every single president we’ve ever had marshaled our nation’s military and economic power to defeat fascism, not to traffic in it.

We’re anti-fascist because fascism is a mortal threat to free speech, to freedom of expression, to body autonomy, to cultural diversity, to life, liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness for every human being who calls this place home or wishes to.

And simply by virtue of the fact that we are anti-fascist Americans, we are dangerous to this Administration, which actually says more about them than it does about us. We haven’t lost the plot here; they have.

So, yeah, Trump and his sycophantic hate-mongers can run this false flag high up the partisan propaganda flagpole in the hopes that their fear-addled, easily manipulated, increasingly uninformed, miserable rank-and-file fall for it, and some of them may.

But the rest of us: the vast, sprawling, disparate majority see through the facade and will not have our gaze diverted away from their criminality and inhumanity, and we will not shrink back in the face of their desperate, blustering bravado.

We will not relent in our daily, unwavering, nonviolent opposition to authoritarianism, to theocracy, to illegality, to unconstitutional overreach, and to State-sponsored brutality.

The Trump Administration needs to understand that the lion’s share of this nation is anti-fascist; that’s what Americans are supposed to be, it’s what most of their ancestors were.

If they want to declare a white extremist holy war and take the side of fascism, I say, “bring it on.”

And the decent, compassionate, truly spiritual, actually patriotic people here will remind them how Americans respond to violent authoritarian regimes.

History is recording these days, friends.

I want to go on record as being anti-fascist and fighting its attempts to destroy this flawed but beautiful experiment in Democracy.

I hope we all do.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Immediately, I replied, “I miss me, too!”

Like many truthful things, the reply arrived housed in humor but left a terrible lingering aftertaste of regret.

I was joking, but I also wasn’t lying.

I wonder if that resonates with you: the grief of remembering the person you used to be before this sickening season began; of wondering what in the hell happened to that previous iteration of yourself?

When I think about the millions of people I’ve crossed paths with over the last decade doing this work, there is such a through line of loss. Whether it was saying goodbye to the idea of God or country or family, to a belief in the goodness of people, to their sense of optimism about the future, to relationships with people they once felt fully at home around, they have been attending a long-running funeral that never fully ends.

But of the legion of lamentations they’ve shared with me, the greater mourning I have sensed in people is the loss of their former selves.

There is a cost to enduring the unceasing storm of Constitutional crises, acts of treason, atrocities against vulnerable people, and cultic indoctrination of tens of millions of people we share a nation with.

In our earnest and valiant efforts to confront this incessant ugliness, we have been transformed, and often not for the better. Oh, sure, these days have helped us clarify our convictions, distill what truly matters to us, and enabled us to tap into the strength and perseverance we’d likely never have discovered otherwise—but they’ve also rightly beaten the hell out of us in the process.

As I consider the person I was a decade ago and compare him to the person in the mirror (well, aside from looking thirty years older), I can’t help but notice the latter doesn’t laugh as easily as the former. He is far less naive about his friends and family members, finds it far more difficult to give people the benefit of the doubt, and he doesn’t see the horizon of history as wide open as he used to.

I begin to grieve that version of myself and feel a bit guilty for losing the earlier one along the way, but I also know exactly how it happened:

He had to watch his former church friends collectively sell their souls to a vile, profane, serial predator, as if he were the Second Coming.He sat at dozens of holiday tables listening to uncles and in-laws deliver well-rehearsed racist rants as easily as breathing.He scrolled through hundreds of hours of the most asinine and baseless conspiracy theories about face masks, vaccines, rigged elections, and Democrat child trafficking networks.He overheard his white neighbors of stratospheric privilege, rambling about the dangerous immigrants supposedly overrunning our town.He began countless days reading about incomprehensible Supreme Court rulings, the passing of mindbogglingly hateful legislation, and the political victories of sociopaths and criminals.

All that s**t leaves a mark.

And as I inventory ten years of exposure to senseless cruelty and prolific discrimination, it suddenly makes perfect sense what happened to that previous incarnation of me: he gradually faded away in the face of too much hatred winning too many times.

So, today, I am missing and mourning that younger, more hopeful version of myself, and I’m also worried that even this tired-but-not-ready-to-give-up iteration of me will also burn up in the inhospitable atmosphere of this national sickness, yielding someone whose heart is harder and whose sense of belonging in this place is even more tenuous than it is today.

But future me is none of my business, because today is waiting on me.

Right now, all I can do, all any of us can do, is to wake up within the day before us and appeal to the better still angels within our reach, to wield the damaged but still functioning humanity in our possession, to access all the goodness, courage, and faith we can still muster.

If there’s any blessing in lamenting the version of ourselves and of the nation we’ve lost over the last ten years, it’s in realizing we can’t afford to squander a day, waste a moment, or allow a single act of inhumanity to go unchallenged.

I miss the person I used to be before this nightmare began, but I’ll be damned if I let these heartbreaking days and the people authoring them take any more.

In the comments, share the things you miss about your former self, and how you’re trying to hold on to the hope you still have.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

A few days ago, I opened my Threads feed and was greeted by the post of a young woman, featuring a couple of resolute carseat selfies, along with the caption:I AM….. PRO ICE PRO Military Pro Law Enforcement Pro Trump Pro Charlie Kirk Pro Voter ID Pro Accountability [sic]

Immediately below that post was another, absolutely identical to the first, except for a different account handle.

I continued to refresh my feed, greeted again and again by the same image, the same quote, yet from different accounts. (I’m currently at 26 and counting, by the way.)

Scrolling through my timeline, this morning alone, I encountered, not only five more greetings from my now ubiquitous brunette, shapeshifting female MAGA warrior, but at least four other different versions featuring other white women, supposedly also declaring their love for their Predator-In-Chief, his barbaric ICE foot soldiers, and MAGA’s anti-immigrant, anti-Black, Anti-Democracy agenda.

A cursory glance at my newsfeed, and no one would blame you for thinking a massive number of young white women are inexplicably assembling around a court-adjudicated rapist and likely serial predator, whose misogynist regime is trying to take away women’s body autonomy and voting rights.And it’s all a mirage, just like everything about this President, his Administration, and their barbaric, yet rapidly shrinking white supremacist movement, but it’s an exhausting mirage.

Being gaslit will wear you the hell out, which of course, is the plan.

I think we all need to collect ourselves and understand what’s really happening here.

We need to inventory the emotional and mental toll of being inundated throughout our waking moments with an endless stream of repeated lies, Right-Wing propaganda, bot proliferation, and Conservative algorithm manipulation.

It’s critical that we don’t allow ourselves to be defeated by an alarming, terrifying, and infuriating fiction. We are not outnumbered.

Donald Trump’s current approval rating is hovering between 28 and 36 percent, depending on the source, and his support is never going to rise from here. This is his absolute ceiling.

His covering up of the Epstein Files, the lawlessness of ICE’s domestic terrorism, his starting of an unnecessary, sickeningly expensive war with Iran, stratospheric gas prices, and a cratering economy that has been in a tailspin ever since his disastrous tariffs began—these are mortal wounds to Trump and his party, and they know it.

Republicans have known since 2024 that the window was going to be incredibly short; that their policies have been wildly unpopular, their base has been dwindling, and that their quickly-collapsing, cognitively-addled, lame duck wanna be dictator has been steadily losing his capacity to bulldoze criticism and manipulate reality.

Trump’s broken campaign promises regarding transparency around Epstein, his vow to end wars, his asinine boasts to bring gas and food prices down, his wasteful ballrooms and national mall desecrations are not playing well with the former faithful who can barely keep the lights on or put food on the table.

The MAGA arrow is pointing down, and nothing can prevent that.

Friends, what this all means is that we are the majority and it ain’t even close.

Well over two-thirds of this nation despise this Christo-fascist regime, their assaults on black and brown people, their endless persecution of the LGBTQ community, their attacks on free speech, the Arts, diversity, and Democracy.

A massive portion of America is disgusted with their coddling of the wealthiest one percent, their pillaging of the Public School System, their poisoning of Health and Human Services, their polluting of the CDC, and their absolute refusal to address affordable healthcare or housing.

We have the numbers. All we need to do is start acting like the majority.

If we can all transcend our wars of preference, our purity politics, and our relatively superficial differences, we can defeat this minority movement. If we wield our collective power and unify our voice in November, it won’t matter how much they gerrymander, how difficult they make it to vote, or the violence they resort to in order to try and intimidate us.

The United States isn’t in hopeless peril; we’ve all just been fooled into believing the myth of our impending doom curated and amplified by those who have nothing else but lies, spin, fake followers, and paid rally crowds.

Donald Trump’s entire life, his supposed success as a businessman, and his disastrous presidencies have been fool’s gold; the smoke and mirror illusions of disinformation and media malpractice.

Beneath the partisan propaganda and the prolific gaslighting, MAGA is in its last days. It is a crumbling, self-devouring, rapidly evaporating niche movement of a small percentage of this nation who are being swallowed up by time and progress.

Don’t be disheartened by your newsfeed or distracted by the bombast of the propagandists.

The vast majority is anti-MAGA, anti-Trump, and pro-Democracy.

Let’s act like we know.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

For many people, that means flowers, handmade cards, Sunday brunches, and waves of laughter. It means celebration, and gratitude, and warm embraces, and great rejoicing. It means resting fully in loving and being loved.

But not for some people.

For some, it only means tears.

For some, it just hurts.

In the hearts of many, this day is a bitter, unsolicited reminder of what was but no longer is, or a heavy holiday of mourning what never was at all.

Maybe it is such a day for you.

It might bring crushing grief for the empty chair around a table.

It might come with stinging regret over a relationship that has been severed.

It might be a day of looking around at other mothers and other children, and feeling the unwelcome intrusion of jealousy that comes with comparison.

It might be yet another occasion to lament the mistakes you made, or the words you didn’t say, or the kindness you never knew.

It might be an annual injury you sustain.

Consider this a personal love letter to you who are struggling today; you whose Mother’s Day experience might be rather bittersweet, or perhaps only bitter.

This is consent to fully acknowledge the contents of your own heart without censorship or guilt or alteration.

If you are hurting, then hurt.

May you feel permission to cry, to grieve, to be not alright.

May you relieve yourself of the burden of pretending everything is fine, or faking stability, or concealing the damage.

May you feel not a trace of guilt for any twinge of pain or anger that seizes you today, because it is your right to feel.

Above all, though, may encouragement come even in your profound anguish.

May you find in your very sadness the proof that your heart, though badly broken, still works.

Let the pain you are enduring reassure you that you are still capable of caring deeply, despite how difficult it has been.

See your grief as the terrible tax on loving people well, and see your unquenched longing for something better as a reminder of the goodness within you that desires a soft place to land.

If on this Mother’s Day you are struggling, know that you are not alone.

May these words be the flowers that you wait for, or the call that won’t come, or the conversation that you can’t have, or the reunion that has not yet arrived.

Let them be hope packaged and personally delivered to the center of your heart, and may they sustain you.

In this time of great pain, know that you are seen and heard, and that you are more loved than you realize.

Be greatly encouraged today.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

To all the white Republican professed Christians across this country:

To hell with you.

To hell with you, as you have the unmitigated audacity to fill churches throughout this nation on Sunday, after celebrating the silencing of your black and brown neighbors all week, as you’ve applauded the erasure of six decades of civil rights progress.

To hell with you as you stand before the Cross, singing songs of adoration to a non-white Jesus who you’d have complete contempt for were he to make his home in your neighborhoods or your voting districts.

To hell with you as you sit in pews, pretending for an hour that you give a damn about the teachings of Christ, while spending the other 167 hours falling prostrate before a sneering, racist, amoral creature who is their very antithesis.

To hell with you and your performative social media displays of showy piety, posting scriptures about love for neighbor, care for the least of these, and a God who so loves the world that you’ve obviously never read a f*ckin’ word of.

To hell with you for collectively selling your souls to a monstrous rapist-felon, all for a few Supreme Court seats, Republican majorities, and a less-diverse community.

To hell with you disregarding Jesus’ mandates; for refusing to protect the stranger in your midst, for letting masked thugs brutalize foreigners, for partnering in the character assassination of entire communities who do not share your pigmentation.

To hell with you for not standing with the Birmingham protestors, the Selma marchers, the lunch counter sitters, and the underground railroaders, aligning instead with the cross burners and the Jim Crowers and the lynch mobs and the men who turned firehoses on children.

For all of these things, to hell with you, figuratively, but literally as well.

Because if the hell you incessantly preach, the hell that you threaten the entire world with, the hell you wield like a hammer against the vulnerable and hurting in your path—if that hell exists, you will certainly find yourselves there.

There would be no human beings on the planet more deserving of merciless eternal torment than you, who have so betrayed your faith’s namesake, violated human beings made in God’s image, and participated in the silencing and erasing of black people in this nation.

In your breathless zeal to create your heaven on earth of a white gated community where no one’s humanity but your own is honored, you’ve made it hell for so many, and done it all with perverse joy.

You have desecrated your faith tradition, turned generations away from the Church, and done it all in the name of a God whose love you are bereft of.

As a former pastor who stood before many of you on Sunday mornings, I grieve who you have become. I regret that I was not clearer from the pulpit on the sins of our traditions’ racist past. I deeply lament that I did not do enough to prevent you from finding yourself on the side of such brutality.

For the rest of this life, other grieving, sickened, and ashamed white people of faith and I are going to confront you, oppose you, and make you into the pariahs you deserve to be.

We’re going to call you out every single time you try to pass the buck to God for your ignorance, hatred, greed, and white supremacy.

We’re going to continue to hold the teachings of Jesus up to your face to reveal you as the frauds and charlatans you are.

And we are going to find our place in the disparate congregation of humanity who will not give your hatred a home.

So, enjoy the blasphemous farce of your worship services, Bible studies, and prayer gatherings. Revel in the phony theatre of your whitewashed, cosplay Christianity. And savor the cheap high of your perceived victory at the expense of people of color.

May you meet your Maker one day, who will certainly not be white, and may you get what you deserve.

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I’ve seen this movie before. It doesn’t end well.

As a Christian for most of my life and a pastor for nearly three decades, I’m quite familiar with the Old Testament story: supposedly faithful people fashioning an idol made of gold and cravenly bowing before it, in complete contempt for the God they claimed to believe in because they had lost their collective minds and souls.

This new American reboot is a little on the nose.It’s also far more tragic.We’ve had a few thousand years to get it right.We shouldn’t be here.

Watching the collective soul-selling of my fellow Christians here in America over the past ten years has been something that has grieved me more than I can measure or accurately describe. Particularly disheartening has been watching ancient religious history repeating, and worse: to realize that nearly every national sickness here in America is coming from professed Christians:

The silencing of tens of millions of black and brown votes, the violent persecution of immigrants, the shielding from accountability for a cadre of sexual predators, the incessant legislative assaults on women's and trans people’s body autonomy, and the brazen parade of white nationalism in churches throughout this nation.

If Jesus’ feet were on the planet, this God-mocking death cult of white supremacy would be the first table he’d flip.

As someone still aspiring to a life of faith and still trying to speak into my religious tradition, it’s sobering to admit that we’re not here as a nation in this brutal battle for the elemental rights of all human beings, if not for people claiming to be devoted to the same Jesus I’ve grown up trying to emulate.

As they both literally and figuratively pledge their undying adoration to some golden-veneered, bastardized counterfeit idol of their pigmentation, I’m left to wonder what I’m to do now:

Do I attempt to redeem this thing I have found such meaning and beauty in, or do I resign myself to the fact that these phobic cultists have commandeered it for good, and it is beyond repair in the eyes of those outside of it?

Do I make an exodus from my homeland of origin and begin down a new spiritual journey, while knowing it will be nearly impossible to differentiate myself from the sycophantic idol worshippers because they have permanently co-opted the trappings of my tradition?

And how can I show the world an alternative spirituality that is supposed to leave more compassion, more diversity, and more justice in its wake, while these delusional power-mad hypocrites eat up market share, because otherwise decent, loving human beings are walking away from organized religion for good, because they are fully exhausted?

The questions far outnumber any helpful answers, and my prayers seem to slip into the ether without reply.

Having read, studied, and preached the story doesn’t make watching it repeat itself any easier.

I know that in the Bible, religious people ended up abandoning God and mindlessly worshiping a golden calf, so it shouldn’t be surprising that so many today are now bowing down to this orange jack*ss. It’s just more terrifying seeing it this close.

It was a lot easier to view the tragic story in the distant rear-view mirror of history in a land thousands of miles away, and not in the windshield of the present here in the country I call home, with the sycophantic cultists so close and prevalent.

While they whirl around the gleaming, empty shell, celebrating themselves and their imagined righteousness, shouting ‘God bless America,’ I’ll be here, sitting with a mournful truth that makes me sick to my stomach:

God didn’t bless America; God wrecked America, or at least these self-identified White Republican God-followers and their spray-tanned messiah are doing their best to wreck it, and I’m not sure how we fix it.

One thing I know for certain: I will not join them in their mindless, fevered dancing around the graven image of a racist, morally-bankrupt, Bible-defiling, felon-rapist.

I will not bow to this empty, shimmering monstrosity of white Christian nationalism nor comply with its efforts to mandate its perverse cruelty onto the rest of us.

I’ll stand with every person in this country who rejects a religion of coercion that seeks to harm and exclude.

Together, with our work and our lives and our votes, we will tear down this homegrown golden idol of whiteness, throw it into the fire, name it as the vile blasphemy it is, and drive this hateful blight back into the hell it came from once and for all.

That will truly bless America.

That will make it great.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

At some point in our journeys, we all found ourselves sitting in a classroom in middle school or high school and learning for the first time about pivot points in human history; days that precisely altered our collective story in beautiful or terrible ways. Like wide-eyed archeologists, we excavated past moments of great consequence, unearthing those times when ordinary people found themselves in the crucible of surrounding chaos and were faced with a choice: condemn inhumanity or partner with it.

Back then, reading what felt like ancient textbook parchment stories of unthinkable carnage, gazing at blurry, stomach-turning photos of open genocides, watching jittery newsreel footage of a barbarism that defied words, and witnessing the very depths of human cruelty, we all invariably asked ourselves the question:

What would I have done?

Would I have been willing to harbor my Jewish neighbors in my home or given them up to certain death for fear of drawing the wrath of the monsters hunting them?Would I have taken up sides against my own flesh-and-blood, in order to defend the inherent worth and freedom of strangers?Would I have had the courage to stand between terrified black school children and the dogs and water cannons, or would I have turned away, pretending I didn’t see anything and retreating into the protective bunker of my privilege?

Would I have defied unjust laws and risked beatings and imprisonment in order to affirm the higher laws of love and justice?Would I have stood alone in the path of a tank, selflessly leveraging my very body for my countrymen? Would I have been willing to confront a weaponized military, braving the bruises and bullets of a corrupt fascist regime, or would self-preservation have kept me home or rendered me silent?Would I have been strong enough to stand in the streets and put my very life on the line for people I’d never met?

Who would I have been when everything went to hell?

And regardless of how we may have answered those questions back then, that was all theoretical; just an interesting, yet ultimately hollow intellectual exercise. The conclusions we came to there, nestled in comfort, were, at best, a declaration of the people we aspired to be. They were bold, overconfident promises made while sitting in the safety of the future and with the benefit of hindsight.

This is different.

Today, we no longer need to ask what we’d have done in the face of evil’s ascension, of Democracy’s destruction, and humanity’s peril; we only need to ask what we’re doing right now.

There is no mystery anymore, no imagination required, no detached speculation about how we’d have responded when courage was called upon. These dark and horrifying days are revealing the naked, inarguable truth in real-time; they are showing us who we really are.

There’s a story we all tell ourselves about the kind of people we show up as every day, the things that matter to us, and the impact of our lives. In those carefully curated narratives, our cause is always just, our motives always pure, our convictions always in stone. There in those stories, we are invariably the human rights warriors, the unflinching revolutionaries, the ordinary heroes. And most of us are watching our convenient fictions burning up in the blazing light of our actual current decisions. Many of us are finding we may not be as brave as we’d have told ourselves we have been back in those classrooms.

Friends, these days, as heartbreaking and terrifying as they might be, are revelatory. There is no more wondering who you and I are. Who we are right now, in these chaotic moments, facing these present tribulations, that is who we are.

Think about the story you’ve always told yourself about who you hope you’d be and what you hoped you'd do when it all hit the fan, and decide if your choices align with that story. Is the person you hoped you’d have been in Germany one hundred years ago, the person you are as you encounter these words?

Because one day, decades from now, hundreds of millions of children will gather to read about these very days, about this precise version of America we are living inside, about you and about me. They will learn of monstrous men, of malevolent regimes, of perversions of justice. They’ll read stories and watch videos of fascism’s violent rise, of an authoritarian’s sociopathic sadism, of hatred’s prolific Renaissance in a past that seems forever ago.

And those children will learn of the choices ordinary people made when faced with evil, whether to collaborate with or confront it all, and they’ll think about you and me, and they’ll ask themselves:

What would I’d have done?

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I have some good news and some bad news.

The bad news is you’re dying.

If you’re paying attention, you’ve probably noticed the symptoms.

Your buildings are slowly clearing, your pews gradually emptying, your congregations visibly aging away, your voice carrying less resonance than it used to.

The reasons for this are complicated and interconnected, but here are a few broad strokes:

You’re dying because of your hypocrisy.People see the ever-widening chasm between who you say you are and what they regularly experience in your presence. They see the great disparity between the expansive hospitality of Jesus and the narrow prejudice you are so often marked by.They see Christ’s deep affection for the poor, hurting, and marginalized, and either your quiet indifference or your open hostility toward them.They’ve listened to you preach incessantly about the immorality of the world, the dangers of greed, the corrupt nature of power, the poison of untruth, the evils of sexual perversion—and watched you willingly align with politicians embodying all of these.They see that you are so often the very kind of malevolent ugliness that you forever warned was coming to assail the world.

You’re dying because of your willful ignorance.People are tired of your war on Science.They are sick of your arguing with Biology.They are exhausted by your attacks on women.They are disgusted by your justifications of racism.They despise your narcissistic nationalism.They know the Earth is round.They know it is billions, not thousands of years old.They know dinosaurs walked it.They know that it is warming rapidly.They know people here don’t choose their sexuality or deserve their poverty.They know whoever and whatever God doesn’t appoint Presidents or hand out weapons or attack people with tornadoes.

You’re dying because of your devotion to cruelty.People watch you dig in your heels against others because of their gender identity and their sexual orientation; the way you continually exact violence upon them, the way you try to blame God and the Bible for your mindless bigotry.They’ve seen your intolerance to other religious traditions: how you vilify anyone who finds spirituality and meaning outside of your precise expression of Christianity, how you so easily disregard the faith stories of those who don’t mirror your own.They’ve watched you so revel in being the bully to those you were originally called to protect.

You’re dying because of your complicity in violence.

Good people have seen you so often be a haven for misogynists, domestic abusers, sexual predators, and white supremacists, who more often receive protection rather than condemnation.They’ve heard your explicit silence in the face of a brutal and rising flood of open racism, of hostility toward immigrants, of anti-Semitism, of attacks on Asian people and Muslims.They see your pastors and leaders misuse their positions and leverage their influence to victimize the most vulnerable and make them scapegoats for discrimination.They’ve watched you be the last, hateful holdout in matters of gender equality, racial diversity, sexuality, and theological difference; lagging behind almost everyone in the world in the kind of goodness you say you aspire to.

It’s easy to be fooled into believing you’re well because you have the political power of a presidency behind you, because you can temporarily impose your will on this nation. But this frantic flurry of cruelty is actually the death rattle of a doomed and dying thing. The empty bombast and blinding lights of your megachurches are a hollow rally that may momentarily anesthetize you, but they cannot stave off what is coming.

Yes, Evangelical Church, the bad news is that you’re slowly but surely expiring as you are now.

The good news is that in your passing, something else is being born.

Rising in these days is a sprawling movement of disparate people, not bound by denomination or tradition or nation, who want to create something redemptive and life-giving here, who don’t care what it’s called, who gets the credit, or what building it happens in.

Its makers are conscientious objectors in your unending holy wars, choosing to step away from you in order to create loving spiritual communities, grow deeper in personal faith, escape tribal partisan politics, craft a healthier planet, reflect the character of Jesus, and hold onto their souls.

These newly emancipated sojourners are creating something of compassion and generosity and hospitality; a radically inclusive faith that opens the table, a spirituality that welcomes the world, a religion that does no harm: a working theology of love. These open-hearted human beings are unearthing the beauty buried beneath heavy layers of rigid dogma, ornamental religion, and institutionalized discrimination.

The soul is leaving a body that no longer serves it, and you are that body.

The bad news for you, White Evangelical Church, is that you are certainly dying.

And it’s very good news for the rest of us and for a Jesus you have long ago murdered in your midst.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Hey MAGAs and Trump Supporters,

No Cinco de Mayo for you.

Seriously, y’all need to sit this one out.

No one wants to see you ICE-supporting, immigrant-slandering, landscaper-harassing fascist bootlickers in local Mexican restaurants throughout this country, cramming your faces with tortilla chips, pounding half-price margaritas, and pretending you haven’t spent the previous 364 days making life hell for the Latino community.

We’ve had it with you hypocrites.

You don’t get to both literally and figuratively patronize people you continually demonize, recklessly paint as illegals, drug dealers, and gang members, and spread dangerous disinformation about, just because you feel like doing a little overeating, some day drinking, and suddenly cosplaying as decent human beings.

Now, most Mexican restaurant and bar owners aren’t going to say this because they’re too kind hearted and welcoming a people, but I’ll say it: you career bigots who’ve stridently celebrated this racist president for the last decade, have a hell of a lot of nerve showing up and expecting the rest of us not to call you out on the dehumanizing stereotypes you traffic in all year long.

You need to own the garbage you believe and broadcast about our Latin, Central, and South American brothers and sisters, and the violence that you are complicit in by your votes, your rhetoric, and your silence.

Over the last year and a half, Latino business owners, day laborers, construction workers, teachers, and families have been terrorized, beaten, threatened, improperly detained, jailed, and kidnapped by masked thugs, and your repugnant spray-tanned savior has been the author of it all.

Brown-skinned children have been ripped from their parents, couples have been separated, grandparents have been bloodied, church services have been invaded, and entire communities have been thrown into chaos—and you have applauded every second of it.

You sure as hell didn’t speak up or show up to defend or support them in the streets or online, lest you feel the slightest bit of turbulence in the places of privilege you call home.

We’ll all had to listen to your rambling racist nonsense in front of our houses, at our family gatherings, at work, at the gym, and pretty much everywhere you show up. We’ve endured your incendiary memes and your asinine jokes and your baseless partisan hit pieces. We’ve absorbed the sewage you spill at town halls, school board meetings, and on neighborhood social media apps.

So, please, pardon the rest of us for not wanting to have to eat our lunches this Tuesday with a side order of your staggering hypocrisy, and for asking you to show a little consistency.

You don’t get to and drive up your local taqueria with a Build That Wall bumper sticker on your F-150 and expect us all to give you one day of amnesty just cause you’re in the mood to get smashed. I’m sure there are tons of good ol’ boy-owned meat-and-threes, or maybe a nice Applebee’s that’ll do you just fine.

It’s just a little bit disengenous for you to mock and ridicule and vilify a group of human beings all year long and think that we’ll all develop 24-hour amnesia.

And, MAGAs, the same goes for every day after Tuesday, as well. You can complain about diversity, atta boy ICE, cheer voting rights rollbacks, lament foreign cultures, spot off about everybody needing to “talk American”, and you continue to fall prostrate before for your Racist-In-Chief.

But don’t show up in places where people gather to celebrate disparate humanity and the cultural richness of this planet, and hope we’ll ignore your red baseball hats, your white nationalist propaganda, and your efforts to make this nation into a white gated community.

If you’re planning on making an appearance this Cinco De Mayo, let us give you a hearty preemptive “adios!”

Have lunch somewhere else.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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It’s been said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Right now, I’d say that it’s stepping into a new day and expecting Republicans not to do something horrible.

It happens to all of us.

We wake up in the morning, eventually check our phones or turn on the news, and are greeted by some new abomination: an unprecedented legislative assault on a central pillar of our Republic, the dismantling of long-established civil rights, a heartbreaking act of violence against the most vulnerable among us.

We encounter a legion of novel nightmares authored by the same people whose brutality from the previous day we’ve not yet recovered from, and we are somehow surprised.

Despite a decade of their daily atrocities, despite their prolific portfolio of inhumanity, despite their seemingly inexhaustible disregard for legal and moral law, their malevolence never fails to rattle our nervous systems and boggle our minds anew.

Each day, a sickening sense of deja vu sets in as we find ourselves freshly outraged, as if these moral abominations are out of character for these people, as if they might have reached their capacity for cruelty overnight, as if they’d suddenly had their sociopathy satiated and will magically relent.

Good people, we need to stop doing this.

This is who they have been; it is who they are. There is no moment of clarity coming, no soul awakening, no tearful repentance. They’ve long passed that possibility. To still be tethered to something as monstrous as this man and his movement is to have permanently abandoned the fundamental humanity required to feel empathy or possess self-awareness. We need to stop wasting time hoping his supporters will suddenly call upon their better angels, as they killed those off long ago.

Yesterday, a distraught member of our online community said over Zoom, “No matter what we do, no matter how much we fight, it seems like nothing gets better. Every day, things are worse.” I think she was hoping I would disagree with her.

I assured her that this wasn’t going to change anytime soon, because the people in power have no current external or internal obstacles in their path. They are not ethically bound by the Constitution and possess no regard for the rule of Law. They have commandeered the highest court in our nation and hold zero compunctions about violating the inalienable rights of other human beings.

They also realize that their time is incredibly short, despite appearances to the contrary. They’ve been paying attention to the elections over the last 16 months, and they know the public sentiment against them is rising swiftly. They live with the Sword of Damocles hovering overhead: the unforced errors of a sexual scandal that will not go away, a costly, unwinnable war, and an economy they have singlehandedly driven to life support.

There is no way back; there is only the way down. All they have left is destruction.

Right now, Americans need to make peace with the fact that the news will continue to be bad. We are going to witness an ever more desperate and violent descent into the depths of the malevolence that broken human beings are capable of. These people are going to wake up every day, as in this one, singularly driven to damage as many people as possible as quickly as they can, and we should prepare ourselves by not being pulled into disbelief as they do.

We cannot waste a single second being shocked by their depravity, or hoping they will tire of violence, or expecting them to be anything other than who they have shown us they are.

Instead, our energy should be better spent keeping our heads down and getting on with the work before us, of building a broad coalition of resistance, of taking our strategic stands where we can, of leveraging our economic power, of caring for those being targeted, and creating a compassionate community that curates decency and love for neighbor.

We need to stop being surprised by Republicans’ inhumanity and to go about the work of being human.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

We were processing our own miniature State of the Union, which at the time we deemed somewhere between sky-is-falling and Armageddon.

The conversation (which, as you can imagine, was decidedly nihilistic) turned toward the suggested bright spot found in the prospect of some of Trump supporters finally being roused from the ten-year stupor of their cultic adoration enough to see with lucid assessment that they have tethered themselves to a monster.

Some suggested with tentative optimism that after a confounding, infuriating decade of sycophantic devotion, they might put aside their fierce tribalism and join the rest of the reasonable people in opposing this rapidly unfolding coup.

At first, I co-signed such a possibility as a sign of hope, but quickly realized that it was misplaced optimism. That’s probably not what we’re going to see at all.

The fact of the matter is, with very few exceptions, people who voted for Trump in 2024 (many for the third time) and who do begin to come around enough to move them to action, will not have had their humanity awakened watching his and his Administration’s illegal weaponizing of I.C.E. against immigrants, both documented and undocumented.

They will not have tapped into heretofore unaccessed reservoirs of compassion for LGBTQ people facing unlawful and unprovoked legislative and personal attacks by his surrogates in Congress, school board meetings, and in the streets.

They will not have had their hearts broken by the abject horrors of the Epstein Files and moved to demand the unredacted contents be revealed so that accountability for every monster and justice for every survivor would come.

They will not have had some kind of miraculous Road to Emmaus spiritual awakening, realizing how many ways Trump has already violated the poor, withheld food from the hungry, visited injury on already suffering people, or urinated on the teachings of Jesus.

They will not be overtaken by some newfound responsibility as global citizens and feel a sudden rush of affinity for the persecuted people of Ukraine, or Gaza, or Iran, or Cuba.

No, the moment that will trigger any kind of oppositional response to Trump by Trump supporters is when the pain becomes personal.

As they abruptly lose their jobs, see their companies move overseas, watch their 401(k)s evaporate, reckon with the skyrocketing grocery and gas prices, find their own voices silenced, see their healthcare options dissolve, they will miraculously find themselves becoming the resistance.

Their rebellion will not be born out of true contrition for their damaging alliances, or genuine regret for being complicit in empowering a fascist, or a sincere desire to partner with the disparate human beings already united in saving our Republic and our planet.

When MAGA Americans finally realize that they, too, are victims of the criminality and predation they initially hoped would only be for those despised others (the immigrant, the gay, the brown, the black, the woke, the blue staters), then it will be a bridge too far. When their feet are finally put to the fire they wished upon so many others, suddenly immorality and overreach will be objectionable.

The moment they are jarred awake by the sobering truth that their whiteness and their party affiliation and their church attendance and their red hats won’t save them from the disaster they have helped create, then and only then will they care in the slightest bit.

I’d like to be wrong but sadly, I don’t believe I will be.

And though it will still be a small consolation to see a larger swath of this nation find out that this president’s sociopathy will spare no one, it would have been nice if they’d been internally transformed by love for their fellow human beings instead of just for themselves.

The real victory would have been if they’d been moved by self-examination and not just self-preservation.

I could have celebrated their empathy but I can’t celebrate their selfishness.

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Dear Supposedly Non-Racist White People in the United States,

You realize what’s happening right now, don’t you?

You have to see it at this point, right?

I mean, they’re not hiding it anymore.

This repugnant, racist President, his white supremacist party, and the soulless bigots he’s polluted the highest Court of our nation with aren’t even trying to pretend this is anything else but the desperation of morally inverted human beings who realize time and progress are coming to swallow them up.

They’ve read the writing on the wall ever since November of 2024. They’ve seen the changing demographics of this nation. They’ve witnessed the wild swings in the state and local elections away from them and their Draconian fever dreams. And they see the plummeting approval ratings of a deranged, lame duck President whose narcissism, recklessness, and incompetence are collapsing our economy, terrorizing vulnerable people, alienating our allies, and throwing the entire planet into chaos.

These dying white dinosaurs see the asteroid of humanity’s evolution coming for them, and in a naked act of panicked self-preservation, they are firing off one final Hail Mary salvo to try and stave off political extinction.

Republicans are furiously dismantling the provisions and protections of the Voting Rights Act for one reason: they assume that white voters will save them.

They believe that if they can silence the voices and the votes of Black people in this country, they will be able to drag this nation back to Jim Crow segregation unabated. They are banking on the hypothesis that if they legislate and gerrymander historically racial minorities out of the electoral process, they’ll have no remaining obstacles to a pre-Civil-Rights-Movement United States. It turns out the alleged "greatness” MAGA has been pining for over the past ten years is a gated community of ignorant, phobic white people.

The Republican Party is going all-in on the assumption that people who share their pigmentation also share their corroded hearts; that we will amen their repulsive aspirations and cosign their depraved delusions.

And we’re going to have to be the ones to reclaim this nation for the disparate multitude it was always supposed to belong to.

This existential crisis facing us is not a Black problem, or a Latino problem, or a brown-skinned immigrants problem. This is a decent-white-people-who-are-sick-to-their-f****n’-stomachs-of-white-racists, problem. The rights of people of color must be the hill we take and are willing to die on, lest our fragile, imperiled Republic dies instead.

These unapologetically racist machinations and shameful civil rights regressions authored by our low-melanin brethren, as alarming as they are, are an invitation to the rest of us. We have a golden moment to declare our conscientious objections to their uncivil war on people of color, to forcefully and permanently bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice, and to send these sneering supremacists back to the hell that they came from once and for all.

And this all must be done now. We cannot squander time navel-gazing, engaging in prolonged lamentations, or trying to predict how bad things will get. We need to throw ourselves into the trenches of local politics. We need to leverage our social circles, economic resources, and social media platforms to denounce white Christian nationalism. And perhaps, most importantly, we need to get into the faces of the white people in our orbits and let them know that these are the moments to declare who they truly are.

We cannot profess to be anti-racist and be silent right now. We either need to find and raise our voices in opposition or admit that we really aren’t all that interested in equality, that our activism has been performative, that our convictions aren’t worth much to us.

Because there will be costs to this work, white friends. We will face separations in our families, disruptions to our social circles, disconnections from our church friends, and relational turbulence we’ve never experienced. There will be financial repercussions, the loss of opportunities, and the dissolution of partnerships. We may face the emotional and perhaps even physical violence of people who look like us but bear no internal resemblance.

We’re going to lose something as we confront the racists around us, but it’s a hell of a lot better than losing our Democracy or our souls.

The Republican Party believes that other white people will save them.

Instead, we must be the ones to defeat and destroy them.

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Watching the Right assembling online with virtual torches and pitchforks, engaging in wild histrionics and performative pearl-clutching, while calling for the head of television host Jimmy Kimmel, one has to marvel at his rank-and-file’s steadfast ability to defy reality.

It’s staggering when you compare the man they’re crusading against and the one they’re emotionally tethered to…

Jimmy Kimmel isn’t responsible for the deaths of countless people.

Donald Trump is.

Jimmy Kimmel isn’t a court-adjudicated rapist.

Donald Trump is.

Jimmy Kimmel isn’t a 34-count felon.

Donald Trump is.

Jimmy Kimmel didn’t incite a violent insurrection at our nation’s Capitol in an effort to overturn a free and fair election, harm members of Congress, and prevent a peaceful transfer of power.

Donald Trump did.

Jimmy Kimmel’s name isn’t listed tens of thousands of times in the Epstein Files.

Donald Trump’s is.

Jimmy Kimmel doesn’t have dozens of credible sexual assault accusations.

Donald Trump does.

Jimmy Kimmel didn’t threaten an entire civilization with destruction.

Donald Trump did.

Jimmy Kimmel didn’t bomb a girl’s school in Iran.

Donald Trump has.

Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t partnered in multiple genocides.

Donald Trump has.

Jimmy Kimmel isn’t fighting to deport the children of migrants.

Donald Trump is.

Jimmy Kimmel isn’t trying to legislate Draconian Evangelical religion.

Donald Trump is.

Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t caused pregnant women to die in emergency rooms because their doctors could not save their lives.

Donald Trump has.

Jimmy Kimmel isn’t partnering with the NRA and gunmakers while doing nothing to protect high school kids from getting butchered in their hallways.

Donald Trump is.

Jimmy Kimmel isn’t causing Transgender people to move out of the country for their safety.

Donald Trump is.

Jimmy Kimmel never stood before the nation and said that immigrants were eating people’s pets.

Donald Trump did.

Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t called for the executions of U.S. Presidents and opposing politicians.

Donald Trump has.

Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t put 500 million dollars from stolen oil reserves into an offshore bank account.

Donald Trump has.

Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t compared himself to Jesus.

Donald Trump has.

Jimmy Kimmel isn’t dismantling our Department of Education.

Donald Trump is.

Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t alienated our nation’s greatest allies.

Donald Trump has.

Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t gone to war against the Free Press.

Donald Trump has.

Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t sent an army of masked thugs to terrorize people of color in their churches, businesses, streets, and homes.

Donald Trump has.

Jimmy Kimmel didn’t cancel USAID, already killing thousands of the most vulnerable on the planet.

Donald Trump did.

Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t emboldened racists to verbally and physically assault people of color on trains, in coffee shops, and in their own yards.Donald Trump has.

Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t partnered with techbros and oligarchs to curate the media and gain access to Americans’ personal data.

Donald Trump has.

Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t consolidated our nation’s wealth into the hands of the wealthiest among us.

Donald Trump has.

Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t spent the last decade tearing apart every principle, system, and institution designed to make this nation safer, to care for our most vulnerable, and to protect every human being’s inalienable rights.

Donald Trump has.

Jimmy Kimmel will not be remembered among the most violent and destructive human beings in our planet’s history.

Donald Trump will.

So yeah, the mindless MAGA zombie horde can engage in feigned outrage and call for the head of Jimmy Kimmel as if he were some terrible scourge upon this nation, while carrying water for a vile, traitorous career criminal and serial predator who has complete contempt for them, the United States, and, honestly, everyone but himself.

The rest of us, the people with a capacity for critical thinking and working empathy, the Christians who care about the teachings of Jesus, and those who truly love this land and its disparate people, know exactly who the true danger here is.

And we stand with Jimmy Kimmel.

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We’re all getting contact insanity from proximity to this violent, kleptocratic Administration.

There is no way for otherwise mentally well, emotionally stable human beings to exist in this kind of prolonged lunacy and extended predation without being internally altered, without losing some sense of normalcy, without developing a persistent PTSD that will likely never leave.

It’s understandable. We are all sharing our home with an unhinged cadre of miserable doomsday cult squatters who will not rest until everyone around them is as nihilistic and devoid of joy as they are.

The toxic cocktail of boundless hatred, prolific malfeasance, and breathtaking incompetence that they continually day drink from spills over into the lives of those of us who still wake up every morning just hoping to do our work, care for our families, help people, and enjoy human existence without having to contend with full-blown Armageddon.

No event comes without chaos, no day arrives free from existential catastrophe, no consequential moment is not leveraged to divide. For the last ten years, everything has been a fraud, a grift, a con, or a weapon, manufactured and stewarded by a collection of broken people who’ve found affinity in their greed, narcissism, and refusal to do the work of self-examination.

Combine this carefully curated chaos with incessant attacks on the media, dubious dissemination of information following emergencies, and never-clear investigatory procedures in their aftermath, and every single moment of crisis is made exponentially worse.

This week has been no exception.

Within nanoseconds of a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, hundreds of MAGA influencers, Right-Wing talk show hosts, and Republican politicians began saturation bombing social media with a single message:This is why we need Trump’s ballroom.Uh, what?

Conservative influencers were still livestreaming from the site of an alleged assassination attempt on the President and Cabinet, in a monumental breach of what should be the absolute tightest of safety protocols—and the wave of propaganda and disinformation flooded our newsfeeds.Not gratitude for the incident ending without death.Not concerns for the safety and well-being of hundreds of people.Not efforts to bring clarity to the bedlam of yet another supposed targeting of a President.Such things would be the hallmarks of a collective not addled by cultic tribalism and possessing working empathy. They would have defined any other Administration in this nation’s history.

In the wake of the WHCD, as in every other time of national unease, what we get from Trump, from his soulless surrogates, and his wish-they-were-bots-but-sadly-they’re-actual people, is nonsense and buffoonery.

Instead of factual information, calm-headed discourse, and calls for unity, we get a coordinated virtual building campaign for another bloated, opulent, gold-plated monument to a cognitively-addled felon-rapist, who is rapidly losing his battle with time and gravity and wants to desecrate everything he can with his likeness before departing.

Trump’s cultivated mass delusion has permanently damaged tens of millions of people around us who quite likely would have been reasonable right now if not for having developed Stockholm syndrome and becoming emotionally tethered to their greatest abuser. Their identities and destinies are now inextricably bound to his.

And my friends, that leaves the rest of us; the sleep-deprived, heartbroken, rightfully furious human beings to try and hold onto our right minds while being immersed in the insane, the profane, and the cruel, by people who have nothing else to offer.

And our individual and collective sanity is non-negotiable if we are to withstand this steady onslaught of chaos, be effective in reversing our political realities, and course correct from the greatest error in our nation’s history.

Resist the pull of their nonsensical rage bait, do your best to avoid being distracted by their incendiary bombast, and do not be drawn into debate with people who have abandoned sense and benevolence.

Find times of rest and clarity, taking refuge in stillness and solitude.Care for your physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional health. Create beautiful things, cultivate gratitude, and fight like hell to stay joyful.Immerse yourself in meaningful community with your like-hearted neighbors. Partner in the redemptive, neighbor-loving work happening where you are.

And above all, refuse to let your mind descend into the spinning maelstrom of madness that has swallowed so many around us. We can’t afford to lose our heads or our souls right now.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I’ve become a restless, reluctant nomad moving through familiar places with a nagging internal dissonance.

I am a lifelong American who is profoundly disoriented trying to navigate this nation now.

I was born here and have spent most of my life here, and yet for a while now, I’ve begun to feel more and more like a stranger in my homeland.

There are dozens, sometimes hundreds of moments in a given day when I look around, and I simply don’t recognize this place anymore. It all seems terrifyingly foreign.

Waking up every morning and walking out into this version of my country is that bittersweet experience of expectantly visiting the town you grew up in as a child, feeling the rapid deflation as you note the changed landscape and strain to see the familiar places you used to know well and feel at home in.Yes, it’s still a version of the familiar, with quick glimpses here and there to momentarily ground and reconnect you, but so much seems missing and so much feels different that you begin to grieve the alterations that have taken place because of how much appears gone for good. You realize you miss the idea of home rather than the reality of it.

I’ve found myself frantically searching for old familiar landmarks to try and ground myself again: family, neighborhood, community, church, nation—but these have all been renovated to the point of being almost completely obscured by the garish facades in their place; newly fashionable malevolence, bitterness, and cruelty.

See, that’s the thing: it isn’t that the physical landscape has changed. There are so many people I do not recognize anymore; people whose lives I used to call home, people I once found easy affinity with, people who now make me feel newly orphaned.

I’m unsettled and distanced in their presence; estranged from them because of what I’ve discovered about their hearts, what I’ve heard out of their mouths, what I am realizing about our new (or perhaps newly revealed) moral incompatibility.

They are the America that I am most disheartened to bear witness to. They are the greatest source of my lostness. They are why I wander here.

Maybe this was never the place I thought it was. That image is likely just the selective memory or the idealized version of it all as filtered through a younger, more naive, less aware, more optimistic version of myself. Still, the sense of loss is the same, the grief as crushing.

Part of me wants to leave altogether, to go and make a new home somewhere else that might feel more aligned with this iteration of who I am, but that would feel like surrender; it would be admitting a defeat that I am still not yet ready to consent to. I still have dreams of what this place can be: not a mythical land born of ignorant nostalgia but a tangible incarnation of the best of its stated aspirations.

Right now, the best thing I know to do is to keep my eyes open for the other restless, reluctant nomads; to look for those who, too, feel lost here but who are still stumbling through increasingly unfamiliar surroundings, trying to manifest quiet goodness in the middle of the loud, sickening march toward national greatness.I’ll keep seeking out those compassionate, generous, open-hearted sojourners who also no longer feel at home here, and together we will shepherd humanity through these days, and we will be rebuilders.

We will make an America where compassion is our greatest calling.

We’ll make an America where diversity is celebrated.

We’ll make an America where religion isn’t wielded like a weapon.

We’ll make an America where no one goes without.

We’ll make an America that is big enough for everyone who wishes to call it home.

We’ll make an America where no one has to go elsewhere to find refuge or respect.

Fashioning the nation we could be out of the nation we are seems impossible, but I still feel it’s worth trying, because I know I am not alone in my disorientation.

I am surrounded by similarly heartbroken human beings, who are also here in this thick, heavy darkness, passionately stumbling toward the light of what we might still be.

And because of them, though I am an American who is lost in America, I am not yet ready to lose America.Where do you feel that sense of lostness I talk about? What helps you feel connected? What keeps you going? Let me know in the comments.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Lately, I’ve been getting sick of bad news.

More accurately, I’ve been getting sick from bad news.

And not figuratively or metaphorically sick, either. I mean that it’s been making me physically ill: showing up in ever-present headaches, a permanently clenched jaw, an enduring knot in the pit of my stomach, and a continual fight-or-flight, full-body Cortisol tsunami.

I imagine you understand some of these symptoms of information sickness. That’s largely been the story for most of us for the past 15 months (hell, more like the last ten years): feeling like the bad news is unending. And to some degree, this has been true, but have we also allowed ourselves to believe the mythology of our newsfeeds, internal editors, and worst-case scenario minds?

A few days ago, I realized that I was doing something I’ve spent years warning people not to do. I’d fallen into the trap of negatively editorializing the information in front of me; of deciding whether it was bad or good (usually determining that it was the former), and letting that decision shape the story I told myself.

Maybe you’ve been guilty of that lately, too: of putting a negative slant on the headlines in your head. It’s easy to do.

We are a people who live inside a story, and we are the narrators of that story. The world moves, people do things, events take place, and we decide what all that means, and our emotions and perspective flow from them.

This week, I thought of a piece of Christian Scripture from my pastor days. At this point in my life, I’ve recontextualized the Bible, and many passages no longer resonate in the same way they once did, but there are still ideas and phrases that can be incredibly meaningful, simply as concepts.

In the New Testament, there is a section of the book of Romans, which is purported to be a letter written by a pastor named Paul to the Jesus followers in house churches in Rome during the first century. The writer is encouraging his audience to remember how important their presence and work were regarding the spreading of the Gospel (which actually means “good news”).

He closes this portion of the letter by quoting an Old Testament prophet, writing, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news.” (10:15)

Regardless of our theology or religious worldview, what a wonderful idea this is: a reminder to all of us to think about the news our feet bring to the places we travel every day, the people we cross paths with, and the stuff we post on social media. Take away the trending stories, the alarming updates, the disturbing realities, and we are still sentient human beings who have choices to make about how we spend our time, our resources, our energy. We still have freedom, decisions, and options in front of us.

Without even needing to attach it to religion, there is a gospel (good news) according to you. What are you evangelizing? What are the headlines in your head? Is hopelessness trending there?

We can easily begin believing the angry, fearful people are the majority; that their hateful hearts are humanity’s default, that everything has gone to hell; that all the news is breaking badly.

If you feel that way, friend, stop it. This is a lie, and I think deep down, you know it.

The good news-bringers are literally everywhere right now: showing compassion to strangers, doing small, unseen acts of decency, toiling humbly in anonymity, living generously toward people, loving counterintuitively.When we tell ourselves a story of everything is awful, all is lost, and we’re irreparably and permanently screwed, we’re doing a terrible injustice to the tens of millions of people who at any given moment are working to craft a more beautiful planet; people who are doing micro acts of kindness, standing up to bullies, opposing legislation, finding and using their voices, and showing up in the places of pain and injustice and need.

There is glorious, heartwarming, defiantly human work being done all around you in this very moment, and if you could get yourself to see it, hope would be involuntary.No, we can’t avoid the bad news. We can’t fast-forward through the difficult things, we can’t sidestep the painful, and we can’t get around the suffering and the sadness in this life. What we can do is respond in such a way that we bring something with us into our daily journeys: we can bring kindness, courage, creativity, and consistency.

I don’t want you to deny the sorrow is there, or to minimize the very real dangers, or to pretend many things aren’t in many ways quite awful. But I do want you to allow a dissenting opinion in, because it deserves to be heard. I want you to have a passionate rebuttal to the prophets of doom who forecast an irreversible course into the abyss, especially when their voices sound like your own.The world needs some good news now.Give it some.Be good news-bringers.May we have beautiful feet.

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Other times, you feel the need to repent for the sins of others’ present.

I suppose I have a foot on each of these paths lately.

I’ve spent a good portion of the past three decades pastoring in predominantly white churches along the East Coast of the United States. They ranged from tiny, unassuming wooden chapels to massive, gleaming megachurches; from hymn-and-robe traditionalism to modern rock show bombast.

Although my theology has shifted substantially in the years since I first stepped into a pulpit or onto a platform, and I’ve long ago put local church ministry in my rearview mirror, I still possess a massive trove of treasures from those years. I was part of meaningful, creative work that I did with great care, I had the privilege of walking with people through the celebrations and devastations of life, and I did so while being held within communities filled with people who genuinely loved me—at least up until the point they didn’t or couldn’t.

I’ve often said that organized religion and organized crime are frighteningly similar: when you’re on the inside, you’re warmly embraced and fiercely protected, but the moment you deviate from the party line, it’s concrete shoes and horse heads in the bed (or, maybe a condescending Facebook post lamenting your eventual miserable afterlife of weeping and teeth-gnashing).

One of the things most people don’t tell you about pastoral ministry is how political a job it is; the number of people you end up trying to placate and please, the small compromises you end up making in a noble attempt to keep an always-tenuous peace among a (hopefully) diverse group, and the way you can easily become beholden to those you are entrusted to shepherd.

All but the last of my churches I left voluntarily, and on good terms, and in that final instance, I had knowingly preached myself out of a job because I refused to make the concessions that I’d previously settled with. Still, I imagine at the time, even most of the congregants there would have told you they respected me and valued my voice. At the very least, I believed they and the tens of thousands of people in the communities I’d departed would have found commonality with me in the worth of every human being, the beauty of diversity, and the teachings of Jesus.That was, of course, until 2016, when hundreds of people in those churches slowly began changing, or maybe they simply began revealing who they truly were all along. Their rigid theological stances were now up for debate, their once-sharply defined ethical lines all softened, and the previously fixed moral goalposts began moving. Ever since, as a minister who genuinely hoped he’d helped people in my care expand their circles of their compassion, jettison toxic theology, and emulate the generous heart of Jesus, I’ve felt a creeping sense of failure.

Social media often allows you to stay virtually connected to people long after you’re geographically or relationally tethered to them. You may not even realize you are still attached at all, until the almighty algorithm suddenly thrusts them in front of you, and you find yourself saying two things to yourself: one, I totally forgot about them, and two, what the hell happened to them?

Every day for the last decade on social media, I’ve seen pastors I served alongside, selfless volunteers from my youth ministries, former students I ministered to who are now grown, and thousands of people from those congregations all fall into the mindless, joyless, death cult for a vile, belligerent serial predator. I’ve watched from a distance as they’ve violently crusaded against transgender people, spewed anti-immigrant vitriol, amplified baseless anti-Science propaganda, and inexplicably rejoiced in trauma to their neighbors.

And even though I know that many of these people had been steeped for years in poisonous, rigid doctrine before I ever crossed paths with them, and that they walked through the doors of my churches carrying the crushing hidden burdens of the voices who spoke hatred into their hearts by their parents and pastors before they could even read—still, I’ve felt partly responsible:Was I not clear enough in my messaging?Did I pull too many punches because I was afraid of the turbulence?Was I too blinded by privilege, self-preservation, or hubris to notice the flimsy veneer of religion covering something rotten underneath?As their pastor, could I have done anything to keep them from throwing Jesus in the garbage and falling prostrate before a monstrous parasite and his miserable movement?

These are impossible questions to answer, of course, just as the ones we’re asking as friends, spouses, partners, parents, children, and siblings are, of those we no longer recognize. I guess we’re all trying to figure out where everything went sideways. Maybe the reality of who the people we’ve loved have become, the ugliness they’ve embraced, the darkness of their hearts, and the damage they’ve shown themselves capable of was all so unthinkable that we couldn’t have prepared for or prevented it. Maybe they were always going to end up here, no matter what we said or did.

But now that we’re here, as a former pastor who every single day sees the sprawling, predatory, hateful congregation so many I ministered to have willfully joined, I only feel a deep grief and the need to apologize to a hurting, heartbroken, and fractured world, for the loveless people from the churches I served who apparently missed the entire damn point.

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And getting through is a heartbreaking slog right now.

Now, I can’t quantify it, but I’m a firm believer that things really went to hell here after Prince died. A decade ago, losing both him and David Bowie within a couple of months was a collective gut punch I don’t think we’ve ever fully recovered from. I know I haven’t.

Over the past year, watching this fascist regime’s relentless assaults on his beloved Minneapolis, I’ve often thought to myself, “Prince wouldn’t have stood for this s**t.” I wonder how he would be using his platform right now, and pulling his community together, and singing truth to power. He damn sure wouldn’t be silent.

A year before his passing, the Purple One released ‘Baltimore,’ a song lamenting the murders of Freddie Gray and Michael Brown by police, and the escalating violence and unrest in America, writing:

Nobody got in nobody’s waySo eye guess u could sayIt was a good dayAt least a little better than the day in BaltimoreDoes anybody hear us pray?4 Michael Brown or Freddie Gray?

While it’s been a beautiful thing seeing Bruce Springsteen, U2, Florence and the Machine, The Strokes, and so many others making art and launching tours to confront corrupt power, oppose violent bigotry, and call Americans to a higher level, Prince would have hit different. He always did.

I had the good fortune of seeing Prince close to a dozen times. These were, for me, spiritual experiences in the truest sense of the word: joy, liberation, unity, love, euphoria. It was baptism in blistering guitar, heavenly choirs of strangers, holy ground as a dance floor.

As he sang, Strangely beautiful, beautiful strange.

The first time I saw Prince at Philadelphia’s Tower Theater, I can remember standing wedged inside a sweaty, pulsing, kaleidoscopic mass of humanity, thinking: “These are my people!” I’d found my place.

Among a myriad of gifts, this was the solitary magic of Prince. He brought completely disparate groups of people together and made them feel they fit. He transcended musical genres, broke through color lines, and challenged gender roles. He boldly declared the dance floor big enough for all of us. And in that free and joyful place, we all danced.

When you were at a Prince show, you belonged. You were the right color, the right shape, the right religion, the right you. And in that space, you felt at home in your own skin and connected to those around you in ways that defy explanation. As much as anything right now, America could use those joyous nightly reminders of how many good people are still here and what we can still do together.

Prince gave me much more than hundreds of songs that altered my path and lifted my spirits.He showed me that masculinity and femininity could inhabit the same space and be embodied in people simultaneously.He made me realize that I could love God while being a complete contradiction. He showed me that spirituality and sexuality weren’t divergent endeavors, but equally beautiful experiences of the Divine.He taught me that friends don’t let friends clap on the one and three.He showed me that humanity’s differences are where the glorious stuff is.And he showed me that sometimes all you need is a funky beat and some friends who set you free.

Ten years after his passing, Prince’s artistic absence is palpable. As a singer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, producer, and dancer, he will forever be without peer; an artistic force of nature, the likes of which we had never seen, and will never see again. The talent, creativity, passion, and light that he left this planet with cannot be measured.

Prince gave me more joy than I can properly express. His music provided me with a place that felt like mine, but never made me feel alone. His shows gave me an occasional three-hour experience of Heaven coming down. As he sang in Uptown: “Black, White, Puerto Rican, everybody just a freakin’...good times were rollin’.” I miss standing in that space; that one where the world could sing one beautiful song together.

Yeah, the threats we’re facing are more complicated than a pop song, and no, life isn’t like a Prince concert, though maybe it should be. There is something defiantly subversive about collective joy. Prince reminded us that we need to fight hatred, but we can’t stop dancing, either.

To all my fellow freaks who are grieving the place we call home and feeling devoid of light; to all the misfits, outcasts, and weirdos out there who find solidarity in their oddness and who want to make sure everybody gets to join the party:

May all your berets be raspberry.May all your corvettes be red.May all your rain be purple.

And if De-elevator tries to bring you down,go crazy, punch a higher floor.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Vance actually had the stratospheric gall to say with a straight face that the Pope “should stick to issues of morality.”

This is an unintentional confession by the Vice President that shows just how useless his religion is, how oblivious he is to the teachings of Jesus, and how little morality matters to him.

Now, let’s set aside the fact that Vance spends his waking days emotional pleasuring, genuflecting before, and joyfully doing the bidding of a man he himself not long ago compared to Hitler: a court-adjudicated rapist and 34-count felon indicted several times for high crimes; a man whose racism, misogyny, and contempt for humanity are boundless. The theological gymnastics he needs to do, and the self-delusion required to reconcile his subservience to Trump with his profession of faith, aren’t things we have time to unpack right now.

I’m not sure exactly what moral issues he believes the Pope should keep himself to; exactly what specific lane he’s suggesting he stay in, but the Vice President seems to believe there’s a whole lot that doesn’t make the cut.

To Vance:The intentional bombing of school children isn’t a moral issue.Fully partnering in a genocide isn’t a moral issue.Destroying one of the world’s oldest cultures to distract from a single serial predator’s sexual crimes isn’t a moral issue.Dragging the entire planet into the existential chaos of a deadly, unprovoked, unnecessary war isn’t a moral issue.

But that’s not all…

The list of what lies outside the bounds of the Vice President’s morality is expansive and ever-growing:- the violent invasion of foreign countries for oil, real estate, and the benefit of billionaires.- the cutting of power to an entire country in an effort to strong-arm them into submission by starving their people.- the deployment of masked, Gestapo-esque thugs, ravaging the streets and preying upon people with brown skin.- the beating, kidnapping, imprisonment, and deportation of people without due process or just cause.- the wiping out of billions of dollars in aid for the hungry, the sick, the disabled, the vulnerable.

Which all begs the questions: Just what the hell is JD Vance’s working morality, anyway? How exactly does that Catholicism he never shuts up about show up in his life, his choices, his work?What did he think Jesus was actually doing 2,000 years ago?

Any professed Christian with even a mustard seed of integrity understands what the Pope understands: if our personal faith convictions don’t compel us to feed the hungry, care for the poor, defend the vulnerable, confront racism, oppose bloodshed, and stand up to corrupt power—they’re crap.

Jesus spent his life and ministry showing his followers that everything was spiritual; that the greatest commandment to love one’s neighbor meant that nothing was off the table. This means that healthcare, education, war, the environment, human rights, body autonomy, and food scarcity are precisely the places where our personal morality needs to show up, because people’s health and safety and survival are moral issues.

Vance, as well as Franklin Graham, Paula White, Sean Hannity, and the sprawling cadre of Christian cosplayers who clutch their pearls at the Pope supposedly meddling in politics, don’t see the irony of engaging in these performative lamentations while dragging the U.S. into a full-blown white Christian Nationalist Theocracy.

They have no issue presiding over this twisted shotgun wedding between Church and State, legislating their perverted, supremacist theology for the rest of us, and brutalizing the poor, sick, foreign, and vulnerable in the name of a Jesus they frankly don’t give a s**t about.

JD Vance doesn’t want the Pope to stick to moral issues; he wants the Pope to stop reminding the world that JD Vance and his party have no morality to speak of, no working theology of benevolence, no desire whatsoever to love their neighbors.

They want a Christianity without Jesus, so they can destroy everything he spent his life saving.

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Warning: Content references sexual assault and may be triggering to survivors.

There are days when you come upon something that shakes you to your core, a reality that is so antithetical to humanity, so sickening in its perversion, that you feel your guts twisting around themselves, your face heating, your blood pressure skyrocketing.

I’m still not sure how to process this, but I’m trying, because it’s something that, as a man, I know has to be reckoned with.

CNN has exposed the existence of what they describe as a massive online “rape academy”, where men from around the world gather on group chats and message boards to encourage and celebrate the drugging, recording, and sexual assault of their wives and partners for the pleasure of other similarly depraved men.

They describe a sprawling virtual horror scape filled with husbands, partners, fiancés, and boyfriends violating the bodies, the trust, and the privacy of the women they share a home, a family, and a bed with.

These sites sit under the ghastly umbrella of what is termed “sleep content”, featuring the abuse of sleeping or medically-incapacitated women, with hundreds of thousands of posts dedicated to the procurement and administering of drugs enabling these unthinkable acts. Just one of the websites, which draws primarily from an American audience, received 62 million views in a single month this year alone.

That kind of widespread degeneracy is almost unfathomable, but maybe that’s because I’m a man. As unimaginably repugnant as the reality of this curated collective sickness is, I have a feeling it’s probably not shocking to most of the women who’ve read about it this week.

They likely aren’t all that surprised.

For decades, the women in my life and those I’ve met doing this work have shared the ever-present fear that comes from realizing you are always a potential target of violence, always on alert, always within arm’s reach of harm, always in the company of danger.

They know they aren’t safe when they jog on greenways. They aren’t safe when they’re walking to their cars at night. They aren’t safe at on-campus parties.They aren’t safe when grabbing a drink with co-workers. They aren’t safe while they’re working out.They aren’t safe when on vacation.

As a man, I can’t fathom the way such realities shape your worldview, renovate your identity, alter your behavior, and hover like a dark cloud in the background operating system of your mind.

But to realize that you may not even be safe when you’re in bed, asleep with a man you’ve built a life with, shared your heart with, revealed your dreams to, had children with; someone you’ve walked through illness and joy and grief alongside—that must be an atomic bomb to the psyche. The emotional devastation of such a revelation seems irreparable.

And as enormous as the crimes CNN has uncovered are, they have even wider implications, as it isn’t only these women who are impacted by this grotesque corner of the manosphere.

It is the middle school girls in the classrooms where these monstrous men teach. It’s the young women pulled over in late-night traffic stops by the officers who frequent these websites after work. It’s the recent college graduate whose new boss spends his free time watching the violation of strangers’ wives. It’s the daughters being raised by fathers who see women as less-than human, who find pleasure in their degradation. It is the boys and young men whose father figures, mentors, coaches, teachers, and idols have such disregard for women that they see violence against them as entertainment content.

Where do we even begin to dismantle such accepted brutality and confront this male-pattern inhumanity?

I confess I’m not quite sure. What I do know is that women don’t need to answer this question; men do, all of us: the monsters who haunt the blackest spaces of the dark web, the internally broken men who are capable of exploiting and injuring their loved ones, the guys who share cubicles, locker rooms, hedgerows, and family gatherings with them, whether they know it or not.

In fact, fixing this collective moral male cancer is firmly on the shoulders of the “not all men” men, who swear they abhor these “rape academies,” and everything they uncover about us as a species.

The brothers, sons, fathers, grandfathers, boyfriends, fiancés, and husbands on this planet who truly aspire to be men of decency, of conscience, of morality, are going to need to become the loudest advocates for the women we share this space and time with.

We who tell ourselves we’re the good guys are going to need to get in the faces of the men in our orbits and let them know where we stand, what we will not accept, and how unwelcome the dehumanization of women is; in tossed off comments, in casual jokes, in perverted theology, in misogynistic policy, and in violence of any kind.

The battle for the soul and the collective conscience of men isn’t going to be won by women, as they shouldn’t need to convince anyone of their inherent worth and beauty. That simply is.

This war has to be won by men who are sick to their stomachs by what we’ve become, and who refuse to let any other man off the hook for the shared mess we’ve made here, whether in our actions or inactions, our words or our silences.

Women deserve to be safe in parks and schools and gyms and nightclubs, and definitely in their homes and their beds.

That day may eventually come, though sadly, it will not be soon.

Until then, women are right to choose the bear.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The first Christians didn’t call themselves Christians.

It wasn’t some congratulatory self-identifier as it is today; a way of loudly trumpeting one’s own supposed goodness, quickly slapped on social media bios, bumper stickers, and t-shirts without forethought, personal cost, or empirical evidence. It wasn’t about a place you visited for an hour on Sunday before Cracker Barrel, either.

The term Christian was originally a designation of the community of people following Jesus, by those outside of it after his death. It was quite likely a slur; a scarlet letter attached to a marginalized group who’d traded comfortable alignment with Caesar for dangerous devotion to a compassionate itinerant Hebrew street preacher from Nazareth.

In the formidable Roman Empire in which it was born, Jesus’ movement was fully countercultural; shunning its power and material wealth, breaking its barriers between the important and the inconsequential, fighting the stereotypes of the in and the out.

The people of Jesus were the table-setters, the wound-menders, and the wall-breakers.

These “little Christs,” as they were called, were derided by outsiders because the expansive, diverse, interdependent community they were creating stood in such opposition to Rome’s singular, top-heavy, trickle-down might, and their generous presence created turbulence there.

Being called a Christian then meant ridicule, threat, and oppression from the Government and the religious leaders. It wasn’t a cheap decal people adorned themselves with to declare their own righteousness; it was applied to them by powerful people who despised them.

Trump Christians wouldn’t be called Christians by these people; they would be called Romans, and those following Jesus then wouldn’t recognize people supporting this President now as their spiritual descendants.

There would be no bloodline to trace, no affinities to note, no visible family resemblance.

Christians then destroyed social barriers between people; they didn’t fortify them.Christians then, welcomed the marginalized and vulnerable; they didn’t harass them at school or in hospital rooms or on street corners.Christians then healed the sick and fed the hungry and clothed the naked; they didn’t resent them, malign their character, or leave them to die.Christians then pushed back against the corrupt power hoarding wealth; they didn’t partner with it.Christians then loved their disparate neighbors as themselves; they didn’t wall them off and lock them in cages and send them away.

People aligned with a Jesus who said “Let the children come to me and do not hinder them”, would have been fully sickened seeing families separated, children ravaged by genocide, students being murdered in their schools

People emulating to a Jesus who said, “You cannot serve both God and money”—wouldn’t be overlooking rape, corruption, and bigotry just to pad their 401ks or get a few tax breaks.

People synonymous with a Jesus who fed a hillside multitude, not because they were right or saved or moral, but because they were hungry, wouldn’t recognize a “pull yourself by your own bootstraps” callousness toward those in need.People associated with a Jesus who touched lepers and healed the sick wouldn’t be able to comprehend professed believers who penalized people for preexisting conditions, or forced people to go bankrupt to pay their medical bills, or made staying alive a financial death sentence.

Most of all, people connected to Jesus weren’t tripping over themselves to publicly claim their Christlikeness. Other people decided that.

Religious people currently supporting this President can label themselves any way they want.

They can imagine themselves sanctified while perpetuating something that far more resembles Caesar of Rome than Jesus of Nazareth.

They can try and retrofit Jesus’ Christianity to the bloated, self-aggrandizing, malevolent Empire they’re currently wallowing in.

They can try and bastardize Jesus’ expansive “For God so loved the world“ purpose statement, into a walled-off, gated white community “America First” rally slogan.

They can even preach the angry gospel of white nationalism and contempt for outsiders, and call themselves Christian while doing so.

But no one in the time of Jesus would be calling them Christian.

Not the Romans.Not the Christ followers.Most of all, not Jesus.

He said, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” John 13:35

Outside of the narrowest segment of straight, white, Republican Americans, MAGA faithful have no love to offer.

The first Christians were labeled Christians because they emulated Christ, in all his compassionate, kind, loving, healing, welcoming, border-breaching, barrier-busting goodness.

Conservative Evangelicals emulate someone antithetical to all of these things.

Technically speaking, of course, given the origins of the word, maybe none of us should claim to be Christian and just see if people can reverse engineer our beliefs by our actions, but if we’re going to, we should at least seek some kind of spiritual synergy between our lives and the life of Jesus revealed in the Gospels.

MAGA believers may be self-identified Christians, but from the outside, the title is fraudulent.They aren’t “Little Christs.”They aren’t “followers of the Way.”They aren’t even Evangelicals, as they have no good news to bring for the poor, imprisoned, and vulnerable.They aren’t peacemakers.They aren’t caregivers.They aren’t healers.

They are simply “Little Trumps”: reflecting his heartlessness, his cruelty, his self-reverential narcissism.

In that God of arrogance and greed and malice, they truly trust.

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He reposted an AI-slop, pseudo-Baroque, Jesus-coded conservative fever-dream fresco of himself in a flowing red and white robe, his glowing hand resting over the forehead of a stricken male, while flanked by a series of awestruck, reverent figures, each one whiter than the other.

A rockets’ red glare hodgepodge of cheesy, street corner souvenir shop American iconography (including some bizarre video-game, science-fiction alien army) sits above Trump, like a radiant crown of divine approval.

As always, the failing, flailing president thought it would be a much-needed easy win: something he could impulsively lob into the ether without consequence; something to fully own the Libs and titillate his cultic devotees.

Things didn’t go as he planned.

In a week where Trump was tripling down on his ill-conceived attacks on Pope Leo for the Pontiff’s criticisms of the illegal and immoral war in Iran (and his annoying habit of quoting Jesus), this self-aggrandizing bit of messiah porn proved too much, even for many of Trump’s sycophantic disciples. Members of the clergy, Republican politicians, Conservative talk-show hosts, MAGA influencers, and a larger-than-normal portion of his historically obedient rank-and-file voiced their displeasure at such unabashed heresy.

Things got so bad that in what should have been another curated self-serving photo op for Trump in front of the White House, he ended up facing reporters’ questions about the meme. Clearly rattled by the pushback, the lame-duck wanna-be despot responded by suggesting that he thought the image was of him as a doctor healing a man, and then invoked the Red Cross… for some reason.

Outside of the most cultic of his supporters, nobody was buying it.

The Internet, which once again remains undefeated, responded with an unrelenting tsunami of ridicule, the likes of which we haven’t seen… well, since No King’s Day. Over the past twenty-four hours, my social media feed has been filled with gut-busting mockery of Trump’s delusional propaganda and his flimsy attempts to cover his own assets when he failed to read the room.

The sarcasm has been thick; the skewering, merciless; the satire, scathing. It’s been cathartic to joy-scroll through and laugh mightily at Trump’s expense, but more than that, the jokes reveal how close this aspiring fascist regime is to crumbling, while reminding us of the subversive power of laughter.

Authoritarians are, at their core, narcissists, and all narcissists crave adoration. Reverence is their lifeblood, accolades the air they breathe. Outwardly overconfident but internally fragile, more than having their names on currency, grand ballrooms, or opulent public monuments, they subsist on the praise and flattery of others.

Trump may be the most miserable, needy, and delicate of history’s recent tyrants, and finding himself in the crosshairs of pubic scorn undoubtedly rattles him. He so desires the accolades of strangers that when he is instead met with derision, he falls apart, unable to relate to human beings who are not genuflecting before him. Ridicule is his kryptonite.

This is the path forward.

Yes, we will need to continue to organize politically, to form broad coalitions of opposition, to wield our financial influence. We will need to marshal our collective power in securing free elections in the Fall, protect our vulnerable neighbors, condemn unjust wars, and resist civil and human rights rollbacks. We need to do the difficult, costly, exhausting, and painful work of resisting this very real threat to our Republic.

But we can’t forget that it is our joy that makes us different.

Our ability to laugh at this man and his movement isn’t just a defense mechanism staving off hopelessness in a dire situation; it is a sure and steadfast declaration that we will not kiss the ring, we do not comply, and we refuse to become as deeply unhappy as those who stand opposite us.

Respect, awe, and blind worship are the food of the Narcissist-In-Chief, and together, we will starve him.

My friends, keep laughing, keep mocking, keep ridiculing, and stay joyful.

There is a power there that cannot be defeated.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Add him to their ever-growing enemies list, comprised of clergy, politicians, military personnel, journalists, athletes, musicians, and actors who dare not bend the knee to their Dear Leader; people who have the audacity to oppose this regime’s wasteful violence.

In his Palm Sunday address in St. Peter’s Square, just a week before Easter, Pope Leo harshly criticized the war in Iran, saying, “(Jesus) does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them…. Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.”

And in response, rather than choosing introspection, reflection, prayer, or repentance, they have chosen violent opposition; criticizing, condemning, and slandering him for his calls for people of faith to be people of peace.

But it’s critical to be clear on what is happening here: these Conservative Christians don’t despise Pope Leo, at least not primarily. They don’t hate him as much as they hate his Jesus.

They are sickened by the “Love your neighbor as yourself” Jesus, who has made him a champion of the poor and the sick.They spit in the face of the “blessed are the peacemakers” Jesus, who has compelled him to call for the abolition of the death penalty.They seethe with anger toward the “care for the least of these” Jesus, who moved him to previously confront JD Vance’s ridiculous position that in the New Testament, love is hierarchical based on geography.

As with Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, the Reverend William Barber, and Pope Francis before Leo, when it comes to spiritual leaders, there is simply nothing that triggers MAGA Christians quite like the teachings of Jesus. Their perverted theology of exclusion dictates that they must reject anyone who represents a barrier to the theocratic fever dreams they have for this nation.

Jesus’ kindness, his compassion, his mercy, and his selflessness all fly in the face of the predatory bully pulpit they are constructing at the Capitol. A Jesus who feeds the hungry, binds up the bleeding, calls out predatory power, condemns wealth, and welcomes the stranger all actively confront the religion of compulsion found in Project 2025, which has proven during Trump’s second term to be their true sacred text.

Professional traitor, serial grifter, and loyal Trump henchman Steve Bannon has called Leo the “worst pick for MAGA Catholics,” declaring him the “anti-Trump pope.”

If he’s the anti-Trump pope, that means he is a pro-Jesus pope—and that is the last thing this Christian cosplay ensemble needs right now.

There is no place in their cruel congregation for an empathy that seeks to walk inside the shoes of another, no room for a soft heart toward those crushed by poverty and sickness, a zero-tolerance policy regarding the outsider or the foreigner seeking refuge.

When the Pope declared, “This is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, ​whom no one can use to justify war,” — this was itself a declaration of war in the hearts of those who desperately need a Jesus-less Christianity.

So, Trump and his surrogates, disciples, and sycophants are now unleashing all manner of vitriol toward Pope Leo, but it isn’t the big story. The bigger story is that MAGA Christianity has no desire to acknowledge, embody, or align with the teachings of Jesus. As long as anyone who claims the Christian faith, whether clergy or lay leader or pew-sitter, strives to embody the lavish love of Jesus of Nazareth, they will be the enemy of the Religious Right.

And the irony of all of this is that Christ’s teachings in the Gospels: of loving neighbor, of not returning violence for violence, of sharing abundance so that all can be fed, of looking after the vulnerable and the endangered, do not find such violent opposition from any other group of people on the planet.

Agnostics, Jews, Muslims, Atheists, Buddhists, Humanists, Wiccans, Hindus, Unitarians, and people of any other worldview can find some shared ground in those aspirations. They may not be deists or theists, or they may have an entirely different religious tradition as their pathway, and still feel some affinity in the Sermon on the Mount’s call to love their neighbor.

The only people who fully reject Jesus’ wall-demolishing compassion, his abhorrence of war, his sacrificial love, and his open-handed generosity outright are MAGA Christians. They are the sole demographic on the planet who appear violently allergic to his life and work.

So, as you watch the Right openly weeping, gnashing their teeth, and rending their garments at Pope Leo, remember that they don’t hate the messengers half as much as they hate the one who sent them.

The compassionate, generous, inclusive Jesus of the Gospels is the one they are working so hard to eradicate.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The words Walter Reed showed up on my timeline over the weekend.

I confess that my heart fluttered, my spirit quickened, and I pulled out our corkscrew and put it on the counter, just in case.

A few hours later… false alarm.

Party postponed.

Humanity, still hostage.

Unfettered lunatic, still at the wheel.

Annihilation, still in play.

Hellscape, still fully ablaze.

While I would never wish anyone harm, I will rejoice the day he leaves the planet.

I feel no shame in saying this.

It would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

And I will be far from alone in my elation.

When he departs this mortal sphere, it will be an occasion of global jubilation, not unlike the passing of any of history’s previous monsters.

On that day, there will be a collective exhale that we haven’t experienced since the end of the Second World War.

Outside of all but a small, brainwashed faction of the population’s most cultic, human beings around the world, will break out in spontaneous celebration at the subtraction of a presence that has done incalculable damage to the course of humanity.

On that day, the messiah of the miserable will no longer be able to generate new nightmares for the rest of us. We will finally be freed from his nonsensical ramblings. He will be unable to pervert the truth, or bastardize the office, or stoke division, or murder the English language.

But I’m not foolish enough to believe that this will be the end of the nightmare.

His enablers will remain; those opportunistic, bottom-feeding hate-mongers, soul-auctioning political traitors, and armageddon-welcoming religious zealots will still all be here, rushing to fill the power chasm he will leave behind. They will devour one another trying to occupy the throne once it is empty.

And not only them, but the legion of his civilian foot soldiers, who carried him upon their shoulders.

These past 10 years have done irreparable harm to the sovereignty of our nation, to our systems of governance, to the relational connections between us, to the collective health of the planet.But he hasn't done this.

The people we share this country with have done it using him as their weapon of choice. Our family members. Our friends. Our co-workers. Our neighbors.

His departure will do nothing to undo all the evil that his now bruised hands have wrought, to erase every vile thing his presence has exposed as he ascended politically.

It will not rewind the years of those who lived in squalor and poverty in New York City, on whose backs he built his fraudulent, hollow empire.

His death will not bring financial restitution to the thousands of workers and contractors left abandoned by the many bankruptcies that emancipated him from responsibility.

It won’t give back wholeness and healing to the girls and women he violated in secret or maligned in public.

It will not reverse the irreparable damage he has done to a political party whose members individually and collectively abandoned every legal and moral expectation to fall prostrate before him.

It will not illicit repentance in a white Evangelical Church that parted ways with the compassionate, loving namesake of its faith tradition and fashioned a vicious, sneering, profane, God-mocking idol out of his antithesis and bowed down before it.

His passing now could not allow us to unsee the repugnant grievance cult he unleashed here; the historically hateful movement of miserable people who’ve spent the last decade reveling in an unrepentant ugliness because he gave them consent.

It will not remove the legion of incompetent, predatory, corrupt sycophants he poisoned our government with; people who have and will continue to dismantle and pervert our systems of care and legal oversight.

And his death, as much as it would feel like an initial reprieve from the chaos he has engineered and the suffering he has spearheaded, would do nothing to conceal the heart maladies he exposed within the people around us: the long-simmering racism, the scalding contempt for foreigners, the phobic hatred of human beings for their gender identity or sexual orientation.

Long after he has made his exit, we will be left with what we now know about our family members and friends and neighbors; about the people in our churches, about the parents of our children’s friends; about the pillars of our communities, about those we trust to govern us, to protect and serve us.

These people and the atrocities they co-authored, sadly, will all long outlive him.

He has merely been the symptom.

The cruelty in the heart of his supporters is the sickness.

Even when he’s gone, they’ll still be here.

So, any celebration will be short-lived.

We’ll have to figure out how to overcome the hatred that made him.

Then, we’ll really be able to rejoice.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

You owe them an apology for making them grow up with a hateful, incompetent, petulant, predatory monster as their President.

For placing their safety in the hands of an impulsive toddler who trolls world leaders with nuclear annihilation and wields the military like a petrified coward.

For unleashing the fierce tide of bigotry they have to see in their classrooms, hallways, ball fields, and neighborhoods, because the man you chose has repeatedly practiced, encouraged, and legislated it.

You owe our daughters an apology for excusing his reprehensible words about women and his heinous crimes against them; for ignoring the evidence of his inhumanity, for placing a man with such clear disregard for women at the highest level of leadership in the country they call home.

You owe our sons an apology for propping up someone with a lifetime resume of filth and misogyny, and asking them to look up to that man as a leader; for rewarding the very sexist, ignorant, repugnant behavior decent parents implore their sons never to engage in or abide in those around him.

You’ve let this nation’s children down by thrusting them into an America that is far less secure, less compassionate, less decent, more fractured, and more violent than it was when he arrived, and because that truth alters children immersed in it.

You owe an apology to every child who has to spend their formative years in an America that is defined by:fear of the other,an epidemic of cruelty,a poverty of decency,a deadly allergy to facts,a Christianity of coercion and malice,and a defiant resistance to diversity.

You owe an apology to terrified Latino children, who’ve watched their parents bludgeoned and bloodied by thugs, for no other reason than the color of their skin.You owe an apology to children who will have to attend underfunded schools with empty bellies, because your messiah of misery is without empathy.

You owe an apology to queer children, Muslim children, black children, and disabled children, whose lives have been made more turbulent and painful than they have to be, because their president lacks decency.

You owe an apology to children who will be fearful and feel less-than because of the color of their skin, or their place of birth, or their sense of self, or the faith of their family.

And you owe an apology to the world’s children:To those in Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, Lebanon, Venezuela, and Cuba, whose childhoods, homelands, families, and bodies have been disfigured and destroyed by the mindless cruelty of the man you chose to lead.To children whose chances for a peaceful existence are threatened by one horrible narcissist whom you gave carte blanche to do whatever his poisoned heart desired.

My children.Your children.The children of this country and of the planet.

They all have lost because you were irresponsible with one of the greatest responsibilities you’ve ever had in their lifetime, and now they have to live with the terrible fallout—and you owe them all an apology.

I’m well aware of what your likely response to all this will be. I don’t imagine an apology will be forthcoming, so I’ll apologize to them on your behalf.

Then, I’ll spend every day living that apology.

I’ll remind my children, your children, and all children, that there are lots of adults who still believe that people are inherently valuable and stunningly beautiful; that not all adults fear brown people and gay people and foreigners and immigrants.

I’ll remind them that there are still people committed to the truth and to equality, and the richness found in diversity.

I’ll do my best to make them feel safe and hopeful here, even on the days that I don’t.

I’ll even teach them to forgive people who fail and hurt them, because I know how difficult that is right now.

And I’ll remind them that even when bad people are rewarded, doing the right thing is still the thing most worth doing.

I’ll teach them that when hatred seems the most treasured currency, love is still worth more than gold.

I’m just sorry that they have to live with or die because of someone who never deserved the lofty throne you handed him.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Hey, friends, this message isn’t for everyone.

It’s not for people who are okay.

If you’re perfectly fine, you can skip this.

If you’re emotionally regulated, mentally stable, and physically well-rested, go ahead and opt out. Gold star today!

If your nervous system isn’t all sorts of jacked up, your sleep isn’t utter trash, your breathing isn’t short and shallow, and your faith in humanity isn’t hanging by the thinnest of threads, please feel free to navigate away and enjoy the rest of the day.

I’ll give you a second to see yourself out…

…

… Alright, if you’re still here, I’m assuming you’re in some state of profound not-okayness: that the unrelenting barrage of Constitutional crises, perpetually breaking bad news, and what-the-hell-is-next social media nightmare fuel feed has left you reeling and rudderless.

Whew, thank God you’re here!

I’m glad to know I’m not the only one noticing a sense of dread buzzing in the background operating system of their daily routine, contending with a thick brain fog that now makes simple tasks Herculean, and wondering how I’m supposed to go on with normal life when we’re rapidly sliding into a fascist abyss that most of the people around me seem oblivious to.

And honestly, that helps.

Sometimes, when we’re not okay, the thing we need most is to know that someone else isn’t okay either; that we are not alone in the despair. That sorrowful solidarity is medicinal.

We should normalize radical not-okayness today.

There are a billion books, think pieces, video tutorials, and news stories providing proven strategies for maintaining emotional, mental, physical, and relational health in difficult times: hydrating, exercise, nutrition, meditation, journaling, prayer, volunteering, play, and community, to name a few.

We should be taking advantage of every tool at our disposal to keep ourselves from sinking beneath the weight of the existential tsunami we’re currently being bludgeoned by.

But, we also need to realize that even the best self-care recipe, workout regime, or spiritual practice isn’t foolproof in days like these.

We aren’t equipped for this kind of sustained trauma, no matter how competent or well-read we are.

Regardless of our work ethic or education, our systems are not built to be in perpetual fight-or-flight urgency.

We cannot survive uninterrupted chaos forever, as high-functioning, emotionally mature, or mindful as we might be.

There is no manual for this s**t.

Not being okay doesn’t mean your faith isn’t strong enough.

It doesn’t mean your attitude isn’t positive enough.

It doesn’t mean you’re overly negative or weak or emotional.

All being not okay right now means is that you’re passing the human test; that you’re a feeling, thinking, self-aware being who refuses to pretend they don’t see that the world is on fire, or to maintain the facade that they are somehow unaffected by that fact.

The last thing we need right now is to waste time and energy trying to convince ourselves or anyone else that it’s business as usual inside our heads.

Last week, I caught myself lying to a neighbor in the grocery store. We noticed one another in adjoining checkout lines, and he asked me how I was, and I smiled and said, “I’m doing well.”

Doing well? I thought to myself, still smiling. You are so full of it. You’re a few thousand miles from well.

When I asked my friend the same question, he too smiled and said, “I’m Good.”

I wondered if he wasn’t lying, too. I hoped he was.

Of course, it would have been more than a little awkward for the clerks and other shoppers if two grown men unpacked their grievances and inventoried their outrage there in the express line. That kind of emotional purging is not appropriate everywhere.

But, in general, we’ve all gotten used to self-censorship when it comes to acknowledging our burdens, and that isn’t helping anyone. It doesn’t make us more effective or more capable; it just makes us less honest.

Today, release yourself from the expectation of holding it together, give yourself permission to crash out, stop apologizing for your rougher-than-usual edges, and let yourself off the hook for dropping some balls.

It’s not you, it’s what you’re going through.

It’s good to be not okay with genocide or authoritarianism or inhumanity or war, especially when far too many seem okay with such things.

To the burnt-out, pissed-off, brokenhearted, unrested, and unwell out there, welcome.

Let’s be not okay together.

That’s how we will make it okay.

If you’re not okay, let me know why in the comments.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This Easter, the MAGA God lovers will be everywhere.

Your social media feed, your street, and perhaps even your dinner table may be filled with people who loudly claim adoration for both Jesus Christ and this President.

Their profiles will be adorned with effusive soliloquies about their steadfast faith.

They will share memes proudly declaring that Jesus is Risen.

They will publicly pledge their fierce and undying love for God.

And they will be lying… at least, according to Jesus.

In the Gospel of Matthew, he tells a crowd of his students and strangers a parable about the coming judgement of God, in which the imagined righteous people will be split into two groups.

One will have eternal and joyful fellowship with him, the other will be forever separated and suffering.

And the evaluation will have nothing to do with a magic, momentary prayer they uttered, or the money they gave, or the religious services they attended, or how boldly they announced their faith—and certainly not their political affiliations.

Their spiritual convictions and their hearts will be judged solely on how they treated people.

Jesus tells those listening that the way they cared for the least of these: the poor, the hungry, the imprisoned, the stranger, will be the way they cared for him; that as they injured or ignored the vulnerable here, they injured or ignored him.

In other words, to those who imagine themselves right with God, Jesus is incarnated in the humanity in their path. He is the disparate neighbor they are called to love.

Given this, these MAGA Christians who will make grand displays of piety and devotion need to reckon with the gravity of Jesus’ words, and the implications for their perceived righteousness:

Who and where is Jesus on this Easter?

Jesus is permanently entombed in a bombed-out basement in Gaza.

Jesus was slain on a Minneapolis sidewalk by the masked thugs.

Jesus lies lifeless beneath the jagged rubble of an Iranian girl’s school.

Jesus is the veteran whose house was foreclosed on after his aid was canceled.

Jesus died from exposure in the squalor of a scalding Florida concentration camp.

Jesus is the Latino man weathering the taunts and threats of emboldened bigots in the very restaurant he built.

Jesus is the Muslim grandfather, cleaning profane slurs from the walls of his mosque.

Jesus was violated on an island by grotesque monsters whose power and privilege keep their names concealed.

Jesus is the trans teenager trying to hold her bladder for the entire school day to avoid the bathroom bullies and their predatory parents.

Jesus is the toddler whose brain was permanently damaged by a virus that we long ago eradicated.

Jesus bled out alone in an overturned car on a Beirut street.

Jesus is the pregnant mother of three who will die in a crowded emergency room because doctors were not allowed to save her life.

Jesus is the radiant young American soldier killed in Tehran for a wasteful war of distraction for a pedophile.

Jesus is the 11-year-old girl who took her life when her classmates told her ICE would come for her family.

Jesus is the grandfather who slowly suffocated without treatments that kept his lungs working.

Jesus is the exhausted Ukrainian father whose sleep and rest never come.

Jesus is a black college student whose body was found hanging from a campus tree.

This is who Jesus says he is right now.

This is where Jesus says he is in these moments.

And if this is indeed true, then the prolific hatred and unrepentant cruelty of his professed followers toward so many hungry, scared, and cast-aside human beings here are going to judge them.

So, this Easter, MAGA Christians can engage in all manner of performative religiosity and feigned faith.

They can sing and preach and post and pontificate about their joy at the Resurrection.

They can tell us they love God.

They can say that Jesus is risen.

And Jesus and we will both know they’re lying.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

It was always going to end this way.

We tried to warn you.

Those of us who’ve been paying attention for the past two hundred and fifty years here pleaded with you not to be distracted by the seductive pull of proximity to power, because it was never going to be permanent with those men.

Your elevation in their midst could never be anything but temporary, because the Patriarchy will always discard you.

No matter how enticing the invitation is on the front end, no matter how effusive and flattering the initial pitch, when the chaotic turbulence becomes too great, when the scalding tongues of criticism come too close, when a ceremonial sacrifice is required, it will always be heads like yours upon the chopping block.

We told you that to the fragile, jittery man-children pulling the strings, you were provisionally useful but ultimately expendable. Once you had served your purpose, once the feigning of equity had accomplished its goals, once the appearance of progress had taken root enough to satiate the naysayers, things would always revert to their natural baseline.

You refused to listen; the shouts of your ambition and internalized misogyny too loud for you to hear anything else.

Despite their grotesque body of work, despite the dehumanization they have trafficked in, despite their prolific misogyny, you told yourself a story that they were different, that you were different, that this was different.

None of it was different because these men are vile creatures of hateful habit who are incompatible with evolution, allergic to change, and in contempt of your ascension.

You think you’re the first woman here: temporarily lulled into believing yourself truly accepted, imagining that your inclusion is unconditional, feeling that you will be the sole exception to the violently insecure man-made rule?

The road to Patriarchy has been littered with those who deluded themselves into thinking they could be agents of change in a cancerous system that would ultimately devour them and spit them out. You may have imagined that your whiteness insulated you, but gender will always trump pigmentation, so you were never truly safe.

For a few months, you felt the cheap and fleeting intoxication of being picked by career predators who have built their empires on the backs of millions of other women who implored you not to be fooled by the rented influence you were being handed.

In spite of the red flags and the recent past and your own eyes, you insisted on carrying water for men who believe that God is a man and that women are baby machines, and so we shouldn’t feel sorry for you, but a bit of us does. We know it’s quite possible you never saw this coming. You believed lies up close that you should have recognized from a mile away.

The voices of your parents and your pastors and your politicians groomed you since birth to be manipulated in these moments, told you you were less-than, and convinced you that you were not worthy, so that when the highly-conditional offer was extended, you simply couldn’t refuse.

You bent the knee, you kissed the ring, and you willfully perpetuated the injury of generations of girls and women, whose subjugation you were complicit in, whose lives will be more difficult because of your presence. You collaborated with predators and conspired with rapists, oblivious to the irony or in too deep to extricate yourselves.

And now, here you are, joining the ranks of other women who could not foresee that with these men you chose to partner with, this was always a matter of time.

As expected and as we predicted, here’s your pink slip from the Patriarchy.

Hopefully, whatever you got for your soul was worth it.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

A reader recently told me that she thinks I’ve become too negative lately: that she misses the optimistic version of me that she got to know before the 2024 election.

“I miss that version of me, too,” I assured her.

Then I asked: “So, do you want me to be optimistic or honest?”

I wasn’t being facetious or sarcastic with the question.

I know that she (like myself and every other sentient human being with working empathy) has completely had it with the catastrophic, the unprecedented, the terrifying. She (like all of us) is stumbling around, both hope and sleep-deprived.

But the alternative to sober realization is to indulge in toxic positivity; to deny the nightmare reality, avoid the afflictive emotions, and wait for a rescue that simply isn’t comin’.’And that’s the rub here, isn’t it: the only way we’re going to persevere is by not sedating or distracting ourselves, which means we’re going to have to feel and know a lot we’d prefer not to.Now, contrary to the opinion of some, I really hate being the bearer of bad news, but anyone thinking we “just have to get through the next two years” isn’t paying attention.

We are already long past the point of any conventional remedies to this fascist takeover. November 5th, 2024, was the closing of that window.

Many of the checks and balances are gone, the Republican Party is unsalvageable, the courts will not permanently sustain us, and no wholesale election rescue is possible.

The old rules of engagement are no longer relevant, which is why, outside of a few leaders, the Democratic Party is falling to the occasion right now.Whether we survive or not as a nation is going to depend solely on whether or not We The People are willing to do what we’ve never had to do in this nation: stand together and oppose our own Government.And this does not necessarily mean violence, but it will likely mean exposing ourselves to violence directed by those in power, pushback from our neighbors, rejection from our families, but believe me, those we stand with and for are worth it.What civil and human rights activists have done to bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice 60 years ago, we are now entrusted with continuing, and if we fail, that work, too, will prove not to have prevented democracy’s demise but postponed it.

I don’t share this to scare or depress you, but to empower you. You have enough information and resources right now to do what needs doing.

No one is going to hold our hands or save us: no party, no court, no personality. We need to use our personal, financial, and relational resources and do something today.

If tens of millions of people move in the small and close confines of where they are, we might be astounded at how much collective power we have.

I didn’t write this to alert you to how dire the circumstances around us have become. You know that, or you wouldn’t be here.

I’m not here today to tell you how bad things are; I’m here to remind you how good you are.This is not about anyone else’s inhumanity; it is about your humanity.It’s not about one group of people’s cruelty; it’s about your empathy.In some ways, it doesn’t matter who is in the seats of power.It doesn’t matter how horrible the legislation that gets passed is.It doesn’t matter how much the Evangelical church rejects Jesus and his teachings.It doesn’t matter how compromised the courts are.It doesn’t matter how predatory the preachers or the politicians become.Those things, in one important way, are almost irrelevant.

The only thing any of us possesses is how we choose to show up in the world, as ugly, nihilistic, and brutal as it might be.Anyone else’s capacity for violence is not the point. Your capacity for love is the point.And that love is the only plan for us individually and collectively.

So, as bad as it is here, we will passionately move together in these days, but we will do so recognizing that we are inextricably bound together here.

We will fight for the outcasts, the vulnerable, and the hungry.

We will fight for the lonely, the hurting, and the desperate.

We will fight for the progressive, the moderate, and the conservative.

We will fight for the blue voters and the red voters.

We will fight for the deeply religious and the fiercely anti-religious.

We will fight for those fortunate enough to be born here and those who seek to call this place home.

We will see hatred and ignorance and violence as the only enemies worth our collective rage.

We will not become people at war with the world, but for it.

We will fight for everyone.

We will fight for everything.

You are one of the fighters, and you’re still here.

That’s what matters most.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

As someone who grew up in the Church and who spent three decades ministering within it, there’s something particularly distressing about the expansive hellscape we’re all stuck in right now: it’s all because of white, professed Christians who are committed to being terrible.

They’re the ones persecuting trans people for existing,the ones working incessantly to deny people the right to vote,the ones attempting to take body autonomy away from women,the ones trying to purge America of immigrants,the ones attacking birthright citizenship,the ones warring against our public schools,the ones cheering the brutality of ICE,the ones celebrating wars and genocides.

Every day, I look at these people, and I wonder, Don’t they ever get tired?

Doesn’t it wear them out to spend so much time and energy monitoring the genders, orientations, bodies, families, and relationships of people they’ve never met?

How does it never get old: always being that deeply entrenched in someone else’s business?”

Honestly, it’s a miracle more white Evangelicals don’t pass out from sheer exhaustion.

It’s incredibly taxing work, policing the world instead of, ya know, loving it.

America seems grossly overpopulated with Christians determined to bully others into compliance, shout them into silence, or eliminate them from their midst. It’s all so wasteful, so mean-spirited, and so antithetical to the teachings of Jesus (not to mention fully draining for them and their targets).

It’s really hard to pray for these people, as they seem to revel so in their cruelty, finding perverse joy in excluding others in the name of a supposed God of love.

But I do pray for them to get tired.

I pray that they get tired of the malicious religion that is hardening their hearts and squandering their days. I sincerely believe it would alter both them and the planet in ways they’d never imagine:

If Conservative Christians finally got tired of persecuting queer people, they’d realize how fruitless their aggression has been, how much damage it’s done, how unlike Jesus it’s been. They’d see people whose only agenda is to live and work and love and worship, and to spend the fleeting days of this life doing something that gives them joy. They’d see people no different from themselves.

If Conservative Christians finally got tired of condemning the world, they’d be able to see it differently. If everyone around them was viewed through a lens of compassion and not damnation, they’d recognize how fragile and precious the humanity around them is, and discover how connected they are to it. They’d cast off the exhausting burden of viewing everyone as a threat and begin to recognize everyone as the neighbor they are called to love as themselves.

If Conservative Christians finally got tired of worshiping America, they’d find that every place is holy ground: Gaza, Iran, Ukraine, Mexico, and every inch of this planet. They’d stop needing to fortify themselves, wall themselves off, dig in their heels, and defend God, because they’d realize they don’t own God to begin with. They’d realize that making America great was never the assignment; it was blessing the world.

If Conservative Christians finally got tired of a faith characterized by fear, they’d hunger for a faith marked by love. They would become deeply burdened to care for their neighbors, even the ones who do not look, love, or worship the way they do. They’d stop seeing diversity as a menace and recognize it as the greatest gift we’ve been given: the beautiful difference of humanity.

If Conservative Christians finally got tired of being terrible in the name of Jesus, they’d be able to accurately reflect him; bring his mercy, empathy, and kindness to the places where such things are not plentiful. They’d be able to see every other as themselves, to see no distinction between them and their neighbor, and to recognize the image of God in every face they encounter.

I hope that more white Christians will be able to find a more life-giving, hope-bringing expression of their faith convictions, for their sake and the sake of those who simply want to live today unfettered by anyone else.

Life is difficult. People are doing the best they can.

I pray that more Conservative Christians get tired of being terrible so that they’ll have more time to be loving.

The world needs less terrible. It needs more loving.

This should be what people of faith are here to bring.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

There’s a good deal of online dialogue lately about how we should be responding to people around us, who are finally beginning to extricate themselves from the MAGA death cult; whether due to human rights atrocities, war crimes, pedophile protection, or simply high gas prices and a decimated 401K.

Ex-Trumpers have posted tearful monologues about the vitriol they’ve experienced as they’ve stepped into the light to declare their newfound emancipation from the indoctrination they received at the hands of their parents, preachers, politicians, and partisan news bubbles. They report of the mockery, acrimony, and insults they’ve absorbed from strangers, family members, and former friends on their de-culting journey, and the way this ugliness has left them struggling to find ways to move forward.

I’ve seen moderates and left-leaners engaged in protracted, volcanic debate with one another, with passions running high and insults flowing freely.

Some demand a strict, no-tolerance policy for former Trumpers, a permanent scarlet letter, forever exempting them from full inclusion in the larger collective. Proponents of this hardline stance maintain that the injuries these MAGA foot soldiers have been complicit in are so irreversible, and the fractures they’ve helped create are so irreparable, restoration is not possible.

Others point to such intolerance as a hypocritical practicing of the very close-minded ostracism they’ve lambasted red-hatters for the last ten years, and as evidence for why the Left will never persevere in overcoming a hateful minority movement. These kinds of punitive purity tests, they say, will never allow us to create the broad coalition of resistance necessary to overcome authoritarianism.

There are very few hard and fast rules to all of this, but here’s what we owe defecting MAGAs:

Acknowledgement.

I’m a firm believer that what will soon rouse many Trump supporters from their cultic stupor will not be empathy or moral awakening, but self-preservation. They will not be rejecting this regime’s inhumanity as much as finally feeling the pain themselves, and this should not be rewarded with praise. Still, regardless of how they reached clarity about the object of their decade-long, breathless adoration, it is no small gesture to outwardly break with a movement that gave you identity, provided you a sense of belonging, and formed your community. That should be respectfully acknowledged.

Decency.

Despite a decade of almost incomprehensible cruelty toward just about everyone on the planet outside of those within their narrow, insular movement of white Republican heteronormativity, we who’ve found ourselves on the other side have told ourselves tales of our own moral superiority. We’ve subsisted on a narrative where our compassion, our code of ethics, our working morality, or our spiritual convictions made us different. To meet former MAGA cultists with unrelenting hatred and dehumanization makes such stories fiction. If we can’t bring our humanity to bear when it is most difficult, we’re not as different as we think.

Expectation.

Having spent so much time participating in the destruction of our Republic doesn’t mean these people can’t be invited into a counter-movement, but they will need to demonstrate with their voices, their activism, and their social media that they have changed. They will need to actively work to undo what they have done to vulnerable, marginalized, oppressed people, and to speak out against the dehumanization they have co-signed. It’s not enough to claim internal renovation; there must be repentance expressed tangibly. We owe ex-Trumpers the chance to prove their hearts have evolved by the work of their hands and the words from their mouths.

Having said that, here’s what we are not obligated to offer MAGA refugees:Forgiveness.We need to be honest: it's been a decade of Trump’s moral sewage: a never-ending parade of human rights violations, vile perversion, dehumanizing comments, legislative overreach, and giddy brutality. His body of work is prolific and unmistakable.One hundred percent of the people now fleeing Trump witnessed him ridicule a disabled person, watched the Access Hollywood video, experienced his incompetence during COVID, heard him say that immigrants were eating family pets, have seen the lawless violence of ICE, realized he’s been disregarding the Constitution, and have known his name is all over the Epstein files. For whatever reason, none of that mattered for a hell of a long time. At some point, grown adults need to own their choices, and these people, over and over again, have chosen illegality, immorality, and sociopathy. Nothing can erase that fact, and we are not obligated to make peace with it.

Hopefully, there will soon be a massive exodus from the MAGA-mind virus, and we’re all going to need to figure out how to fold these former cultists into the collective resistance, without forgetting how we got here. We shouldn’t avoid the inhumanity they’ve been party to, but we can’t respond with inhumanity ourselves, either.

How should we respond to family members, friends, and strangers as they begin to peel away from Donald Trump? What do you feel we owe these people, and what is too much to ask? Let me know in the comments.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

We'll never get another president like Donald Trump.

That is why it's important we do everything we can to try to get him re-elected.”

A Republican Congressperson didn’t say this a few days ago.

A Fox News anchor didn’t say it.

A Nazi content creator didn’t say it.

Your racist neighbor didn’t say it. (Well, maybe…)

Franklin Graham said this.

One of the Evangelical world’s most influential preachers did.

Son of the esteemed and certainly wildly spinning in his grave, Reverend Billy Graham did.

Leading into Holy Week, Christianity’s marking of the last few days of Jesus’ life, this supposed man of God, stood behind a podium to address American Conservatives.

He did not use the moment of consequence to condemn the unprovoked bombing of Iranian citizens or the illegal and immoral war visited on their nation.

He delivered no fiery sermon against the genocide in Gaza, the intentional starving of the Cuban people, or the brutal attacks on Lebanon.

He didn’t unleash righteous fury at a presidential regime protecting a network of wealthy rapists and pedophiles.

He called down no divine judgment upon a masked army of violent thugs terrorizing brown and black-skinned human beings in the places they live, study, work, and worship.

He did not castigate the soulless cadre of oligarchs swallowing up the financial and natural resources of this nation.

He made no impassioned appeal to the self-identified Christians listening, to replicate the heart of Jesus by rallying around the vulnerable, the oppressed, the poor, and the foreigner; to flip the tables of the powerful who prey upon the least of these.

He did not decry America’s renaissance of open racism, its persecution of immigrants, or its sinful lack of affordable healthcare.

No, this cosplaying, snake oil peddling religious huckster, used this moment and the microphone and the spotlight his privilege affords him, to pledge undying allegiance to a court-adjudicated rapist, to a serial predator, to a war criminal, to a convicted felon, to a murderous, wanna be dictator.

It was this vile, repugnant, profane career criminal whose fervent defense he came to: not exhausted Mexican refugees or terrorized trans people or war-ravaged Ukrainians or battered peaceful protestors.

Just a few days before Easter Sunday, Franklin Graham proudly preached the dehumanizing, racist, violent, perverse Gospel of Donald Trump.

I was a pastor for nearly three decades, and during that time, I largely abandoned the concept of Hell. I simply could not reconcile a place of eternal torment for human beings, constructed by a God who is supposedly love. However, some days I confess that I want to be wrong.

Look, I’m not a theological expert by any means, but I feel fairly confident in saying that if the Hell Conservative Evangelicals promise does exist, Franklin Graham is a slam dunk.

If there’s a hell, it will be filled with people who claimed faith in Jesus, while trying to strip the sick of care, the terrified of refuge, and the vulnerable of protection, and reveled in it as if it were a righteous victory.

If eternal damnation exists, it should be the wages of men and women who coordinated, participated in, and applauded the vilifications of immigrants and refugees, whose only crime was their nation of birth or the color of their skin.

If there’s a place of endless agony saved for people with cancerous hearts, it will surely house those who crucified strangers for their sexuality, who persecuted them over pronouns, who willfully trafficked in a dehumanization that was deadly.

If there’s a hell, it’s going to be packed to the brimstone-scorched rafters with professed Christians who chose to celebrate, turn the other way, or be silent as they watched it all happen.

So, for at least this moment, I am praying for the existence of Evangelicals’ angry, vengeful, and punitive Maker to materialize.

Because, if by some chance God has indeed crafted a furnace of forever suffering for heretics, blasphemers, and those who willfully brought suffering upon God’s people in His* name, then Franklin Graham will finally be made accountable for the mockery he has made of Jesus and the damage he has done to those Jesus fiercely loves.* Evangelicals’ gendering for God

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Sometimes you don’t notice attrition when it happens.

When you lose elemental parts of yourself, they don’t all depart at once, and since you’re sustaining the daily woundings of this life from the inside, you may not be aware of the thousands of tiny cuts at the time. You may not notice the lifeblood slowly draining from your spirit.

In fact, you might believe you’re who you’ve always been, until something reminds you of the you you used to be.

No Kings Day reminded me.

Earlier this week, I wrote a piece as Saturday approached, questioning the ultimate merits of the rally in helping us avoid an inexorable slide into fascism. Some suggested that I’d become more negative and fatalistic, that they missed the me they'd encountered a few years ago.

While not completely agreeing with them, I couldn’t ignore the fatigue of the last decade; the collective sorrows accumulated along the way, the sad deja vu of, for at least the 30th time, heading out into a beautiful day to confront the very leaders entrusted with protecting our Republic and its people.

I may not have been despondent, but I’ve certainly been feeling the wear and tear of the draining dog years of this regime.

But, yesterday, as I stood shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of similarly exhausted, equally disheartened, but still not ready to call it a day human beings lining the streets of our little North Carolina town, I found a few things I hadn’t even realized I’d lost.

I found joy.

There is a silent toll that witnessing so much suffering takes on compassionate people, especially when you work so hard to remain awake and aware. Being reminded every day of just how many human beings are experiencing such wasteful brutality can gradually suffocate the spirit, rendering us joyless. One of the first sounds I noticed as I found myself within the pulsating mass of humanity on that highway was the sound of laughter, and it was my own. I realized it had been a while since I’d heard it like this: easy, constant, booming. The joy was medicinal. It was infectious. This was not a dour, dismal acknowledgement of defeat, as much as it was a joyfully defiant dance party of pissed-off people who haven’t let a minority movement of misery make them incapable of restorative jubilation.

I found hope.

One of the goals of authoritarian regimes is to extinguish the lightness from people; to inundate them with a legion of emergencies and nightmares that require so much energy to confront that they begin to lose the ability to see anything ahead worth pursuing. When optimism dries up, the future becomes a bleak foregone conclusion. I hadn’t realized I had been chronically emotionally dehydrated. That is, until once surrounded by a swirling technicolor sea of activists, fighters, healers, helpers, and dreamers in the rising North Carolina sun, I could feel hope returning within me: not a naive one that denies the gravity of the moment or the reality of the threats, but a hope that refuses to give this ugliness the last word.

I found another America.

There’s been a story that’s made headlines in my head lately: the one of this nation’s certain demise; the one where fascism’s presence will be permanent; the one where we are now hopelessly overrun in both the government and our electorate with violent, hateful, cruel people who find joy in the suffering of others. And while there’s no debating that a sizable segment of America certainly fits that description, the vast majority here (those who made their presence unmistakable felt throughout this nation yesterday by the millions) is comprised of beautiful, loving, patriotic human beings who don’t just believe in the idea of America, they embody it. I remembered that throughout its nearly quarter of a millennium history, this place has always been inside the crucible of conflict, because the country we aspire to be cannot be incarnated without it.

I found a bit of myself.

One of the greatest tragedies of the last decade is how wasteful it’s all been: the unnecessary emergencies generated by those in power, the unrelenting assaults on vulnerable people, the never-ending constitutional crises, the stupefying cruelty, and the collateral damage of trying to hold and attend to all of it.

I’m not who I was ten years ago, and some of that is a good thing. But for a couple of hours in the streets of our town that seems to finally be waking up, I was able to clarify what matters to me, the things and the people worth fighting for, and the kind of human being I want to show up in the world as.

Yesterday won’t magically rewind the clock pre-election and let us have a do-over. It doesn’t suddenly erase the unprecedented damage to our systems and safeguards. It alone can’t bend the arc of the moral universe away from fascism. That will require a sustained and organized presence, political engagement leading into the midterms like we’ve never seen, and very likely, a general strike.

But No Kings Day was a glorious reminder of how vital joy, hope, diversity, and our collective efforts are in resisting this Renaissance of hatred.

Our Republic is still in great peril, but we, its fierce caretakers who number in the tens of millions, are still not ready to consent to defeat.

With all we’ve had thrown at us for ten years by this batshit wanna be despot, his morally bankrupt accomplices, and his cultic disciples, that, in itself, is a victory.Share your feelings and experiences from No Kings Day in the comments.

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A friend of mine who is politically active and engaged every day in justice work here in our town recently confessed to me and a group of friends, “Dozens of times a day, I look around at everyone seemingly on autopilot, and I just want to scream, ‘The world is f*****g on fire, people!’”

I felt seen.

According to a recent NPR article, three major reports warn that Democracy in America under Trump is eroding rapidly.

The piece cites an annual report by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden, that has lowered America’s democracy ranking from 20th to 51st out of 179 countries.Staffan Lindberg, V-Dem’s Founding Director, is quoted as saying, "The developments in the United States are moving towards dictatorship, which the founders wanted to avoid. It's the most rapid decline ever in the history of the United States and one of the most rapid in the world."

This should be a five-alarm fire, all hands on deck, stop-whatever-the hell-you’re-doing-and-get-in-the-game, national emergency, but to a terrifying number of Americans, it simply isn’t.

Despite the unceasing nightmare fuel of the news cycle, it seems like most people are still trying to do business as usual: going through the motions as if we’re not losing elemental freedoms by the hour, as if the checks and balances are still in place, as if all we need to do is show up at the polls in November.

From the outside, everything looks perfectly normal: pickleball courts are packed, people are out on restaurant patios having lunch, and weekend parties are in full swing. It doesn’t look like a failing democracy, which is part of the reason we’re in such trouble right now.

Many of us are fully cognizant of the steady slide toward the abyss, but it sure feels like an alarming portion of our family members, friends, neighbors, and co-workers can’t see all that we’ve lost over the last 15 months: the dismantling of 250-year-old systems of governance, the reversal of human and civil rights that took generations to secure, the erosion of protections for people and the land, and the suffocation of the agency of its citizens.

Or, maybe they see it, and they just can’t manage to care enough to stop scrolling or streaming to do anything about it.

And, honestly, this is what terrifies me: not the brazen, incessant attempts by this regime to dismantle every structural system and safeguard set in place by our founders, but the collective apathy it is being greeted with.

I’m beginning to fear that Americans as a whole are too lazy to prevent the collapse of our Republic, not because we’re unaware, but because we are determined to remain unbothered.

We’ve become a nation of soft convictions and low energy, anesthetized by a numbing cocktail of Amazon Prime immediate gratification, social media dopamine dependency, stream-binge diversion, and artery-clogging, drive-thru self-soothing.

Oh, sure, we can manage to boycott a fascist-friendly big box store for a couple of weeks, but eventually ease and proximity win out, and we’re right back to tacitly funding ICE because we just had to have new patio furniture.

We may be temporarily devastated by scenes on our timelines of the genocide in Gaza, the growing devastation in Iran, or the crimes against humanity here at the hands of a weaponized law enforcement, but we’re quickly yanked away by videos of sass-talking birds or killer cheese dip recipes.

When I detox fully from American exceptionalism, I wonder if the United States has the wherewithal to prevent ourselves from falling into a dictatorship; if we’re really made of the stuff our forebears were.

Are we willing to get our hands dirty, to alter our previously planned lives, and to experience the discomfort that comes when the urgency of the moment refuses to defer to the story we want to be true?

Do we have enough good people who are willing to move together across lines of politics, religion, race, nation of origin, and orientation in sustained acts of civil disobedience and systemic disruption?

Do we have the diligence and courage to risk the loss of something: time, money, comfort, to ensure we don’t lose something far more precious?

Do we have the attention span and intestinal fortitude to fight like we’ve never had to fight before, because we’ve never had to go to war with our government in this way before?

I gotta say, I’m concerned that the answers don’t seem encouraging.

Look, I believe in the need to live fully in times when the darkness is thick and oppressive; to make sure that we’re not so consumed with encroaching horrors that we eliminate the restorative and joyful experiences of being human. We can’t and shouldn't spend 24 hours a day in a state of unrelenting panic. Our ability to stay in the fight for the long haul is dependent on our ability to find moments of pleasure and rest and even escape.

But if we’re going to reverse the democracy death spiral much of the world is predicting we’re in, a lot more of us are going to need to get far angrier and more activated than we are right now.

I’m running out of ways to try to dislodge people from their stasis, and I’m beginning to doubt that anything will ever be a red line for some of them.

Democracy doesn’t always die in darkness.

Sometimes, it dies in the glow of a phone screen.

So, what are you thinking? What’s your reaction to what I’ve shared? Are you seeing more people become engaged, or are more people tuning out? What have you found to be effective in motivating people? Do you believe, as a collective, that the American people can meet this moment? Let me know in the comments.

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I suppose practically speaking, they’re often correct, but they’re also missing the point, sometimes mistakenly and sometimes intentionally.

Well-meaning friends might say this as an oversimplified bit of descriptive shorthand; a way of quickly summarizing the work I do, the words I write and speak, the activism I engage in, and the directness of the voice I use.

More often, though, strangers say this as a pointed criticism; the assertion that I am somehow preoccupied to the point of dangerously disproportionate anger toward a group of strangers; that I am singularly fueled by an unhealthy hatred for people simply because of their political affiliation.

That isn’t the real story here.

This, in many ways, has nothing to do with Trump, the GOP, or their all-too-willing acolytes.

My life is and always has been oriented toward something far greater than a person or a party.

I am propelled into my days by who and what I love.

I’m pro-humanity.

I have a fierce regard for every human being who finds themselves here, and it burdens me greatly when anyone is exposed to cruelty and violence in any form, because I realize that life is heavy and it’s difficult for most of us, on our best days. My stomach turns when people of power and privilege pile burdens on already burdened people.

I’m pro-diversity.

I find the differences in disparate humanity here to be one of the greatest gifts we are given in this life, and experiencing this expansive variety has always made me a better and wiser version of myself. I despise when one group of people wants to rid the world of those who don’t look, talk, think, and believe the way that they do, because we all lose in the subtraction.

I’m pro-equality.

I believe every person on the planet has the same inherent worth, regardless of their race, nation of origin, sexuality, or any other qualifier. Each of the 8 billion people who reside here is deserving of reverence and justice, and I am driven fully to sickness when anyone’s value is ignored, when they are treated as less-than.

I’m pro-compassion.

I want to cultivate empathy in the days I am given here; to remember just how much pain people are in, how many invisible battles they are fighting, how paper-thin a thread they sometimes hang by. I want my life to be a soft place to land for human beings whose lives can be terribly hard.

I’m pro-family.

Not just my family. Not just families who look like mine or worship like mine. Not just families who live in America or were born here or speak my language. Not families who conform to anyone’s expectations. I believe every home and every configuration of people in those homes is as valid and beautiful as my own.

I’m pro-decency.

I am an unrelenting fighter for joy; for belly laughs and warm embraces and well-earned smile lines around eyes who have seen wonders and beheld beauty.I am a fierce warrior for unearned acts of kindness, for gentle words for people who are hurting, for unsuspecting blessings from strangers.I am a steadfast defender of goodness that finds no joy in exclusion or separation or injury to another.I believe I was fortunate to be born where I was born, and with all the privileges and advantages I have because of it, and that I have a responsibility to share and not to hoard these things as some divine birthright or earned reward or sign of my superiority.I want to leverage my talent, my resources, my voice, and my abundance to make this world more compassionate, loving, and kind than when I arrived.

And all of this is the crux of the misunderstanding.

That these convictions almost always leave me in direct opposition to the MAGA ethos, to its grim practitioners, and to their miserable messiah is a sad indictment of who they are.

The fact that centering empathy and decency invariably necessitates me pushing back against them and opposing their unrelenting holy war on the rest of the world says far more about him than it does me.

I’m not against Trump supporters.

I’m not working to keep them from voting or marrying the person they love or using the bathroom they want to use or making their own healthcare decisions or living where they wish to live.

I’m actually for them.

I am, however, also for Muslims and immigrants and refugees and Christians and atheists and young black men and veterans and transgender teens and poor families and sick children and single parents and undocumented neighbors, and this makes me MAGA’s adversary by choice—their choice.

I’m joyfully, passionately, unapologetically, perpetually pro-all humanity.

That’s the real story here.

That’s who I am.

I wish that was who they were.

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We see that you’ve declared yet another war this week.

This time, you haven’t viciously attacked some distant nation whose people you’ve bombed without cause, as a reckless and deadly act of distraction.

This time, you haven’t launched a violent campaign against brown-skinned human beings, whose dehumanization you’ve trafficked in for over a decade.

This time, you haven’t brought relentless trauma to survivors of the predators and rapists, among whose numbers you find yourself.

This time, you haven’t marshaled a savage offensive on the electoral process, or trans kids, or women’s rights, or environmental protections alone.

No, this time, you’ve declared war on all of us: the Radical Left.

You see, we know it isn’t merely a political party that you’re threatened by, trying to silence, consumed with hatred for, and seeking to eradicate—it’s the American people.

It’s those of us who stand in your way; those whose knees refuse to bow and whose mouths will not regurgitate the curated praise of sycophants and cult members that you bathe your eggshell ego in.

It’s students of history who know a failing, flailing wannabe dictator in a death spiral when they see one, and who have no interest in kissing the ring, shutting our mouths, or quietly complying.

It’s people of conscience who’ve courageously served, fought, bled, and suffered for this nation to defeat fascism on foreign shores, and who damn well aren’t going to allow it to thrive here.

It’s generations of activists and allies who decades ago braved water cannons, beatings, and arrests so that every human being could be afforded the dignity they deserve, and that you would deny them.

It’s people of true and abiding faith who refuse to allow you to make a mockery of a God you have never sought, a Jesus you have contempt for, and a religion you drape yourself in to cover your wickedness.

It’s human beings of every pigmentation, orientation, nation of origin, religious tradition, and political affiliation who will not allow a Temu authoritarian to write the epitaph for our 250-year republic.

We are all the Radical Left.

And you, you teetering, jittery lame duck, dollar store despot, have declared war on all decent, law-abiding people here, and we’re to tell you that you cannot win.

You are the enemy of the people, of We The People,” the fierce, unwieldy multitude whose presence here is your greatest remaining obstacle.

And so we declare war on you.

You’ll see us gather by the millions this weekend, filling city streets, highway overpasses, city parks, parking lots, and neighborhood sidewalks, declaring our collective opposition. We will stand together as a defiant army of sustained resistance, unlike anything this nation has ever witnessed.

But rest assured, we’ll be there well after the sun sets on that day.

We will be in our neighborhoods, outnumbering the masked monsters you deploy to terrorize and brutalize.

We will be in our communities, feeding, clothing, and caring for one another, protecting the most vulnerable whom you so gladly prey upon.We’ll be organizing in our communities to support candidates, monitor the polls, and protect people whose voices you are working so hard to silence.

We’ll be relentlessly hounding the compromised lawmakers and public servants who would discard their oaths and abdicate their responsibilities just to please you.

We’ll be everywhere your cultic disciples show up to let them know that they are part of a miserable minority that will not prevail.

And believe us when we tell you that we will defeat you and we will outlast you.

When you leave the office or this planet, whichever comes first, we will be here to rebuild what you have broken, to heal all that you have injured, to tear your name from every place you have defiled with it, and to course-correct from the greatest collective error in our nation’s history.

And so today, we, the Radical Left, raise a defiant middle finger, we spit on the ground in front of you, we defy your will, and we piss on your crown.

The kingdom is crumbling, and where we find ourselves, the king is already dead.

He has no home here.

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This Saturday is No Kings Day.

More than 3,000 protests are planned throughout every state in the U.S., as well as hundreds of cities around the world.

If last year’s events are any indication, close to ten million people could be in attendance.

We can safely make some predictions about what will happen. this weekend:

The National Mall will be overrun by a massive, ebullient mob of radical woke leftists: families, schoolteachers, ministers, parents, grocery store clerks, college students, business owners, grandparents, and toddlers on shoulders.

City streets all over this nation will be lined with exuberant, sign-waving throngs of joyfully defiant human beings loudly declaring their shared disdain of a wannabe dictator.

Local parks will explode in a kaleidoscopic display of disparate humanity, converging to declare their solidarity and their collective rejection of authoritarianism.

Republican lawmakers’ offices will be surrounded by a spirited show of fierce resistance from pissed-off, fed-up constituents demanding accountability.

And, based on my previous experience, there are some guarantees I’ll make:

The vibe will be glorious.

The chants will be on point.

The sign game will be strong.

The love will be tangible.

It will be soul-stirring.

It will be goosebump-inducing.

It will be off-the-charts beautiful.

And if that is all that happens, it also won’t make a damn bit of difference.

We’ve already had two massively successful No Kings Day events, and as cathartic and encouraging as they were, things here are far worse than they were then.

The Constitutional crises are piling up. We’re immersed in unnecessary and unwinnable wars halfway across the world. This Administration’s disregard for legality and morality is escalating. The complete Epstein files are still concealed, the monsters within them still evading their reckoning. ICE is still ravaging our communities with impunity and with taxpayer funding.And our traitorous, cognitively-decimated, sociopathic Predator-In-Chief has become more unstable, more violent, and more unhinged than before. We’re a hair’s breadth from full-on fascism.

The last No Kings Day protests didn’t stave off the chaos that is now here, and it won’t prevent what this regime has planned, unless we all do more than show up on Saturday.

Rallies and protests are powerful, important things.

They are a necessary visual reminder that we’re not alone.They help provide a sense of agency in dark days, to help our minds right-size the threats that seem so towering and so beyond our reach.They give us a chance to stand with a chosen community and be a tangible response to the things that burden us.They connect us with people we live, work, and study alongside and give us the chance to forge partnerships and build coalitions.

Rallies and protests are awe-inspiring, breathtaking moments.

But rallies and protests don’t save democracies.

They can’t craft legislation and they won’t protect endangered people.Rallies alone won’t jettison corrupt leaders from their well-fortified perches of power.They can’t reach into the labyrinthine hallways and cloistered rooms where those charged with protecting us decide our fates.Protests can’t tip the scales of our political process back toward balance.They will not reject would-be dictators.

Please hear me: attending a No Kings protest for a few hours isn’t nothing, but it is the easiest possible ask of us, as Americans.

Our efforts on Saturday don’t matter even a little bit to Trump and his sycophantic gaggle of ghouls. Like so many times before, they will simply allow us to have an afternoon where we all feel a false sense of power, blow off steam, and then largely return to our lives currently in progress, while they continue to dismantle our Republic largely unabated.

We need to remember that transformative activism is found in sustained movements, not in soothing moments, and we need to find our place in the messy and local battles throughout this nation until we actually strike fear into the oppressors and oligarchs, and upend the new order they are constructing where we are truly powerless.

The only way this Saturday will really mean something is if we make meaningful connections with our neighbors while we’re there, if we partner with organizations in our communities, if we sign up to work the polls or lobby our lawmakers or contribute to campaigns, if we find a place to do the daily, unglamorous, incremental work of resisting fascism.

For No Kings Day to matter, it cannot be a landing pad; it must be a launching pad.

Yes, Saturday afternoon is something.

But Monday morning is everything.

In the comments, let me know what you’ll be doing for No Kings Day, and share ways that you’ve found to do sustained activism in meaningful ways, so that others can be inspired beyond Saturday.

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“I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

These words are a continual presence these days.I hear them a couple of hundred times a day in one form or another.I read them in desperate social media outbursts.I overhear them in coffee shop conversations.I find them in my inbox from friends and from strangers.I hear them in my own head.

They are the symptoms of a shared sickness we now find ourselves afflicted with: a sprawling homegrown mental health crisis. They are part of a growing national neurosis brought on by a continual assault on decency, sanity, and goodness by those in power.

Mental health is a daily battle, even on our best days.

During any given year in America, one in five adults (nearly 68 million people) experiences mental illness; 10 million of these people finding their lives fundamentally impacted by their internal, invisible maladies.

The personal toll of these diseases is almost incalculable: debilitating mood disorders, propensity toward addiction, susceptibility to physical illness, and regular feelings of isolation and hopelessness.

Nearly 50, 000 people die here by suicide each year, with 25 attempts for each of these deaths. Many of these premature passings have direct or indirect lines to undiagnosed, untreated, or treated but ultimately insurmountable sickness. At any given moment, tens of millions of people are fighting a battle in their own heads, just to stay here.

This is all under normal circumstances, and these are not at all normal circumstances.

These are days that tax people’s already burdened mental defense systems and emotional reserves by relentlessly targeting their places of vulnerability:

the real and manufactured emergencies designed by our leadership,the daily, incessant legislative attacks on vulnerable people groups,the normalized acts of violence this sociopathic president not only tolerates but incites,the untethered behavior regarding matters of national security, international relations, environmental stewardship, and human rights.

Our leadership is mentally unwell, and lots of good, already hurting people see it clearly. They understand the gravity of these moments for our nation, and they are rightly terrified by the lack of accountability, the absence of conscience, and the poverty of empathy.

Men and women, already prone to depression and anxiety, those normally driven to despair without any discernible cause or reason, now also have objective data that makes that hopelessness quite sensible.

The MAGA movement is making otherwise mentally healthy people emotionally sick and making already ill people much worse.

And a growing number of otherwise well people are developing a form of PTSD from continual exposure to a group of people in power whose malevolence and contempt for life are beyond comprehension. They, too, are finding the space within their own heads to be a dangerous one as they live within it all and try to make sense of senseless cruelty.

What's worse, the GOP’s boundless assaults on human rights, their vicious crusades against science, their continual gaslighting of otherwise sensible people, and their reckless fake news conspiracy theories, aren’t just making those who oppose them prone to head sickness; they’re doing the same to their supporters.

Republican leaders are playing on their own rank-and-file’s paranoia, instability, and fear; ratifying their latent or active neuroses, and justifying the ways they now act out in both emotional and physical violence.

We are seeing daily acts of aggression in schools, churches, subways, city streets, and grocery stores by people whose own illnesses and frailties have been triggered by the incendiary language and calculated lies continually perpetuated from the top. If there is such a thing as Trump Derangement Syndrome, these are its symptoms.

America is sickly, and this regime is perfectly fine with that.

It’s no coincidence that the Trump Administration has drastically reduced funding for mental healthcare and removed barriers to ill people accessing firearms. This cocktail of mayhem is what it thrives upon, traffics in, and desires.

In an environment populated by emotionally fragile and mentally unhealthy people, it’s much easier to act without accountability and to continue to take away resources, personal liberties, and human rights without recompense.

Mental illness is rarely treated with the same urgency and seriousness as physical illness, and the dismissal is even more profound in days when people feeling deep sadness and great empathy for others are derided as weak, overly emotional, or too sensitive. The callousness of these days makes brain maladies trivial, or worse, worthy of ridicule.

The President and those who support him in Congress are counting on exhausted people growing too weary from pushing back, too overwhelmed fighting their inner demons, and too hopeless to go on.

We can’t allow that.

We need to keep our eyes and ears open to the pain of others right now: to hear the suffering in their words or that is buried in their silence, and to move toward it.We need to linger long enough to see people who are hurting; to notice their withdrawal and absence, and to make sure they’re OK.We need to use the resources currently available of therapists, doctors, and counselors who understand these invisible sicknesses and how very real they are.We need to gather in community to bolster and encourage one another, and to remind people that they aren’t alone in the wars they wage to get better.We need to reach out to people in our own despair, in our sadness, in our own fight to stay here.And we all need to carry one another and care for one another, realizing that the GOP has no desire to, and in fact is doing willful damage to the people they have sworn to protect.

We are not well, America.Many of our leaders are really not well.The sickest and most damaged among them sits in the Oval Office.Together, we need to oppose the ugliness that collectively threatens us.We need to care for our health and the health of those around us.We need to work and vote to purge our nation of the curators of this chaos, so that we can get well together.

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Tens of millions of us still find ourselves asking this question, watching a staggering number of Americans somehow remain unflinching in their devotion to this President. Despite high crimes, sexual assaults, cognitive decline, reckless wars, and an authoritarian agenda, they remain seemingly giddy over his existence.

But Trump’s supporters aren’t necessarily pleased with the actual policies, tactics,or methods, but with the results: pissing off the people they don’t like.

That is all that matters to them.It’s the reason they vote the way they do.It’s the reason their support is steadfast through pedophilia accusations and acts of treason and human rights disasters and wanton ignorance.It’s the reason they remain emotionally infatuated with him despite his breaking every campaign promise.

Trump supporters have always seen his ascendency as a big “F— You” to his predecessor, to the identity politics that they feel has targeted them, and to an ever-diversifying nation that they see as a threat. More than affordable healthcare, unpolluted food, and economic opportunity, they want someone to stick it to the world on their behalf, and in their rage-addled state, they somehow believe he does that.

It’s a nationwide mental health crisis that seems both beyond repair and belief.

It’s terribly sad to admit that a huge portion of this nation is moved not primarily by party over country (which would be bad enough) but by spite: that they care more about flipping Democrats the bird than the sovereignty of our nation. To know that people you respected and loved and work with live with anger as their engine is a reason for mourning.

MAGA voters would rather give a strident middle finger to woke liberals, even at the expense of the air their kids breathe and the schools they attend.They’d prefer to “own the Libs,” even if their medical bills bankrupt them, and businesses migrate away, and natural disasters go ignored.Their white fragility is so profound that two years ago, they gave Trump another blank check because he’s reversing any recent advances by marginalized communities whose gains they see as threats to their own.They still feel victorious, even though gas prices are astronomical, we’re immersed in chaos, nothing is trickling down, and America is not first.Even professed Christians among them are willing to abandon any semblance of Christlikeness because they get back the nostalgic veneers and ceremonial trappings of God and Country that Obama couldn’t satisfy because of his pigmentation and his embracing of the world and its religions.

And so these people are now subsiding on Liberal tears and complete denial.

That is the only barometer for them in this moment of what is good, wise, or productive.It guides their vote, filters their media, defines their faith, and shapes their hearts.That’s why arguing policies or stating facts or attempting constructive conversation with them right now is almost impossible, because spite is irrational and stubborn and unmovable. It wants emotional food that feels good, even if it is filled with empty calories.

The only course of action right now is for those of us motivated by things other than revenge and payback and vitriol to be clear, loud, and unified.

We need to reach across all the divides, and to be about what we’re about, and to declare these things with clarity and without relenting or apology.

Our intent should no longer be understanding these people who are still emotionally bound to him. We do understand them. We’ve listened to them. That’s why we know that they cannot be convinced by any previously used methods to connect with rational people. Their blind hatred of the Left and their complete adoration of this President make them, practically speaking, unreachable currently.

And as frustrating as sharing a nation with them is, they remind us who we do not want to be.

Being motivated by spite is a really horrible way to go through this life, which is why the rest of us can’t make our response now be about these people and the angry wars they want to stay immersed in. It cannot be shaped by our grievances and complaints and purity stances either. We need to gaze higher than that.

The human and civil rights of our people, the future of our children, the integrity of our nation, our standing in the world, and the defense of our Constitution are all far too important to squander as a middle finger to people we want to piss off.

We’ve seen what that yields.

We need to live and work and vote for equality, diversity, compassion, love, and justice—not for spite.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Recently, Donald Trump ridiculed California Governor Gavin Newsom’s dyslexia, saying, “Honestly, I'm all for people with learning disabilities, but not for my president."

Personally, I’d rather have a human being with dyslexia leading our nation than a felonious, traitorous rapist who has the compassion of a ham sandwich, but that’s just me.

Trump’s comments, as disgusting and dangerous as they are, are hardly shocking. His body of work against those with physical, mental, and emotional challenges is well-documented and shameful:

Trump’s initial 2016 presidential campaign included a vicious rally ridiculing of a disabled reporter, which in any other iteration of America would have immediately disqualified him.

He has often publicly used the R-word in insulting political opponents, including then-Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

In March of 2025, Trump’s nephew Fred C. Trump, whose son William was born with a genetic abnormality that altered his physical and cognitive development, detailed the contempt his uncle has for mentally disabled human beings, quoting him as saying, “Those people… “the shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”

It’s impossible to overstate how damaging Trump’s words are to disabled people throughout this nation, especially children, who have to hear the occupant of our highest office tell them they are less-than, that they are a burden, that they are insult-fodder, that they will forever be limited by their differences.

For a nation that has seen tremendous progress in the perception of and conversation around Americans with disabilities, the President’s ignorant, Jurassic ramblings signal a sad regression, with millions of his sycophantic disciples celebrating the return of slurs, myths, and mockery that they are all too happy to traffic in.

And somehow, as incomprehensibly destructive as Trump’s words are, they pale in comparison to his party’s legislative war on children and adults with disabilities:

The Trump Administration’s incessant attacks on SNAP benefits are a fierce blow to disabled people, who are disproportionally impacted by the funding cuts and program cancellations.

The elimination of DEIA programs throughout the country are profoundly harmful to the visibility, representation, and opportunity for those with physical, mental, and emotional challenges.

The Administration is working to dismantle the Department of Education, including severe cuts to staffing and financial support for the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services.

They have targeted (SSI) Supplemental Security Income, which helps provide financial support for parents of children with disabilities, placing greater burdens on already vulnerable families.

They’ve cut funding to SOAR (Supplemental Security Income (SSI)/Social Security Disability Insurance, and (SSDI) Outreach, Access, and Recovery), an invaluable resource in housing those with severe mental illness and other serious medical conditions.

Trump’s Department of Labor has canceled a proposal to phase out subminimum wages for workers with disabilities, financially penalizing them in the workplace.

Over and over, in both the President’s reckless words and his regime’s punitive legislative assaults, children and adults with disabilities in America are facing an undeserved cruelty that they should not be left alone to endure.

While the domestic terrorism of ICE, the growing carnage of the war in Iran, and the prolific predation of the Epstein files all relentlessly scream for our attention and rightly receive it, it can be easy to overlook tens of millions of people who are finding themselves assailed by those elected to protect and represent them.

We cannot overlook them.

Decent human beings here need to make sure we do not fail our families, friends, and neighbors with our silence or our inaction. We must confront those who would drag our nation back to a shameful place where those with disabilities are shut in and silenced, erased from the collective community, and denied the freedoms and liberties that presence here should provide without caveat or condition.

People of faith, morality, and conscience need to step forcefully into the face of the bullies and the bigots, whether in our families, our schools, our communities, or in the White House, and let them know that we will not tolerate their cruelty.

Donald Trump, his willing Cabinet of ghouls, his complicit party, and a pathetic number of their supporters will continue to demean and dehumanize disabled people, but they will not do it unopposed.

They have declared war on Americans with disabilities, but they’re gonna have to fight all of us. And we will not let them win.

In the comments, please share your experience as a disabled person or someone who loves them, or the work you’re doing to care for, advocate for, and stand alongside those with physical, mental, or emotional disabilities. Help me crowdsource hope and resources.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Over two decades ago, I was at a Christmas dinner party in the home of a gay couple. From the outside, it looked like any holiday gathering: a warm, beautifully decorated room filled with people laughing and telling stories in the soft glow of the tree, while the silky voice of Johnny Mathis wafted through the air along with the heavenly cocktail of aromas from a well-used kitchen.

Most of the guests that night happened to identify as LGBTQ, which hadn’t really occurred to me until, as I smiled and surveyed the room, a sickening thought rudely interrupted: “Many Christians believe that these beautiful people in this room (other than my wife and me) are all going to hell. For no other reason than their gender identity or sexual orientation, every one of them is doomed to spend eternity beyond this life in perpetual torment at the hands of a God who apparently made them, put them here, and loves them passionately.”

And as a Christian and a pastor, I was supposed to believe and preach this, too. It simply no longer rang true for me. I couldn’t reconcile this with the character of an infinitely loving Creator. I lost hell right then and there.

And after that moment, I began taking note of the vast multitudes I’d also been taught were similarly condemned:

My Jewish friends from the gym.The Muslim couple down the street from our home.The gay couple I’d once worked for in college.My atheist friends from high school.My non-Born Again classmates from childhood.Every non-Christian who ever lived.Thousands of authors, musicians, philosophers, and thinkers have inspired me. Gandhi, Buddha, and everyone from their faith traditions.An estimated 69 percent of the people on the planet right now. (around 5.6 billion of them).Lots of good human beings are in hell, and many more are on their way, at least, according to Evangelicals who seem all too happy about that fact.

Over the course of my life, I’ve met or known of so many brilliant, funny, giving, caring people, who for thousands of different reasons can’t or won’t declare themselves Christians, and the idea that God condemns them simply for that fact feels far more human than divine to me now. It seems more like the mind of people who are determined to exclude, judge, and shame. Hell doesn’t feel like the logical construction of a God who is Love, but of human beings who are hateful.

Few things get Christian leaders as excited as forecasting damnation for other people. It rallies their bases, gives them a common enemy to rail against (gays, Muslims, Atheists, Democrats, drag queens, etc.), and leverages the fear that we all have that God may be out to squash us. It’s also a big religious business, which doesn’t hurt.

And there’s a trickle-down judgmentalism that reaches the pews too, allowing ordinary, incredibly imperfect people to believe themselves safe from divine prosecution because they’ve said the magic words, and to simultaneously feel superior to those they can condemn from a distance based on any number of perceived things that disqualify them from Heaven: their sexual activity, their faith perspective, their political affiliations, their nation of origin.

Not long after this experience, I shared a social media post about being resigned to my own eternal punishment, and I received replies from all over the world; people from every walk of life, every life stage, of every religious tradition and color and orientation, who all expressed a similar sentiment:

I’ll see you there!

And that’s the recurring thought I often have now as I cross paths with people who I once believed were condemned, as well as those who confidently almost joyfully condemn them: If Heaven is supposedly filled with such petty, self-righteous, hypocrites, it doesn’t sound all that much like Heaven to me, and if so many beautiful, life-giving souls are surely bound for Hell, it seems like it’ll be one helluva time.

I received a gift at that Christmas party nearly twenty-five years ago. I found myself freed up to see people as they were: for their inherent worth and equally flawed beauty, none deserving of eternal torment, and each one like me: doing the very best that they could to be decent and loving and kind and to treat people well. I’m pretty sure God will be cool with that.

I’m well aware that many professed Christians believe that my doubts about the existence of hell all but guarantee that I’ll spend eternity there, and I’m sure that with great pride or pity, many will comment as such. But from the looks of it, I’ll be in good company in my hot-and-humid eternity, and I won’t have to look far to find diverse, loving humanity when I get there. I look forward to spending eternity alongside all the compassionate, creative, and open-hearted people who weren’t good enough for an Evangelical afterlife, which is just as well.

The clearer the image of these miserable, judgmental people’s Heaven becomes, the less and less trepidation I have of my soul’s resting place somewhere outside of it.

Receiving their damnation actually begins to feel like dodging a bullet: I’ll be avoiding them.

To quote one of my favorite songwriters, the great Frank Turner:

And we’re definitely going to hell—but we’ll have all the best stories to tell.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Whether that vote is cast joyfully, or with trepidation, or begrudgingly, or without all the information, or as a protest, it makes the same bold statements:This is my choice.I am with this person.I consent to their conduct.I co-sign their actions.I endorse them.

A vote doesn’t have qualifiers, caveats, or escape clauses. It simply says Yes or No.

And as we’re witnessing a rapid and expansive dismantling of our nation’s systems, a complete mockery of our Cabinet positions, a terrifying defection of decorated generals and dedicated public servants, a pervasive chaos enveloping everything from our social services to our healthcare to our Military to our essential needs to our standing in the world, the one question I keep wanting to ask you, his supporters is:

Is this really what you wanted?

Did you really want grocery and gas here to rise stratospherically while he dumps billions of dollars into foreign conflicts and his own bank accounts?Did you really want us dragged into an unnecessary, costly, and unwinnable war against a nation our highest Cabinet members and intelligence experts admit did not pose an imminent threat to us?Did you really intend for Latino families to be terrorized in their workplaces, schools, and homes, with no regard for due process or for legal and human rights?Did you really want the predators and perverts behind one of the largest human trafficking organizations in our history to be shielded from accountability for their brutality against our most vulnerable? Did you really want delusional billionaires and oligarchs to have access to our nation’s financial resources, trusted news organizations, and personal data?Did you really vote for the dismantling of programs that provide benefits to veterans, lunch to hungry children, and retirement funds for the elderly?Did you really want us alienated from the world by abandoning every global humanitarian and diplomatic partnership we have participated in?

Is this really what you voted for? Honestly?

Because if this isn’t what you voted for, you need to be vocal now.

Silence is not a luxury anyone can afford in days like these. If you voted for Donald Trump and you’re ashamed of that fact, or if you feel like you’re being unfairly criticized, I’m sorry, but that isn’t what this is about right now. Your guilt or your discomfort doesn’t trump your responsibility as a citizen of a nation you claim to revere. Your regret without a response is useless. No one is interested in shaming you, we’re interested in hearing you.

To be silent now, after voting so loudly, is irresponsible and unhelpful.Your silence doesn’t protect refugees or avoid disastrous Cabinet appointees or pay treatment bills for the soon-to-be uninsured.It doesn’t shield marginalized communities from hate crimes or uncover the truth about the pedophiles in our government, or ensure our kids don’t die from preventable diseases, or pull us from a half a dozen reckless acts of aggression on foreign soil that are costing billions of dollars and unthinkable human suffering.Your silence doesn’t encourage lawmakers to push against their party even if they feel they should, and it doesn’t show solidarity with activists in the streets spending themselves to advocate for equality and justice.It doesn’t discourage the President and his spokespeople from rolling out an unrelenting stream of lies or attacking those doing real, Constitution-guarding journalism.It doesn’t hold those in the highest levels of power and influence accountable for disregarding every procedure, rule of law, and safeguard established to ensure that citizens are protected from those governing them.

Your silence doesn’t do anything right now but allow you to divorce yourself from your vote, to avoid any accountability for the man you’ve chosen, and to perpetuate the erratic, reckless, criminal behavior that is endangering all of us.

What this means, friends, is that if you are indeed regretting your vote in any way, this would be the time to stand up and say so. Millions of us are out here doing the work of pushing back and standing with the marginalized, poor, and disregarded (including Trump voters). We’re marching, and we’re calling our elected officials, and we’re busting our butts to keep our Constitution intact, so that regardless of our political affiliations or religious beliefs or nation of origin, we all have access to the personal and collective liberties this nation promised.

And all the while, this President traffics in partisan rhetoric designed to keep us warring with one another, to divert our attention with manufactured culture wars, to fool us into believing the evil is beside us and not above us, to distract us from the truth that we are in equal peril.

And every day you say nothing, our Republic is more and more vulnerable, more and more compromised, more and more in danger of losing the elemental freedoms that we all treasure.

All this to say, I’m really sorry for your embarrassment, but even more concerned about your silence.

Your vote, for whatever reason you cast it, was loud.

And if you regret that vote or if you don’t consent to what you are seeing from this man and this Administration, your voice now is necessary too.

Please join those of us who are resisting together because we love America more than a political party, because we know we are all closer to being beggars than billionaires, and because we understand that this isn’t about some of us, it’s about all of us.

Please speak, and speak up.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

As horrifying and sad as it is watching the worst inhumanity of the past repeating itself in the place we call home, it does allow us to look back and get some idea as to where we’re likely headed.

For students of History, the last two years here in America have been one long experience of Déjà vu of the worst kind: a growing assemblage of governmental red flag overreach, incendiary rhetoric designed to dehumanize an entire segment of the population, a steady failure of both systems and sanity, and the mass delusion of otherwise reasonable people who gladly enabled a fragile lunatic’s sickening rise.

For those of us fortunate enough not to have had our brains rotted and our souls devoured by the decade-long death cult of an orange imbecile here in America, we’ve endeavored to understand how people around us succumbed to a hollow ruse that either intelligence or empathy should have seen through.

We’ve repeatedly beaten our heads against the wall trying (and failing) to find new ways to reach into the stupor of their blind adoration and pull them into moral clarity, none of which proved successful.

And, we’ve attempted to predict just when (if ever) they would awaken from this ten-year racist fever-dream and come to terms with the multitude of horrors they’ve co-authored with their votes and their undying allegiance.

If recent history is any indication, we’d better not hold our breath.

Last night, I found myself tumbling down a YouTube rabbit hole of archival footage of the end of World War II recorded by the US Air Force’s First Motion Picture Unit for a series of films code-named Special Film Project 186. There were heartbreaking scenes of the unthinkable barbarism of the Nazis, vivid inventories of the human, cultural, and emotional toll of Hitler’s reign, and the stories of German leaders, soldiers, and citizens as they reckoned with the end of a twelve-year-long parade of abject brutality.

One particular video detailing the liberation of the concentration camp at Dachau stopped me dead in my tracks, because suddenly, I could see what’s coming here.

Near the end of the clip, the narrator quoted German author Erich Kästner, who wrote in his diary on May 5th, 1945, about his country and its people:

Depression is turning into irritability. Everyone is making someone else responsible. And everyone is excluding just one person from this blame: themselves.

Erich Kästner continued: Why are people irritable? Did they actually believe the deception? Did they really confuse the outrageous rhetoric with facts? No one can be that stupid. Now, they are pretending to be surprised. In other words, they would rather be thought of as a complete idiot than as a scoundrel.

This is where MAGA Americans are headed in the (hopefully near) future when Trump has his bunker moment or reaches his political demise: not the admission of culpability for the suffering, or the grieving and repentance such ownership requires, but feigned ignorance.

They will pretend not to have heard the rest of us over the last decade as we labored relentlessly to rouse them awake with facts and data that they stridently rejected.

They will claim no recollection of the nearly infinite occasions we passionately appealed to a reason and decency that were nowhere to be found within them.

And they will plead innocence in the hopes that we will somehow believe that they were misled, duped, and swindled, instead of correctly concluding that they’d abandoned their humanity in the presence of a moral bottom feeder whose prejudices, phobias, and grievances matched their own.

When justice finally arrives (as it always does for tyrants and despots); when Trump’s legion of atrocities can no longer be contained within heavily redacted files, buried beneath Fox News fluff pieces, or explained away by their wildest mental gymnastics, then, they will fire off one last, desperate salvo: denial.

One day soon, just as the Germans Erich Kästner wrote about eighty years ago, MAGA Americans will hope to be thought of as gullible idiots rather than complicit enablers. They will seek exoneration in the name of having been fooled, attempting to rewrite the story one last time and hope the rest of us will let them.When that happens, we’ll need to preserve history and their participation accurately, so that if this terrible bit of History repeats itself in the future, the good people who bear witness in those days will make sure no one forgets—or let’s them off the hook.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Dear Muslim Friends,

I’m an American Christian, and I wanted you to know that I’m sorry.

I’m sorry that the loudest voices representing my faith tradition right now seem to be the most hateful ones, the most violent ones, the ones least like Jesus.

I’m sorry that these voices are making you feel unwelcome and unloved; that they are magnifying fear, leveraging ignorance, and trafficking in stereotypes.

I am sorry that they are causing you to experience undeserved animosity in the places you worship, raise your families, and do your work.

I want you to know that those bullies do not represent me, no matter how high a platform they have or how loudly their voices carry.

They don’t represent most of the Christians I know, either.

They certainly don’t represent Jesus. He preached that the peacemakers were the ones most replicating God’s heart; that a fierce and unrelenting love for our neighbor was the mark of a true disciple of Christ; that our religious convictions are defined by our willingness to welcome the stranger.

You see, so many Christians here fully realize that the people attacking you are fundamentalist religious extremists, too. There is little difference between them and those they so vehemently condemn. Like you, we recognize contempt and malice when they come decorated with righteousness, clothed in religion, and wrapped in scripture.

We understand well that hatred is not the sole property of any religion or nation, and we reject the broad and damaging brush they paint you with. You deserve to be fully seen, fully heard, and fully known, and to have your lives alone speak for you. We all do.

We know that so many of you, like so many of us, choose goodness and default to gentleness. We know that you, too, believe in the inherent value of all people and genuinely seek peace with those who live alongside you. We wake up each day seeking love, compassion, kindness, and mercy, and in so many fundamental ways, we are the same.

We are all together in this life, living shoulder to shoulder in the kindhearted middle of true humanity, stuck wedged between warring factions who don’t realize they are so very much alike. We are all their collateral damage.

I apologize for those who have bastardized the teachings of Jesus and weaponized our faith tradition in ways that cause you such pain. I am sorry that they are perpetuating violence with every dehumanizing comment, every incendiary sermon, every reckless stump speech, and every bit of social media slander.

But more than that, I am sorry that so many of us have been so silent in the face of it all. Most people don’t have the power, or the reach, or the influence that these propagandists have, but that can no longer be an excuse.

Just as the terrorists and zealots steal your voices and commandeer your spirituality, so the predatory presidents and the bigoted politicians do ours. We’re going to change that. We have to.

Right now, please accept these words as a beginning; as confirmation that we are fully disgusted with our misguided brothers and sisters, that we condemn their narrow-minded, unprovoked attacks on you and your faith tradition, and that we are fully committed to finding a better response to violence than more violence.

We will not meet fear with fear.We will not respond to bigotry with more of the same.We will not be drafted into their manufactured holy war.

So, until we can wrestle the microphone from those warmongers who have monopolized it, and until we can make sure that the voice of Jesus is the one most loudly representing us, please know that we are sorry.

We are called by our tradition to be forgivers, to be cheek turners, to be healers, to be peacemakers.

Many of us remember this.

Many of us desire this.

May this peace be in us.

And may this peace, be with you.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I hear this sentiment from time to time, and perhaps you do, too.

The implication is that declaring your opposition to people, or laws, or movements is somehow an unhelpful negative posture that comes across as combative and confrontational and inevitably makes people back away or shut down.

On its face, the idea sounds like it makes total sense: focus on positivity and a message of collaboration, and you’ll have better progress with people who disagree with you.

The problem is, it’s simply not universally true.

It’s not something I’m all that interested in either, at least when it comes to the arrival of fascism.

I want people to know what I’m against.I want to specifically name the things I find unconscionable, the conduct that turns my stomach, the legislation I abhor, the cruelty I will not abide.I want to state my disgust with such clarity that misunderstanding me is not possible.I want there to be no ambiguity in my words or any confusion about my outrage, because I don’t want to let the bigots and racists and phobic people off the hook.I don’t want them to pretend we’re of like mind merely because we both use words like family, justice, love, or liberty.

That specificity allows for no mysteries and forces people to declare where they stand, regarding immigration, or LGBTQ rights, or women’s healthcare. That clarity doesn’t let anyone hide behind semantics or vague language.

Whenever people say, “I want to know what you’re for, not what you’re against,” they’re usually not being intellectually honest anyway. They know damn well what I’m for; they just don’t like what I’m for or how forcefully and unapologetically I’m delivering the message.

It isn’t that they actually believe me to be an unreasonably negative person; they simply realize that attacking me for my tone and my manner is a convenient conversation stopper that allows them to avoid accountability and not have to dig any deeper.

I’m against many things:

I’m against LGBTQ people being told who they can marry, what bathrooms they can use, whether they can adopt children, and why they can’t serve in the Military.

I’m against sick and poor people being without affordable healthcare in a nation that conservative leaders won’t stop saying is so damn great, when every other civilized country seems to figure it out.

I’m against the violence regularly experienced by Muslims and Jewish people, immigrants, people of color, women in hijabs, and men in turbans at the hands of emboldened supremacists.

I’m against old white men with no medical experience making legislative decisions about what a woman does with her body or what choices she has regarding her autonomy over that body.

I’m against conservative Evangelicals trying to legislatively impose their religious phobias and antiquated prejudices against people who don’t believe, love, worship, or look the way they do.

I’m against the proliferation of weapons of rapid carnage, the near-daily mass murders committed with them, and a political party so in bed with the gunmakers that they do nothing to stop the bleeding.I’m against Right-wing media for intentionally preying upon suggestible people by providing an endless stream of lies and incendiary rhetoric designed to manipulate them into being perpetually terrified of people of color, Latinos, foreigners, and Democrats—everyone, really.

I’m against Republicans in Congress who have abandoned their responsibility to represent the people, who regularly disregard the Constitution, and who undermine our national sovereignty by capitulating to a predatory leader whose only impulse is to damage.

I’m against this historically malignant President and the incessant and unspeakable violations he commits against the most vulnerable and already burdened human beings—and the people I love and live alongside who’ve abandoned all morality and decency to support him.If anyone claims they can’t tell from these statements about what I’m against, that I’m conversely for equality, for diversity, for compassion, for humanity, I’m not going to argue with them.

I’m just going to believe that they don’t really want to know what I’m for, because the things and the people I’m clearly for, they’re clearly against.

And by speaking with absolute clarity and undeniable specificity about all that boils my blood, and turns my stomach, and grieves my heart, maybe I will give others the courage to declare it as well.

Perhaps what we need right now is a fierce, disparate affinity community of people who will not tolerate the dehumanization that is having the run of the house right now—and who are OK saying so.It’s good to let people know what you’re against.So, how do you feel about all of this? What are you against? Let me know in the comments.

Dear MAGAs,This war has you confused, and I’d like to help you.

I see your performative star-spangled posturing, your arrogant middle finger contempt for strangers half a world away, your perverse joy at the broken bodies of people with dark skin and strange headwear, and I feel like someone needs to tell you something:

You’re not Donald Trump.

He is not you.

What I mean is that he is not like you, even though you have placed your very identity in him, even though you wrongly believe there is some possibility that you can attain the undeserved lofty position he occupies, even though you incorrectly feel he represents you in a world you’ve decided has wronged you.

You and he have nothing in common.

He does not share your fierce, though sometimes misplaced, national pride.

The truth is, he is an opportunistic parasite; an insatiable bloodsucker who has left everything he has touched scarred, withered, and lifeless. His 79-year moral slime trail is strewn with assaulted girls, dehumanized tenants, disregarded spouses, bankrupt business partners, slandered women, abducted grandfathers, and nameless corpses. America is simply another host he has slapped his name on and drained of its resources.

He does not share your respect for the men and women of our Military, your children.

They are, to him, the losers and suckers he has called them; expendable collateral damage of his capricious, vain, and pointless acts of aggression in our streets, on foreign waters, and in a rapidly-growing number of nations he has decided to claim, colonize, or deplete.

He does not share your faith in Jesus or your adoration of God.

He has never had any other deity other than the needy, fragile, loveless husk of a man he sees in the mirror. He has never stepped into a church without cameras rolling, never read a Bible beyond the page he sacrilegiously signs, and never had an impulse to love any neighbor as himself. Religion to him is an ill-fitting costume, dusted off and draped over his barbaric frame while he fleeces the sheep.

He does not share your work ethic or your pride in the work of your hands.

He is a ban born on third base and 89 feet; cradled in privilege and opulence that all but a tiny fraction of one percent of this world will ever experience. His success is a grand mirage; a gold-veneer facade built on reality TV, Fox News fiction, and purchased propaganda. He doesn’t give a damn about the working class, because he has built his unearned empire upon its back.

In other words, MAGA friend, you are not him, and he is not you.

He is not of you, or with you, or for you.

You, MAGA friend, are the Iranian people.

The hardworking, honest, human beings living thousands of miles away under the brutal thumb of corrupt leaders whom you claim you seek to emancipate them from, even while disparaging them with slurs and threats.

They may not share your religion or your nation of origin or your mother tongue, but you have far more in common with them than you will ever have with a morally bankrupt billionaire warmonger like Donald Trump. There is no difference between you and the people of Iran who toil their entire lives in systems that are designed to consume them.

They will bury their children and you will bury yours, and he will never shed a single tear for either.

That’s why Donald Trump and his party are in complete control of the presidency and of Congress, and yet your groceries are astronomical, your gas prices are stratospheric, your healthcare costs are crippling you, and your jobs are disappearing.

It’s why he runs the Department of Justice, and yet a legion of pedophiles and rapists are still safely in the shadows, still shielded from accountability.

It’s why he is our Military’s Commander-In-Chief, and thousands of your children are being needlessly placed in harm’s way, staring into the face of the abyss, and delivered like slaughterhouse lambs, for a war you honestly can’t explain or justify because the person sending them cannot.

Just like the atrocities of Ukraine and Gaza before, you are vilifying the victims and applauding the predators, never realizing that your affinity is not with the latter but the former.

So, you can enjoy the temporary intoxication of manufactured patriotism, you can feed on the empty calories of America First, and you can dehumanize a nation you couldn’t distinguish from a dozen others.

You can regurgitate White House talking points that paint millions of innocent people as faceless monsters whose eradication is righteous.And most of all, you can fall prostrate before this sneering, self-pleasuring narcissist who couldn’t care less if you lived or died, or for the suffering and sorrow he is inflicting on multitudes, in the name of a Constitution he has no allegiance to, a God he has no belief in, and a nation has complete contempt for.

But know this truth: the only thing you and Donald Trump have in common is that you both worship Donald Trump.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

It turns out, I loved the myth of America.

Growing up, I bought into its songs and its anthems and its stirring stories of liberty and opportunity; I fully embraced the carefully curated fiction handed to me, which I guess was understandable.

For a white, cisgender, heterosexual male who identified as Christian, these myths were more true for me than most. They were all I’d ever known. That version of America had always been available to me, even if it was out of reach for many people.

But the more I had my eyes opened by travel and experience and curiosity and education, the more I saw the cracks in the glistening, whitewashed facade and into the putrid decay underneath. It is a sickness that now seems more pervasive and profound than ever. As bad as I’ve come to realize it has always been, in many ways it feels far worse now.

Lately, I’m realizing that not only do I not love this nation, but I really don’t like it very much, either: not the one we have been and certainly not the one I see us becoming now that we have rejected decency and elected inhumanity.

I don’t like the fierce denial of Science and data.I don’t like the rejection of education and expertise.I don’t like rising hostility toward the different.I don’t like a cruel white Christian Church devoid of a compassionate Jesus of color.I don’t like the unrepentant brutality of our leaders.I don’t like a political party fully beholden to a traitorous monster.I don’t like the racists emboldened to bully store clerks and harass black teenagers.I don’t like seeing people I love devoured by baseless conspiracy and nonsensical propaganda.I don’t like hundreds of millions of people being one illness away from bankruptcy.I don’t like realizing how many people I know harbor hatred for strangers.I don’t like that we are being helmed by a felon-rapist who is bereft of nobility.

I don’t like so much of this place that it grieves my heart and brings me to tears.

My adversaries tell me to “just get out if I don’t like it,” and on many days, I completely agree with them. I confess to regularly daydreaming about leaving it all behind, about beginning again somewhere else: about escaping the coming flood of fascism that feels unstoppable, avoiding my increasingly unrecognizable neighbors, and cutting off my unhinged family members.

Yet, I know even having the option to do such things is a symptom of my privilege and a luxury many cannot afford; people who will remain here regardless of what happens because their forebears had stayed and because not staying isn’t something their minds have the good fortune to entertain.

And so, even though I really don’t like America, I’m trying to stay in America, too.

I’m trying to stay because my children and so many other people’s children deserve to inherit something less like what this place is, and more like the place it could be: the nation the songs declare we are but have not yet been.

I’m trying to stay to show people that Christianity is not what they’ve been told it is by this MAGA, Bible Belt bastardization with a bloodthirsty, gun-toting, white Republican Jesus with no love for his neighbors.

I’m trying to stay to stand up to the grocery store bullies and the mosque door vandals and the social media terrorists and the truck flag bigots, to let them know that they don’t have the run of the house just because they have had a kindred spirit in the White House or steadfast advocates in the highest levels of Congress or surrogates on the Supreme Court.

I’m trying to stay to help build the country I dream of living in, the one whose glory I have seen brief flashes of; the one that has always been made better by good people who decided to be loud in the face of a really powerful violence that seemed to be winning.

I’m trying to stay here and get my hands dirty, instead of watching from a safe distance and praying someone does something to keep it all from hitting the fan, because that’s how we ended up here.

Most of all, I’m trying to stay because I’ve done my time here and contributed my gifts and earned my scars, and I’m not about to let anyone threaten me or push me or shout me out of here.

It’s getting bad here, and yes, I do fully believe it’s all going to get worse before it gets better, but I’m staying so that hopefully the worst isn’t quite as bad and so the better arrives a little bit sooner.

If things continue to devolve and our systems further fail and fascism gets a greater foothold, I may feel differently.

But for now, I’m going to roll up my sleeves, steady myself, double my resolve, and work tirelessly alongside tens of millions of others here who don’t like America either, but who are hell-bent on crafting a better version of it.

I love the liberty and equality and diversity this nation was supposed to aspire to, and we still have a shot at being home to these things, even if the odds are not as good as they may have been a year ago.

For now, that is enough reason to stay.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

OK, it’s probably not particularly healthy to have a grievance with an entire species, so let me narrow that down a bit.

I’m having a really hard time with the unbothered people, the “everything is gonna be fine” people, the people who are acting as though they are above those of us who are blowing gaskets, breaking down, and freaking out.

You know who I’m talking about: those friends, family members, coworkers, classmates, and social media acquaintances who tone-police us for surveying the monumental destruction being inflicted upon our fragile Republic and its people and being livid. Those people.

I’ve reached my breaking point with human beings around me who are still averting their eyes, avoiding the news, and anesthetizing themselves on a mind-numbing cocktail of wishful thinking, retail therapy, self-preservation, and American exceptionalism.

I’ve reached the limit of my tolerance for people who have seemingly spent the past year poo-pooing hundreds of atrocities and illegalities, any one of which would be an alarm-tripping red flag for a nation sliding swiftly into fascism.

And I’ve really had it with people who are still criticizing the emotionality of those of us who’ve been told for a decade that we’re overreacting, while we’ve watched every single supposedly impossible prediction come to pass.

I don’t think laissez-faire wait-and-seers are particularly helpful right now.

Look, I believe in being rational when at all possible, in offering a measured response to most kinds of adversity, to being strategic and sober of mind in the face of many struggles.

But right now, circumstances are such that we could use a lot more people who have seen, heard, and have had enough: enough injustice, enough lawlessness, enough dehumanization, and who aren’t afraid to be labeled too loud, too pissed off, and too passionate.

There is a time and place for self-control, for tolerance, for listening and bearing with people, for breathing and being still. But there is also a time and place when the gravity of the moment calls for something fierce and unwieldy; a wildness of heart that isn’t interested in decorum or social norms. I suggest that now is such a time, and here is precisely the place.

America is on the brink of authoritarianism.Our president is a sociopath.His Cabinet is sycophantic.His party is complicit.They are at war with the world.They are ignoring law and morality.They are building concentration camps.They are murdering protestors.They are silencing journalists.The media are bending the knee.

This Congress is neutered.The Supreme Court is compromised.The checks and balances are disappearing.The systems are failing.People are being arrested for existing.People are being targeted for who they love.

These are not hyperbolic rantings of overly emotional crepe-hangers; they are the clear-headed conclusions of those of us who are paying attention, who’ve read the files, who’ve waded into the minutia of the legislation, and who don’t scroll away from things that turn our stomachs and break our hearts.

I’m not advocating for an aimless, reckless assembly of panicked people running around like headless chickens, but some urgency and a little ferocity from a lot more people would be a good start. Ignorance is bliss until it’s deadly.

If you’re already furious, fed up, and losing your filters and your f***s, celebrate that. We need a lot more fire and a lot less chill.

Right now, it’s a sign of your humanity, of your sanity, and of your soul, to look around at it all and say, “I’ve had it.”

Note: If you’ve had it and want to know how to productively and strategically wield your exasperation with other similarly pissed-off people, start by contacting your local Indivisible group, connecting with the ACLU, and partnering with Remove Coalition or Red, Wine, & Blue. You can also research progressive faith communities, nonprofits, and candidates, and ask them where they can use your help.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Hey, guys, it’s time for us to have a white man-to-white man conversation.

We need to talk about how we’re going to clean up the catastrophic mess we’ve made here.

And we need to be honest with ourselves and reckon with the truth that this nation is in the perilous place it is, because we have collectively failed the human test.

Our handiwork is everywhere right now:

The rabid nationalism that has swallowed up the Evangelical Church.The inexplicable second term of a court-adjudicated rapist.The violent, anti-immigrant persecution by ICE and its supporters. The Renaissance of unapologetic Nazi idols and white supremacist cheerleaders.The never-ending culture war campaigns and Don’t Tread on Me battle posturing from the political and religious Right. The knuckle-dragging, intellectually fetal toxic manhood running through the MAGA movement.And, even the internalized misogyny of Conservative Christian women.

We need to fully own it all and to decide what we’re going to do about it.

I can already hear the objections coming from behind tiny screens throughout this country from guys like me who abhor this wannabe despot, his willing acolytes in Congress, and the red-hatted death cultists who are now in year ten of living vicariously through their snarling, incompetent messiah of white mediocrity:

Not all white men!

Yes, all white men.

Not me!

Yes, you, and yes, me.

None of us gets a pass on this.

There is no immunity prize when it comes to culpability.

The protests we’ve attended, the posts we’ve authored, the charities we’ve contributed to, and the number of James Baldwin quotes we’ve shared on social do not exempt us.

There is no Good White Guy loyalty card where we earn rewards for having deconstructed our faith, spoken out against patriarchy, defected from the politics of our parents, or evolved beyond the dog-and-pony faux patriotism and hollow, one-hour-a-week religion we were weaned on.

None of that absolves us from our failure to police our own; for the times we have stayed silent when speaking required courage; when we have laughed nervously through the dehumanizing, sexist filth delivered by our neighbors, fathers, friends, and co-workers.

We need to inventory and lament the countless times we should have corrected another man; when we failed to cut off the ignorant diatribe of a stranger, or come to the defense of a woman being berated in our presence, when we chose the family gathering of least resistance and avoided meeting the moment.

I fully realize that white men are not a monolith in matters of politics or religion. Obviously, our ideologies, our opinions, and our values vary widely, as do their tangible expressions of these things in our lives. When it comes to both the contents of our hearts and the work of our hands, it would be unfair to suggest that any one of us is interchangeable with another.

And yes, acknowledging the national scourge of white supremacy, believing that women and trans people deserve to have agency over their bodies, condemning the white Evangelical theocratic aspirations, and demanding serial predators be made accountable are all important.

Yet, we don’t get kudos or atta-boys for entry-level human being stuff. That’s the bare minimum of what men of decency should do. In fact, it is precisely because we do know better that we bear the responsibility of making sure the other men around us know that they cannot get away with the garbage they can around other like-minded morons, kindred racists, and fellow predators.

The job of overcoming misogyny should not be left to women alone, the war against homophobia not relegated solely to the LGBTQ community, and the defeat of xenophobia not placed upon the shoulders of immigrants. They must be accompanied in these battles must be accompanied by members of the very community who serve as their genesis.

When it comes to the privileges provided by our gender and pigmentation, we have equally benefited, and as a result, we are equally to blame. This nation has been a 250-year-long group project that we were declared leaders of without needing to be intellectually qualified or morally equipped for the job.

And in days like these, when so many fragile, insecure, and emotionally-addled white guys are doing such harm to marginalized and vulnerable communities, all while crying about their supposed oppression, men of character and decency need to step up and make sure that they know that in us they will not find a safe space, a silent observer, or a willing accomplice.

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He’d been watching the news and said he wanted to check on me.

“We’re heartbroken to see what’s going on there.” He wrote. “Is it really as bad as it looks?”

Another sweet reader from England emailed me this morning with similar concern for our nation and for me, based on what she’s been reading and seeing in the media.

Over the past year, many kind-hearted people from all over the world have made similar inquiries about America, asking if it is as dire and alarming up close as it appears from a distance.

Yes, yes it is.

In fact, it’s actually far worse here on the ground, because all the ugliness people can see from thousands of miles away is probably still rather abstract, a largely undefinable, faceless wave of malice and bigotry, something to be analyzed and picked apart and studied. To them, it’s likely a fascinating, if not terrifying, historical event.

But here on the ground, this malignant sickness has a distinct face, one that is far too familiar:

It’s the face of family members whose newly revealed racism is continually confronting us around the dinner table.It’s the face of former church friends, who have completely abandoned the Jesus they claim faith in and chosen the vilest of idols.It’s the face of once pleasant neighbors who casually regurgitate extremist propaganda in sidewalk conversations.It’s the face of childhood friends spewing anti-immigrant filth on their social media profiles.It’s the face of storeowners and hair stylists and restaurant workers, the interactions with whom have become careful walks through conversational minefields.

So yes, it’s the staggering cruelty of those holding the power here, but just as much, it’s the people we know and live alongside who are so gladly empowering them by supporting them.

Yes, it’s the complete bastardization of the rule of law and the systems of protections our forebears put in place to avoid putting our nation in such peril, but it’s our coworkers and uncles and classmates who don’t seem to give a damn about that.

Yes, it’s one political party’s sociopathic lack of empathy and their unrepentant viciousness, but it’s the people we’ve shared Thanksgiving dinner with and served on mission trips alongside, who share their venom and boost their signal.

Yes, it’s Republican politicians’ incessant attacks on the poor and the sick and the vulnerable, but it’s the once kind-hearted people we love, who have been so poisoned by partisan talking points and perverted Christian theology that they celebrate all of it.

That’s why this is all so bad.

We’re certainly losing the big things here: the integrity of our elections, the stability of our Republic, the faith in our systems, the illusion that our Republican leaders will put anything over power and party.

But we’re losing much more than that.We’re losing the soft places we called home: our families and our churches and our circle of friends.We are swiftly and almost hourly seeing the relational fractures that may have always been there beneath the surface, but are now visible and cavernous.We’re trying to decide whether to fight for relationships we’ve spent our lives nurturing, or whether we need to sever those connections in the name of self-preservation.These things will never make the news or have a global impact, but they are shattering our personal worlds to the bedrock.

So, we’re fighting and opposing and working and resisting in the face of this monumental and historically malevolent national political cancer—and while we’re doing that, we’re also trying to preserve our families and our friendships and our workplaces, which are also hanging by a thread.

This is a Constitutional crisis, and it’s a family emergency.

We’re wondering what happened to our nation, and to people we once loved and respected; to our parents, grandparents, siblings, neighbors, and best friends.

Yes, our Democracy is in peril, but our most treasured relationships with people are in tatters, too.

We are trying to salvage both, and it’s exhausting.

Our efforts involve defending our Republic and rebuilding our tribes.

So yes, friends around the world, thank you for caring about us in America.

It is as bad as it looks from where you’re standing.

But I promise you, it’s far worse up close.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

It’s sinful.It’s blasphemous.It’s lousy evangelism.It’s terrible theology.It’s also just plain asinine.

The hypocrisy on display is historic: after spending years straining to find infinitesimal specks in Barack Obama’s eye that they could condemn as moral deal breakers, Conservative White Christians are now perfectly fine with Trump’s expansive, rotted, and reeking forest of immorality and lawlessness.

In fact, in the most dizzying display of theological spin doctoring, it is now precisely his ever-growing trail of personal toxic discharge that supposedly proves evidence of the Almighty’s hand in it all. After all, God uses flawed people.

So Trump’s porn star affairs, his rape adjudication, his mountain of sexual assault claims, his verbal obscenities, his disregard for the rule of law, his compulsive lying, his unrepentant racism, and his incessant attacks on marginalized communities are now unmistakable signs that the Lord is using this ignoramus President.

This is nonsense of Biblical proportions; to try to draw some line between Jesus of Nazareth and Donald of Mar-a-Lago is about as farcical as you can get without actually spontaneously combusting from the cognitive dissonance.

Dying to justify their own allegiances to Trump, Evangelicals have lumped him in with other famously flawed heroes of Scripture, suggesting he is actually God’s anointed, imperfect tool of salvation, in the tradition of the Old Testament.

(Well, God did apparently use the jawbone of an ass, so I guess there is precedent).

This sanctified retrofitting of this godless, loveless blight on the planet to any kind of providential intervention is the height of absurdity.

No, Donald Trump wasn’t anointed by God.He isn’t an instrument of Divine will.He isn’t Biblically hastening Armageddon or Jesus’ return.

He’s just a hateful, indecent, predatory fraud who is destroying the environment, stripping people of their human rights, and making America a global laughingstock.

His ascension is not prophetic but pathetic, the result of:

Russian interference,fake news,gerrymandering,voter suppression,Fox News brainwashing,Democratic stumbles,the votes of bigoted Evangelicals, whites terrified of losing market share, and third-party voters, and the inaction of millions of Americans who couldn’t be bothered to participate in one of the greatest responsibilities of living in a democracy.And ultimately, his unholy coronation is the fruit of the phobias, prejudices, and moral failures of tens of millions of cosplaying Christians.

That’s it.

No evidence of providence.No Divine messages deliveredNo Biblical prophecies fulfilled.No spiritual movements.

Just ordinary human beings who performed a grand act of collective stupidity.

This isn’t a mystery or a miracle, and it sure as hell isn’t God.

Trump Christians need to stop passing the buck to the Divine, and fully own the sinful compromises and rapist bedfellows they’ve been willing to make for Supreme Court seats, anti-choice legislation, weapon stockpiling, and a rapidly assembling white Evangelical theocracy..

God wasn’t generating conspiracy theories or showing up at his campaign rallies or stumping for him at nationwide crusades or using him as an expression of their misogyny.God didn’t vote for the guy who said he could grab women by the genitalia.God didn’t stand by the prolific felon.God didn’t go with the guy endorsed by the KKK, the Proud Boys, the Patriot Front, and the Nazi next door.God didn’t excuse the bankruptcies, overlook the affairs, and laugh off the racist remarks.

I’m pretty sure people did that; most of them, supposedly Christian people.

And God isn’t now justifying wasteful wars,defending the protection of pedophiles,or ignoring hundreds of missing immigrants,or turning a blind eye to Constitutional crises,or celebrating LGBTQ discrimination,or laughing off collusion, treason, and human rights atrocities.

Again, alleged Christians.We really should stop pretending God is responsible for this fast food dumpster fire when it’s clear whose hand is in it all.

This reality is the rotten fruit of misogyny,racism,nationalism, fear, xenophobia, and bigotry, all propagated by people who want God to consent to it all so they don’t have to deal with their own culpability or face their own repentance.

God didn’t anoint this monster. Like-hearted cosplaying Christians did.

Our ability to hold complexity is evaporating. Our willingness to accommodate nuance is vanishing. Our need for all-or-nothing purity stances is becoming insatiable.Our tolerance for tension is expiring.

Over the last few days, several dangerous myths have surfaced; a series of purported truths about the simplicity of the moment, a litany of supposedly straightforward questions people are being asked to respond immediately to:Do you condemn this war, or do you support Iranian women?

In the aftermath of the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, we here in the U.S. awakened with two very different kinds of videos on our timelines. The first were scenes of massive crowds of Iranian woman, uncovered, joyous, and freely dancing in the streets at the elimination of the source of their subjugation and dehumanization. On their own, they would have been glorious sights to behold, but they were not on their own.

The other videos revealed abject terror, as Iranian people bellowed and wept, while frantically digging through the broken rubble that seconds earlier was a school filled with hundreds of Iranian girls, more than 160 whose bodies were ravaged by the authors of the supposed emancipation being celebrated just blocks away.

Many immediately rushed to deliver a forced choice: Do you support Iranian women, or do you oppose the unprovoked military strikes by two world leaders whose resumes of disregard for human life are legendary?

Is it possible that someone can fully rejoice at the at least temporary return of human rights and to completely grieve the waste of dozens of young lives? It is, and it actually should be, for people whose empathy is not conditional or narrow, who are capable of holding two conflicting emotions simultaneously.

Do you condemn this war, or do you oppose anti-Semitism?

The conflating of a nation’s leadership and a nation’s people has never been wise or helpful, and yet when it comes to Israel, many are not only choosing this dangerous intertwining but demanding it of others, as well. Compassionate human beings decrying the annihilation of the Palestinian people have often been met with character assassinations, immediate vitriol, and charges of anti-Semitism.

I believe one can deeply love, respect, and advocate for the Jewish people and fully denounce and abhor all anti-Semitism, while also condemning Netanyahu and the IDF for what one believes to be war crimes. All decent people need to defend innocent humanity whenever it is disregarded and oppose senseless violence, whatever its source. If we don’t see the commonalities in all those who suffer by war’s hateful hand, we have lost what makes us human.

Do you condemn this war, or do you love America?

The Trump regime, whose cultic MAGA empire has been built almost entirely on the blind allegiance of its rank-and-file and on an all-encompassing branding of any opposition as traitorous and unpatriotic, has always trafficked in extremism. And now that they have launched an ill-prepared and unconstitutional act of military aggression against a foreign nation with no quantifiable justification or exit strategy, the propaganda machine has been working overtime to vilify those who rightly protest it all.

Just as so many other times in our nation’s long and extensive history of violent campaigns built on distraction, religion, oil, real estate, and straight-up bloodlust, the American people are being demanded by the warmongers to pledge undying allegiance or be excoriated for having no love for God or country. And as always, it’s a crock. The very essence of true patriotism and the heart of earnest faith is in recognizing that each refuses to abide injustice or stand with brutality, no matter its source; that speaks unflinching truth to corrupt power and names wickedness no matter how close it is.

In these and so many other cases, whether in our political affiliations, our stances on divisive issues, or our emotional response to wide-scale suffering, we are being pushed to opposite poles by an ever more common reductive oversimplification that demands immediate agreement and absolute certainty.

If we are to be people of conscience, of ethics, of morality, we have to be a people of complexity and nuance; human beings who will not avoid study, reflection, and the tensions that we encounter. We have to refuse to pretend that every situation is simple and every side clear, and to resist the temptation to dismiss people out-of-hand when they don’t show up with the conclusions and clarity that we feel we have.You can condemn this war and still not be sure how to resolve everything that it has unearthed. As complicated as this all is, this is the simple truth.

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We’re now four days into Benjamin Netanyahu’s and our self-identified “peace President’s” war in Iran that has triggered domestic unrest, incited international chaos, and generated Stock Market panic.

It’s easy to believe that this is all a blatant and shameful effort by Republicans to distract from the Epstein files, shift focus from ICE’s domestic terrorism, seize another massive cache of global oil production, and fuel the cancellation of an upcoming election reckoning.

These would all be correct assessments, at least from Trump’s self-serving, narcissistic point of view, but there’s another, more alarming motivation for religious Conservatives dragging the planet into a self-destructive, full-scale bomb-a-thon: the second coming of Christ.

Substack journalist Jonathan Larsen is reporting that the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) claims to have received over 100 complaints from service members across 40 units, claiming that Military leadership is telling them that this is essentially a righteous Right-Wing holy war designed to hasten the end of the world.

Larsen quotes one of the testimonies as detailing that our troops are being told, “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth”.

And while independent new sources have yet to corroborate Larsen’s claims, to someone who has spent nearly 30 years as a local church pastor, much of that in largely white churches in the South, I’ve heard this sermon before.

This planetary annihilation has been the white Christian nationalist plan for decades. Their entire nihilistic Revelation-based theological worldview rests on the destruction of this world so that God can send back his son to do his righteous renovation. This helps understand why the most deeply indoctrinated of MAGA Christians have no interest in Jesus’ instructions about loving their neighbors, feeding the poor, healing the sick, and welcoming the stranger. Their gaze is so laser-focused on the afterlife that this life is almost irrelevant, as is the suffering of people in the here and now.

To the violent Evangelical zealots and brimstone-breathing fundamentalists who have permeated the Trump regime and our nation’s military, war isn’t hell, it’s “Hello, Jesus!”

Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, takes a weekly Sabbath from ignoring the Constitution and disregarding its amendments, to pretend he cares about the Bible, spending Sundays at a DC church whose lineage connects directly to world-renowned woman-hating, woke-allergic prophet of disaster, pastor Doug Wilson.

There, Hegseth is undoubtedly hearing the same wild, unhinged, rapture-hastening diatribes that Trump’s Cabinet and its MAGA rank-and-file foot soldiers are being inundated with by their preachers and podcasters: If we blow the whole thing up, our white, straight American Republican Christian Daddy will come back and finally perfect the gated community of self-appointed saints they’ve been working tirelessly to build here.

These self-righteous disciples of a vengeful Conservative God are a tiny but dangerous minority because of their proximity to power and the depth and breadth of their infiltration in our nation’s Congressional chambers, courthouses, and Military leadership.It is going to take the rest of us as a unified, focused, and unrelenting coalition of anti-Armageddonists, who, through grassroots activism, persistent protest, organized opposition, poll presence, and legal challenge, will make sure that Christian fundamentalists and Republican politicians don't get to sacrifice the planet and humanity on the altar of their violent Evangelical fever dream.

We cannot allow them to bomb us into the afterlife. We have to fight together to keep this life sacred.

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This unrelenting chaos that we find ourselves emotionally drowning in: the manufactured emergencies, fabricated culture wars, and conjured crises that hound us from the moment we rise exhausted, until the second our besieged nervous systems finally allow us a brief, though uneasy respite.

He is not worth this prolific corruption, the boundless breach of ethics and legality that is enabling a tiny cadre of billionaires to gorge themselves on the lunch money of hungry schoolchildren, the salaries of public school teachers, and the insurance subsidies of sick seniors.

He is not worth this incomparable political malpractice; a kleptocratic Cabinet filled with the grossly unqualified, the morally compromised, the emotionally ill-equipped, and the unrepentantly cruel.

He is not worth this division; the billions of relational fractures he has, if not created, then purposefully exacerbated with a decade-long verbal torrent of incendiary war rhetoric, bottom-feeding dehumanization, and all-or-nothing tribal demands.

He is not worth this bloodshed; Good Samaritans assassinated in their neighborhoods, immigrant fathers dying alone in glorified dog kennels, young women expiring on hospital gurneys, cancer patients denied sustaining medication, Iranian schoolchildren buried beneath a senseless war of distraction.

He is not worth the end of our Republic, an imperfect but determined two-hundred-and-fifty-year experiment in Democracy having its life and liberty choked out by a sneering, narcissistic, intellectually fetal, morally bankrupt bottom feeder.

It could have been so easily avoided if, for a day two Novembers ago, we had simply come to our collective senses and chosen a steady, empathetic prosecutor and public servant instead of inexplicably embracing a felonious, predatory carnival barker with a lengthy resume of filth and fraudulence.Had we done so, we’d have avoided having our military weaponized against our citizens, being illegally taxed for a year on nearly every expense, and battling an Attorney General who is harboring sexual predators. Hungry kids would have food support, our allies wouldn’t be abandoning us, and women would have body autonomy.

Most of all, had we spoken wisely at the polls in 2024, we wouldn’t have to spend nearly every waking hour defending ourselves from an authoritarian regime we alone coronated.

And yet, despite how far afield we’ve found ourselves from the nation our founders dreamed of and our forebears fought for, we could still course correct.

We could be delivered from this preventable, seemingly permanent hell scape this very day, if our representatives in both chambers of Congress weren’t afflicted with fearful spirits, stilled tongues, and feet of clay.We could be immediately emancipated from the clutches of a heartless, joyless, dementia-brutalized sociopath if our elected leaders had the courage to abandon their unwavering tribalism, to stop worrying about saving their own political asses, and to do what the entire world knows they should do, and is waiting for them to do.

We could be released from this death spiral today if he were simply removed as our Constitution and the consciences of good people demand.

And if our leaders still refuse to bravely and righteously meet this moment, as they seem determined to do, what are We The People going to do?

How are we, as the shared heirs to this place, as beneficiaries of the activism, sacrifice, and bloodshed of billions, going to respond?

When our systems and safeguards and representatives have all failed, what are we willing to do together in order to pull ourselves from the abyss?

We will need to respond to these unprecedented existential threats in a way the people who have called this place home for a quarter of a millennium have never had to.

He is not worth being the hateful, bloated, spray-tanned hill this beautiful nation dies on.

How are we going to make sure that he isn’t?

(And, to his still ardent supporters: he is not worth your unwavering loyalty, your hatred of strangers, your disconnections from your loved ones, or your moving of the legal and moral goalposts. He is not for you or for this nation. I hope you’ll see this, one day soon.)

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I mourned over their valiant but futile efforts to extricate life from beneath the crushing carnage surrounding them.

I mourned the senseless destruction of dozens of radiant young lives eradicated in the span of a heartbeat by a nameless, faceless terror from the sky.

I mourned for a beautiful people whose unprovoked trauma and undeserved suffering mean nothing to a substantial portion of my country, who simply do not care for brown-skinned, foreign human beings.

And I mourned the fact that no matter what happens in the coming hours and days, America has already lost the real wars, long before this moment.

We have lost the war to prevent tens of millions of our parents, siblings, lifelong friends, and neighbors from abandoning human empathy, discarding critical thinking, and falling into a thick, impenetrable cultic stupor from which facts, data, or the obliterated bodies of Iranian schoolchildren cannot retrieve them.

We have lost the war to prevent people we love and once respected from becoming morally-addled by a whitewashed myth of national exceptionalism that has rendered them with little value for those beyond the tightly-closed, fiercely-guarded borders of their calloused hearts.

We have lost the war to ensure that we did not place our nation’s fate into the bruised and jittery hands of a classless, bottom-feeding, race-baiting, empty husk of a human being, whose eight decades on this planet have not yielded one noble impulse or benevolent act.

We have lost the war to collectively choose wisely between an intelligent, experienced woman of color and a narcissistic, convicted felon and court-adjudicated white male rapist, and now find ourselves teetering precariously on the edge of authoritarianism.

We have lost the war to keep the people we live and work, study and worship alongside from being swallowed up by a blind tribal allegiance to party and country that runs solely on stoked fears and curated prejudices.

We have lost the war to live in a nation that believes human beings thousands of miles away are as sacred and as worthy of defense as those within arm’s reach.

We have lost the war to keep from normalizing the prolific atrocities of an untethered madman and his cadre of emboldened bigots, whose inhumanity is unabated.

We have lost the war to create a nation where mass murders, protected pedophiles, and masked mercenaries are alarming and not commonplace.

We have lost the war to live in a nation where all people recognize when a sitting president launches a brutal act of lawless military aggression simply to avoid legal accountability for his sexual crimes against girls and women, and the political reckoning of a free and fair election.

The unconstitutional, illegal, unethical, and immoral bombing of the Iranian people is not a war; it is the latest deadly symptom of a diseased Republic whose leaders feel no obligation to the Laws of our nation or to the higher laws governing decent human beings.

It is yet another manifestation of the collective heart sickness afflicting tens of millions of people who call this place home, a moral cancer that chokes out compassion and metastasizes cruelty.

Our bleeding, barely breathing two-hundred-and-fifty-year experiment in democracy is now lying beneath the crushing rubble of billions of tiny compromises, turned heads, shared sins, allowed injustices, and avoided confrontations.

I wonder if we can still win the war to emancipate it.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

You probably didn’t give much thought to the fact that you’re here, that you woke up.

You likely haven’t stopped to breathe in deeply, to feel the air expand your chest, and to let it fall slowly as it departs.You probably haven’t taken a second to realize that you’re alive.

There’s a good chance your mind has already been overtaken by all the things you need to do, the tasks at hand, the appointments you have, everything filling up the small white block of your calendar assigned to today, all the worries that made sleep difficult last night, the clattering parade of bad news you’re already scrolling through.

You’re already running so fast, so quickly.

Because of all that urgent and terrible and necessary pulling at you from every direction, I bet you went from zero to 6,000 in a matter of seconds, not giving your body and mind a chance to ease into it all, to be intentional about this moment, to decide not what you’ll do today, but how you’ll be today.

Today, you’re likely going to be really busy, and since you are, I don’t want you to forget something important:

I don’t want you to forget to be happy.

I don’t want you to fritter away the next 86,400 seconds as they skyrocket by you from the present and into the past, never filling them with the things that give you joy or generate gratitude or register contentment.

Today it’s going to be difficult for you to remember that this is life: that you are not waiting on a day that is coming in which to do all that you dream of doing or to say everything you should say to people you love, or to create and build and write and make the beautiful things stored up inside you.

If not reminded, you may not remember that this is not a day to RSVP for some future living you’ll do somewhere off on the horizon.You and the daylight are both here now.I’d hate to see you procrastinate away living for another time, when this is the living time.

Because it was not a guarantee that you’d wake up today.Many people didn’t.They didn’t get to feel the rise and fall of their chests.They didn’t get to stop and notice they are alive.They are missing this day you and I are present for.

If they had opened their eyes today and joined us here, they’d likely already be running too, and also in danger of making the same mistake you and I can make if we’re not careful.

They, too, might be seduced by the calendar and distracted by their obligations and weighed down by the tragedies, so much that they would forget to fully live in this small twenty-four-hour sliver of time and space in front of them.

I realize that conditions aren’t perfect today for any of this, but trust me, they will not be tomorrow either.

There will again be things you need to do, tasks at hand, appointments you’ve made, everything filling up the small white block of your calendar assigned to that day, all the worries that will have made sleeping tonight difficult, and the clattering parade of bad news you’ll be scrolling through should you reach the morning.

All the more reason you need to do, in this imperfect day, something that declares you will not be so overwhelmed by all that is not right, that you refrain from living well, from being human.

Fill your time with those who make you feel loved, with moments spent in the places that refresh and inspire you: creating and making and dreaming the glorious stuff that cannot wait because they can only be born today and by you.

Please put joy on your agenda today.Don’t make it wait.Create space for it.Meet with it.

Work for justice and be outraged when it is denied.Passionately oppose every bit of inhumanity that you can.Never grow comfortable with cruelty or brutality.

But amidst the countless appointment reminders, calendar notifications, and sticky note prompts that you have to keep you focused on all that seemingly needs to be done, include one more critical reminder, even if you have to tattoo it on your heart:

Welcome to another day. Don’t forget to be happy.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Good people have had it.

It’s been enough of a decade-long gut punch watching a sizable portion of our nation becoming fully indoctrinated into a stuporous, sycophantic cult of personality of the very worst kind of person our species has produced.

And, it’s been rightly heartbreaking witnessing once reasonable people abandon any semblance of benevolence toward diverse humanity, to find themselves so addled by tribalism that they have declared war on vaccines and trans kids and the electoral process.

And yes, it’s been continually crash-out-inducing, witnessing tens of millions of Americans having their minds slowly poisoned by Kristi Noem, Franklin Graham, and Megyn Kelly to the point they defend sanctioned domestic terrorism and co-sign human trafficking rings.

But perhaps worse than having our family members, friends, and neighbors break out in this ten-year zombie apocalypse flash mob has been watching them invoke love of God and country in the process.

That’s what makes these days so infuriating for us: not merely coming to terms with the prejudices and phobias of those we are daily surrounded by here, but having to contend with their constant projection about the rest of us and their refusal to simply own who they are.

Good people have had it with frauds and pretenders.They’re tired of traitors masquerading as patriots,of the treasonous forever waving the flag,of hateful people peddling a God of supposed love,of human beings sermonizing about the sanctity of life while having contempt for so much of the living,of star-spangled prophets preaching America First while disregarding nearly everyone in America.

Where are the selflessness, generosity, and hospitality that were supposed to mark the lives of people who truly love God and country?Where are lives that replicate the willing embrace of the poor, huddled masses affixed to the very feet of Liberty?Where are the open-hearted people who emulate the radical love of disparate neighbors at the heart of the Gospels?

They’re gone, replaced by immigrant-hating wall-builders, blindly intolerant culture warriors, and violent anti-abortion zealots.

The words patriot and Christian used to cost something to claim. They were labels that once came with the expectation of a modicum of transformation; identifiers that previously required some measure of evidence displayed in one’s altered life.

The flag and the cross were once symbols of higher causes and better angels, visual reminders of who we might be as we embodied our Constitution and our creeds.

For those of us who still treasure nation and/or faith, using these words and wearing these symbols has become more and more difficult, as they now align us with people who embody the antithesis of our ethical aspirations and our moral convictions.

Human beings who earnestly seek a religion expressed in love and those who are burdened to make America worthy of the anthems, find ourselves branded heretics and traitors, and forcibly displaced by these miserable squatters who have taken up residence within them.

And we know how disgusting that is.

We know that true patriots should want all Americans to vote, they should oppose would-be dictators, they should yield to the Constitution, and they should demand a nation that is offered to everyone equally.

We know that actual followers of Jesus should defend the vulnerable, they should give comfort to the sick, should welcome the immigrant, and love the least among us.

And while the masqueraders and pretenders parade around in grand performative acts of love of God and country while willfully betraying both, the rest of us are going to have to fight to hold on to our religion and our nation, and to care for a world that desperately needs authentic people of faith, morality, and conscience who simply live a love that doesn’t need to declare itself loving.

As far as patriotism and faith go, this nation needs the real thing again.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Teach your children well. Their father’s hell did slowly go by. And feed them on your dreams. The one they pick’s, the one you’ll know by. - Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young

One thing you learn as you raise children is that they’re always watching, always listening, always learning; that you are forever teaching them something even when you’re unaware: about what you value, about the way to treat people, about how to be a human being.

I wonder if people supporting Donald Trump and this Administration realize what they’re teaching their children; what boosting his words and applauding his tantrums and celebrating his assaults on vulnerable people is telling them.

Whether they realize it or not, they’re teaching them...

Diversity is dangerous. The more differences around you, the more there is to fear. Threats always come from those who aren’t like you. If someone’s pigmentation or orientation or nation of origin doesn’t match your own, they’re probably someone you want to avoid or be wary of. Never seek out difference. Exclusion and self-preservation are the best defenses against the evils in the world.

Compassion is a flaw. To feel empathy is to show weakness. Sitting with people long enough to see them and understand their story and to feel a bit of their pain will only slow you down. The more callous you can become, the less vulnerable you are. The greatest virtue in this life is to simply not give a damn about other people. A dead heart is much better than a bleeding one.

Women are less-than. Consent is irrelevant. Autonomy is unimportant. A woman exists solely for the pleasure and purpose of men, and this is true of wives and partners and blind dates and people you pass on the street. No matter how much they accomplish, they will always be the butt of the joke. Whatever a man does to a woman, no matter how disgusting, he will never be made accountable for.

People don’t matter. Human beings are things, insignificant and expendable casualties, wielded in battles you manufacture in order to win. The actual flesh and blood lives on the other side of your stereotypes, and slurs, and caricatures have no intrinsic value. The moment you can dehumanize a person you’ve never met, is the moment you free yourself from any responsibility for the damage you do to them or applaud someone else doing.

Whiteness is better. You’ll hear a lot about equality, and you might even pretend it matters to you when it’s helpful, but don’t believe it for a second. Brown and black-skinned people are a problem, a danger, a barrier, and most of all a threat. Never see or treat them as equals, never stop dehumanizing them, and never forget that your levels of melanin make you superior.

Religion is a prop. Faith is simply a costume to put on when it profits you; a shiny veneer to cover yourself in in order to ingratiate yourself with genuinely spiritual people who will think the best of you, and thus be easily fooled. Wield religious values like a rented tuxedo: wear them in public for special events and discard them elsewhere.

America is the world. Some people will tell you that all human beings on the planet have value, that humanity is one interdependent community sharing the same home, that a child five thousand miles away is as important as one down the street or the one in your nursery. Don’t buy it. The place where you live and the people who live there are better than everyone else.

Never apologize. When you are found to be wrong or speak in error, never admit it. No matter how far afield of facts you find yourself or how grievous the mistake or how divorced from reality your initial statements may have been, simply double down, gaslight people, and attack your critic’s credibility and integrity—but never admit the error and never, under any circumstance, apologize. That is failure.

It’s all about you. Forget the advice of your teachers and pastors and storybooks, and discard all that nonsense about loving your neighbor as yourself or doing unto others as you’d have done to you. Other people’s experiences are unimportant. In this self-centered universe, you are the solitary sun around which every other body revolves. The more you allow other people to be seen and heard, the less you will be able to thrive. This is a zero-sum game, and there is only one winner.

Cheat to win. The desired ends justify any possible means, no matter how vile. Rig every system, fix every game, stack every deck, and justify it all because the victory is all that matters. Fair play, honesty, and being a person of honor are all of little value. What really matters is the prize, so be sure and get it. Winning is worth both someone else’s pain and your soul.”

Convictions are for sale. Everything has a price: your word, your allegiance, your vote, and yes, even your soul. Don’t waste any time trying to cultivate personal morality, or forming a code of ethics, or standing for anything. Those things will only weigh you down and hinder your success. Instead, find which way the wind is blowing and move that way. See who the likely winners will be and cast your lots with them. Don’t worry about your soul—take the cash.

Laws don’t apply to you. In theory, society has rules, and they must be followed by everyone (well, not you, of course). It will be important to give lip service to “doing things the right way,” and to “valuing the Constitution,” and to “obeying the laws in place”, as such declarations will divert people’s attention from your disregarding anything that prevents you from advancement or profit. But find the loopholes and use them, that’s why they’re there.

When in doubt, lie. The truth is malleable. It is something fluid. You get to define it for yourself and for those who listen to you. Have no concern about facts or objective reality or data; instead, over and over and over, speak untruth with conviction. Say the lies with confidence, and suddenly they will become true.

A generation of children is learning these things from the people most entrusted to show them how to be human. They are forming the lenses through which they see the world from birth. It will be almost impossible for them to discern reality or feel empathy.

The rest of us will have to do all we can to remind them that this simply isn’t good or right or decent, and help them transcend their parents’ prejudices and preferences, and to embrace interdependence and equality and compassion.

The world we become depends on it.

As a wise woman once said, “It takes a village.”

(Trump Supporters, you’re welcome to dispute the above assertions, just know that the President’s own words and actions are the greatest argument against you. The daily, incendiary filth he manufactures is recorded, and it testifies loudly to his hatred for a large portion of this nation. As long as you support it, you’re declaring what you value or complicit in something you object to.)

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Not just in ice hockey, but in misogyny.

Watching you all hunched around a phone loudly laughing it up while a court-adjudicated rapist and likely serial pedophile unnecessarily (but quite predictably) belittles your female counterparts, I gotta tell ya, the national pride was off the charts.

I mean, I was this close to throwing on some acid-washed jorts, lighting up a bottle rocket, waving a flag, and crankin’ me up some Kid Rock.

Look, I get it, guys: you were in a rough spot: still flooded with adrenaline after having just accomplished the greatest athletic feat of your lives, something you surely worked tirelessly for and should be extremely proud of, I can imagine it was impossibly easy to get caught up in the moment.

But here’s the thing: real men are defined in such moments.

Having the so-called leader of what currently passes for the Free World (whose name appears tens of thousands of times in the Epstein files) shamelessly gushing over you, all while the crazy-eyed head of the FBI guzzles beer like a frat party first-timer who’ll soon be vomiting into the nacho bar, was a lot to contend with.

Women always have to contend with a lot, fellas.

And being young men, there’s a good chance you may not have any clue about the terrible optics of you all yukin’ it up with an Olympic-level predator like Donald Trump; a guy who’s already spent the last couple of weeks attacking your brethren in free skiing and skating for not wanting to claim ownership of trafficking ring coverups and masked death squads—or for having a mouth piercing.

You should have had a damn clue.

It might not even occur to you the message you sent, not only to the USA Women’s Hockey Team, but to tens of millions of girls and young women throughout this country who spend every single day of their lives having to fight tooth-and-nail for their worth, who work five times as hard for half the respect, who are continually made to feel less-than by the men in their lives.

It should have occurred to you if you already lived that way.

There’s a good chance it didn’t even register how this was a deja vu moment where they once again were reminded that this country is not designed for them nor willing to treat them with the dignity they deserve.

It should have registered, unless you’re really comfortable in such a country.

Or, you may simply have been exactly what you looked like to many people. You may be among the terrifyingly large army of young white men throughout this nation who find their identity in a vile, beligerent, spray-tanned knuckle-dragger who’s spent his entire life dehumanizing, berating, and abusing the girls and women in his path.

That’s what I’m afraid of.Some of you might have been raised by fathers whose voices you recognize in his narcissistic, racist, sexist ramblings, so you don’t wince like the rest of us as we watched this all-too-familiar, boys-will-be-boys dudebro huddle. You may be surrounded in your homes and churches and practices and locker rooms by other men who display the same disregard for the feelings, bodies, and wills of women.

Because of this, you may even aspire to become a so-called adult like this President, a man who defiles women without accountability, who defames them without penalty, and whose vast and disgusting body of work declares he has complete contempt for girls and young women.

I truly hope that some of you might have simply laughed along, placed in an almost impossible spot in front of the lights and the cameras and the bombast of a bloviating world leader carelessly using you as propaganda fodder.

Just know that as you grow and mature, the test of your manhood is whether or not you can declare the joke unfunny, no matter who’s in the room.

I hope that you define yourselves differently, stand for something higher, and believe in a decency that the man leading this nation is not capable of or interested in.

After all, good men can stand for what is right, even when that means standing alone.

And if so, I hope that in the quiet of your life, in the private and public exchanges you have with women, and in the individual platforms that these medals afford you, that you’ll hold yourself to a higher standard than the subterranean crater Donald Trump daily excavates.

None of you are children, though; you’re grown men. And grown men who can’t police themselves or rise to a moment like this are proving who they are.

As it is, your entire team should at the very least apologize to this nation and to the women who call it home, for your collective lack of judgment, your alignment with a predator, and your perpetuation of the toxic masculinity that is doing so much damage to the country you represent. If not, you’ll have lost where it really counts.

But just know that disturbing and painful moments like these are why women rightly choose the bear.

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After all these years watching so many of my fellow Americans convert while pushing him away, I think I’m ready to invite MAGA Jesus into my heart.

It’s not inspiration, inner conviction, or divine revelation that has led me to this holy conversion moment; it’s mainly just fatigue.

I’m tired.

Caring about people is exhausting; waking up every morning and having empathy for someone who isn’t me, let alone someone who doesn’t even look like me, think like me, vote like me, talk like me, worship like me.It’s downright wearying trying to actually live all that Gospel Jesus stuff: loving the least, serving others, turning the other cheek, living humbly, tending to the sick and the poor, and praying for my enemies.I didn’t realize that being a peacemaker, a neighbor-lover, and a Good Samaritan would be such thankless, taxing, costly business, and honestly, it’s worn me the hell out.

I was beginning to think maybe I needed to jump ship altogether; that maybe Christianity wasn’t for me, until I found MAGA Jesus, and he saved me from a life of sacrifice, humility, and selflessness.

MAGA Jesus isn’t half as demanding as Gospel Jesus is.

In fact, all things considered, he requires very little from me: a quick magic prayer and cherry-picked scripture in my bio, in exchange for a permanent Get Out of Hell Free card, a life of unrepentant privilege, and the right to condemn the humanity around me as much as I please. It’s a pretty sweet deal.

With MAGA Jesus running things, I’ll be able to focus on saving souls for the next life, which means I won’t have to be concerned with what befalls people in this one all that much anymore. Their poverty, their adversity, and their suffering are really none of my concern.

Oh sure, I’ll still be able to take enough interest in people’s personal existence to condemn them for the country they come from or the bathroom they use or having the gall to want to marry the person they love—but beyond that I don’t have any pressing interest one way or the other. Someone else’s life (at least as far as their pain or their needs) is none of my business.

Republican Jesus also frees me up from worrying about the planet heating up, or the coral reefs dying, or the honeybees disappearing. I can chalk that all up to a “groaning creation” that is well above my pay grade, and simply live with relative abandon, consuming and wasting to my heart’s delight, knowing the destruction of the planet will bring a Divine rest.

As a disciple of MAGA Jesus, I won’t have to welcome refugees or immigrants or outsiders, those fleeing war, oppression, and sickness, the way annoying Gospel Jesus insisted. I can just tell them all to go to hell, or back where they came from.I can spend and acquire and hoard as much as I want and not give it a second thought, because MAGA Jesus is a heartless, capitalist deity who wouldn’t dare tell me that I can’t serve both God and money the way Gospel Jesus would.And all the annoying death, suffering, and violence outside my door? I can merely blame it all on the sins of a fallen world, get me some of that gun money, while offering up some copied-and-pasted “thoughts and prayers” platitudes, and consider myself off the hook.

The really great thing about worshiping MAGA Jesus is that I’ll still get to call myself a Christian, which will be super helpful. Sure, I’ll have to adopt a white, affluent, American, gun-loving, gay-hating Savior, which, admittedly, will take some getting used to, but from what I’ve seen from so many of my friends and family members, it’s easier than it sounds.

If I follow MAGA Jesus faithfully, in no time, I’ll be harboring pedophiles, banning books, shunning refugees, worshipping America, and telling the poor and the hurting to pull themselves up by their bootstraps without having to worry about whether or not they even have boots.

I figure, I’ve given this Gospel Jesus thing a good go of it. For well over half a century, I’ve been tirelessly working that whole “love your neighbor as yourself”, compassionate, generous program, and what has it gotten me? All I have to show for my labors are an experience of diverse community, an understanding of lives that are different from my own, the knowledge of humanity’s commonality, and the hope of leaving the planet a little kinder than when I found it. Not exactly a golden parachute, and surely not profitable or easy.

It isn’t as if I’ll be totally exempt from empathy either. Of course, I’ll still get to care for my spouse and my kids and my parents and my friends, my kind, but beyond that, giving a greater damn will be at my discretion. Anyone else’s well-being, healthcare, security, or future (especially those beyond our borders) won’t have to be a priority anymore.

I’m sure I’ll miss my old religion from time to time; the joy and kindness and the mercy, but I definitely won’t miss the work.

I’m looking forward to finally having a God who will work for me instead of the other way around.

I think I’ll finally get everything that I, as a straight, white, Christian, deserve, for a change.

I believe MAGA Jesus will make my Christianity great (or at least easier) again.

I once was blind, but now I think I see...

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I mean, at the end of the day, it really means nothing.

In the grand scheme of things, this is all pretty inconsequential.

With every horrible thing happening here at home, what a group of strangers does on a slab of ice or a frozen hillside a few thousand miles away doesn’t impact me in the slightest, I know that.

So, why the hell was I crying?

As I watched Alysa Liu, the child of a Chinese dissident, radiant and beaming as she made positively superhuman physical feats look simply effortless, I felt a lump growing in my throat, while tears pooled in my eyes.

Knowing the perilous and nearly impossible journey she’d taken to that moment: the expectations she’d obliterated, the rigid system she’d transcended, and the agency she’d reclaimed along the way, for four minutes the world stopped, and I was transfixed.

With each graceful flourish, with every blinding cyclone spin, and every explosive, shimmering smile, I found myself involuntarily feeling something largely foreign lately, something I haven’t felt often: I felt proud of my country.

Not the cheap patriotism that so many wear like an ill-fitting costume, not some ceremonial love for homeland that denies its flaws and failings, and certainly not the blind, cultic adoration that our President and his sycophantic disciples demand.

This was a pride in the people who call this place home and who wish to; the disparate humanity that is renovating our assailed and beleaguered nation in the small and close places.

Throughout these Olympics, I have been reminded that we are a land of stories.

Stories like Liu’s: a skating prodigy who grew so disheartened by an unforgiving, often dehumanizing system that she walked away at 16, having had her joy extinguished, her identity swallowed up.Stories like Texas-born Amber Glenn, the oldest competing U.S. women's singles skater in nearly a century and the team’s first openly LGBTQ member, who has battled crippling depression and an eating disorder on her way to Olympic glory.Stories like Laila Edwards, whose brave, trailblazing journey led from Cleveland Heights, Ohio, to her becoming the first Black American woman to win a gold medal in women’s hockey.Stories like American freeskier Hunter Hess, whose experience at the very pinnacle of his career, had to overcome a disgusting and dangerous personal attack by a sitting President and his mindless, knuckle-dragging acolytes, simply for expressing a love for country that refuses to co-sign the totality of its ugliness and brutality.

These aren’t just skaters and skiers; they are symbols. They do more than just represent us in a global athletic competition once every four years; they help us remember that we are a nation still becoming, still unfinished, still with chapters left to write, and that we are among their 342 million co-authors.

It’s easy to dismiss sports as trivial; a frivolous diversion providing temporary escape from the sprawling horrors of the day (though that in itself is no small achievement).

But these Olympic athletes remind us who we are as a nation: diverse, resilient, fearless, imperfect, and defiantly joyful in the face of our demons and detractors.

We relentlessly battle the monsters both around and within us.

We lift one another when our bodies fail, our spirits falter, and our dreams come undone.

We stridently defy those who would keep us trapped in the stunted smallness of prejudice and stereotype. We give what we have in the moment, even if it is less than we wish it were, even if the possibility of victory seems remote.

We love our homeland fiercely but not blindly, so much so that we demand its better angels and will not abide its lesser devils.

We willingly sacrifice valuable things so that we might protect the priceless, those worth more than gold.

So, yeah, it’s just a bunch of strangers on a slab of ice and a frozen hillside, but it matters.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

That godforsaken island of unthinkable horrors, crafted by men whose disfigured, darkened minds cannot be stepped into by normal human beings. This is about that terrible place.

That suffering…

The tortured screams and silent anguish of the most tender and vulnerable, physical. and emotional wounds so marrow deep that they will never fully heal. This is about that agony.

Those unrepentant monsters…

Those morally defective, internally fractured creatures with blackened hearts whose billions and similarly poisoned bedfellows provided them cover as they desecrated invaluable and unprotected beauty. This is about those pieces of filth.

Those beautiful souls…

A legion of then children, now adults, imprisoned for years in a story they may never have been able to utter, a burden that has been carried alone; women and men whose journeys were irreparably altered by a depravity that did not deserve. This is about those survivors.

Those courageous warriors…

Women and men willing to have their most painful and dehumanizing moments thrust into the blinding light of the entire world’s gaze, so that justice might arrive and the animals who injured them might be ripped from their hidden places and fully revealed. This is about their staggering bravery.

Yes, this fight is about that place, and that agony, and those monsters, and those beautiful souls, and those brave warriors. It is about dragging the perverts and predators from the cloistered places that privilege, wealth, and even the law have kept them.

But this is about so much more.

This is about millions upon millions of other human beings; about sisters, wives, mothers, and children; about next-door neighbors, classmates, and childhood friends who right now find themselves in a private hell not of their own making or choosing.

It’s about those living inside their personal nightmares, children with no protectors, women with no advocates, young people without fierce defenders; radiant, precious lives who may be carrying decades-old secrets or holding fresh sorrows in silence. This is about them knowing that someone cares for them, honors their humanity, recognizes their pricelessness, and declares them worth of fighting for.It’s about the husbands, uncles, managers, boyfriends, and youth group leaders who, at this moment, believe themselves protected and out of the reach of accountability; men who are creating their own islands of horrors in perceived anonymity and imagined safety. This is about letting them know that we will be unrelenting in our pursuit of them, too.

And this is about the collective home we are building, one where monstrous human beings find no safe harbor, where the vulnerable are not fed to the wolves, where money and power will not save evil people from their transgressions.

Yes, the stories within those files, the reams and reams of the very cavernous depths of what human beings are capable of, the thousands whose dehumanization is documented there. We march, and we post, and we make calls, and we hold the power holders’ feet to the fire, and we refuse to let it go for them.But we also do it for every scared, solitary, heartbroken, beautiful human being throughout this nation and across this world, who deserves to know that someone sees them and is gonna fight like hell for them.To the survivors of Epstein and his collaborators, we’re doing this for you because you are so worth it.And to all survivors everywhere, we’re doing this for you, too, because you are worth that, too.Be encouraged.

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And the artists will lead us…

This week, the legendary U2 dropped a surprise 6-song EP called Songs of Ash, a collection of tracks the band said in a press release, “couldn’t wait.” The music speaks explicitly to the human rights crises in America, Iraq, Ukraine, and Gaza.

The song American Obituary is a breathtaking commentary on the ICE occupation of Minneapolis and the murder of Renee Good.

U2’s announcement comes less than a week after Bruce Springsteen, who last month released the unflinching “Streets of Minneapolis,’ announced his ‘Land of Hope and Dreams Tour’, as a direct response to the Trump regime, saying in a statement “We are living through dark, disturbing and dangerous times, but do not despair, the cavalry is coming!”

Springsteen continued in the video, “We will be rocking your town in celebration and in defense of America, American democracy, American freedom, our American Constitution and our sacred American dream.”

Elsewhere, Erstwhile guitar-slinging activist Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, began his recent Minneapolis concert with a scathing rebuke of the Trump Administration, just before launching into Rage’s ‘Killing in the Name’, saying: “If it looks like fascism, sounds like fascism, acts like fascism, dresses like fascism, talks like fascism, kills like fascism and lies like fascism, boys & girls, it’s f—king fascism,”

California’s Green Day have regularly used their stage to raise a defiant middle finger to Trump, changing the lyrics to their 2004 hit American Idiot to “I’m not part of a MAGA agenda."

Irish punk legends Dropkick Murphys continue their commitment to social justice and political engagement, including an event on the National Mall where I was fortunate to share the platform with them.

Singer Ken Casey recently urged more of their brethren to become politically active, saying, there’s “nothing to be scared about. Hey, we’re all in, we’re getting trashed, trolled, losing fans, and guess what, the water’s fine. Come on in. Nothing to be scared about. No one’s stepped to me in public yet. It’s just trolls on the internet.”

But it isn’t just long-in-the-tooth rock royalty stepping into the fray. Across all genres, ages, and audience sizes, musicians are leveraging their gifts, platforms, and influence to join in, and in many ways, center the resistance movement:Instagram phenom Jesse Welles has become a prolific and eloquent voice of the times, delivering direct, unadorned traditional folk protest music that is tethered directly to the work of artists like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Woody Guthrie.

Self described “troubadour of truth” singer-songwriter Crys Matthews creates soulful, confessional acoustic-based music that often records the inner cost to our outer struggles.

Miami-based Earth to Eve serves up a fierce and unapologetic fusion of Amy Winehouse, hip-hop, and alt-pop that skewers the authoritarian powers that be right now.

And Rising modern folk-punk artist Carsie Blanton, regularly writes sardonic, fierce, and poignant rebukes of fascists and billionaires.

These and so many other musicians remind us that in times like these, it will not be the politicians or the priests that save us, it will be the poets, and the painters, and the six-string prophets armed with three chords and the truth.

There’s a reason Trump and his Administration are trying to financially cripple PBS and NPR, why they have infiltrated the Kennedy Center For the Performing Arts, why they’ve declared war on our libraries and museums, why they’re slashing funding for art, music, and theatre programs to young people:

Fascists are terrified of artists.

Creativity has always been one of the most powerful weapons against authoritarianism, against injustice, against dehumanization. Art is wild and unruly. It defies political proclamation, it does not respect authority, and it refuses subjugation.

Once released into the world, it cannot be contained or legislated away.

From the sustaining songs of Black people kidnapped and forced to build the scaffolding of this nation hundreds of years ago, to the clarion calls for justice in the ‘60s folk music movement, to the Black Arts Movement, to the Chicano Mural Movement, to the LGBTQ+ Arts movements in the face of the AIDS crisis, to the Hip Hop movements, to Black Lives Matter, to this present Resistance movement, the hands and voices and bodies of artists have confronted injustice, awakened the souls of humanity, and fortified the fighters.

Right now, as much as we need to push back against legislation and rally against corruption in the political arena, we need to create. We need the plays and the songs and the murals and prophetic words that help us imagine a place better than this one. We need beauty and melody and drama and dissonance.

Famously etched into the guitar of folk songwriter Woody Guthrie were the words THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS, and seeing so many musicians speak truth to corrupt power right now is a reminder how true those words are.

The song Land of Hope and Dreams, which Springsteen has named his protest tour after, paints a word picture of the journey to a place where equity, justice, and liberty are reached, where our destinies are tethered together:I said, this train, dreams will not be thwartedThis train, faith will be rewardedThis train, hear the steel wheels singin’This train, bells of freedom ringin’

May we stay connected to our muses, to our humanity, and one another.

May we in America arrive at that glorious place one day, and let us be singing as we do.In the comments, please share your favorite artistic activists.Learn about art and social change:Art, Protest, and Public Space

The Black Arts Movement and Black Liberation Struggle

The Black Arts Movement

The Chicano Mural Movement: A Cultural Renaissance

Music in the Civil Rights Movement

Artists as Agents of Social Change

LGBTQ Artists & Their Activism

Queer Art

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Well, this is a difficult message to deliver, but it’s necessary, given recent events in America.

I’ve done a good deal of painful soul-searching over the past two weeks, facing the truth about my past and coming to terms with my failures as both a human being and as someone who aspires to be a leader.

After many hours of honest reflection, prayer, and the support of wise counsel, I feel that in order to stay true to my convictions, I need to be completely transparent, regardless of the cost to me, both personally and professionally. They say the truth will set you free, and I hope it will set others free as well.

As a member of the woke, radical Left, I wanted to apologize from the bottom of my heart for preventing Conservative white people from catching their fish, drinking their beer, driving their trucks, cutting their grass, feeding their dogs, wearing their boots, watching their games, and saying their prayers.

Until the Turning Point Super Bowl Halftime Show, I never considered the plight of those across the aisle whose journeys have been so filled with adversity and hardship. Yet, seeing country singer Lee Brice bravely bare his soul in one of his people’s dudebro spirituals, inventorying the terrible injustices he’s had to carry through his life, I was shaken to my core.

And later, as I watched the ageless, godly, perpetually relevant, jorts-adorned Kid Rock badly lip synching the word “Bawitdaba,” which I assume must be the mother tongue of his people, I found myself brought to tears.

There in the purifying glow of red, white, and blue fireworks, I began to understand the ways my calls for equality and representation for every human being have been so hurtful toward white Evangelicals in America all this time; how my efforts to create a diverse and just nation where everyone was seen, heard, and respected must have served as a fresh reminder of their never-ending persecution.

In retrospect, I can see how my actions and those of my fellow liberals have made the already Herculean task of being a straight white Christian in America that much more challenging, and I regret that. I am working behind the scenes to educate myself so that I can be more sensitive and self-aware in the future.

I am terribly sorry for the harm I have caused, and I humbly ask for forgiveness. I hope this can be the start of a journey of healing and recovery for this oppressed, vulnerable, and obviously extremely fragile people group.

And so, with a contrite heart, an awakened mind, and a steadfast commitment to building an America where beer-drinking, truck-driving, gun-toting white Christian people can finally, after 250 agonizing years, live freely and unfettered, I say to you, Bawitdaba, my lightly pigmented friends, Bawtidaba. You shall overcome.May this be my turning point…

Sincerely,

John Pavlovitz,

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Do You fiscal Conservatives still exist?

Are Red-Voting followers of Jesus still a thing? Because right now, I’m having a really hard time accounting for either of you.

According to The Washington Post, ICE is spending 38.3 billion dollars to buy warehouses across the country and turn them into detention centers.

38 billion.

We seemingly can’t afford to provide people with affordable healthcare, or give hungry kids food, but we can expedite the creation of massive concentration camps to address a need that has never been substantively proven to exist.

We’re apparently unable to care for our veterans, or fund our public schools, or pay people a living wage, but we can essentially incarcerate tens of thousands of people, the majority of whom have never been given due process or convicted of a crime.

The overall budget for ICE is close to 90 billion dollars.

Where are you, fiscal Conservatives, on this kind of reckless spending?

How is this a prudent use of financial resources, manpower, and infrastructure?

Do you support allocating this amount of money to such an endeavor, considering the high costs of groceries, housing, and healthcare for all Americans?

What is the economic justification for an initiative that is financially upending local communities, decimating international tourism, and crippling our nation’s farmers?

How is any of this compatible with your stated economic ethos?

And where are you, supposed Conservative Christians, in the face of this unprovoked violence toward an entire people group?

What is your spiritual stance on racial profiling, indiscriminate violence, masked mercenaries, mass incarceration, and ethnic cleansing?

How do you make theological sense of the kidnappings of children, the vicious beatings of fathers and grandmothers and big brothers, the shootings of peaceful bystanders, and the random brutality playing out all over our nation?

How does any of this specifically embody the teachings of Jesus?What is your specific scriptural justification for not welcoming the stranger, for withholding care from the least of these, and for refusing to love your neighbor as yourself?

When you see the unthinkable trauma to individuals, to families, to children, to local communities, to an entire nation, how does any of it align with your personal faith in Christ?

Maybe I’m shouting into the void, here.

Maybe my words are floating into the ether.

Maybe I’m interrogating ghosts.

Maybe fiscal Conservatives and actual red-voting followers of Jesus are relegated to our nation’s past.

But if you’re out there, I’d really like to know precisely and explicitly how you people on the Right justify what this Administration is doing through ICE, either economically or morally, because from where I’m standing, this all feels both financially reckless and morally reprehensible.

What am I missing here?

Many things will change.

The world will be busy.

On the day I die, all the important appointments I made will be left unattended.

The many plans I had yet to complete will remain forever undone.

The calendar that ruled so many of my days will now be of no use to me.

All the material things I chased and treasured will be left for others to care for or discard, placed into new hands or into the garbage.

On the day I die, the words of my critics, which so hounded and harassed me, will suddenly cease to sting. I will forever be beyond their reach.

The arguments I believed I’d won here will not bring me any satisfaction or solace. They will be merely hollow victories in inconsequential battles that only served to distract me.

The incessant, noisy legion of notifications and alerts will go unanswered; their screaming urgency silenced, no longer rewarded with a reply.

On the day I die, my many nagging regrets will all be resigned permanently to the past, where they should have always been to begin with.

Every superficial worry that I ever labored over, about my waistline or my hairline or (ironically), my worry lines, will fade away.

My carefully crafted image, the one I worked so hard to shape for others here, will be left to them to complete anyway. My legacy will be curated by everyone but me.

On the day I die, all the small and large anxieties that stole sleep from my nights and peace from my days will be rendered powerless.

The deep and towering mysteries about life and death that so consumed my mind will finally be clarified in a way that they could never be while I lived.

These things will certainly all be true on the day that I die.

Yet for as much as will happen on that day, one more thing will happen.

On the day I die, the few people who really know me and truly love me will grieve deeply.

They will feel a void.

They will feel cheated.

They will not feel ready.

They will feel as though a part of them has died as well.

And on that day, more than anything in the world, they will want more time with me. They will plead through tears and sobs for that time, and it will not be given to them.

I know this from those I love and grieve over.

Given this, while I am still alive, I’ll try to remember that my time with those who are home to my heart is finite and fleeting and so very precious, and do my best not to waste a moment of it.

I’ll try not to squander a priceless second burdened by all the other things that will happen on the day I die, because most of those things are not my concern or beyond my control.

Friends, those other things have an insidious way of keeping us from living even as we live; vying for our attention, competing for our affections, masquerading as meaningful.

Chasing such things robs us of the joy of this unrepeatable, uncontainable, ever-evaporating Now with those who love us and want only to share it with us.

On the day you die, there will be people who will be gutted by your absence.

Don’t miss the chance to laugh and dream and dance with them while you can.

It’s easy to waste so much daylight in the days before you die..

Try not to let your life be stolen in a billion poor choices by all that you’ve been led to believe matters, because on the day you die, the fact is, that much of it simply won’t.

Yes, you and I will die one day.

But before that day comes, let us do our best to live.

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In the story I inherited, there was a place where monstrous people would spend an excruciating eternal afterlife suffering for the vile things they did in this life; a prison of their own making in which all the sins of their past would be visited upon them a hundredfold.

There would be no rest, no reprieve, no end. There would only be their continuous anguished cries and the assurance that no one was coming to rescue them.

As I got older, I began to see the idea of a destination of unending suffering as incompatible with a God who was love, and I discarded the idea as a reality.

But lately, I have grown to hope and pray I was wrong and that Hell does indeed exist, because if that were true, I’d at least know that this entire Republican Congress will find themselves there as they move from here to hereafter.Watching these putrid frauds bring generational sorrow and suffering to hundreds of millions of human beings in poverty and lack while further elevating the wealthy, I cling to the hope that somewhere beyond this life, there is a place where horrible people pay for their earthly brutality.

My mind contemplates an afterworld where the despair that human beings have unleashed upon others in this world is returned to them in kind, a place where they feel the pain they have inflicted while here.

If there’s a hell, it will be filled with people who claimed faith in Jesus, while trying to strip the sick of care, the terrified of refuge, and the vulnerable of protection, and reveled in it as if it were a righteous victory.If eternal damnation exists, it should be the wages of men and women who coordinated, participated in, and applauded the vilifications of immigrants and refugees, whose only crime was their nation of birth or the color of their skin.

If there’s a forever place of suffering saved for people with cancerous hearts, it will surely house those who crucified strangers for their sexuality, who persecuted them over pronouns, who willfully trafficked in a dehumanization that was deadly.

And if there’s a hell, it’s going to be packed to the brimstone-scorched rafters with professed Christians who chose to celebrate, turn the other way, or be silent as they watched it all happen.

This isn’t about Trump.

He is a walking moral cesspool; a lumbering, empty, loveless husk of a human being, but he has never been anything else. He has existed so long in a cloistered, gold-plated palace of privilege where no accountability has ever truly come that his mind has become so corroded that the question of right or wrong no longer exists. His only impulse is self-preservation.

The Republicans in Congress (and in the Supreme Court) who have enabled, defended, and preserved his ascension are far worse.

They know better.

They know he’s a pedophile and a rapist. They know he’s committed (and is still committing) high crimes against this nation. They know what he is doing with ICE is illegal, immoral, and unconstitutional. They know he is cognitively compromised and mentally unwell.They know that he is fully beholden to hostile foreign powers.

They know every vile, grotesque, and illegal atrocity he has authored, and none of it matters.

Congressional Republicans could have prevented this thousands of times over the last decade.

They could have removed him, rejected him, defied him, but their own craven lust for power would not permit such nobility.

They have had every opportunity to cut ties with him and to spare countless people so much unnecessary suffering, such needless violence, such emotional and physical trauma.

They could have single-handedly emancipated this nation from a ten-year Constitutional crisis, but they chose to bend the knee, kiss the ring, and give a middle finger to our forbears and to the entire planet.

And despite all of that, they could end this sickening scourge upon our nation today if they had the simple courage to defend the Constitution they forever claim to revere, to embody the teachings of a Jesus whose name they incessantly broadcast.

This malignant, Democracy-crushing disgrace would all be over if they simply remembered their oaths—but that isn’t something they’re interested in.

Tomorrow I’ll be standing again in the trenches alongside my like-hearted brothers and sisters who believe that good people can alter the planet, but today that doesn’t feel like enough. That doesn’t feel like the story unfolding.

The story unfolding is that hateful people do hateful things to other people, and they do it all believing God is good with it.

The story unfolding is that people of unthinkable cruelty and malice seem to be rewarded for it.

The story unfolding is that the sick and the poor and the different and the vulnerable are being trodden upon.

And I hate this story, because too many innocent people are suffering in real time because of it. Too many people are enduring a living hell in their earthly lives.

And so yes, right now I look at this day and this life and this world, and it feels like the bad people are winning, and I want those people to understand how much hurt they are causing. And since they don’t seem to care very much at all, I want to believe that they will one day face their Maker and the mirror and the blood upon their hands.

And so as much as it pains me to say it, today I’m kinda hoping there is a hell.

That may be the only way these Republicans will pay for their sins against all of us.

In fact, he never shuts up about it.

He wears his religion openly, brandishing it at every opportunity in performative piety and finger-wagging condescension, while justifying the harboring of pedophiles, the rolling back of human rights, and the indiscriminate assaults of brown-skinned people by government-funded, masked mercenaries.

Vance is doing all this while breathlessly doing the bidding of a man he only a couple of years ago compared to Hitler: a court-adjudicated rapist and 34-count felon indicted several times for high crimes; a man whose racism, misogyny, and immorality are at stratospheric levels.

The theological gymnastics he and those like him have to engage in to reconcile their idolatry of a sociopath with the teachings of Jesus are at Olympic-gold-medal levels.

I remember Vance giving an interview talking about immigration, and trying to justify prioritizing the American people, saying:

“You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world…”

This is made-in-the-USA, homegrown, sanctified horse s**t.

The idea that there is anything anywhere in the teachings of Jesus to support this means Vance is either willfully ignorant, purposefully misleading, or he’s never actually read the Bible. And when rightly called out on his blasphemous Jesus makeover, Vance took to social media to peddle some asinine, Christian nationalist “ladder of compassion” nuttery, writing:

“The idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense. Does anyone really think someone’s moral duties to their own children are the same as their duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away?

Does anyone?”

Yeah, JD, someone does: Jesus.

That’s essentially the heart of the whole friggin’ thing: loving our neighbors, our enemies, and the least of these: caring for the marginalized, the left out, the foreigner, the people we’ve previously seen as not being our own.

Vance and his morally inverted, cultic brethren have been bending the knee to their vile, belligerent, spray-tanned savior for so long that the actual teachings of Jesus aren’t really a concern at this point.

This is why they spend their days try to connect un-connectable dots between mass violence against immigrants and a poor, dark-skinned, itinerant refugee preacher commanding his people to love everyone.

For God so loved the World ain’t America First, no matter how stridently Vance or any MAGA Christians believe or declare it is.

I realize that to disciples of the Predator-in-Chief, these words will likely all be white noise, much like the Gospel teachings themselves have clearly become to them.

If not, instead of trying to justify abject cruelty in the name of Jesus, JD Vance and people like him (really anyone who simultaneously claims Christianity and MAGA) would be severing ties with Donald Trump and repenting of the prejudices, phobias, and white supremacy that led them to fall prostrate before him to begin with.

If they actually gave half a damn about the non-American, non-English-speaking, “blessed are the peacemakers” center of their faith tradition, they’d work the rest of their lives to undo the grievous damage they have done in such a short time to so many beautiful human beings created in the image of God, who do not share their pigmentation, native language, or nation of origin.

Jesus taught that love for neighbor was the highest calling and the greatest priority we have here. And when asked by a man in the crowd (likely someone Trump Christians would identify with), who he actually had to consider his neighbor, Jesus tells the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

Most people, whether Christian or not, are likely familiar with the story about a man beaten and robbed by the side of the road who is ignored by several religious passersby, finally being cared for by a Samaritan man who stops to tend to his wounds and get him to a place of safety and rest.

Jesus making a Samaritan the hero was striking and scandalous, as people from Samaria were thought to be morally impure half-breeds, likely reviled by Jesus’ hearers.

By doing this, he is reminding them (and us) that our love and concern for humanity is not organized and prioritized by nation, ethnicity, place of birth, or geography. We are to show equally lavish mercy on the hurting, terrified, assailed humanity in our path—period.

The Jesus of the Bible didn’t just love his own. He didn’t choose his family, friends, students, over strangers. He healed people he’d never met. He expanded the table and fed a vast multitude who showed up to hear him speak, not because they were the right people, but because they were hungry.

In fact, Jesus said that in showing obedience to his call for expansive, borderless compassion, we may even experience turbulence within our own family.

I’m fully aware that most Republican Evangelicals probably don’t care about any of this; they have a Jesus-free Christian that is doing everything that they want it to do, so self-awareness, let alone repentance, isn’t likely.

I just want to say that people like me, tens of millions of people of faith in this country, know that what this arrogant, posturing cadre of cosplaying Christians (Vance chief among them) are doing to immigrants and refugees and people of color and gay couples and Mexican families and trans teenagers is a vile, predatory rejection of everything Jesus stood for.

And people of earnest faith in Jesus, along with every decent human being who can’t abide hypocrisy, aren’t going to let these charlatans get away with it, at least not in his name.

Vance may be able to B.S. his boss’s sycophantic disciples with this fraudulent, heretical, Jesus-less parade of hypocrisy, but the rest of the world (Christians and non-Christians alike) knows they’re full of it… and it ain’t the Spirit.

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The sundowning of the MAGA movement is upon us.

The signs are everywhere.

As much as History can be an albatross in moments like these, alerting us to the terrifying ways in which we are repeating the past pathologies of inhumanity, she can also be a source of comfort; a reminder of the inevitability of the endings of all evil things.

If we consult her with a clear head, she’ll remind us that all brutal empires fall, that all hateful movements dissolve, that every seemingly bulletproof regime reaches its extinction, and that all malevolent momentary victors eventually find themselves defeated and driven out.

Every time the pendulum has swung wildly toward barbarism in a society, it has invariably come back with even greater opposite force to bend the arc of the moral universe back toward justice again.

And History tells us that, despite the story in our heads or the one that comes through the partisan propaganda that we’re continually saturated by, our brutal national nightmare is likely in its final hours.

Few cults survive the passing of their leaders, and MAGA will not outlive the departure of Donald Trump from the White House or from this earth, whichever comes first.

His physical attrition and mental degradation can no longer be hidden or distracted from. His body is rapidly breaking down, laboring with simple tasks, hemorrhaging energy, and riddled with the unmistakable tells of a man whose systems are failing.

His already hate-addled mind is becoming more and more clouded in an ever-thickening haze of deterioration, drugs, and almost certain dementia. His outbursts have grown more impulsive, his decisions have become more desperate, and the once indestructible facade of strength is steadily crumbling.

The strongman is withering.

He is a lame duck president whose once fierce death grip on political power is giving way to neutered impotence and growing irrelevance.

The rapacious brutality of his regime is being exposed and condemned.

The groundswell of public opposition is growing louder and more organized.

The defections from his party are accelerating, their unwavering allegiance weakening.

His cockroach accomplices are scattering in the raking light of coming accountability.

His supposed social media army of support is proving to be made largely of foreign bot factories.

And there is no scenario in which his political power or cultic influence increases from here. It will all be an exercise in diminishing returns. He has peaked as a galvanizing presence, and there’s no GOP spin doctoring that can change that.

Whether he is taken by nature or by the Constitution, the gap left will be too expansive to fill, because although Trump didn’t create the unapologetic bigotry, or give birth to the unrepentant cruelty, or author the intellectual ignorance of the MAGA movement, he alone was the catalyst for it.

His bizarre carnival barker charisma, his curated mythology of financial success, his lowest-common-denominator soundbite sermonizing, and his lack of any moral requirements made him the singular human being to expose the worst of humanity.

He gave people permission to revel in the worst of their instincts, to give loud voice to their hidden hatreds, to discard their religious convictions, and to fully abandon empathy and decency.

And once he is gone, MAGA will be gone, too.

No, the tens of millions of Americans whose minds have been steadily poisoned by him, his willing political partners, compromised clergy, dudebro podcasters, opportunist internet vultures, and Fox News fakery will not suddenly awaken from their cultic stupor and join the rest of us in benevolent and interdependent humanity.

But they will never again have someone who embodies the zeitgeist of grotesque impulses the way Trump has. His sycophants, disciples, and cheerleaders will all be scattered in his absence, no longer able to rally around a singular presence. Their collective influence will slowly fade, and the cancerous movement they fed will die off.

This doesn’t mean the coming days will be easy or painless, likely just the opposite. Like a wounded and dying animal, he and his cadre of ghouls will become more violent, more desperate, and more committed to destruction.

But they know, as well as we do, that their time is short and that the clock on their stranglehold on this nation is ticking. That should strengthen our resolve, lift our spirits, and sturdy our steps.

Take heart, good people.

Time, gravity, and term limits are undefeated, and one way or another, the end of MAGA is near.

And the dawn of the promise of America will break once again.

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I know you feel something breaking inside lately, an invisible fracture that only you’re fully aware of, one that seems to grow deeper by the hour.

I know you walk away from conversations with people you once relied on for wisdom and compassion, doubting your own sanity because you no longer recognize those qualities in them.

I know you feel internally estranged from the friends, coworkers, family members, and neighbors you used to find affinity with, the people who once felt like home.

I know you stare at the perpetual parade of horrible scrolling past you, from the second you wake up prematurely in the early morning until the stretched-out nighttime moments you try unsuccessfully to fall asleep, and how you question the grip you have on reality.

I know the crushing disbelief you feel when you look around and see so many people who don’t seem the slightest bit bothered, who are carrying on as if this is all normal; people who appear fully oblivious to the Category 5 shitstorm that you’ve been screaming about for a decade, now.

I hear the nagging question that careens inside your head, the one you ask yourself a few hundred times a day: “Is it me, or has a huge portion of this country lost its mind?”

It isn’t you.

You’re quite fine, and this is, of course, both good and terrible news because of what it says about you and about the place you find yourself.

The fact that you see how wrong this all is means your faculties are intact, your mind is fully right, and your heart is working properly. It’s all confirmation that you still have a soul doing what souls are supposed to do: keep you deeply human in profoundly inhumane times.

This is why you need to hold tightly to that humanity because it is rarer and more valuable than it has ever been.It’s why you need to kindle this holy unrest in the center of your belly, because it can push back the numbing flood of apathy threatening to swallow up the beautiful fury of good people.It’s why you can’t allow your right but troubled mind to make peace with such abject madness.

If enough time passes, an otherwise healthy person can start to get used to feeling sick. They can slowly begin to convince themselves that almost any horrifying, toxic, painful, twisted reality is acceptable, even ordinary.Little by little, they can gradually allow their hearts to acclimate to the nightmare, to come to see it as normal.Either that, or they come to believe the damage to be beyond repair, and they collapse inward, a hopeless, lightless shell of who they once were.

I need you to hear this, friend:You’re okay.You’re not overreacting,you’re not stupid,and you’re not crazy.You’re also in good company.

Right now, there is a massive army of similarly walking wounded sharing this place with you; fellow exhausted but still pissed-off warriors who realize that the bad people are counting on them to become so disheartened that they give up—and who refuse to give them the f*ckin’ satisfaction.

You and I, we’re seeing clearly, friend, which is always the more painful path; staring down the terrors and refusing to look away from what so many willfully choose not to see.

We know that this movement assailing our nation is an assault on decency, a rebellion against goodness, a mutiny against sanity, and that’s why we need to keep resisting it.

We need to shout down the legion of professional liars working so fiercely to convince us that it’s we who have gone mad.

We need to refuse to be gaslit by people who try to diminish our worries, mock our outrage, or dismiss our despair, even if we have once called them friends.

We need to press on undaunted and unafraid, knowing that the jittery chaos-makers realize their time is short, and they are rightly terrified of us because our goodness makes us dangerous.

So, breathe, gather yourself, and carry on.

Work to find your people, those who are as heartbroken and furious as you are. Find ways to care for human beings in peril, to organize against the legislative and physical assaults, to be focused and effective in your response, and to be strengthened by loving community.

You’re not crazy, but these days surely are.

You’re not upside down right now, friend; a good portion of this place is.

People of faith, morality, and conscience together, from every corner of this nation, will right it.

Grieve, and move.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In the unrelenting storm of Conservative’s legislative assaults on body autonomy, their withholding of the unredacted Epstein files, and their coronation of a court-adjudicated rapist to the highest seat of power in the nation, we’ve forgotten something critical: our sons have been watching and listening, too.

They are being irreparably altered in real-time by the men they are being raised by, look up to, and taught to revere.

My heart breaks open when I think about the kind of young men being created right now, the collateral damage of these days on the boys in the Right’s collective care.

I grieve deeply when I consider what so many of MAGA America’s sons are likely to grow into:

men with a dangerous sense of entitlement when it comes to the bodies and wishes and wills of the women around them,who believe they will get rewarded for their sexism and moral filth, because they’ve watched it happen for their entire lives.men who are physically incapable of apologizing and morally allergic to accountability.men who believe that money, power, and their penises give them license to do whatever they want.men for whom violent, hateful, objectifying words about women are considered normal, even admirable.men who are violently threatened by any expression of manhood that falls outside of the tiny, rigid sensibilities they feel secure within.men who inherit a religion that tells them that women should defer to them, yield to them, and blindly obey them.men for whom the very idea of consent is irrelevant.men who grow to have no value for gentleness, sensitivity, and empathy.men who think a weak, needy, fragile narcissist like Donald Trump is a man worth emulating.

Just before the 2016 election, I remember my then 11-year-old son coming home and asking me what Donald Trump had said about women in the audio that had been unearthed and was being talked about at school. I did the best I could to relay it all without using the actual words, because to use the actual words Trump used would have meant subjecting my son to the kind of vile vulgarity that isn’t normal and shouldn’t be normal for 11-year-old boys—or to men of integrity of any age.

The fact that a man with such a vast and sickening resume of depravity soon became the political messiah for so many professed Christians, and remains a decade later, securely seated on the throne of their unwavering devotion, should prompt effusive repentance within faithful followers of Jesus, and be cause for national mourning among every decent American.

We should all be collectively sick to our stomachs right now, watching an entire political party dismantling the rights and devaluing the worth of women and realizing how poisonous this all is to the hearts and minds of the boys who will emulate these assaults in the trenches of their private and professional lives.

There is a terrible trickle-down inhumanity flowing from the white House, the Supreme Court, the halls of Congress, and the pulpits of megachurches, and into the homes and hallways where young boys are having their brains rewired, their morality renovated, and their roads redirected.

I have better dreams for our sons than this.

I want them to know that girls and women, that all people, are worthy of respect and decency.I want them to know that dehumanizing a woman is never normal: not in a locker room or a campus party or a board room or a bedroom or a court room.I want them to know that another woman’s body is not their jurisdiction.I want them to know that a woman’s outward no is louder than their internal yes.I want them to know that there is a huge difference between being male and being a man, in being a gentle man.

I believe all our sons deserve better than this fragile, fraudulent MAGA masculinity that will surely keep them in the same suspended state of undeveloped humanity their fathers are permanently trapped in.

They deserve a higher definition of what it means to be a man than the ratified sexism and legislated subjugation of the Republican platform.

They deserve a morality that isn’t as pliable as their Evangelical parents, politicians, and pastors have made theirs in order to accommodate the moral cancer of their profane, perverted, spray-tanned savior.

As a young father, I dreamed that my son would become a man who recognizes women as valuable, equal, and worthy of respect. To my great joy, he has. But I want that for every boy and young man who calls this place home.

Because of that, I’m going to do everything in my power to shout down all the voices that dehumanize and devalue women, even if those voices come from the men sanctifying sexism in the pulpits of their churches, berating women in beligerant press conference rants, or sitting at the kitchen table talking over the women across from them.

At this point, opposing a movement of misogyny and aggression shouldn’t be seen as an act of tribalism, but this is where we are.

There shouldn’t be an alternative side to raising men of character and compassion, but sadly, tens of millions of Conservative men have chosen it.

Right now, millions of bright and beautiful boys with big hearts and bigger questions are watching and listening. In these moments, they are asking the kind of men they should become.

The MAGA movement and its surrogates are failing them.

The rest of us must not.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

And when the friction becomes too great, the exchange too heated, and the tension too uncomfortable, they invariably drop an all-too-familiar final salvo designed to stop the conversation and avoid pressing ahead:

"We're just going to have to agree to disagree."

I strongly disagree.

I refuse these terms.

I do not consent to this convenient truce.

Such a concession assumes that we both have equally valid opinions, that we're each mutually declaring those opinions not so divergent that they cannot be abided, that our relationship is of greater value than the differences, but that isn't exactly true for me.

No, we don't just disagree now. They’re simply wrong.

I believe they are deeply, profoundly, and egregiously wrong; the kind of wrong about the kinds of things that I can no longer excuse or make peace with or overlook, because that would be a denial of who I am and what matters to me, the values I have spent a lifetime forming.

This is not a disagreement.

We are not simply declaring mismatched preferences regarding something inconsequential. We're not talking about who has the best offensive line in the NFL, what craft beer pairs best with a cheesesteak, or the sonic differences between CDs and vinyl. On such matters (though I will provide spirited debate), I can tolerate dissension.

We're not even talking about clear misalignments on very important things: how to best address climate change, or what will fix our healthcare system, or how to reduce our national debt, or ways to provide affordable housing. Those subjects, while critically important, still have room for constructive debate and differing solutions. They are mendable fractures.

But this runs far deeper and into the marrow of who we each are.

At this point, with the last decade (and particularly the past couple of months) as a resume, their alignment with this president means that we are fundamentally disconnected on what is morally and ethically acceptable. I've simply seen too much to explain that away or rationalize their intentions or give them the benefit of the doubt any longer.

I know what their reaffirmation of him is telling me about their disregard for the lives of people of color, about their opinion of women, about their attitude toward Science, about the faith they so loudly profess, and about their elemental disrespect for bedrock truth. I now can see how pliable their morality is, the kinds of compromises they’re willing to make, the ever-descending bottom they are following him into, in order to feel victorious in a war they don't even know why they're fighting.

That's why I need these people to understand that this isn't just a schism on one issue or a single piece of legislation, as those things would be manageable. This isn't a matter of politics or preference. This is a pervasive, sprawling, saturating separation about the way we see the world, what we value, and how we want to move through this life.

Agreeing to disagree with these people in these matters would mean silencing myself and, more importantly, betraying the people who bear the burdens of their political affiliations— and this is not something I'm willing to do. My relationships with many of these people, who are family members, former friends, and neighbors, still matter greatly to me, but if they have to be the collateral damage of standing with the vulnerable and the oppressed, I'll have to see that as acceptable losses.

Trump supporters’ devaluing of people of color is not an opinion.Their acceptance of falsehoods is not an opinion.Their demonizing of queer people is not an opinion.Their devaluing of women is not an opinion.Their embracing of racism is not an opinion.Their defiance of facts is not an opinion.Their dehumanization of immigrants is not an opinion.These are fundamental heart issues.

And I want them all to know where I stand so that when the chair is empty this Thanksgiving, the calls don't come, they meet with radio silence, or they begin to notice the slow fade of our exchanges, I want them to know why: it's because I have learned how morally incompatible we are. It doesn't mean I don't care for them, but it means proximity to them isn't going to be healthy.

I've been disagreeing with people all my life. That isn't the issue here.

Were we talking about anything less than the lives of other beautiful, disparate beings, I'd be more than willing to disagree with them, but since we are talking about the lives of other beautiful, disparate beings, I can't.

I believe his supporters are wrong in ways that are harming people.They’re wrong to deny the humanity of other human beings.They’re wrong to justify their affiliation with this violence.They’re wrong to embrace a movement built on the worst parts of who we are.

I simply can't agree with that.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I spent today, as much of the nation, watching you speak before the House Judiciary Committee in a state of stunned disbelief, which surprised me, as I thought you’d reached a moral bottom many weeks ago.

I witnessed you posturing and protesting, feigning indignation in the face of reasonable questions you repeatedly refused to answer.

I looked on as you deflected and pivoted, performing the wildest verbal gymnastics to keep from providing the simple clarity that our elected representatives asked for and deserved—and wondered why anyone would do that.

I sat incredulous, watching you appear to lie with great ease, even perverse joy, seeming, to my ears, to contradict both irrefutable evidence and your own words in the past. It was a tour de force in distraction, a true masterclass in gaslighting.

And while a thousand thoughts ran through my head, when it was all over, I was left with a single question:

How does someone become Pam Bondi?

I’m not speaking about your education, your professional experience, or your career path, which are easily retrieved with a few keystrokes. I’m talking about the meandering road to losing one’s soul.

I wonder how an apparently intelligent human being finds themselves sitting in that chair in front of the watching world in a moment of such gravity, so completely bereft of empathy, so seemingly unencumbered by other people’s suffering, and so strident in the face of simple accountability.

I try to imagine how you, the person entrusted with stewarding the Law in the highest seat of power here, arrives at a place where that Law has seemingly become irrelevant.

Are the money and the power so intoxicating that they have rendered your conscience inoperable?

Has your journey been filled with a million small moral compromises that burdened you in the beginning, but slowly emotionally anesthetized you to the point that now you feel nothing?

Are you so beholden to the redacted man who enabled your ascension to this lofty space that you are willing to shield him from the litany of heinous sins that you must know well he is guilty of?

Maybe you don’t even have the answers.

Maybe you can’t explain it either, though I’m sure there’s a story you have to tell yourself to keep the self-loathing at bay and let you sleep at night, at least I hope so.

I see that you do not have children of your own. Perhaps, if you did, I wonder if you might see this all differently. I don’t know. Tens of millions of people without children are as furious as I am.

But you are someone’s daughter, and I do wonder how that girl became the woman sitting there at that table today, so dismissive of other women who have survived trauma. I imagine there may be some answers there somewhere.

But as the father of a daughter, I want you to know that I fully detest what you are doing to so many other people’s children right now.

I abhor your callous disregard for the daughters who stood courageously before you today, whose eyes you did not have the dignity to look into; women whose black, cavernous hell you know full well, because you’ve pored over it countless times in words, photos, and videos that are still being concealed.

It sickens me to my core to know that thousands of survivors, girls and young women not unlike my daughter, have experienced unspeakable horrors and are finding in you, not a fierce and willing advocate, not a steadfast warrior who will deliver them justice, but an unsuspecting, shame-throwing avatar of the men who brutalized them.

And if you truly do care for survivors, then I’d like to hear how you justify your treatment of them. They deserve that. We all do.

I’m not sure what you believe in, but I am a person of faith, and my religious tradition tells me that we will all face accountability for our misdeeds and transgressions beyond this life, even if we evade them in this one. That possibility does provide a small bit of comfort, but I hope you don’t have to wait that long.

I hope that you will face a legal reckoning for any betrayals of our nation that you are guilty of, for the chaos you are willfully creating, and most of all for the sorrow you are exacerbating for the daughters (and the sons) throughout this nation who feel less safe and less protected.

I stand with and bear witness to those who are afraid because the Law seems to be refusing to drag the monsters out into the light, because people like you appear so willing to curate the darkness.

I hope whatever you got for your soul was worth it to you.

It sure as hell isn’t for the rest of us.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

MAGA Americans have a Bunny living rent-free in their heads.

(We’ll just call it BDS: Bunny Derangement Syndrome.)

Their president has posted late-night, untethered, rambling word salads about him.

Their media surrogates have gone on racist tirades against him, seeking to reclaim football for oppressed white people.Their lawmakers have demanded investigations and deportations, clutching their pearls about the terrifying moral dangers of Latino twerking.

And they are currently frantically saturation-bombing social media in an effort to convince us (and themselves) that no one liked the most-watched Super Bowl Halftime Show in history.

Bad Bunny didn’t just break the Internet and viewership records; he broke MAGA in a way that is deeply personal, and they hate him for it.

But they don’t hate him because he doesn’t sing in English, or because he’s been critical of the masked thugs they beat immigrants vicariously through, or because his pigmentation is problematic—at least those aren’t the primary reasons.

They hate him because he is a symbol of their greatest fears coming to life: a nation that is outgrowing them, a culture that is evolving past them, a war against progress that they know they’re losing.

They despise Bad Bunny because, over the course of a thirteen-minute halftime show that they swore they wouldn’t watch but couldn’t look away from, they were forced to see what’s happening outside of the insular, white nationalist, MAGA echo chamber they spend their lives in, and it terrified them.

They watched it all play out on the green hallowed ground of their holiest of national holidays: pulsating, syncopated rhythms that transcended their four-on-the-floor white classic rock safe spaces; a joyous, swirling assembly of brown-skinned people unapologetically celebrating a collective story that these sheltered supremacists know nothing about;messages of unity and hope that defy the hateful, nihilistic, tribal poison that they have been weaned on. It all felt foreign and disorienting and threatening.

And even if they can’t make sense of it in their heads right now (or admit it to the rest of us if they can), they can feel it on a visceral level; an internal panic raising their heart rates, turning their white cheeks flush with fury, and filling them with existential dread. Something is terribly wrong, and they know it.

And the more they throw tantrums and the louder they carry on, the more obvious it is that they’re losing, and a Puerto Rican pop star was the public prophet of their demise, which is why they hate him.

Bad Bunny interrupted the sanctity of the Super Bowl and slammed a loud, radiant Reggaeton wrecking ball into the fictional story that Trump supporters spend every day telling themselves about their prominence and power. Now, they need to figure out a way to make that narrative still be true: he isn’t really that popular, those viewership numbers can’t be accurate, the crowd didn’t really enjoy it. They will do anything to explain it all away as some godless, radical Leftist woke fever dream.

But the truth is the truth: The landscape is being renovated, the climate is changing, and America is becoming the diverse, enlightened, culturally-expansive place that they are fighting so hard to prevent it from becoming.

Despite their violent opposition and their relentless posturing and their raw-throated protestations, this nation is becoming too big for them to constrain or suppress. Time and progress are going to swallow up the prejudices and phobias they traffic in. The phony patriotism and hollow religion they peddle in tired dudebro country songs about trucks and Bibles is going to be fully exposed as simply white supremacy with a shitty soundtrack.

The Super Bowl Halftime show was a bold and glorious microcosm of the America that we are becoming, whether MAGAs like it or not.

This is a game they ultimately cannot win, and so they'd better just take the L.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Or, at least maybe that’s the way you’ve always felt.

Perhaps you don’t see yourself in a street with a sign yelling slogans, shouting through a bullhorn on courthouse steps, wielding your social media profile like an independent news outlet, or standing at a school board meeting, elevating your voice to rise above the jeers of your hateful neighbors.

These things might all feel miles outside of what you’re comfortable with, and I understand, empathize, and respect that, I really do.

But here’s the thing: that’s too damn bad. It’s time to get comfortable with the discomfort.

Activism is no longer optional for good humans in America, and here’s why:

People of brown and black skin are disappearing. Today. Right now.

In the very state you live in, if not the very community, there are people who quite recently were there but no longer are, and not because they chose to leave.

They are college students taken from the streets in broad daylight without cause.Fathers rounded up, beaten, and jailed without due process.Legal residents rejected at airports and sent back to places they no longer call home.Foreign spouses of citizens unlawfully detained and harassed.Families taken from their homes and businesses with no warning.

These are not hypotheticals to be postulated or fantastical fodder for theoretical political conversations. They aren’t exaggerated examples of worst-case scenarios that will likely never materialize. They are the here, now, real-time subtractions of this brutal regime.

These are beautiful, original, unprecedented flesh-and-blood human beings whose presence has been removed simply for the color of their skin, their nation of origin, a rally they may have attended, a paper they once published, a class they taught, or a comment they posted.

They are the disappeared and the missing and the unaccounted for, and unless you and I show up now, there will be many more who will join them: more classmates, best friends, mothers, teachers, favorite uncles, little league coaches, and church members.

And for every one of these lost people, there are thousands more whose lives have been upended, whose families have been fractured, whose childhoods have been irreparably scarred, whose livelihoods have been destroyed, whose sense of peace has been ripped away, and whose bodies have been broken.

And soon, these will not be spread out and distant stories we can dismiss as aberrations; they will be commonplace terrors that we all have front-row seats to. And eventually, someone we know and love dearly will be one of the disappeared, though it should not take that to move us from complacency to urgency.

Since these removed, erased, and bloodied human beings are without a voice now, we who still have ours need to speak for them.For our neighbors who are unable to fight for themselves, we owe it to them to fight in their stead.Since they have involuntarily disappeared from this place, if we imagine ourselves to be people of faith, morality, and conscience, our voluntary presence must be mandatory in response.

Again, I truly do understand that many of you have an aversion to confrontation; perhaps some severe social anxiety, a sincere desire to keep the peace, a feeling of fear for your safety, or maybe you just don’t like to be seen as an a*****e.

All I can tell you is, in every case, it’s time.

With all love and compassion, I loudly say to hell with your comfort level, anxiety be damned, and f*ck whatever excuse you’d propose as to why you aren’t the kind of person who is an activist.

It’s time to put on our big kid pants and find our outside voices.

Right now, at this place and time in the 250-year history of this beautiful but threatened experiment in Democracy with so much quickly going sideways, being an activist simply means being a human who values other humans enough to get your hands dirty, push through your apprehensions, discard your ego, and brave the bruises and scars that will come, because as bad as any of that might feel, at least we’re here to feel it.

You may not see yourself as an activist, dear friends, but to be an inactivist right now just isn’t an option.

Since you are here and free and well, stand strong and speak loudly for the disappeared and the wounded and the terrified.

And do it now.

I do understand that personal safety, job security, and social connections are real concerns and true barriers. In the comments, let’s crowd-source ways people can step into activism, regardless of the constraints and pressures.

It’s easy when the horrors have become commonplace to become so beaten down and disheartened by the fight that you can lose sight of why you’re doing it.

The repeated brutality and the relentless sorrows and the never-ending crises can squeeze out and suffocate your imagination, gradually rendering you unable to see a future worth walking into anymore.

And then suddenly, when you least expect it, there it is.

Suddenly, you find those long-dried-up reservoirs of hope bursting open once more.

Caught up in the throes of a stirring, pulsating rhythm that you cannot resist, you find your way back.

For thirteen minutes on a football field in San Francisco, from thousands of miles away, we could see it again.

This America: diverse, creative, joyful, colorful, unified.

This America, where fear is banished, where adversity is overcome, where fierce embraces find each of us, where no one is left outside.

This America, North, Central, and South.

This America, whose story cannot be complete without the Latino community so many wish to erase.

This is it.

This is what we’re fighting like hell for.

This is why giving up isn't an option.

And this is why centering something other than Love is the only way we lose.

Bad Bunny reminded us that in this war for the nation we’re still renovating, it is not might, or force, or eye-for-an-eye violence that will cause us to prevail; it will be our refusal to become as miserable and hateful as those we oppose.

He, a man faced for months with the undeserved scorn of tens of millions of strangers, the target of the worst poison human beings are capable of, chose not to stand upon the largest platform and fly some bitter, middle finger contempt.

He simply showed his humanity and reminded us of our own.

He refused to allow his enemies to defeat him by becoming them.

Love wins.

Words can easily feel like hollow platitudes, like empty cliches, until they aren’t.

Until they are the truest truth there is in this life.

Until we can feel them in the marrow of our bones.

Until those words towering above a beleaguered multitude that has been starved of Love.

That love is what those grim-faced, joyless exclusionists are afraid of, what they are working so tirelessly to eliminate.

That’s why this was more than just entertainment, more than songs and set pieces, more than pop music and sentiment.

We cannot lose sight of who we are.

Our compassion is what makes us different.

We do wield those open, bleeding hearts they ridicule us for.

We are a people who believe that the open hand is greater than the clenched fist.

Now, I’m not so naive to believe that a 13-minute show is magic: that violent mobs of masked men are going to suddenly disappear from our streets, that the cruel and calloused hearts all around us are going to soften, that the people so addled by racism that they needed an alternative to this celebration of our commonalities are going to be moved to alter their allegiance to a monster.

In fact, witnessing such a bold and beautiful declaration of diverse coexistence will likely make those threatened by such things double down in their attacks, but that doesn’t matter.

But what I do know is that for thirteen minutes, it all became clear again.

For thirteen minutes, we could see the future.

We have had our attentions redirected, our spirits lifted, and our strength returned.

We have been reminded of the place that we might still be if we refuse to stop doing the hard work; if we continue to make sure that everyone has a place here, that everyone finds welcome, that everyone gets a chance to dance.

Over the span of thirteen minutes, Bad Bunny delivered a rich and nuanced love letter to his Puerto Rican roots and to the Latin American culture that shaped both him and our nation.

Over the span of thirteen minutes, he gave his detractors lessons in empathy, diversity, unity, and geography.

He gave the rest of us the eyes to see what we may have forgotten.

He, Love, and America won.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Dear Republican Voters, Trump Supporters, White Evangelicals, and MAGA Faithful,

I’d like to ask you some questions, and I’d like to hear your honest responses…

If the President is a pedophile, don’t you want to know?

If the person in the highest seat of power in our nation is a serial predator, isn’t it important to bring that truth into the light?

If our Commander-in-Chief committed sexual abuse of minors for years, doesn’t that matter to you?

You see, I know how you might have responded to these questions before January 20th, when we had a Democrat in the White House, because back then, your performative posturing never ceased. You were supposedly all about stopping the child groomers, punishing sexual criminals, and eradicating human traffickers.

And with the continually delayed release of the entire Jeffrey Epstein files, I sense your fierce moral stances suddenly becoming more malleable, your hardline religious convictions coming up for debate, your once-passionate sermonizing now softening.

Are you against child groomers unless they have an R next to their names?

Does sexual violence still sicken you if the perpetrator helps you build a theocracy?

Are you for exposing human traffickers, unless they can supply you with Supreme Court seats?

Because from where I’m standing, the rubber is meeting the road, and you’re trying to take an exit ramp. It seems like you don’t have the clarity of convictions you’ve always told yourself (and the rest of us) that you have.

Look, I don’t need you to agree with me politically or align with me theologically, but I was hoping we could find common ground in a base level of humanity that doesn’t want our leaders to be rapists.

I thought that maybe we could cut through America’s fierce tribal divide by agreeing that we should drag monsters who use their wealth to brutalize girls and young women into the light of accountability.

If I were as devoted a Christian as you claim to be, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to make the story of these crimes all go away so that I can go back to pretending I’m a follower of Jesus and morally policing the world, all while turning my head at the possibility that I voted for and still support a deviant monster.

But what do I know, I’m over here on the supposedly godless, amoral Left demanding the full and unedited release of these files because my morality is a fixed reality, it is not partisan, and it is not up for debate.

I don’t give a damn if these documents implicate someone I once respected or even voted for, because I want every vile pervert and predator to be exposed. I want justice for every child and woman who suffered at the hands of the wealthy and powerful. I believe the worth of a human being doesn’t depend on the voting bloc they belong to.

And yeah, if the President is a pedophile, if he is a serial predator, if he has abused girls and women, I damn well want to know because I want him to be accountable.

And I want you to know, because I want you to be held accountable for trying to turn away from the truth, for attempting to push it all under the rug for fear it might expose your hypocrisy.

Most of all, I want to see if your cultic devotion will remain, even if you find out he is the very kind of filth you claim to be sickened by.

And maybe that’s why you don’t want these files released, because you know the answer to that question.

Prove me wrong. Stand with me. Demand the unredacted Epstein files be released—or tell me again who you think you are.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Yesterday, a Trump supporter dropped a lengthy, rambling, profanity-laden diatribe into my comments section, lecturing me for implying that MAGA is inherently a white supremacist movement.

In between vile personal attacks and egregious spelling errors, he accused me of “playing the Race Card", of making assumptions about people like him, and of stoking division in America (a fracture first caused, he claimed, by President Obama).

The man closed by assuring me that I was unfairly maligning tens of millions of white Americans, saying, “We’re f*ckin’ tired of being called racists!”

(Is that right, sunshine?)

Well, to my pearl-clutching, righteously indignant friend and the rest of the exhausted, exasperated, misunderstood white folk across America:

I’m a white American.

I am both a person of faith and someone who considers themselves extremely patriotic, and do you know what I’m tired of?

I’m tired of white people supporting a political party incessantly working to keep people of color from voting, and feigning outrage at the suggestion that they may be racist.

I’m tired of a timeline, comment section, and inbox, littered with the most vile racist epithets, and always knowing their authors’ political affiliation, before even looking.

I’m tired of seeing people passionately defending lawless vigilantes who are violently targeting my Latino and immigrant neighbors, making them synonymous with criminals, rapists, and drug dealers.

I’m tired of seeing the loudest, most violent opposition to racial equity in this country come from white people professing to love a dark-skinned, foreign Jesus and operating as if God is a white cisgender-heterosexual guy who was born in America, raised Christian, and votes Republican.

I’m tired of former church friends, neighbors, and family members hiding behind the flimsy facade of “economic insecurity” and “safety”, to cover the reality that they are terrified of the shifting demographics of this nation and are willing to do anything to stave them off.

I’m tired of seeing one political party legislatively assaulting vulnerable communities’ right to vote, their access to healthcare, to affordable housing, and to comparable education.

I’m tired of white people doing Olympic-level intellectual gymnastics to try to gaslight the rest of us into believing a meme of an African-American President and his wife depicted as apes is anything other than a dehumanizing and dangerous stereotype.

White people in America, if you’re really tired of being called racists, here’s what you might wanna try: stop doing racist s**t.Begin by clearly, unequivocally, and loudly divorcing yourself from the single most racist entity on the planet right now, which is this President and his Administration. That would be a great start.

If you’re truly offended at the assertion that you might be a white supremacist, ask yourself whether sharing a voting bloc with The Proud Boys, the KKK, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Kristi Noem is making your accusers’ case stronger.

You are known by the company you keep, by the people you vote for, those you contribute to and elevate to public office, and to the highest courts of this nation. And if your self-righteous outrage at being labeled a racist is real, you’re going to need to explain how you can be someone who honestly treasures diversity while standing alongside its greatest and fiercest adversaries.

If you really find the idea of racism objectionable and are committed to dismantling it:

Work to ensure voting rights for all Americans, and take note of those resisting them.

Stop mindlessly attacking Critical Race Theory and DEI and begin actually finding out what those things are and why they matter.

Read a book about the realities of systemic racism, white privilege, and the human toll of discrimination written by people of color.

Participate in and publicize a march, rally, vigil, or awareness event that you know will cause turbulence with your circle of influence, and ask yourself why that’s a problem for them.

Volunteer with a nonprofit, ministry, or community organization in your city, working on the front lines where marginalized communities facing the direct effects of the legislation you support live.

Openly confront family members, friends, coworkers, classmates, and social media friends when they perpetuate racist tropes and stereotypes, and see how they respond.

Get out of your literal or figurative gated community of whiteness and actually hear the story of someone whose pigmentation differs from your own.

In other words: move, learn, speak, work, give, and vote in a way that rattles people of privilege, that takes power from those who traffic in inequity, and threatens those most comfortable in systemic supremacy.

Be willing to cross the aisle, leave a church, or lose a friend to demonstrate just how strongly you are opposed to this hateful ignorance.

And use your social media platform to explicitly condemn the racism and white supremacy of Donald Trump, JD Vance, the Trump Administration, the Republican Party, White Evangelicalism, and the MAGA movement.

If you’re not willing to do any of those things, you’re just going to have to deal with the fallout and the pushback and the implications from the rest of us.

You may be tired of being called racist, my white friends.

The rest of us are tired of you enabling, supporting, voting for, and actively partnering with racists and expecting us accept it and be silent about it.

I don’t accept it, and I won't remain silent about it.

If that offends you, that’s a you problem.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

(Note: Even if you’re a white person who believes themselves to be moderate, progressive, liberal, or anti-racist, these are good ways to make sure your outward life is congruent with your internal story.)

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

With our nation stretched to its breaking point by a litany of Constitutional crises and human rights emergencies, just a hair’s breadth from exploding into inexorable chaos, our sitting president used the unrivaled platform he has been given to perpetuate one of the longest-running and most dehumanizing stereotypes about people of color.

It is a historic dereliction of duty, a gross and unprecedented failure of leadership; it is dangerous, damaging, deadly.

And before you start thinking anything crazy, I just want to remind you (and myself) that we’ve been here before:

This is gonna end him.This will be the tipping point.This is the red line.He’s finally gone too far.

How many times over the last ten years have you said this or thought this?

How many times have you heard this from well-meaning friends, trusted journalists, beloved podcasters, or even from me?

How many new additions to his vast resume of filth convinced us all that this would be the moment when our friends, family members, and neighbors finally had the scales removed from their eyes, when their buried humanity would show itself, when they would be broken from their mindless cultic stupor and reject him?

When he mocked a disabled reporter.When he urged rally protestors to be beaten.When he boasted about grabbing women by the genitalia.When he mocked a decorated prisoner of war.When he called veterans suckers and losers.When he talked about a female reporter’s menstrual cycle.When he shrugged off hundreds of thousands of pandemic deaths.When he incited a violent insurrection at our Capitol.When he screamed about immigrants eating family pets.When he slandered citizens executed in the streets of Minneapolis.When he berated a female journalist for asking about the burying of a human trafficking investigation, his name appears in thousands of times.

If I had space here, I could easily list a thousand such moments when reasonable human beings were positive that we’d arrived at a nadir of morality, a political Waterloo, one that would precipitate the exodus of the brainwashed sycophants and empty-headed disciples who allowed him to ascend to a place he was never worthy of.

And yet, here we are, with this snarling, repugnant cesspool of a man once again slumped upon the highest seat in our nation and almost by the hour, tearing apart everything our forebears and ancestors spent two hundred and fifty years building.

And we’re here because tens of millions of people with whom we share this beautiful land have deemed every single bit of moral filth that has erupted from within his dead and blackened heart acceptable.

No violent rhetoric toward individuals or people groups has been a moral dealbreaker. No vicious attack on women or people of color or immigrants or queer people or Democrats has proven beyond the pale.No lawless or immoral word or act has been the catalyst for their defection.

And so, no, his targeting of the Obamas with the kind of vulgar white supremacist propaganda that has forever poisoned our national bloodstream will change nothing for the people we know and love who have spent ten years fiercely tethered to him.

They will cling tightly to his side as he sinks rapidly like a bloated whale carcass toward an ever-deepening moral bottom, because they either harbor that same bigoted ignorance or they lack the courage to oppose it.

If they were people possessing the decency and goodness we still give them credit for, they would have abandoned him long ago.

They will have no great awakening.They will not publicly condemn him.There will be no epiphanies or moments of clarity.He is them, and they are him, and that’s just how this is.

And since they will not part from him, we will need to part from them.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The conspicuous silence?

The supposed pro-life Christians have gone awfully quiet lately.

In fact, come to think of it, they’ve virtually vanished ever since the Epstein files began floating up from the depths of billionaire-birthed hell and into the national discourse (at least, once they realized some of the names within them).

As the Trump Administration worked tirelessly over the last year to suppress, withhold, and redact the unspeakable horrors the files contain, the alleged church-going, God-fearing, self-identified life-lovers said nothing; sudden conscientious objectors in the war for the sanctity of all they claim God has fashioned.

And right now, as millions of pages filled with the most despicable, depraved atrocities human beings are capable of, cover every square inch of America’s collective consciousness, the pro-life Christians are nowhere to be found.

To them, these lives are not sacred; they are worthless.

The thousands of girls and young women whose childhoods, innocence, dreams, security, and very bodies were violated in ways that decent human beings cannot comprehend receive no fierce advocacy, merit no anguished outcry, and earn no passionate defense.

That’s because their massive moral burden immediately expires outside the womb.

You see, Conservative Christians don’t love life; they love embryos.

They tell us all the time.

They speak effusively about them in conversation, publicly revere them at rallies, shed crocodile tears over them in Op-Eds, accost strangers entering clinics over them, viciously troll people on social media because of them, and sermonize on street corners about them.

They even claim to have voted for a reprehensible monster whom they’d never otherwise tolerate to lead, solely on their behalf.

Republican people of faith regularly fall all over themselves, carrying on in performative grief over embryos, unleashing all manner of histrionics at those of us who believe in a woman’s right to have autonomy over her own body.

And they do all of this (they claim), because they believe that embryos are human beings, and they want those beloved in-utero human beings to be cherished, defended, and protected at all costs.

The problem with their breathless, tearful zealotry is that once these embryos are no longer embryos, these supposed life-lovers often don’t treat them like they’re at all human.

Before departing the birth canal, they’re sacred.

After that, they’re screwed.

We don’t see this MAGA Christian hypocrisy in the Epstein files alone, but in their ambivalence toward ICE’s brutality, and their silence regarding the elimination of SNAP funding, expansive Medicare cuts, or Veterans benefit reduction.

Over and over, when human beings are pressed up hard against the nightmares and staring down the demons, when people who respect and revere life should be the loudest voices and the most fervent presence, they refuse to speak.

We can’t allow these people to claim moral high ground and cosplay as defenders of life when it suits them and then disappear when it threatens their political affiliations and religious institutions, when it requires them to confront their own.

We have to hold these sanctified frauds’ feet to the fire of the convictions they claim.

We have to confront our family members, friends, neighbors, co-workers, classmates, and social media contacts. We cannot allow them to look away, deny awareness, or hide in the shadows. Most of all, we cannot allow them to label themselves pro-life while showing such contempt for so much of the living.

I wish white Christian Conservatives had the same passion for victims of assault, migrant children, school shooting victims, sick toddlers, young black men, Muslim families, and LGBTQ teens that they claim to have for embryos.

Then they’d actually be pro-life, and then we’d all be able to go about the work together of caring for humanity and defeating the monsters.

Yes, white Conservative Christians love embryos.

Disparate sentient human beings who suffer in their midst?

Not so much.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This morning, I woke up abruptly after another night of disrupted sleep and replaying nightmares.

My mind and body, though exhausted, could not rest, plagued by a parade of horrifying visions of unthinkable violence that passed in front of me the night before:

A disabled veteran, intentionally targeted by an SUV and knocked to the ground, the driver opening his door only to add insult to terrible injury.An unarmed teenage boy, riddled with rubber bullets, the force blowing apart the clothes covering his back.A mother of three, ripped through the smashed window of her car and thrown to the pavement.A young man, his face forcefully driven into the street while being pepper-sprayed from inches away.A hysterical child, watching his grandfather being gang-tackled and beaten by masked thugs.A church minister, bloodied and bruised, his assailants laughing and mocking.A shell-shocked college student, taunted by a man with a gun pointed at her face, asking if she’d “learned anything from that b***h in Minneapolis.”

And as this sickening storm of blood and broken glass and whistles and screams swirled around inside my head, a question suddenly stopped me in my tracks:

What kind of person does what you do?

I reminded myself that none of this chaos and bloodshed is happening without you.

You are the face concealed behind the mask.

Yours are the hands delivering the blows.

Yours are the feet stomping on people’s necks.

It’s your voice spitting out the taunts and threats.

I began to try to put myself inside your head.

I tried to imagine how it feels to wake up every morning, knowing that you will hurt other people, and that you will do so, not begrudgingly but joyfully.

I wondered, as you strap on layers of armor, adorn yourself with weapons that you barely know how to use, and reach for the thick mask that will allow you to terrorize your neighbors in anonymity, does it make you feel a strength you never otherwise feel?

Does it soothe your fragile ego to be able to inflict suffering on a world you believe has wronged you?

Does all of this power and control silence those voices in your head that have always told you that you were useless and stupid?

Do you tell yourself a story where the hell you’re going to put people through is for a righteous cause, that you’re working for the greater good, or do you simply get off on it all?

I thought about you with your family in the morning, and other questions came:

Do you kiss the heads of your kids as you prepare to leave, so willing to brutalize other people’s children?

Do you enjoy the tranquility and safety of your home for a few quiet predawn moments, as you ready yourself to invade the homes and the peace of strangers?And as you head out for the day, do you embrace the people you love one more time before violating the lives and bodies of someone else’s loved ones?

I also wondered about your faith.

Do you believe in a God of love?

Do you pray to a Jesus who commands you to care for your neighbor?

Do you sit in a church on Sunday, hearing sermons about a compassion that clothes the naked, feeds the hungry, welcomes the stranger, and protects the vulnerable?

And if such things are true, how are you seemingly so able to leave all of this at home as you become a willing instrument of such cruelty and malice against people made in the image of God?

Actually, maybe that's your secret.

Maybe that’s how you do what you do all day long and still sleep at night.

Maybe you don’t see the people in front of you as people at all, either because of the color of their skin, the accents they use, or the place they were born.

Maybe you’ve dehumanized the human beings in your path to the point that their suffering, their sorrow, their injuries, and even their executions can all be justified:The fathers whose heads you break open, The high school students you shower with tear gas,the young mothers you toss around like rag dolls, the screaming children whose tiny wrists you zip-tie,the battle-scarred former soldiers you throw handcuffed into a van for daring to ask you to respect the Constitution and the nation they fought and suffered to defend.

Maybe in the darkened and desolate space inside your head, they’re all simply the enemy to be destroyed, the poison to eradicate, the sickness to drive out.

Maybe you really do somehow believe in the middle of the blood and broken glass and whistles and screams that this is all making us safer, but I can’t fathom how.

But after a few moments of this, I realize it’s a losing proposition. I’m never going to understand you.

No matter how many questions I ask and no matter how hard I work to imagine what it is to be you, I can’t—and I thank God for that. If I were able to, perhaps I would be the lawless, violent coward behind the mask that you are. Maybe I would be causing the trauma that you are.

Instead, today, I will step out into my neighborhood, hoping to be the opposite of you, to live in such a way that I undo the damage you are so happily doing. I will be a healer and a helper and a lover of all my neighbors.

And at the end of this day, I know I will again find it difficult to sleep, as the monstrous images of this day will once again replay in my head. I will likely wake up tomorrow still weary from a fatigue that refuses to leave.

But I will welcome this constant restlessness as the cost of my compassion, I will give thanks for a faith that compels me to love fiercely, and I’ll be grateful that the life I live, the path I take, the work I do, and the person I am never need to be hidden behind a mask.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Sometimes they out themselves.

Back in the Fall, within nanoseconds of the NFL announcing that Latin rapper Bad Bunny would be performing the Super Bowl Halftime Show, the Trump cult tore itself away from Charlie Kirk martyrdom, MAGA church shooter retcons, restaurant logo crusades, and pro-ICE posturing to launch into a full-on frenzy of performative histrionics in protest.

Since then, they’ve continued their tortured pearl-clutching unabated, with the white supremacist stalwarts at Turning Point USA recently announcing an “alternative” halftime show (called, of course, The All-American Halftime Show), featuring Olympic-level cultural appropriator-turned MAGA bootlicker Kid Rock and an undercard of similarly pigmented, patriotism-peddling, Bible-brandishing, shameless deep South virtue signalers.

You see the “alternative” they’re offering here, right?

If you’re over 25 and, like many older white folks, have remained permanently trapped in the amber of Classic Rock radio, you may have never even heard of Bad Bunny, whose birth name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio. (I’d be willing to bet my house that 90 percent of the Conservatives who are currently rending their garments online hadn’t, either.)

Born and raised in Puerto Rico (which a terrifying number of MAGAs don’t seem to know is an American territory), his father was a truck driver and his mother a school teacher. He spent his formative years singing in the choir in a Roman Catholic Church his family attended, and began writing his own music at the age of 14. Bunny was signed to a record label at the age of 20 after being discovered online.

Today, Bad Bunny is an international superstar, the second most-streamed artist of all time, with 100 billion streamed songs. He is a multiple Grammy winner, has crossed over into professional wrestling and acting, is a coveted brand ambassador, and does millions of dollars in philanthropic work through his Good Bunny Foundation (Fundación el Buen Conejo), which he started in 2018.

Ocasio is the literal embodiment of the American Dream that the GOP has spent decades waving in our faces and flying up the flagpole.

So, what’s the problem?

Let’s just say it’s primarily a melanin issue, with a side order of MAGA cultism, a heaping portion of Christian nationalism, and a healthy dash of homophobia thrown in.

As a self-described gender-fluid Latin musician who sings predominantly in Spanish, has previously criticized Donald Trump, and repeatedly lamented the inhumanity of ICE as recently as during his Grammy acceptance speech last week, Ocasio must be condemned, vilified, and eradicated because membership in the mindless death cult of white American intolerance they now call home requires it. This asinine mob mentality vitriol is what Trump’s movement has fostered and fomented, and what it demands.

Ocasio opened his recent Grammy speech with these words:

“Before I say thanks to God, I’m going to say: ICE out,” he said. “We’re not savages. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans.”

This is supposed to be what America stands for: decency, diversity, humanity, and yet it is precisely the message MAGA is burdened to shout down and suffocate.

The fact that the Right feels compelled to create an “alternative” to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl appearance speaks eloquently about their desire to secede from a culturally and racially diverse nation, how committed they are to perpetuating the myth of oppressed white Christians, and how determined they are to manipulate every event into a racist holy war in order to keep their rank-and-file foaming at the mouth.

Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet said in a statement that the show “is an opportunity for all Americans to enjoy a halftime show with no agenda other than to celebrate faith, family, and freedom.”

But whose faith are they celebrating?

Not the spiritual beliefs of Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, Unitarians, or non-MAGA Evangelical Christians.

Whose families are they talking about?

Not Latino families, or black families, or immigrant families, or LGBTQ families, that’s for damn sure.

And exactly whose freedom will take center stage on Sunday?

Not the people with brown skin being relentlessly terrorized by ICE, not the thousands of sexual assault survivors brutalized by Jeffrey Epstein and his collaborators, not the tens of millions of women who deserve autonomy over their own bodies, and not the migrants and refugees being persecuted by these cosplaying Christians.

The Turning Point halftime show, like every venture in the MAGA/Trump ecosystem, is a grim, sinister, mean-spirited fight against progress, evolution, and diversity disguised as sincere virtue.

This isn’t about Bad Bunny.This isn’t about a halftime show.It’s about who we collectively want to be, the kind of nation we dream of living in, and the future we want those who follow us to inherit.It’s about the cost of standing up to the bullies, of rejecting racism, of being intolerant of intolerance.This is about what we will demand and what we will not accept when it comes to the rights and voices of people of color.

Trump and his supporters don’t want an alternative halftime show; they want an alternative white, gated community nation where only they benefit.

In these days, we are in a brutal battle for an America where everyone will find opportunity, safety, and welcome.

It’s time we all got in the game.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Hundreds of times every day, I feel compelled to break into strangers’ conversations on social media or in the checkout line or in my neighborhood, whenever I see them encountering professed Christians who support this president, his platform, and his actions—and I want to apologize profusely to them.

As someone who seeks to follow Jesus and aspire to his teachings of compassion, generosity, and radical hospitality, I’m burdened to publicly distance myself from their unrepentant cruelty, to tell the goodhearted people bearing the brunt of their disfigured MAGA religion that this is not the Jesus I know; to remind them that a vast multitude of faithful people are as horrified by them as they are. I want them to know how much I grieve alongside them and that it makes no sense to me, either.

As a thirty-year local church pastor, the most tragic part of the rapid erosion of decency and empathy in America is knowing its source; it’s admitting that the exponential rise in aggression toward immigrants and people of color flows from alleged followers of a dark-skinned, Middle Eastern Jesus whom they would fully abhor.

It’s a stomach-turning realization because I know what a confounding, anti-Christian Gospel they’re preaching to the world right now and how they are violently driving decent people from religion and derailing their spiritual journeys—because the cognitive dissonance of Jesus’ words and their responses defies comprehension.

I am so sorry for MAGA Christians.

I’m sorry for them, because I know they have no idea who Jesus is.

Perhaps they once did, but because of some toxic cocktail of fearful theology, partisan media, inherited racism, anti-science rhetoric, and political tribalism, he has been all but entirely squeezed from their hearts and replaced with some terrible, sneering white abomination that bears his name, but little else.

The Jesus of the Gospels is nonexistent in them:

His overflowing compassion that fed a hillside multitude, not because they agreed with him or earned their free meal, but because they were hungry.His heart for the alone, vulnerable, and invisible, that declared he resided with them in their suffering.His tenderness toward the hurting and the afraid who were drawn to him because they recognized they were seen and safe in his presence.His quiet humility and soft-hearted peacemaking.His perseverant love for his neighbor and for the least and for his enemies.

There is none of that in these people or the religion they impose on the world, and that is a flat-out sin.

There is only this boasting, angry, greedy “don’t tread on me” bravado.There is only their callous revelry in the suffering of others.There is only an insular, protective, territorial hoarding of blessings and opportunities.There is only this snarling, middle-finger contempt for so much of the hurting, scared, sacred humanity that crosses their paths every day, needing healing and finding greater injury.

I am so sorry for angry MAGA Christians, because of how much damage they are joyfully doing to so many in the name of a Jesus who spent his life being radical hatred’s beautifully defiant counterpoint.

I’m sorry because I know the dilemma earnest people of faith are facing in these moments: they are drawn to Jesus’ teachings and repelled by hateful Christians. I feel the same way. I am exhausted from trying to perpetually overcome MAGA believers to find any sign of the fierce lover of people that they say they believe in.

And since I can’t seem to reach these people, all I can do is to declare as often and as loudly as I am able that I am not with them.We are not of like heart or like faith.We are not doing the same work.I do not share their fear of their neighbor.I do not echo their contempt for the least of these.I do not co-sign their prolific malice.

MAGA Christians don’t represent me.They don’t represent millions of followers of Jesus.Most of all, they don’t represent Jesus.They have no use for him.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been doing some serious soul-searching, have spent hours in quiet reflection, and faced some hard truths.

I need to come clean now and get this all out in the open.

I confess that all those MAGAs in my mentions have been right all along: I am woke.

“How woke?”, you ask.

I hope you’re sitting down.

I'm so woke, I want the complete Epstein files released so every rapist and pedophile, regardless of their political affiliation, faces accountability, and so all survivors of abuse know they matter.

I’m so woke, I don’t believe people should be rounded up like animals simply for the color of their skin or the language they speak and thrown into concentration camps, just to placate insecure white bigots.

I’m so woke, I believe it’s disgusting to take away healthcare and food from the old, the poor, and the sick, because no one should lack in a land of such abundance

I’m so woke, I think banning books is a sign of intellectually insecure, religion-addled fascists who are afraid of progress and want to control what people learn and experience.

I’m so woke, I think actual physicians should be in charge of national health, TV hosts shouldn’t be running our Military, and Russian assets shouldn’t be overseeing our national security.

I’m so woke, I think women and their physicians should decide what happens to their bodies, not a group of knuckle-dragging politicians who want to legislate their Jurassic values onto them.

I’m so woke, I believe every child deserves an education, even non-wealthy, non-white people, and that they all be free from religious indoctrination in their classrooms.

I’m so woke, I don’t believe someone’s gender identity and sexual orientation are anyone else’s damn business, and that people should be able to live in peace in their own skin.

I’m so woke, I believe in full LGBTQ rights,that we should protect the planet,that everyone deserves healthcare,that a nation cannot be Christian,that the world is bigger than America,that to be "pro-life" means to treasure all of it.

I’m so woke that I believe America isn’t a white birthright,that we are all one interdependent community,that people and places are made better by diversity,that no one’s religion should be compulsory,that non-American human beings have as much value as American ones,that there is no such thing as an “illegal.”

I’m so woke, I believe generosity is greater than greed, compassion better than contempt, and kindness superior to derision.I’m so woke, I believe there is enough in this world for everyone: enough food, enough money, enough room, enough care, if we unleash our creativity and unclench our fists and treat people like we want to be treated.

I’m so woke, I think it’s a pathetic disgrace that America's president is an incoherent convicted felon and court-adjudicated rapist who has contempt for the Rule of Law and the Constitution.

I’m so woke, I’m embarrassed that one of our political parties continually votes against healthcare, against free speech, against body autonomy, against public schools, against due process, against the Bill of Rights, all because they are compromised and beholden to a career criminal.

I’m so fully, hopelessly, and unrepentantly woke that I actually give a damn about people other than myself.

I confess that the Woke Mind Virus has left me empathetic toward suffering, welcoming of diversity, generous toward those with less, allergic to discrimination, sickened by bigotry, and intolerant of intolerance.

In saying all of this, I am the antithesis of MAGA Americans and certainly disappointing, irritating, and confounding them.

And that’s how I know I’m doing life right.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I’m sorry to break it to you, MAGA Christians, but America isn’t a Christian nation.

In fact, God doesn’t bless it, either.

That’s not how this works.

Now, I know this blows up the convenient narrative you’ve been selling for the past 250 years (and pretty violently the last year or so), but honestly, that nasty bit of heresy is straight-up of the devil, and it needs to go.

I’m not sure where you’re getting your information from, but I know it isn’t from the Bible.

Your beloved John 3:16, which you always have ready to throw out like a grenade, is pretty darn clear.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

God loves the world.The planet.Like, everyone here.Everyone.God is in the world-loving business, not the America-blessing business.

You remember the world, don’t you? That massive, spinning sphere of 8 billion beautiful, disparate human beings: white Christian people, sure, but brown people, Muslims, LGBTQ folks, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, humanists, agnostics, atheists, and lots and lots of non-English speaking, non-Americans?

Check out the Old and New Testaments again.Read through any of the Gospels.Put your finger down randomly at any Jesus teaching.Use any translation you’d like.No America First.No Making America Great Again (or at all.)No flags to pledge allegiance to.

And a few other annoying bits of news from the Scriptures:Jesus was born in the Middle East.He didn’t speak English.He wasn’t white.He wasn’t Evangelical.He wasn’t a Republican.He wasn’t American.Heck, he wasn’t even Christian.

Jesus was a Palestinian Jewish Rabbi who spent his days as an itinerant street preacher, living off the generosity of strangers and speaking in parables about a new “Kingdom of God,” a radical way of living where the poor were cared for, the oppressed freed, and the outcasts welcomed in.

Jesus came to usher in a countercultural kind of interdependent community, directly confronting the oppressive Roman Empire he stepped into. It was a diverse, barrier-breaking, border-transcending, nation-defying movement of generosity and mutual affection. It had nothing to do with blessing a Government or building an army, or creating a gated community of white folks in North America two thousand years in the future.

To claim that America was at all the point of the Gospels is to prove you’ve never read them or want to disregard them for your own gain.To assume any God-ordained supremacy based on religion, nation of origin, pigmentation, orientation, or native tongue is a perversion of the work of Jesus and idolatry of the worst kind.

There’s no way America could be a Christian nation, and that’s really good news for you.

You wouldn’t want America to be a Christian nation anyway (if such a thing were even possible). That would mean you’d be living in a country that embodied Jesus’ teachings; a country where the hungry would be fed and not shamed or starved; where the sick would be made well without needing to earn it or justify themselves.If America were a Christian nation, that would mean that the assailed would receive rest and refuge, that the foreigner would be warmly welcomed, that every human being would be treated like a treasured neighbor made in the image of God, and that you would be compelled by your faith to make sure this all happened.

Kinda glad you don’t have to do that, huh?

Loving the least of these, well, that just ain’t your M.O.

In fact, if this nation were truly rooted in Jesus’ teachings, you couldn’t call yourself a Christian while allowing genocide, celebrating the harassment of immigrants, or worshipping a serial predator.

A nation cannot be Christian; only individual people can be, but they actually need to be inconvenienced with Jesus’ teachings. Bummer, I know.

I’m sorry to break all this bad news to you.

I understand the actual words of the Gospel are problematic, given the story you’re selling to those whose fears and phobias you’re leveraging in America right now.

I’m sorry to tell you that it’s impossible to be devoted to the Jesus of the Scriptures while refusing refugees, expelling immigrants, demonizing Muslims, vilifying people of color, worshiping political power, and neglecting the poor.

And most of all, I’m sorry to have to remind you that your Christian Nationalism is a sin of the worst kind.

As long as you continue to conflate God and America, you’re going to be whitewashing the Good News, shrinking God into your own image, and bastardizing the message of Jesus in ways that can only be described as fully and violently heretical.

No one needs America to be a Christian nation, but it would be pretty cool if you American Christians, like you tried to be Jesus Christians.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

He embodies the fragile masculinity that so many are afflicted with. He validates their misogyny, giving voice to the antiquated, knuckle-dragging sexist garbage they save for mindless locker room monologues and man-cave hangs with other neighborhood Neanderthals.

Trump is the unsurprising idol of teen and college-aged young men whose distorted view of manhood has been shaped in Conservative churches, incel message boards, and dudebro podcast episodes.

They are predatory birds of a feather, and their advocacy, though sickening, almost makes sense. It is an act of self-preservation, a propping up of one of their own. He is a monstrous avatar who can represent them in the places of power they can never hope to enter.

And it’s completely expected that Republican men in Congress would fiercely obstruct the release of the Epstein files, as many of them risk exposure themselves, as well as the crumbling of the brutal empire they sit atop and benefit from.

All in all, knowing that over eighty percent of women have experienced sexual assault or harassment in their lifetimes, it’s understandable that tens of millions of men in this country would be among the rabid, cultic base of a serial scumbag like the sitting President.

As pathetic and sad as that is, there is still a perverse logic to it.

What I can’t fathom are women who have seen all they have seen over the last decade: the “genitalia-grabbing” bravado, the incestuous remarks about his daughter, his extensive adultery, his porn star affairs, and his ubiquitous presence in the Jeffrey Epstein files, and who remain unwavering.

It’s impossible to make sense of mothers with daughters who’ve witnessed him being found liable in court for sexual assault, watched him gleefully take away women’s body autonomy under the law, and work tirelessly to prevent the release of evidence that would expose decades of his pedophilia, rape, and child trafficking—and who’ve chosen to double down.

But perhaps most stomach-turning of all are women like Karoline Leavitt, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Megyn Kelly, Tulsi Gabbard, Maria Bartiromo, and Laura Ingraham; women with the power and platform that few are given, and are using them to perpetuate the pain of other women.

Their willingness to serve as a mouthpiece, a cheerleader, a proxy, and an instrument of injury for him boggles the mind of anyone still capable of compassion and critical thinking.

These women surely know damn well that Donald Trump is a rapist and a pedophile. They’re fully aware of the absolute horrors he and his Epstein collaborators have put hundreds, perhaps thousands of girls and young women through.They have both the knowledge of the prolific evil this man is responsible for and the ability to make him accountable.Yet, they are willing to deny those survivors justice, to exacerbate their trauma, and stand in the way of justice, all to line their own pockets, and build their brands, and keep their party in power.

When the full, unredacted truth of the Epstein files and Trump’s complete resume of abuse is finally dragged into the raking light of public access, so will the degree of their obstruction and the gravity of their gaslighting of the American people.

History will declare them shameful mothers, betrayers of victims of violence, and disgraces to our nation. They broke through the glass ceiling and are wounding other women with the jagged shards.

The Jesus of the scriptures that nearly all Conservatives loudly claim to treasure asks the question, “What can it profit a man if he gains the world but loses his soul?”

Rest assured, that he is asking that of these women, too.

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Despite all their performative Don’t Tread on Me bluster, they are morally impotent in the moments that truly matter.

When the opportunity arrives for them to put their money where their mouths are and make a courageous stand, they’re suddenly struck by performance anxiety.

Given the choice between exposing reprehensible men who have committed unspeakable violence against children and young women, or protecting a guy they voted for and find identity in, they are choosing the latter.

Guys who never shut up about protecting girls from harm immediately fold when called upon to step up and actually advocate for them.

Self-identified alpha males, fully aware that women, not unlike their wives, partners, sisters, and friends were trafficked and assaulted, shrink back into the shadows.

Supposed faithful Christian men, knowing girls just like their daughters and nieces have been brutalized, fall silent, their religious convictions proving powerless.

For all their showy, chest-beating tough-guy bravado, when the rubber meets the road, MAGA men lack the guts to demand that Epstein and his partnering abusers and sexual predators be made accountable, for fear that it will reveal the object of their emotional allegiance is a monster.

And if that were to happen, they’d be faced with a moment of real toughness that they know they aren’t up to.

I hear guys on the Right constantly waving the flag for “real manhood.” I don’t know what the hell that means, and I don’t think they do either. I prefer to aspire to be a decent human being who happens to be male, but hey, I’m just a soy boy, cuck, beta male who believes perverts and predators should be outed and condemned regardless of their political parties.

Here’s what I do know about strong men: There is nothing strong about turning your head from the trauma of women.There is nothing strong about falling in line to avoid conflicts with your tribe.There is nothing strong about being so emotionally tethered to a politician that you would sacrifice survivors of assault on the altar of your adulation.There is nothing strong about saying nothing when speaking is the right thing.There is nothing strong about harboring rapists.

The sad irony here is how terrified the quivering coward who professes to lead this nation is: how much he hides behind a phone screen, how he abdicates accountability, the way he runs from reporters, how he uses our military as a shield; his complete inability to stand in the raking light of criticism without withering like a tiny orange flower in the scorching midday sun. He is a man fully lacking humanity, absent of strength, and devoid of decency.

Sadder still is that a generation of American men who've so placed their identity in him that they have lost the ability to criticize him or oppose him, men who cannot stand up for their loved ones or strangers, men who are so enamored with this fraudulent man-child that they will do anything to defend him, even allow criminals to avoid justice.

I’d love to see a massive move of Conservative men stand up and demand that Jeffrey Epstein’s collaborators all be dragged into the light of full accountability, but the bottom line is, they’re just not strong enough.

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I’m angry at this vile, repugnant, cognitively-addled despot urinating on our Constitution and driving our nation into the moral abyss.

I’m furious with his complicit collaborators in Congress who could have so easily prevented this at any time, including this one.

I’m sickened by genuflecting media members, gutless public servants, and God-forsaking pastors who’ve trafficked in fear on his behalf.

I’m disgusted by a legion of strangers who’ve spent the last decade in sycophantic, cultic adoration to a slithering, spray-tanned pile of excrement whose contempt for this nation and its people is complete.

But do you know the people who piss me off the most?

The people I know who voted for him, and who still don’t have the courage to admit they made a horrible mistake, who will not publicly voice any dissent.

The people who are turning off the news, looking away from the horrors, and muting people like me who refuse to stop reminding them where we are and where we’re headed as a nation.

There are literally hundreds of people following me on social media who are extended family, former friends, and people in the churches where I served, who haven’t said one critical thing about this Administration.

Not a peep.

Children kidnapped and thrown into detention camps.

Young men blinded by rubber bullets.

Thousands of people terrorized, beaten, left bloodied, and traumatized.

Entire cities thrown into chaos for nothing.

Reporters arrested for documenting war crimes.

Thousands arrested, detained, and deported without due process.

Ministers tear-gassed and arrested for bearing witness to bloodshed.

Mothers and nurses executed in the damn street.

Politicians slandering their names.

A daily nightmare reel of chaos and bloodshed.

And from them, from these self-identified lovers of God and country, complete f*ckin’ silence.

People who never shut up about their faith and patriotism are nowhere to be seen.

And I’m never going to forget what they’ve done and what they are failing to do.

As heartbreaking as these days have been, they have also been emancipating.

I used to feel guilty about my confrontational nature and the directness of my words, but that was usually because these very same people convinced me that I should feel guilty.

I was told that I was the problem, that I was overreacting, that I was too emotional and too angry, that I was stoking division.

On many days, I allowed myself to be gaslighted into believing them.

And yet here we are, in the throes of the kind of brutality at the hands of our government that we have not seen in my lifetime, and these people, many of whom have the audacity to call themselves Christians, are silent and invisible.

They’re either brokenhearted and too cowardly to speak out or they agree with what is happening. Either option is disgraceful.

One day, this nightmare will be over, at least in its current form.

Trump will soon be gone, his regime will fall, and I’ll be left knowing that I learned about all of these people.

That I can’t ever forget.

That my heart will never be free from.

That will never get fixed.

And that really pisses me off.

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I left massive skid marks on the carpet—and elsewhere.I got in my car and drove home quickly.

When I arrived, the agent told us that they had been monitoring extremist Right-wing message boards, that my name had been coming up with concerning comments, and they were providing what is known as a Duty To Warn.She instructed us that the Bureau would keep an eye out for imminent and direct threats, and that in the meantime, we should be aware of suspicious packages and pay greater attention to traffic around our home, as well as make sure our home monitoring systems were up to date. We were grateful for such diligence and thorough work.This was occurring just a few months after our local police department had helped us with MAGA/QAnon/Trump supporters who, in an act of stratospheric irony, wanted to show us how upset they were at me calling them unstable and violent, by doxxing and fantasizing about injuring me and my family.In a really sad and terrifying example of how much our nation has regressed in a matter of months, those leading the FBI now are the very kinds of unhinged, lawless, conspiratorial extremists that the bureau had protected us and people like us from in the past.

But please know, this isn’t about just me or my loved one. It’s about you. It’s about your family. It’s about every one of us regardless of our politics or position.This isn’t merely public figures critical of Trump: not just woke, Leftist writers, politicians, activists, clergy, or media members, but ordinary people from all over this nation whose lives have been made less safe, more volatile, and more turbulent because of this Administration:It’s about legal immigrants harassed by I.C.E. workers at their workplaces,thousands of government employees unceremoniously jettisoned from their jobs,refugees in the laborious legal process of securing residency here cut-off without warning,severely-ill people in possibly life-saving medical trials, now halted,sick veterans and elderly retirees seeing their benefits and pensions targeted,experienced researchers, scientists, investigators, and safety experts removed en masse all over the country, and on and on and on…Over and over, Trump and his coconspirators have declared war on all people regardless of political affiliation, religious tradition, or any other qualifier. They have no allegiance to the Constitution or to those they represent.This kleptocratic Cabinet is targeting us all financially, legislatively, electorally, and now, even physically; taking away personal liberties, avenues of education and opportunity, and anything left resembling the American Dream we all grew up believing came along with our presence here.

With the richest man in the world illegally commandeering billions of dollars, access to our programs of care, along with the personal data of the American people,an anti-Science, anti-vax loon heading up our Health Department,a Project 2025 architect overseeing the spending of our nation’s assets,a Fox News host with a closet full of skeletons and no experience stewarding our Military and our troops,and a known Putin-apologist responsible for our national security, this Administration isn’t just filled with incompetent people, but highly-functioning sociopaths whose only allegiance is to their traitorous rapist-felon king.And here's the thing, friends, none of us are exempt from what they are attempting, not even his rabid base; still full-throated in their adoration of him while they are being fully fleeced of agency and future.We have become an upside-down nation where those most entrusted with guarding our individual and collective safety, security, finances, human and civil rights, our laws, are the very people most jeopardizing them.The inmates are running the asylum and the rest of us are all going to be more vulnerable because of it.Our only chance now is to partner together, using strategies that we’ve never had to employ because we’ve never had our existence this seriously threatened before, at least not from the inside.You may be wondering what to do, and the simplest answer is something. Here are just a few suggestions:

Connect with a local chapter of Indivisible.Make your voice heard using the 5 Calls app.Support the ACLU and SPLC in their advocacy through the courts.Get involved with a local political candidate.Volunteer for a nonprofit serving endangered people groups where you live.Participate in one of the many national, state, and local protests happening.Leverage your social media to amplify objective data and to educate your following.Be strategic about how you spend your money, patronizing companies that support DEI and free speech, and refusing to support companies that fund fascism.Become a relational activist, helping organize your circle of influence.Do one small thing, and then another.

We all deserve safety, security, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We all deserve a Government that protects and serves all those who call this place home and that humanely responds to all those who wish to call it home, and we're going to need to work until it once again does.

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To be a person of compassion in a time and place when compassion is in such great demand?

To wake up every day in days like these, and push back against predatory politicians, toxic systems, human rights atrocities, acts of treason, and spiritual leadership failures?

The volume and the relentlessness of the threats can be wearying.

You may have noticed.

But it’s more than that.

You’re not only burdened with these sprawling systemic sicknesses and political realities, but the people within them.

You’re carrying the names and the faces and the lives of specific human beings who are in peril right now; people whose stories you read, listen to, know, and live inside; people you fiercely love, even if you have never met them.

And day after day, these legions of sorrows begin to take up residence in your body. They accumulate upon your shoulders, in your clenched jaw, in your elevated heart rate, in the headache that never goes away, and in the knot in your stomach that returns every morning when you check your phone, turn on the news, step out into your community, or walk into the kitchen, and are reminded again of how sideways it’s all gone.

And perhaps worst of all, is how many people, both at a distance and very close to you, just don’t seem to give a damn; how the pain of other people simply doesn’t register within them anymore.It seems like fewer and fewer people are capable of even a base-level empathy for the suffering around them, and you’re seriously considering joining their ranks, because of how f*****g tired you are of feeling it all.

And though I don’t have any business doing so, I’m asking you to keep feeling it all.

I’m not sure why you’re reading this, but it’s probably because you’re a damn-giver; because the wounds of the world cause you injury. As a result, these words likely find you pissed off, disconnected, isolated, worn out, and on the verge of a breakdown because of how few people are as addled by the need around them as you are.

Whether you’re an activist or a minister or a parent or a caregiver, or just a citizen of the planet who is moved by other people’s suffering, you likely feel the immeasurable heaviness of these days. Sure, speed and activity can mask it for a while, but if you stop long enough, the reality of the fatigue catches up to you, and you can measure the toll it’s all taken on you.

I want you to measure it. I want you to reckon with how tired you are. I want you to hear yourself exhale with the heavy sighs of someone who feels the full weight of this broken, jagged place.

Notice the bruises and the sores, and give them your attention.Extend some of that compassion you’re so willing to extend to the world to yourself.Take time to step away from the fray and the fight. They will still be there when you return, and you’ll be better able to face them.

Friend, I know you’re exhausted. If you’re not exhausted right now, your empathy is busted.But I also know that you aren’t alone.Tens of millions of people are as tired as you are right now.We, too, live in disbelief at how callous so many people around us have become.We, too, are incredulous, witnessing our elected leaders and parents and neighbors and favorite aunts abandon any semblance of gentleness toward their neighbors.And we, too, feel the fatigue of believing we’re doing this damn-giving alone.

You are in good company, so be encouraged.Fight like hell to keep your heart soft, even while so many people have become hardened.Yes, the world is upside-down right now, but we can make it right, one beautiful act of decency at a time.Get some rest and keep going.The world needs people like you.

Blessed are the damn-givers, for they will right-side the world.

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You’ve probably seen these sentiments pop up on social media, come across them in eloquent think pieces, or heard them in daily conversations: the idea that family members and friends are too important to lose over something as benign as a political position or a ballot choice.

That idea made philosophical sense before 2016, back when we had reasonably functioning parties and candidates with actual platforms; when we were just debating methodological or economic approaches to problems that we all agreed were problems. Choosing people over politics was a logical position in the days when we believed that our fathers, cousins, coworkers, neighbors, and lifelong friends cared about diversity, justice, personal freedoms, and helping people as much as we did.

We are way past that, friends..

The fate of the America we are seeing on our phones and outside our windows, this nation besieged by senseless violence and battered by a wanton disregard for the law and human life, is no longer a political conversation; it’s a moral one.

This is not about a policy difference, not a simple disagreement on the responsible way to deal with collective national challenges; it isn’t a matter of agreeing to disagree on less-than-critical subjects where a stalemate is acceptable.This moment is about whether we will reject or embrace legislated racism, the dehumanization of vulnerable human beings, the erasure of civil rights, and a lawless, merciless, State-sanctioned brutality.

It’s about 5-year-old children used as bait, families terrorized in their homes, young men accosted in their workplaces, bystanders executed in their cars, and entire communities living in fear simply because of the color of their skin or their place of birth.

And these things are worth cutting people off, severing ties, and social media blocking.

The lives of hundreds of millions of flesh-and-blood human beings now hang in the balance of the choices we make right now: their freedom to make healthcare decisions for themselves, their access to fundamental liberties promised in the Constitution, their agency to govern their own destinies, and their basic sense of safety from harassment and harm.

If there was ever something that justified a deleted contact number or an empty chair at the Thanksgiving table or an exodus from a church or the termination of a friendship, it’s this.

A guy I grew up with who supports Trump texted me recently, saying, “We’ve been friends a long time. I’d hate to see politics get in the way of our friendship.”I assured him that politics hasn’t. I told him that his acceptance of genocide has gotten in the way of our friendship, that his minimizing of the covering up of pedophilia has, that his justification of insurrection has, that his support of murderous masked thugs has, that his turning away from a relentless and senseless violence against the Latino and immigrant communities has.

At some point, we as adult human beings whose time here is finite, need to choose whether we will lean into our deepest convictions or into relationships with people whose presence increasingly causes us to compromise those convictions.

We need to decide whether we will keep a tenuous peace with those we share blood or history with, but little else, or whether we will step out into the raking light of full authenticity and fight for the things that break our hearts and boil our blood. Will we choose people we know but who we realize we are morally incompatible with, or the strangers whose lives are upended and threatened by them?

The tangible, terrifying impact of this Administration on people of color, on LGBTQ human beings, on the sick and the poor and the elderly, on our immigrant communities (let alone the rest of the world) is beyond what we can comprehend right now.

And this kind of inhumanity demands a response that affirms our humanity.

I’m not telling you to disconnect from everyone you know who supports this mad despot and his willing collaborators, but as we slide swiftly into a Police State, as we step further into authoritarianism, and as we see the bloodshed and chaos increase, many of us may decide that we cannot forgive or align ourselves with those who not only allowed it to happen, but did so with perverse joy and unrepentant cruelty.

If that isn’t a reason to end a relationship, nothing is.

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A few days ago, something showed up on my timeline (I can’t even remember exactly what, to be honest), and it was as if my already fragile psyche broke, sending me spiraling into an expansive five-alarm emotional crisis that was somehow equal parts panic attack, emotional numbness, and scalding rage.

I think the kids call it “crashing out.”

The days since have left me ping-ponging wildly between long bouts of mindless slot machine phone scrolling, lengthy stretches of sleeplessness, and valiant but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to extricate myself from a sticky black pit of fatalism that has rendered me laboring to accomplish otherwise simple tasks. (Sounds fun, right?)

It’s clear that America has presently become toxic to my system.

I’ve decided that the only way I’m going to save my sanity and my physical health is by getting out, and if any of this is helpful to you, it will do my heart good.

Moving forward…

I’m getting out of my head.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been working overtime inside your brain for years now, struggling to figure out the unfigureouttable things: trying to make sense of how millions of people have jettisoned basic empathy and hitched their sense of self to an abject madman; looking to somehow calculate how bad things might get; and creating an endless set of contingencies for doomsday scenarios that while once seemingly impossible, on many days feel quite likely. Lingering in such a treacherous brainscape means that the light of alternative thought patterns gets all but shut out. So, the cliche of getting out and touching grass isn’t just a toxic positivity platitude designed to distract us from the grim reality around us, but the necessary practice of letting our minds be pleasantly surprised by a dissenting opinion coming through exercise, nature, art, new vistas, and other human beings.

I’m getting out of my phone.

There’s a razor-thin line between being informed and being overwhelmed, and I admittedly hurdled across that line somewhere back in late 2016. The sheer scale and velocity of the bad news, the availability at which it arrives, carefully curated in my hands, and a cultural device addiction that I confess has not evaded me, all mean that I often find myself immersed in the distorted reality of social media, where disastrous news is amplified, grief-worthy tragedies are boosted, and worst-case scenarios are ever-present. Blissful ignorance isn’t the goal, as that’s how we got here in the first place, but the challenge for empathetic human beings is to limit exposure to the raging torrent of information always swirling around us so that we’re aware of what is happening while making sure we don’t drown in the flood.

I’m getting out of my house.

I’m a serial introvert… like, an Olympic-level recluse, and I can quite easily find myself in my home for long stretches of time, and as I mentioned, both in my head and in my phone. And there’s a myth of helplessness that isolation and stasis can perpetuate, gradually building an iron-clad case for the futility of writing or speaking or fighting or working or pressing on. And yet, I’ve always believed that at any given moment, we always have two things: proximity to pain and agency to alleviate it. And the second you and I step out of our doorways and into the communities in which we live, that truth becomes palpable. When we place ourselves into the path of other human beings, finding our usefulness becomes effortless, and repairing the planet becomes attainable.

I’m getting out of corrosive relationships.

For the last decade, many of us have tirelessly expended Herculean levels of energy trying to preserve relational connections with human beings in our lives with whom we’ve become increasingly morally incompatible. Ten years ago, unpleasant realities about people we live with, love, have called friends, and worked and worshiped alongside began to surface in the form of offhand remarks at holiday gatherings, shocking social media diatribes, and facepalm-inducing text threads. And yet, we’ve done our best to excuse, explain away, or endure the disconcerting evidence in the name of keeping peace or not ruining the holidays or avoiding conflict. But at this point, those who are still tethered to He Who Shall Not Be Named are likely lifers: either permanently indoctrinated into a hateful cult of grievance or willfully choosing it because it reflects their hearts. Either way, severing ties with these people may be the path of self-preservation.

I can imagine it’s easy to dismiss the title of this piece as a clever bit of clickbait, but I can assure you that physically leaving America is something I’ve certainly spent a great deal of time considering (or at least daydreaming about), for about as many reasons as I imagine you might have. And while a geographic departure is not imminent, the other movements I’ve shared here are an effort to stay and to stay sane simultaneously. I imagine you’d like to do the same.If you’re maxed out, exhausted, and drifting into apathy or hopelessness, maybe you need to get out.Of this list, where do you see a need in your own life to leave in order to be healthier or at peace? Let me know in the comments.

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I do.

I’ve spent most of the last thirty years as a local church pastor, much of that in megachurches in the Bible Belt. I’ve been shoulder to shoulder in ministry and in life with white Evangelicals; I’ve sat in Bible studies with them, served alongside them in staff meetings, attended hundreds of pastoral gatherings, eavesdropped on their conversations, and heard how they think and what drives them.

I need you to understand something:

Conservative white Evangelicals need to be stopped.

You might agree with me as a simple emotional reflex, but I want you to know precisely why; to comprehend the specific danger they present and the historic urgency of the moment.

The wholesale moral failure white Evangelicals have been guilty of over the past decades has been alarming, but you haven’t seen anything yet. It will get exponentially worse now that they have this unprecedented opportunity. As far as religious extremists go, they’re unmatched in their fervor, ferocity, and organization.

In vast numbers, in churches all over the country, these people have gradually but now completely lost the plot of their faith tradition, to the point that they now pose a human rights emergency to the rest of us.

They’ve long ago abandoned Jesus, discarded his compassion, and feel no obligation whatsoever to love their neighbors. Their Jesus-less Christianity runs entirely on malice, exclusion, and cruelty.

If allowed to continue to hold their death grip on all three branches of Government, Conservative Christians will render this nation unrecognizable. LGBTQ people, Muslims, women, people of color, immigrants, and non-Christians will never have equality under the law again.

This is not alarmist, sky-is-falling histrionics, or hyperbolic exaggeration; it is the clear and sober forecast from someone who knows these people better than anyone because he’s been on the inside.

Full-blown theocracy is the plan, and trust me when I tell you that we won’t recover from it if they are given greater power or prolonged influence. If we fail in opposing their Christo-fascist agenda both in the streets and at the polls, they will have a political power that will render every election null and void, and we will never have a voice again in our lifetimes.

Women will permanently lose autonomy over their own bodies and the right to vote.LGBTQ people will have the right to marry and adopt taken away for good.People of color will be fully squeezed out of the electoral process.Immigrants will be denied access to opportunity and refuge here.These are not creative projections; they are precisely what Evangelicals have repeatedly stated as their intentions, and they’re closer than they’ve ever been to having a rubber stamp.

We can still stop it, though.We just need a unity and coordination that transcends theirs.We need a sustained, passionate, dedicated defense of humanity that rivals their relentless assaults on it.

The sole option we have to save ourselves and generations of human beings is for all of us to move in concert, locally, on a state level, and nationally: Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, progressive Christians and humanists and Muslims and Atheists and Jews and Agnostics. We need to stop staying in our silos of individual activism and isolated impact and to nurture creative partnerships, build broad coalitions, and link arms with our disparate neighbors.

We’ve seen this play out throughout history, and we know how it ends. We know the horrors unchecked religious extremism can birth, and we know the cost of the silence and inaction of good people. We also know what human beings are capable of when they refuse to accept fascism and white supremacy cloaked in the Bible and wrapped in the flag, when they move en masse.

As someone who knows just how much these Christians have veered from their religion’s namesake, believe me when I tell you that they cannot be allowed to steer this nation any longer. It will not end well for the people who call it home or who one day wish to. It is unsustainable.

I wish more decent people in America remembered they are among the vast majority instead of acting as if they are helpless victims of Republican Christians. We could defeat them, we need to defeat them, and we will defeat them. We just need to stop lamenting how much damage they are doing and do something together to oppose them.

This is about the country we leave our children. It’s about our Constitution. It’s about the health of the planet. It’s about every cause you hold dear. It’s about the most elemental freedoms we have and deserve to keep.

These days are a pivot point in our history, and the Religious Right cannot be allowed to determine the path we take forward. These cultists are sold out for their hateful messiah of imagined grievance. They are experts at consolidating their power, and they will not allow morality or decency to restrict them.

As a former pastor and a father and a Christian and a citizen of the planet and a lover of humanity, I can’t make this any clearer:

White Evangelical Christians are the source of everything afflicting our nation: all of this violence, chaos, dehumanization, and suffering.

If you want the beautiful, expansive humanity of this world to be equally protected, respected, and cared for, they need to be stopped.

And we can stop them, together.

They must be confronted, opposed, resisted, shouted down, outworked, outnumbered, and outvoted.America is not in a Civil War; we’re in White Christian Nationalists’ grim and loveless holy war.All people of faith, morality, and conscience need to stand together and push them back into the hell they came from.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Hey my friends,

I wanted to come on here and just share a few thoughts about the days in which we find ourselves.

You’re obviously heartbroken right now. You’re grieving. You’re frustrated. You’re angry. And all of that can lead you into a place of despair, hopelessness, resignation.

Now, I know that because I’m in the same boat. I’m feeling all the same stuff that you’re feeling.

I wake up on many days and don’t recognize the country that I live in anymore. And yet, the heartbreak that you’re experiencing, that I’m experiencing, I want you to remember that that’s actually a good and really beautiful thing.

Because the fact that you are so deeply disturbed by what is going ont means that your empathy is still working. It means that you still are a human being doing what a human being is supposed to do.

Be aware of the pain around you and to move toward that pain. You know, I tell people all the time, are you frustrated? Are you pissed off? Are you scared? Are you worried?Well, congratulations. That’s actually good news. Because right now, what we’re seeing is a movement of tremendous cruelty, a disregard for other people, a refusal to love someone’s neighbor. And while we feel all that, that’s a reminder that we are here to do exactly what we’d see not being done by so many.

And so as difficult as it is to watch the news and to be aware of what’s happening and to feel that deeply, I don’t want you to turn away from it.

Sure you need some time to protect yourself to get rest to recalibrate those times of solitude those times of community being in nature and prayer and meditation and rest and all of those things they’re critical however i want you to keep coming back to what’s in front of you and to let it break your heart.

Peeople ask me about, “What do I do right now, John?”

Well, the what we should be doing first is feeling deeply and then it’s following that burden. This isn’t a mystery. It isn’t as nebulous as we think it is. Solving the problems right now are about getting up every day and paying attention and hearing people’s stories and knowing what’s going on and then feeling all of that. And then doing what I ask people to do all the time, follow the burden. Whatever it is that breaks your heart and boils your blood, whatever keeps you up at night, whatever people groups you are drawn to, whatever causes you feel deeply, that should instruct you.

And then, begin to figure out where and how in my local community, right where I am, maybe without even leaving my home, where and how can I do something to be a help, to be a caregiver, to be a reassuring voice?

So I just wanted to take a couple seconds and acknowledge how heavy these days are, the reality that it is terrible, and yet to not tire of feeling as deeply as you do because that is the greatest asset you have in a world where cruelty is trending.

So please hold on to that burden in the center of your chest because it is the antidote to all that afflicts us. So, thanks for spending some time with me tonight.

And just, just be encouraged.

Keep going.

Peace.

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In the wake of the unthinkable images and footage coming out of Minneapolis over the last weeks, it’s easy to feel insulated from the chaos if we happen to reside somewhere else in the country, as if our geography protects us, as if Minnesota is some distant land we are separated from and can view from insulated safety.

As we witness masked, heavily-armed, untethered, and untrained State-sponsored goon squads indiscriminately kidnapping, beating, and executing human beings, as we watch in disbelief as they terrorize of people working in local businesses, sitting in traffic, dropping off their kids at school, and showing up for their legal immigration appointments, we must remember something:

This isn’t about Minneapolis.It’s not about the bluest of the blue cities receiving the wrath of a vindictive Republican president.It’s not about an outspoken Democrat Governor being intentionally targeted by a leader who resents him.This is about the future of our Republic.

Minneapolis is a test by this corrupt Administration of how much illegality the American people will tolerate, how willing we will be to abide authoritarianism, and how easily ordinary people will allow an arm of the government to be weaponized against us. It is a barometer of the intestinal fortitude of our citizenry.

Trump is always looking for his Reichstag Fire; his reason to bring the hammer of the Military down upon the nation.

Declaring Martial Law has always been his endgame, and his strategy has been transparent: create an emergency where one did not exist and propose to bring Law and Order to a lawlessness and disorder of which he is the sole author.

As California Governor Gavin Newsom correctly declared on his X account last year when the illegal occupation of Los Angeles began: 1) Local law enforcement didn’t need help. 2) Trump sent troops anyway — to manufacture chaos and violence. 3) Trump succeeded. 4) Now things are destabilized, and we need to send in more law enforcement just to clean up Trump’s mess.

Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper has discussed that during his first term, Trump sought to turn the Military on citizens by shooting Black Lives Matter protestors, but was dissuaded from doing so by him and other leaders. Now, with a far more willing sycophant in Pete Hegseth, and with a Cabinet filled with shameless, soulless genuflecting disciples like Kristi Noem and Greg Bovino, there is almost nothing standing in his way, other than We the People.

What’s happened and is happening in Minneapolis is a personal question to all of us, regardless of where we live, asking how much we’re willing to do to preserve the America we call home and claim to love.

Is our patriotism real enough, our morality sturdy enough, is our faith true enough to move us into the fray? The people in Minnesota don’t just have answers in the abstract. They know in the certainty of their bruises, broken bones, lost eyes, and dead children.

The ordinary people in those neighborhoods, business owners, Uber drivers, retirees, school teachers, and college students, have shown us the very best of what humanity aspires to by standing up for family members, friends, and strangers whose humanity was disregarded. They braved rubber bullets and tear gas and beatings by armed soldiers, and in doing so, showed more devotion to this nation and its Constitution than those very soldiers.

America, we are all Minneapolis.

Its streets are the streets we traverse each day. Its restaurant workers and business owners are those we know and work alongside. Its families are those we find our identity and meaning in. Its murdered sons and daughters can easily be ours.

In fact, they are ours.

Our destinies are tethered together.

There is no border between us when it comes to the fascist aspirations of this president. No geography will keep us safe, no political affiliation will exempt us from harm, and nothing will prevent us from having our neighborhoods and communities invaded by complicit agencies and willing foot soldiers, unless we decide that we, too, dare to stand in the gap between power and assailed human beings.

I don’t know where in this nation you call home, what you do for a living, or what the story in your head is about the violence in Minneapolis this week. What I do know is that you are in this now, just as I am. We all need to choose whether we will be numbed into apathy, terrified into silence, or propelled into the trenches of the war for this nation, regardless of the cost.

Like so many of our fellow Americans in Minnesota, I pray we choose the latter.

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For simply bearing witness to a neighbor’s abuse, for being the kind of person we all say we aspire to be, for being present to an imperiled stranger, he was executed in the street by our government.

It is as tragic and frightening as any day in my lifetime:

The complete disregard for his life by those thugs cosplaying as soldiers is beyond comprehension.The utter contempt for his memory by this Administration is unrepentantly evil.

And what soon followed by supposedly patriotic, Jesus-following Conservative Americans is sadly predictable.

Like you, I’m finding words difficult for the waste of it all, the sickening deja vu of what’s unfolded, and the feeling that we’re slipping into something more dark than our minds can fathom.

One of the saddest things about Alex Pretti’s murder is that I can imagine the conversations right now by my former friends, distant family members, neighbors, and people I used to pastor:"Oh, he was threatening them!""He came at them with a gun. They were just defending themselves.""He was another Leftist extremist!""That's what you get when you attack officers."

This is the mass delusion being curated again.They will believe Donald Trump, JD Vance, Kristi Noem, Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, and Karoline Leavitt, and not their own eyes. They will convince themselves that the truth is not the truth, because otherwise they will need to come to terms with the reality that they are complicit in this, that they have created this monster, that they have failed their nation and their faith, that everything we've warned them about for ten years is now here.

To avoid accountability, and the courage and change that would require of them, they will willfully choose a comfortable fiction; a fantasy that declares them patriotic and righteous, and anyone whose presence disturbs that story, the enemy.And they will dig in their heels, double down, and descend further into cultic tribalism while trying to bury the cognitive dissonance they have authored.

Actual, real, walking-around, business-owning, church-going, school board-attending Americans will choose to vilify slaughtered human beings instead of admitting they were wrong.And they will look at the decent people across this nation, those with a conscience, those who refuse to deny reality, and they will say that we are the problem. They will dehumanize us to the point that when we are beaten or kidnapped or executed, it will not elicit anything but the belief that we got what we deserved.

This is what Trump has done to a sizable portion of this nation, and it’s something the rest of us need to face with sober, unflinching clarity.

It’s not enough to grieve the loss of Renee Good and Alex Pretti; we must defend their memories.

We must not allow them to be slandered, mischaracterized, and dehumanized.

We must walk into our days and into every space in which we find ourselves, and we must speak truth about what is happening.

That is our responsibility as good people bearing witness to violence, just as they did.

This is the statement from Alex Pretti’s distraught family:

ICE killed him.

The Trump Administration slandered him.

Conservative Americans have joined them.

This has happened to Alex Pretti and his family.

It happened to Renee Good and her family.

It will happen to thousands and thousands of families, unless we decide that we not tolerate it another day.

I know you’d like me to tell you what you should do in response, but I’m unable to.

I’m still working through what my response will be.

These are matters of conscience, and they cannot be made from a distance, but within the cavernous places of our own hearts.

I can only tell you that we are all tethered together, that every one of us has a life to leverage, and that we will rise or fall together.

May we meet this moment with the best of ourselves.

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It’s time to stop beating this one, America. It’s not going anywhere.

These people cannot be helped.

We’ve tried for ten years now.We’ve tried to understand them.We’ve tried to listen to them.We’ve given them the benefit of the doubt.We’ve tried not to assign motive to them, not to speculate as to why they voted the way they voted, not to believe they consented to every cruel thing their vote birthed and has enabled.We’ve tried not to caricaturize them; not to make them into one-dimensional stereotypes, not to treat them as some fictional other whose presence posed a threat.We’ve tried appealing to their sense of decency, to their capacity for compassion, to their faith in Jesus.We’ve quietly endured thousands of their racist outbursts and homophobic rants on social media and at neighborhood picnics and across the Thanksgiving dinner table, in the hopes that I could find some vulnerable place beneath their fear to access later.We’ve tried buoying pep talks and firm tough love and expressions of kindness and straight-talking challenge and attempts at affirmation.We’ve tried discussing theology, sharing stories of oppressed communities, offering facts in the face of a million lies generated by their President, and reminding them of the lessons History has already taught us about the steep slope we’re currently sliding precipitously down.

They have all failed to reach fertile ground.Nothing has worked.It’s all been fruitless.

I think it’s time to stop saying that we need to understand these people. We do understand them:

We understand that they have dug in their heels so deeply, they will not be moved by anything: not facts or data or truth or their own eyes.We understand that there is no political scandal massive enough, no post reckless enough, no legislation predatory enough to alter their allegiance.We understand that the past ten years of viciousness and ineptitude haven’t tempered their passions but ignited them. We understand that the image of an angry white, American male God is so burned into their brains that they see no conflict with a religion devoid of love, or a world absent diversity, or a theology made of malice.We understand that infidelity, dishonesty, obscenity, and cruelty are no longer liabilities in those who lead them.We understand that the Fox News poison has so fully circulated through their systems that truth is no longer necessary.We understand that white supremacists in the Cabinet and Russian infiltration in our elections and children separated from their parents are all acceptable collateral damage to winning, whatever that means to themWe understand that their capacity to rationalize away human rights atrocities now borders on complete delusion.

People have warned that we should treat these people with kid gloves; that explicitly expressing anger or pointing out criminality or vocally opposing injustice right now will only drive them deeper into their entrenched positions. That’s a fairly dire assessment if true.

If adults are that fragile in the face of reality, that thin-skinned, that willing to deny country and humanity to retain their cultic allegiances, the rest of us aren’t saddled with appeasing them and shouldn’t try to.

We don’t come to this understanding with any joy or self-satisfaction; we come to it with sober despair and the deepest grief, because we know practically speaking that right now they are unreachable.

It’s one thing to have held out hope for them two election cycles ago, but at this point, I’m not sure any miraculous moral awakening or conversion of the heart is possible.

If their consciences and compassion and reason have not been accessed and unearthed by now, it’s highly likely those things will never be forthcoming.

And since these people will not be moved, the rest of us need to move together:

Democrat, Republican, and Independent,the deeply devout and the passionately irreligious,people of every difference and distinction need to move in concert, to affirm our shared regard for one another, and to work to restore balance in something we all love that is teetering wildly.

This isn’t a battle to change the minds of the few who refuse to be changed. That horse is dead.

It also isn’t a test to see if we can manufacture the same hatred and vitriol for them as they dispense toward us.

This is a golden moment for the vast, sprawling army of good people who believe in the beauty of diversity and in a fully accessible America to speak unequivocally, on our social media profiles, at family gatherings, in our church meetings, and most of all, in the voting booth.

We don’t need to convince or coddle or win over hatred, and we don’t need to outdo it either.

We need to outnumber it.We need to outlast it.We need to outlove it.We need to outvote it.

And we will.

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It’s taken me a while to realize and admit this, but I’m grateful to you.

I’ve spent a decade openly lamenting your presence and the poison it has so effortlessly released into our nation’s blood system.

Today, I find myself horrified at a second term that is doing even greater damage than I ever imagined it could. My heart has been hourly broken as I’ve watched our country imploding, our public discourse become polluted, our daily existence grow ever more corrosive, and I’ve wrongly assumed you were to blame.

Yet, I’ve come to understand that you haven’t manufactured our current national ugliness; you’ve simply revealed it and leveraged it.

By generating a limitless torrent of hateful, mean-spirited ignorance, you’ve given other like-minded people license to do the same. You’ve opened up the floodgates for their collective moral sewage to flow fully. People no longer hide their malevolence behind feigned politeness and phony civility; they now revel in it, they broadcast it, and they celebrate it.

You’ve made bigotry, misogyny, and racism socially acceptable again, and that has been a kind of twisted gift because it’s allowed me to really see people, not as they pretend to be on the surface, but in the very depths of their closed and calloused hearts.

Over and over throughout the last decade, your supporters would always tell me that they liked you because you “speak your mind,” yet I realized a long time ago that it is because you speak their minds. You’ve given credence to their phobias, sanctioned their prejudices, and normalized their contempt for their neighbors.

Thanks to the terrible ground you’ve broken, politicians, pastors, friends, and strangers, both in person and on social media, now regularly out themselves as cruel, intolerant, and malicious. They remind me just how close they are to me, just how deep the sickness in us runs, and just how far a nation we have to go to become worthy of our songs and anthems.

You’ve emboldened people to be open about things they used to conceal for the sake of decorum, and though it turns my stomach, I know that this is the only way we can move forward; to have that cancerous stuff exposed fully so that it can be dealt with. Our progress as a nation is predicated on authentic dialogue, no matter how brutal and disheartening that dialogue is.

In other words, you’ve let us know what we’re really dealing with here and while it’s been rightly disturbing, it’s also been revelatory. That’s the thing about that kind of harsh light: you’re forced to see everything; beauty and monstrosity equally illuminated.

Now, please don’t misunderstand me: I think you are the most malignant President in our nation’s history, and I fear gravely for the world my children will inherit, should America survive your Presidency at all. I believe you’re a soulless, loveless, irredeemably hateful bottom-feeder; the very worst of what humanity has produced.

But regardless of what happens now, you’ve already allowed me the blessing of discovering the truth: about me, about my neighbors, about my friends and family members, and about our country.

And in the process, you’ve also shown me that I am not alone in resisting you and the sickening, grievous things you’ve revealed about us.

You’ve generated an equally loud, equally passionate response to it, and this is where I find my hope these days.

I find it in those for whom equality, freedom, and justice aren’t just cheap buzzwords or hollow sentiments; they are the most precious of hills to die on.

I find it in those people who refuse to be silent in the face of our moral regression.

I find it in those who are willing to be more bold in defending the inherent value of all people.

I find it in the growing army of those true patriots who will not tolerate hatred as a core American value.

I find it in human beings who fiercely reject white supremacy in every form.

I find it in those who reject violence as a default response to dissension.

I find it in the ever-rising voice of people who will not let your malice and bitterness represent them in the world.

I find it in the ordinary activists who will not allow us to repeat the worst of history here.

Today I find my hope in those who, like me, will not be complicit in allowing exclusion to become a source of national pride, who will not tolerate an America that is bereft of empathy and drained of diversity, because we’ve seen where that leads.

Yes, President Trump, you’ve unearthed our hidden afflictions, and you’ve paraded them unapologetically in the light of day.

You brought every awful thing about us out into the open so that we can face it without myth or misunderstanding.

You’ve shown me that America is greater than you and your sycophantic disciples’ repugnant plans for it, and that it is worth fighting for with everything I have.

And for all of this, I thank you.

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They have fully, grievously, and irreparably failed us all.

If not for them, Donald Trump’s video confession of assault over a decade ago is a deal breaker.If not for them, his ridiculing of a disabled reporter is a bridge too far.If not for them, he isn’t declared a Christian.If not for them, he isn’t elected.If not for them, he isn’t reelectedIf not for them, there are no stomach-turning photo ops of opportunistic phony religious sycophants laying hands on him.If not for them, thousands of people aren’t being terrorized by their own Government right now.If not for the White Conservative Church, sick people aren’t creating GoFundMe pages to stay alive,Nazis aren’t marching through our streets and through the halls of Congress,our elections aren’t polluted by murderous dictators,his unhinged, racist vanity rallies are deservedly empty,climate change isn’t ridiculed and disregarded, and gun victims get more than #thoughtsandprayers platitudes.

If not for the White supposed Christians, bigots aren’t emboldened to proudly parade hatred in the light of day,sexual assault survivors aren’t belittled and traumatized anew,all of his lies are named and condemned,he is held accountable for his crimes and his immorality,this planet is safer, more compassionate, and more just.and we aren’t saturated in tribalism and chaos and suffering.

The irony of our current national nightmare is that despite all their sanctimonious sermonizing and finger-wagging condemnation and sky-is-falling histrionics, the white Evangelical Church has enabled, nurtured, and championed more inequity, more immorality, and more misery in these days than any other entity, and there is no close second.

For the disparate masses of the world, the Conservative American Church has become a barrier to belonging, a sanctuary for supremacy, and a hostile presence for the least of these.

By its marriage to a politics of exclusion, the white Evangelical Church has failed the poor, women, people of color, gender fluid human beings, and non-heteronormative people.It’s failed immigrants and refugees and foreigners; vulnerable and marginalized communities; non-religious and non-Christians.It has failed everyone outside the tiny gated community of the white and the wealthy.This is indeed a tragedy.

But more than anyone, the white Evangelical Church has failed Jesus.

They have misappropriated his likeness, hijacked his name, and weaponized his message into something grotesque and oppressive—and it is rightfully repelling good people.

If not for the white Evangelical Church, people might see the peacemaking, wound-healing, leper-embracing, crowd-feeding Jesus that deserves to be seen and run toward it.If not for them, religion might not be a trigger of the worst abuse and the greatest harm and the fiercest violence that has visited them.If not for the White Evangelical Church, Christianity might be the refuge for the hurting and the hopeless that it was intended to be, and it can be again.

Other White Christians are going to have to fix this grievous national error.

Followers of Jesus can be the healers and lovers of people that we were called to be if we have the courage to be, if we have the strength to oppose this bitterness, to flatly reject it, and to leave it, instead of making a bed or making peace with it as so many have.

So, I say cue the exodus, throw open the doors, and let the good people stream out of the pews and into the streets.

May that thing become a deserving dead relic of the distant past; a dusty, darkened museum of another fully fallen empire, a decaying monument to a soon-to-be obsolete hatred.

Let us set a table big enough for everyone who has been failed by this Frankensteined freak show claiming to be of God, and let us remind people that where Jesus is, there is good news for the poor, embrace for the unloved, rest for the weary, and a belly-busting meal that demands no prerequisite but hunger.

Let us make sure love gets the last, loudest word.

Yes, the white Conservative Church has failed us, but actual followers of Jesus cannot fail him, and we cannot fail one another.

It’s time to turn over this table, as Jesus would.

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Yesterday morning, before my feet had even hit the floor, I opened up Instagram, and sitting at the top of my feed was a video of a group of ICE agents driving a man’s face into the pavement and pepper-spraying him at point-blank range.

Just below that, a petrified and screaming child alone, surrounded by masked thugs.

And underneath that, a wide-eyed content creator was alerting viewers about a pregnant woman’s wounds suffered under ICE detainment.

I instinctively scrolled through, bombarded by one image of staggering inhumanity after another.

Click.Share.Swipe.Click.Share.

Before I realized it, I was on an algorithm-propelled descent into a rabbit hole of horrors that triggered another fight-or-flight rush of Cortisol into my already taxed system.

Suddenly, I was jolted from my phone by a thought: What the hell am I doing here?

I’d barely been awake for five minutes, and I was already drowning in the same hellish scenes I’d gone to bed to a few hours earlier. I’d taken a brief respite of broken sleep and stress dreams and had immediately returned to my now permanent waking condition: emotional exhaustion.

I inventoried the last few weeks and realized that this jittery internal panic has been my default setting. Day after day, from waking until sleeping, I’d mindlessly absorbed countless hours of video, sounds, and photos that the human mind cannot properly make sense of. Not only that, but thousands of times, I’d reflexively boosted this nightmare fuel to friends, readers, followers, and strangers, contributing untold gallons to the fierce flood of terrible they too have been drowning in.

Right now, we are all in danger of killing ourselves with bad news, of willfully dying on the altar of information.

When does our noble desire not to turn away from the violence become something self-destructive and injurious, something counterproductive to an effective response to that violence? How do we know when we’ve passed from knowing what’s happening to a crippling fear porn addiction that is doing nothing but rendering us hopeless and overwhelmed? When is our newsfeed doing more harm than good?

Please hear me, I’m not advocating checking out by any measure. We’re here in this perilous and heartbreaking place as a nation because tens of millions of Americans of privilege have spent years averting their eyes, turning away from unpleasant news, and burying their heads in the sands of distraction instead of facing the reality in front of them. We sure as hell don’t want to do that.

The danger is real, the threat is formidable, and the human toll is massive, and we can’t pretend these things are not true. It’s critically important to be aware of the atrocities this Administration is perpetrating with ICE and elsewhere so that we don’t lose sight of the gravity of the moment. But at some point, we move from being adequately informed to being profoundly addled by the scale and velocity of the bad news.

I can throw a bath towel onto a flooded floor, and it will immediately fill its fibers with liquid until it becomes fully saturated, at which point it cannot take anything else in. Once it reaches its capacity, it becomes completely weighed down and useless.

You’re probably pretty close to such a state, friend. I know I am.

So how do we pull ourselves out of this precipitous spiral into despair?We all need to be asking ourselves the questions:How much devastation can we responsibly hold? What purpose does the doom-scrolling serve?How does it actually help us or anyone else?

I can’t tell you how much information you need to be adequately informed, or how much carnage your brain and body can sustain and still function, or when you’ve reached a place of ineffectiveness.

What I do know is that every second we spend on social media, staring at the horrors on a screen is a second we could spend moving out into the world and doing something that affirms our agency, something that generates a tangible response to what breaks our hearts, something that helps another human being.

My friends, stay informed.Stay engaged.Be aware.Don’t fall into apathy.But please, don’t let the bad news kill you.

We need you here to help twist the plot.

How do you balance taking in news with not allowing yourself to be overcome? What are strategies and practices that help you avoid drowning in despair? Let me know in the comments.

Far too many of our family members, friends, neighbors, co-workers, and classmates are fully complicit in this carnage.

His absolute disregard for the Constitution, throwing our nation into perpetual chaos;his rejection of the rule of Law, stripping elemental rights from tens of millions of Americans;his unthinkable, unspeakable treatment of human beings, rounded up like animals and jailed without probable cause;his capricious and violent crusade against veterans, universities, law firms, public school teachers, medical professionals, and journalists.

The people we love and live alongside, those we work and study shoulder to shoulder with, those we have invited into our hearts and homes. They are as responsible for all of this as he is, as those in his Cabinet are.

The war crimes in Gaza and Ukraine.The attacks on Venezuela and Greenland.The medical relief ripped from the poorest of the world.The scalding panic felt by immigrants, both documented and undocumented.The unending emergencies we are immersed in.

They are culpable for all of it.

The literal and figurative blood is on their hands.

They may as well be smashing the car windows of a migrant family waiting for their lawyer,joyously ripping the lunches from children living in poverty,unceremoniously terminating federal employees after decades of faithful service, terrorizing transgender students in their school hallways,and accosting pregnant women in emergency rooms.

They could have so easily stopped this.

They could have allowed their humanity to come to bear a year ago, when it was clear that he was cognitively shattered, that his singular goal was a fascist dictatorship, that his agenda would consist solely of retribution against those who sought legal and moral accountability for him.

Instead, our childhood friends, our favorite uncles, and our next-door neighbors ignored revered journalists, Constitutional scholars, renowned economists, and past presidents.

They shunned their responsibility as Americans, they rejected the teachings of their faith tradition, and they abandoned any kind of moral footing by enabling the ascension of a felon-rapist-scumbag mobster who lacks a single noble impulse. Through whatever combination of racism, misogyny, prejudice, intellectual ignorance, and plain old hatred, they willfully coronated him.

And now, they either fully endorse this most vicious and vile season in our nation’s history, or enable it by their cowardice and silence.

And as a result, this senseless waste of life, this asinine global trade war, this stupid squandering of prosperity, this sociopathic predation against citizens and immigrants—they are collaborators on all of it.

And in light of this, they do not deserve proximity with those of us who are hourly pushing back against the criminality, exposing the atrocities, caring for those under duress. They are nothing but barriers to healing and obstacles to justice.

I’m not sure America can even survive the damage we’ve sustained in such a short time. Despite our best efforts, it may not be possible (at least in our lifetimes) to stop the bleeding, reverse course, and repair all that has been damaged since January 20th.

But if any of this is going to happen: if we are going to salvage our Republic from this massive wrecking ball of cruelty, it is going to be necessary for the good people of this nation to sever ties with those still loyal to him. We need to withhold our friendship, exclude them from our holiday gatherings, cut personal and professional ties, and, practically speaking, marginalize them.

If we truly believe in bending the arc of the moral universe toward justice at this place and time, his supporters need to become pariahs. They should not be welcome where good people gather. They need to be held accountable for unleashing this hell on the rest of us.

I’m not speaking about those who have or will come to their senses; those with the humility and empathy to admit their errors; those who will be visible and vocal in their resistance to this Administration. While it would have been far better for their souls to have been accessed much earlier, later is still better than never.

But as far as his cheerleaders, champions, kindred spirits, sycophants, and disciples—they are proving themselves unreachable with reason, impervious to compassion, and mortally allergic to anything that reasonable human beings value.

As in other times of historic monstrous regimes, there is no ambiguity left now.

The lines are starkly drawn, the factions clearly defined, the opposing values unmistakable.

On one side of this battle for the soul of our nation, the safety of its people, and the welfare of the planet, is the sprawling interdependent community of those committed to healing, kindness, and the common good.

And on the other side stands this historically unredeemable would-be king and those who, regardless of the story they tell themselves, still inexplicably stand alongside him.

Compromise is not an option, and because of that, many of us are going to need to lean into our convictions and move away from people we know, love, and once respected.

Sadly and tragically, that’s just how this has to be.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If he had run as a Democrat, it would have been a nonstarter.

You wouldn’t have needed to spend the last ten years trying to convince me or lobby my conscience, or reach down into my humanity to alter my political allegiance.

You wouldn’t be exhausting yourself trying to figure out how to break me of my unwavering cultic fervor to a traitorous rapist.

You wouldn’t have had to continually appeal to my professed religious tradition or my respect for the Constitution or to our shared humanity in order to move me to your side, as I’d have already tapped into these things myself and willingly joined you there.

If I’d been standing where you were standing in 2016 or 2020 or 2024, we’d never have ended up here.

I’d never have tolerated his words about women or his vitriol toward foreigners or his brazen lawlessness or his Nazi affiliations or his violence against citizens. Over the course of his first campaign alone, there would have been a few hundred deal breakers in who he was and what he said and what he’d done, for me to ever choose him to represent me. It would have been a moral impossibility.

And yet, if somehow back then I had been temporarily caught in some perfect storm of fear, delusion, and bad information and had ushered him in, after what I’d have witnessed over the ensuing years (the corruption and the incompetence and the bigotry), I’d be standing alongside you right now in undoing my grievous error, because that error was harming both of us.

And failing all of that, after everything I’d have seen from him in the past few months alone, right now you’d know that I was your ally and not your adversary in this fight for the place we both call home. My love for you and for America would compel me to defend both of those things with equal vigor. You would feel safe in my presence because I’d have defended you from him, even if he were a Democrat.

I think that’s the most painful part of these days: not how fractured our nation is, not how hopelessly tribal every moment has become, not the prejudices being unapologetically paraded around, not how openly ugly the discourse now is—it’s realizing how little people like me actually matter to people like you. It’s knowing that you’re willing to disconnect with me in order to remain tethered to him.

And this simply wouldn’t have been so for me.

I would never have voted for a Democratic candidate who dehumanized Republicans the way Trump dehumanizes Democrats.

I wouldn’t have accepted him branding you the “Radical Right,” for your conscientious objection to his war on decency and poverty and diversity.

I’d never have tolerated the nasty nicknames or the incendiary language or the continual verbal assaults on you for simply disagreeing with him.

As I watched someone like Donald Trump manufacture malice and dispense stereotypes and invoke violence against you, I’d have considered you and your family, the work you’ve done in the world, and the ways you’ve shown me goodness, and I’d have felt more allegiance to you than to him, whether he had a D or an R next to his name in the voting booth.

Getting the temporary high of a political win wouldn’t have been worth the compromises I‘d have had to make to get it, or the collateral damage to more than half the human beings who make their homes here. It wouldn’t have been compatible with my morality to hold Trump to your head like a loaded weapon.

I don’t expect you to believe me, but I know who I am and the way I live my life, and I can promise you that if this President had shown the contempt for you and the people you love that he has toward me and the people I love (not to mention to the planet, the rule of law, and vulnerable communities), there’s no way in hell I’d give him a single day more to steer us all into the abyss. I’d be standing alongside you in opposing him at every turn.

Knowing that this isn’t true for you has created a wedge between us that will never be dismantled. It has irreparably cut the ties that had connected us before he arrived.

If you claim to love and respect me and people like me, but you still support him, you’re lying to yourself or to me or to both of us, and you’re going to have to come to terms with that. I am trying to.

I believe that if a person hates and willingly generates injury to half the country, they don’t deserve to lead it, and the fact that you don’t seem to feel that way is the source of the deepest sadness and most profound grieving of this moment.

If Trump were a Democrat, I wouldn’t have voted for him or supported him.

I love and respect you too much to do that to you.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Conservative Christians love to ask this question.

They adorn their Sunday school rooms with it. They wrap it around their wrists. They saturate their social media accounts with it. They punctuate their sermons with it.

The only thing they don’t want to do is actually answer it, at least not using Jesus as a measuring stick.

We’ve seen that with breathtaking clarity again this week.

Recently, a group of anti-ICE protestors interrupted a Minneapolis church service over one of its pastors’ leadership of a local ICE field office. The activists entered the sanctuary mid-service, and without physical violence of any kind, loudly confronted Easterwood and those gathered, with the hypocrisy of a professed Christian minister’s partnering with a violent and lawless Government-sanctioned assault on human beings made in the image of God. They disrupted comfort for the sake of those in profound discomfort.

And in the wake of the incident, celebrity pastors, Conservative denominations, Evangelical seminaries, and Right-Wing media outlets have predictably fallen all over themselves in performative histrionics, condemning the protestors for supposedly violating the sanctity of the sanctuary and the peace of the pew sitters.

As reported by the Associated Press, the Minnesota-Wisconsin Baptist Convention called the event “an unacceptable trauma,” lamenting that the service was ”forced to end prematurely” as protesters shouted “insults and accusations at youth, children, and families.”

So, now, these sanctimonious, self-righteous charlatans are suddenly concerned about youth, children, and families?Not the youth, children, and families in Ukraine and Palestine who are being starved and bombed to death by the Administration they’ve passionately supported.Not the youth, children, and families who’ve had healthcare and food supports ripped from them by the party they claim upholds and defends their faith tradition.Not the youth, children, and families irreparably scarred by the pedophiles and rapists their political leaders tirelessly protect.And certainly not the youth, children, and families who are being terrorized in their homes and workplaces and schools and hospital rooms (and yes, churches), by one of the single most vile abuses of power in our lifetimes, one they continue to applaud.

I can’t imagine a more tone deaf, hypocritical, and anti-Christian position than chastising people who have eloquently answered the question What Would Jesus Do? by literally following in his footsteps.

All four of the New Testament Gospel accounts describe Jesus, overcome with anger at the perversion of the Temple, entering its courts and violently overturning the tables of the money changers and merchants. There and throughout the scriptures, we see a Jesus whose ferocity for humanity and zeal for the temple compelled him to do the audacious, the reckless, the inappropriate; a Jesus who never allowed decorum, conventions, or shame-hurling religious people to silence his voice or soften his convictions.

This is the call to all followers of Jesus: to upend the evil that this world has normalized.

If his feet were on American soil, Jesus would be interrupting church services to condemn leaders who create hell on earth for others, and to confront those who call those churches home with the unpleasant reality of their faith’s namesake.

Conservative Christians love to invoke Jesus’ turning over the temple tables when it suits them (when they want to terrorize families at a PRIDE event, take away body autonomy from women, or brutalize people of color without cause), yet, when faced with a living embodiment of the redemptive spirit of Jesus’ disruption at the Temple, they want to close the book, clutch their pearls, and play the victim.

Supposed followers of Jesus feigning outrage at people of conscience disrupting a worship gathering to call out hypocrisy and vile abuses of power remind us again that they have no interest in emulating Christ or reading the Gospels. They want a Jesus-free Christianity that doesn’t inconvenience them with the annoyances of living with empathy or loving their neighbors.

What would Jesus actually do right now?Jesus would stand in the street between ICE and those it seeks to terrorize.Jesus would defy the politicians openly preying upon God’s people.Jesus would cut off family and friends who collaborate with this unrepentant evil.Jesus would interrupt the cloistered privilege and ceremonial religion of churches partnering in ethnic cleansing.

There is the law of the land, and there is the law of Love, and sometimes, those are not compatible.

There have always been days for people of faith, morality, and conscience, when manifesting the latter meant overstepping the former.

ICE is a corrupt table.The Trump Administration is a corrupt table.White Christian Nationalism is a corrupt table.Conservative Evangelicalism is a corrupt table.Jesus would flip over tables in the cause of driving out wickedness and defending the least of these.

And that’s what more Christians should be doing.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.