While I took time to write and think, I watched the world on fire from ecological disasters, none of which was earned or deserved except by our global human hubris. On August 11, storms killed seven people in Indiana and left a thousand homeless. Rainstorms on the Big Island added three and half feet to the total yearly rain precipitation. It also washed out roads and swept houses off their foundations. Ahead of Typhoon Dolphin, one million people were evacuated from areas of Zhejiang, over 900,000 from Wenzhou alone. Death toll from monsoon floods in Pakistan exceed one hundred twenty and are mostly located in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab provinces. Flash floods killed a market full of people in Nuristan along with its mayor. Refugees sleeping in a border camp were also killed. Wildfire forced residents from communities along the Gironde and west of Madrid. More areas burned in Spain than ever recorded in the country’s history. Niño the continued weather over the southwest while there are 639 active US wildfires across 4.5M acres.

So, as I reflect on Chaco Canyon, I am conscious that there is much to say from a naturalist perspective on the climate crisis, and in this series we have yet to truly begin. This week, from the book of Exodus I begin this 5th in my series on Anglican Episcopal naturalist theology.

If you and I sat down and opened up our bible to the passage where Moses encounters the burning bush, we would see that the first part of the conversation between God and Moses is not about the liberation of the people of Israel. It is a word about the relationship between humanity and the divine. God says, take off your shoes.

This is a word about the ground. It is about the earth. Read the words (I love the King James Version): The place whereon thou standest is holy ground. I want to suggest that the ground did not become holy when Moses arrived to see it; it was holy before. It is that Moses has had his eyes opened to see that the ground itself is holy. It is a revealing dust and dirt.

A colonialist view always sees the ground as something to be claimed as if it did not exist as a reality before the conqueror and colonist found it.

I want to take you to Chaco Canyon; it is a place in the desert that a whole people knew and experienced for thousands of years. We, our government on our behalf, are preparing to drill. We, as a people, have not realized that holiness may require of us something different from just seeing the land of Chaco Canyon as a conquest ground to do with it as we please because we have the power to do so. A key principle here, it seems to me, is to say clearly: just because we can do something does not mean we should do it.

This AI illustration offers a view of Craig Childs and Stephen Lekson and their contributions to protect Chaco Canyon as a sacred and living landscape.

Here are the details for Chaco Canyon.

Chaco

This summer I spent time in the Sangre de Cristo mountains in New Mexico, a place that was inspiring as I first drafted this essay, and a land I would like to explore more. Someday I want to make a pilgrimage to the high desert of northwest New Mexico and stand in the great rooms and houses of Chaco.

Over a thousand years ago the ancestors of today’s Pueblo people, built these houses intentionally to allow the light of the sun and moon to be at the center of their ceremonial centers. The roads go straight for miles across the desert leading to particular horizon points chosen but no longer know how to read or understand the buildings’ grammar. Chaco remains a sacred place to the Pueblo and Hopi as an ancestral homeland. and is one of a few World Heritages sites in the U.S.^[2]

The land has carried a protected boundary, a buffer, from the surrounding oil and gas drilling in the San Juan Basin. Today, our government which we elected, removed that buffer acros about 336,000 acres.^[3] This will allow drilling in the Chaco Canyon area. Consider this like allowing drilling in the front yard of your church, synagogue, or mosque without your say-so. The National Trust has publicly called the Greater Chaco landscape the most endangered historic place in America. So that you might understand, the National Trust for Historic Preservation is a privately funded, nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. Established in 1949 by a law passed by Congress, it works to protect and care for important historic buildings, neighborhoods, and cultural sites across the United States. In other words, in the ‘40s and ‘50s we understood that we could not be trusted to protect our heritage from generation to generation, and we created a group, and that group says to the American people, “Warning, Warning!”

We can talk more about the leasing below. However, as Christians facing the reality of this situation in our country and on behalf of neighbors and the native peoples of our land, we need to begin with how we approach this in a meaningful way.

So, I want to call your attention to the story of Moses and the ground. For Christians, we understand that the ground itself is a revelatory space. And that we can relate to understanding that the ground is holy because God makes it so, because God makes it and sets it in motion. This is not dependent upon the Bureau of Land Management or some weird creationist perspective; it is biblical and about how we understand our relationship with a God and cosmos that preexists humanity, in which humanity is given the ability to reveal God’s presence through experience of the world in which we live.

Such a perspective allows us, as Christians, to understand that the 2023 proclamation and the repeal in 2026 did not make the ground holy, sacred, or a world heritage site. That is the tragedy we can relate to. The sin at Chaco is not that we would trespass on ground we know to be sacred; it is worse: it is the sin of Jacob. The sin of Jacob is that we would drill and never see what ancestors of this land see - the gate to the divine is present in this place.

The Sin of Jacob

Jacob lay down where heaven’s gate was. He dreamed of the ladder and angels going up and down. He rose up, and said something, he said,

“Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not… this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”^[4]

That should probably be written above every drill site permit in the San Juan Basin, along with: “Warning: watch where you tread; this is sacred ground.”

I turn again to Anglican theologian and naturalist Thomas Traherne. He understood Jacob’s words deeply as he experienced the world around him. He wrote,

“The world is a Temple of Majesty, yet no man regards it… It is the place of Angels and the Gate of Heaven. When Jacob waked out of his dream, he said, God is here, and I wist it not.”^[5]

That is the sin of Jacob, and the sin of mankind, for to forget our connection and integration with the land made by God is to return to the life of beasts who lack imagination beyond what “I can get for me now.”

Let me be clear, it isn’t that Jacob was irreverent, but asleep to where he lay. Jacob’s eyes were opened. The question that drilling in Chaco gives the waking person, the awake Christian, is: are we willing to desecrate any holy place to feed our hunger for power and greed? Or are there limits we must place on ourselves because, left to our own desires, we will drive, fly, consume enough to lay the earth to waste.

A Naturalist Theological Truth of Sin

Mark Zuckerberg has described climate change as “one of the most important challenges of our generation” and encouraged society to take steps to protect the planet. Michael Dell has pledged to run its data centers on renewable energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero throughout its value chain by 2050. Elon Musk believes that climate change is real and caused by carbon emissions, but later downplayed its urgency, saying that society is already on the right path and that other threats worry him more, such as artificial intelligence and population collapse. Musk often expressed that humanity should aim to leave the fossil fuel era as soon as possible by transitioning to solar and electric power. The five major publicly traded Western oil and gas "supermajors," ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP, and TotalEnergies publicly acknowledge that climate change is real and that human activity drives it.

Paul in Romans 7:15–19 reminds us that there is a real, deep personal, and I would add magnified corporate, sin. He describes a deep inner struggle in which a person wants to do what is right but, because of human weakness, fails to do so. When we get together, we are even harder to change our course.

Why? Well, we have trained ourselves not to be, and given our companies personal freedom to not be held to account, we do not hold them to account, and we do not hold ourselves to account. It isn’t really that, on an individual basis, in human conversation, we would not all agree that Chaco is holy. Instead, what we do is remove that from our language and grammar. We remove it from the bills and repeals. We instead want to speak of the American “mineral estate,” and of the “acreage available for leasing,” of the “resource potential” of the San Juan Basin. Those phrases describe a world fitted upon inert ground, where the surface is a reservoir of value, waiting for economic use.

The belief that humans cannot achieve their spiritual potential because of human weakness and arrogance (false sense of individual independence) is held by virtually every religion and spirituality on Earth. For instance, Abrahamic religions such as Christianity, Islam and Judaism say that when man is sinful, he acts as if he can do whatever he wants because he is too arrogant, has ignored/forgotten his spiritual teachings or simply lacks the will to do better. To paraphrase these beliefs, a person may allow their shortcomings and desires to override their sense of humility; they attempt to live life as if they can bend or break God's laws and get away with it. Dharmic religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism believe this as well, but due to delusion, Maya (illusion), and craving in samsara (material world). If someone were to mistake selfish desires or distorted views on free will as true freedom, then the universe could not function properly, and they would be knowingly or unknowingly subjecting themselves and others around them to suffering through karma. The belief of humanism can say the same thing; however, instead of using spiritual terminology, it would use terms such as mental, evolutionary, and social.

What I am saying is that we all know this is wrong, not creative, a part of global warming, and desecration; but we do not do the things we wish to do. We have to repent, and begin by individually and corporately living differently.

Now A Harder Truth

I must honestly acknowledge something here that makes me sad to say. People also live around Chaco. Diné families live around Chaco. Some of those families have allotments that the Navajo Nation would have to lease from – funds that would be difficult to refuse, when dollars are difficult to come by.^[6] I hate that we’re forced into a dichotomy between the holy and the poor. I won’t sanitize that away. But notice how it is the same false dichotomy in both situations, the false dichotomy that looks at the ground and sees only what dollars can be pumped out of it; that forces an environmental sacrifice and a poor family to compete over the one metric of value it will deign to recognize. Tradition doesn’t solve that violence by sacrificing poor families for sacred ground. It solves it by refusing the value scheme that allowed them to be at odds in the first place, and by affirming that this land is sacred because we who live upon it can flourish - that the two were never meant to be bartered against each other, that there will be a world in which the poor will not be forced to choose between their rent and their gate of heaven.

Conclusion

I want to visit Chaco at sunrise; you should go if you have the opportunity. Watch as the light rises horizontally across the desert and pours over those terraced walls, which, centuries ago, were prayed over to welcome its touch. Or visit whichever patch of ground God deems holy for you, your great-grandparents’ gravesite, your baptismal pool, a doorway you cannot cross without catching in your throat, and do the thing God asked of us before he told us to do all the other metaphorical things: take off your shoes. Stand on that ground barefoot and whisper words of Jacob upon realizing where he laid his head last night as if they were your prayer, because they are: Surely the Lord is present in this place, and I knew it not.

Admit that you have been sleeping, willingly sleeping, fattening up while we sleep — as we’ve walked doorway after doorway of heaven with our shoes on and named it plenty. Named it progress. Named it anything besides what it clearly is. And then repent. Get up. When it comes to our environment, we have refused to do the work. Caring for God’s creation is work. Standing with those who cannot sleep, those who understand this world to be holy, after 1,000 years is far too long to go, and are screaming at us today to wake up while they still can- that is what ministry looks like. That is what happens before a raised fist to the powers and a march or call for change. We ourselves must begin the change ourselves. To stand with Chaco is realizing, deep in your bones, that the Church ^[7] knows what it means to steward this land, to see the doorway to heaven on this earth, and refuse to let them drill through it. To say not while we can still speak. While we can still listen.

When Jacob woke up, there was one thing left he had to do, he erected an altar and he faced the work of reconciliation with his family. It’s our job to do it too. Jacob lifted up the rock that supported his head that night, created an altar around it, spilled oil on top of it, and named that place Bethel, house of God. [8] Jacob didn’t strip the land; he sanctified it. He lifted up the rock from under his head and exalted it and worshipped upon it so that his descendants would know God had been there and he reconciled himself to the place and to others.

That is what is at stake at Chaco Canyon. That is literally what Jacob faced, only we would reverse the process using our technology. We can either be the generation that wakes up and lifts up the rock; that recognizes when we see holy ground for what it is and fights to keep it that way for our children after us… or we can sleepwalk past that rock and be the generation that shows up at that same doorway only to grab a bottle of that same oil, not to spill it on the stone but to pump it out from underneath and drill through the house of God while we’re still asleep and never even know we missed it.^[8] The larger issue is our consumption of power and dependency on oil and gas

And it is not only the desert stones or the water that are holy. The same reverence the burning bush demands of us in the sand, the tradition has always known in the shade of great trees, the oaks of Mamre where Abraham fed the angels, the cedars that built the temple, the groves where God has been met. The next place I want to speak with you about is the forest, the next quiet ground to be pondered in this series of essays.

Notes

AI Transparency: The data on river specifics in the box at the beginning and the art is AI. The rest of the text is written by me. The art for the series is based upon my own love of the Civilian Conservation Corps murals that dot America. The collection of pieces is composed by AI, whose design choices were governed and edited by me. The prose is mine. Each picture features an American persona (men and women naturalists who are associated with the areas I am talking about). Information about each is presented in the “mural”. Because I used AI, I have made a koinonia (/ˌkoinəˈnēə/), which means communion and communal gift, to the Philippines to help preserve green space and restore habitat along the American Rivers. This first essay is about the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota.

Footnotes

^[1]Exodus 3:5 (KJV): God’s first words to Moses at the burning bush.

^[2]Chaco Culture National Historical Park preserves great houses built roughly a thousand years ago by ancestral Puebloan peoples; it is sacred to Pueblo and Hopi peoples and is inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. See the National Trust for Historic Preservation, 2026 list.

^[3]In 2026 the Department of the Interior / Bureau of Land Management moved to rescind the 2023 twenty-year mineral withdrawal — a roughly ten-mile, ~336,000-acre buffer — around Chaco Culture National Historical Park, opening the surrounding land to oil and gas leasing; the National Trust for Historic Preservation named the Greater Chaco Cultural Landscape the most endangered historic place in America for 2026. See Albuquerque Journal, “Federal agency proposes revoking Chaco Canyon drilling buffer zone”; Center for Western Priorities, “BLM fast-tracks proposal to open Chaco Canyon to oil and gas drilling” (July 2026); NPR, “America’s Most Endangered Historic Places 2026”. (Confirm the exact acreage and the current procedural status before publication.)

^[4]Genesis 28:16–17 (KJV): Jacob’s waking words at Bethel.

^[5]Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, I.31 (ed. Bertram Dobell, London, 1908). Verified against the full text in the Anglican Nature Writing vault.

^[6]Some Diné (Navajo) allottees hold individual land allotments in the region where oil and gas leasing provides income, and Navajo Nation officials have at times opposed a blanket ban; the human situation around Chaco is not reducible to a single position. See Yahoo/Associated Press, “Navajo officials say a mining and drilling ban at Chaco Canyon will hurt local residents”. This deserves careful, first-source verification and a fair hearing before publication.

^[7]On the Church’s rite for setting apart holy ground, see The Book of Common Prayer (1979), “The Dedication and Consecration of a Church,” p. 567. The claim that the Body of Christ is an ecological as well as ecclesial reality, with a sacramental sense of place, follows C. Andrew Doyle, Embodied Apologetics (2024); on a Christian theology of place more broadly, see John Inge, A Christian Theology of Place (2003); on reading such ground through Native Christian eyes, see Steven Charleston, The Four Vision Quests of Jesus and Ladder to the Light.

^[8]Genesis 28:18–19 (KJV): Jacob sets up his stone pillow as a pillar, pours oil upon it, and names the place Bethel, “the house of God.”

— The imposition of ashes, Ash Wednesday^[1]

As a religion of resurrection, the Christian Church does a seemingly odd thing. It reminds everyone that we are made from dust and that we will return to dust. If you have ever been to a funeral, you have seen dirt thrown into the grave. Here the words appear again. The reality is that as Christians we don’t claim to understand how resurrection works, but rather that it does, despite the fact that we are made of cosmic dust. When we mark our foreheads at the beginning of the season of Lent, we are inaugurating a time of repentance in the face of that great mystery. Life is short and in such a short life, we recognize the importance of saying we are sorry for the things we have done, the things we have left undone, and the horrors done on our behalf. We recognize the interconnected cosmic and earthly home in which we live. let the truth be written on us where we can feel it: that we are mortal, that we are going, that the flower fades and the grass withers and all flesh is grass.^[2] We recognize our place in God’s creation, and our short time to make it a better place to live for all people, through the grace God gives us.

Such a tradition of acknowledgement recognizes our part within our natural surroundings and so in this article I want to focus upon Glacier National Park.

The park was set aside in 1910 and was given the name because glaciers ground their way slowly through the valley, as they had for centuries. Those glaciers created rivers and left stones and gravel in their wake. The rivers themselves green.^[3] There were 80 glaciers at the time, and they were huge, expanding and contracting. Today about 2 dozen remain. They are melting faster than even models had predicted. There used to be signs there that predicted when the glaciers would cease to exist. The park service took them down because they were irrelevant to the actual melting.^[4] Children baptized today will live a life during which very likely the glaciers will be gone. Glacier National Park will be a name that evokes memories.

Our tradition helps us to understand that life changes. As a tradition that embraces science, we seek answers to why this is happening and what we, as Christians, are to say and do about it.

There are many graphs that show that what I have said is true. George Bird Grinnell probably couldn’t imagine the state of the park today. What is happening is a “glacier retreat.” There are many reasons for the retreat. We learn more every year about our planet and what is affecting global warming. This week I read new articles about the warming of the Atlantic and what it could mean for European farming (see AMOC). I also read about a 1912 newspaper article discussing how carbon dioxide was changing the atmosphere. I finished the week by reading an article about the UAH scientist who has been studying results of solar dust detected by the Parker Solar Probe and how it may be heating up our solar system and planet.

What do we know? Science is complex and is affirming the reality that we are experiencing an environment that is heating up; and we have some part to play in it by polluting God’s creation. To have a deep Christian response, we must consider the reality of our situation differently.

First, glaciers are not just numbers on a graph. They are, from our perspective within the Abrahamic tradition, a creation of God’s cosmos, filled with life. From the Song of the Three Children in the ancient biblical hymn in the book of Daniel 3:57, here is the tradition of a cosmos that praises God. Rivers and mountains, trees and earth, creature and star call out to their maker. Not resources to be commanded, but instead beauty that reflects the beauty of God. “O ye Ice and Snow, bless ye the Lord.”

So, our first response is to mourn the silence of a choir member of God’s glorious cosmic choir. By doing so, we recognize we are not the only ones created to praise God’s name, and with the passing of days, we must mourn the retreat of the glaciers.

⁘

This is not some new theological warming of the naturalists’ hearts for God’s creation. No. This is an ancient Anglican and Episcopal tradition. Our theology has understood since the very beginning that God’s creation was and is meant to reflect the glory of God, and that it does so in obedience to God’s own making. The doctrine of creation has been for centuries a core of our faith. We remember and proclaim it every Sunday when we recite the creed. We can go much deeper, though.

George Herbert gave words to this notion in a small poem about the purpose of creation and also the reality that beautiful things come to an end.

“Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,” he wrote, “the bridall of the earth and skie: the dew shall weep thy fall to night; for thou must die.”^[5]

Every sweet thing has its close, Herbert says, the day, the rose, the spring itself, “and all must die.” Herbert ends the poem with,

“onely a sweet and vertuous soul, like season’d timber, never gives; but though the whole world turn to coal, then chiefly lives.”^[6]

The truth is that life in the cosmos lives and dies, just as we return to dust. Yet, here we must also name the second part of confession. Regardless of the wider changes in the climate and how the life of the cosmos affects it, we have a very big role in mining and burning coal. We have mined and turned the world toxic for minerals. We have, in fact, participated in the melting of glaciers.

Two things can be true at the same time. We, humans, don’t like that, but here is the complicated truth. There are atmospheric causes for the melting, AND we have contributed mightily to their vanishing as well.

We also do not like the idea that such destruction can be caused on our behalf and that we are held responsible for actions we could not have imagined would have such consequences. New life begins in the marking of our foreheads with the dust of the ground from which the glaciers recede and to remember our part in ™eir extraction from the cosmos.

⁘

We also know that repentance and accountability are not the last word. That Creation itself met Christ on resurrection day and humanity and all of the cosmos set right. We are not being naïve, we simply refuse the idea that there is nothing to be done, or that the death of these glaciers is both already a done deal or that we cannot ourselves choose as a community to reverse what we can in order to save the planet and the human race.

Some do in fact believe the earth is gone and that upon its destruction through the death of the planet, the first and last nuclear war, that Jesus will return. Others believe the future is in space. But we are already doing in space what we have done to the planet - ruining it with our debris and trash. This is not our Anglican Episcopal way. Instead, through accountability, repentance, and hope, which is our particular gift, we believe in a changed future.

⁘

Too often the church spends its time blaming others without making the personal and communal changes it tells others to make. It is an age-old problem. We raise the fist and march; we call for divestment while we ourselves consume more and more energy. Wind farm generators pollute rivers around the world; we fly to meetings to write resolutions; we drive our cars; and we spend more to create a chip and materials for solar power that have yet to return on their investment.

Marking ourselves with dust reminds us of the precarious nature of our lives and creation. It also calls us to be honest that we are part of the glacier's retreat, and that it isn’t something happening to us, but that we ourselves are doing this to one another and to the planet. We are called in this act to stop pretending and to hold our complex situation honestly and forthrightly in our hands and to act to reverse what our presence has caused to God’s creation.

Anglican theologian John Keble (1792-1866), poet, priest, author, and church leader. He wrote,

“Between the porch and altar weep, unworthy of the holiest place, yet hoping near the shrine to keep one lowly cell in sight of grace.”^[7]

We weep, we hope, and we fast. In fasting we learn to amend our life. If we do not fast, our tears for the glacier are theater; our call for ecological justice is hallow. To be a Christian, to cherish the hymn sung by a river, to want to protect the life carried in a glacier, and to admire the reflection of purple on a mountain is nothing if we do not decide to help sustain it and protect it.

It was a Christian congregationalist Katharine Lee Bates who visited Pikes Peak and wrote,

The dust of the earth is inviting us to amendment of life. God is inviting us to amend our lives.

Mourn the glaciers as you would any death of something you loved: honestly. And without despair. And allow the death to change your life. I said at the beginning that the Church does this peculiar thing one day each year: marking those who are alive with the sign of their death. It is doing it now to an entire mountain range, priestlessly, in liquid form, leaving behind all that it has carried and retreating. The Christian naturalist asks, will we read this sign as an end or as the first word of a conversion? The mountains are asking it of us too.

That Chaco is next.

Notes

AI Transparency: The data on river specifics in the box at the beginning and the art is AI. The rest of the text is written by me. The art for the series is based upon my own love of the Civilian Conservation Corps murals that dot America. The collection of pieces is composed by AI, whose design choices were governed and edited by me. The prose is mine. Each picture features an American persona (men and women naturalists who are associated with the areas I am talking about). Information about each is presented in the “mural”. Because I used AI, I have made a koinonia (/ˌkoinəˈnēə/), which means communion and communal gift, to the Philippines to help preserve green space and restore habitat along the American Rivers. This first essay is about the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota.

Endnotes

^[1]The Book of Common Prayer (1979), the Imposition of Ashes in the Ash Wednesday liturgy, p. 265: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (echoing Genesis 3:19).

^[2]Isaiah 40:6–8 (KJV): “All flesh is grass… The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.” The line “O ye Ice and Snow, bless ye the Lord” is from the Benedicite, omnia opera (A Song of Creation / the Song of the Three Children), Morning Prayer, BCP.

^[3]Glacier National Park was established in 1910.

^[4]A 2019 study counted roughly 82 bodies of ice larger than 0.1 km² in the park at the end of the Little Ice Age; by 2015 only about 26 named glaciers remained large enough to meet the USGS size threshold (0.1 km²). Earlier predictions that the glaciers would vanish by 2020 or 2030 were removed from park exhibits as melting outpaced the models, though some USGS projections (e.g., for Sperry Glacier) extend later in the century. See USGS, “Adapting to the reality of climate change at Glacier National Park”, and Wikipedia, “List of glaciers in Glacier National Park”. (Confirm the current count and the size threshold against the latest USGS Benchmark Glacier data before publication.)

^[5]George Herbert, “Vertue,” in The Temple (1633). Verified against the full text in the Anglican Nature Writing vault.

^[6]Herbert, “Vertue,” final stanza. “Though the whole world turn to coal” is Herbert’s figure for the final conflagration; the resonance with fossil-fuel combustion is the essay’s, not his.

^[7]John Keble, “Ash Wednesday,” in The Christian Year (1827). Verified against the vault text.

^[8]1 Corinthians 15:53–54 (KJV): “For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.”

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. — Psalm 137:1–2^[1]

I am not sure that it is true, but it seems that very empire has been built beside a river, because power is thirsty and always has been. Babylon on the Euphrates and Rome on the Tiber and London on the Thames, and Moscow on the Moskva; the river was never just the supply of water to the locals. It was like a great mirror the city couldn’t look away from, the witness that ran through the middle of everything the city did and carried the evidence downstream. Here is where the women gathered. So when the exiles wanted to testify about what had happened to them, what was happening to them, they did not go to some building but to the public spot where people gathered by the water’s edge for the living of life. They went to the water. By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept. They hung their harps on the willows because Zion would not sing in exile. The songs of Zion would not come in a country whose very river belonged to empire, whose currents ran toward Babylon. So they took their grief to the river because the river was a witness and carried their tears.

A picture of American Quaker, naturalist, scientist, and abolitionist Graceanna Lewis (1821–1912)

I want to take you to the river at the seat of our own power as a country. We like to think about power belonging to others, but the capital of our country belongs to us. The river bears witness.

The Potomac

The Potomac runs three hundred and eighty miles from the Appalachian highlands, past monuments and marble and the dome, until it is spent and worn down at last to sea-level flat and out into the Chesapeake. [1] It provides drinking water to the capital of the United States and more than six million people across its basin. [2] We begin here because often we think policy comes first. What is happening to the river is not “infrastructure.” It is the people’s water.

Izaak Walton, most known for his early fishing guide, was an Anglican priest and naturalist, he spent an entire book trying to say what a river was for and settled, after exhausting its every utility, on the same psalm: those “children of the Israel, who, having hung up their then mute Instruments upon the Willow trees, growing by the Rivers of Babylon, sate down upon those banks bemoaning the ruines of Sion.”[3] The river is what shows us what we have done to ourselves when we’ve forgotten to look away.

Strip away every monument, every church and lobby and senate office until all that’s left is traffic and dirt, and it will still be there. It is our conscience made visible, running downhill - a river that itself carries our sins with it. To me, this all makes its current situation quite something more than an environmental issue.

The Two Cities

There are two cities laid over this one river, and Thomas Traherne knew both of them centuries before there was a river between them to fight about. “There are two worlds,” Traherne wrote. “One was made by God, the other by men. That made by God was great and beautiful… That made by men is a Babel of Confusions: Invented Riches, Pomps and Vanities, brought in by Sin.”[4] Read that, this time with the capital’s river at the edge of your mind, and it stops feeling archaic and feels more present. God’s world is the river with its shad, heron, creatures meeting in the water that falls there as rain even now, long since Babylon, long before the Republic. And men’s world, the towers and glass and digging, the monuments, and residences that rise up along its banks at last now at a scale that should terrify us: row upon air-conditioned row of the machine itself, data centers chewing constantly through electricity and spitting out more heat than they can bear, a babel of invented riches that can never thirst again, but must be cooled and cooled and cooled again, and cooled with water, water drawn from the drinking cup of six million people. They call it Northern Virginia’s Data Alley.

Three hundred and sixty of them already crowd the Northern Virginia hills, too many to count, they say; some estimate a thousand total, stretching across twenty thousand acres of Northern Virginia ground, many of them built upstream of the drinking water intakes themselves. [5] They rise without public accounting of how much water they consume or what they replenish in return. This spring the river tried to tell anyone who would listen. Two hundred to three hundred million gallons of sewage burst from a line that should have failed years ago and spilled straight into the river; near the break, the bacteria count hit almost twelve thousand times what is safe for any body of water. [6] American Rivers just named it the most endangered river in the country. [7]

Now let the tradition offer a bit of wisdom. What we are building is the future, we say; this is economic development, this is progress. Data lives here now; this is where we wash our hands of it and turn back to our lives. I offer Traherne again: These inventions will “pursue the wind: nay, labour in the very fire, and after all reap but vanity.”[8] Six million gallons of sewage is a judgment, albeit the least we’ve mustered so far. Read the whole poem against the lobbyists and you realize that Traherne has described men’s world so well that he doesn’t need to mention data centers at all. They don’t exist as the brochure describes them. In the brochure, the river feeds the temple, sustaining our radiant tomb with cool, forgiving water. In reality the river is the older and more true thing; it is the gift that was there first.

What I write next reveals a bit of my own nerdiness, but it reminds me of the before-and-after images that J.R.R. Tolkien writes of the water in the Shire. J. R. R. Tolkien calls the stream passing Hobbiton simply "the Water" ("Shire- water" when using its full formal name). Prior to Frodo's departure, it is mentioned to be "a clear swift merry rivulet, fringed with trees"; after his return, it is referred to specifically as "the lower Water", malignant, defiled, and polluted with filth by Saruman's henchmen and the mill of the Sandyman.

The calf.

The Israelites made a god of gold while Moses was up the mountain, they thought that Moses and God had abandoned them. That they were left to do what they wanted. God wasn’t fooled. Moses came down, and Moses ground that calf to powder, and Moses had the children of Israel eat it mixed into the water. [9] There is no better image for our activities upstream. We have built a radiant AI and worshiped it. The machine is so total and so bright that we have begun to mistake it for wisdom itself; the mirror for the window; the accident of electrons for the face of God. [10] The calf is being ground into our drinking water, and we drink it every day at the (enchanted) fiat of corporations. Six million people raised their glasses. Six million communicants at a desecrated cup. Here is what the river knows: what we worship before it comes down the pipes to us.

So. What does a river ask of the city it can never stop witnessing? How does a city repent with a river at its knees? Hear George Herbert, because he wrote a sermon three hundred years before: “But rather turn the pipe, and waters course,” he says, “to serve thy sinnes, and furnish thee with store / of sov’raigne tears springing from true remorse.”[11] Change the river. Right where it runs out of your faucet; through the water intake that feeds the machines; turn it and make it count for sin instead. Rivers run both ways, Herbert reminds us. They can run toward our treason, or they can be tortured by remorse back toward the source that “gives to man, as he sees fit, Salvation.” That is where the Potomac goes now. It runs out of someone’s sight, someone’s idea of profit. But it can be turned back.

Herbert knew who gets in the way when it happens, because he had looked hard at that person in the mirror. “He that hath made a sorrie wedding / between his soul and gold,” he wrote, and he hath sold for money his deare Lord, / and is a Judas-Jew.”[12] The world “is an ancient murderer,” he says in the same poem. It “hath slain.” It “kills daily.” You know what enables the murders? Speech. Speech is the cancer of rivers. It is a gift we were given and learned to lie with.

The river whispers, and murmurs louder than our own conventions ever will. It speaks and points a finger. Like how Nathan tricked David with a parable about a lamb; and David talked himself to the cliff’s edge of confession before he said three words: Thou art the man. [13] Potomac water talks softly and reveals the truth of who it is that is guilty of the reality - not a policy or agreement but human beings.

Fill a glass at a tap in the capital, yours, or your office, or your church, or your grandma’s kitchen. Hold the glass and understand. Understand the six million souls at the mercy, and the roar of machinery at its shore; present Baltimore and the watershed we keep forgetting. Imagine with me Washington Irving sitting on a log eating brown bread by the waterfall; present the shad and the heron; present the water you will not drink because it cannot be fixed fast enough, but do not fail to present the river words and how all the money poured upon it has produced wastewater. Pray honestly, then, for that thin stretched line of worry downstream from us all: Save us from violence, discord and confusion; from pride and arrogancy, and from every evil way. [15] Then drink, because you will; the city cannot live without that river, not really. By this revelation resolve simply to break your fellowship with cruelty. When you get to church on Sunday, dry your feet, and catch a vision for how to help turn the world the other way.

Resolve is repentance. Which means it is something physical you do long before you ever try to act upon the vision.

The Exile

The exile couldn’t sing because their harps were on the willows. But by the same prophet who cried with them by Babylon there ran a second scripture, and it is the verse that turns around our own responsibility: Seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away, and pray unto the Lord for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace. [16] Peace means healing, and the river whose bones they wept became the river whose healing they were commanded to seek. We need to see the Potomac that way again. Not just as wounded but as holy. We will grieve it into health, but we must also seek its welfare as we truly never have. Realize that our water rises and sets as one, that our own safety is not negotiated at the river until the river’s safety is first treated as ours. We held our glasses high and promised to put them down. Here is where the exile put theirs. Seek the welfare of the river at the heart of power, wherever that water may run. Seek its health. Take up our harps and let it learn what it is to sing again.

I am going to continue my thinking on water and the next river is west. That river is the Colorado.

Notes

AI Transparency: The data on river specifics in the box at the beginning and the art is AI. The rest of the text is written by me. The art for the series is based upon my own love of the Civilian Conservation Corps murals that dot America. The collection of pieces is composed by AI, whose design choices were governed and edited by me. The prose is mine. Each picture features an American persona (men and women naturalists who are associated with the areas I am talking about). Information about each is presented in the “mural”. Because I used AI, I have made a koinonia (/ˌkoinəˈnēə/), which means communion and communal gift, to the Philippines to help preserve green space and restore habitat along the American Rivers. This first essay is about the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota.

Footnotes

^[1]Psalm 137:1–2 (KJV). The exiles’ lament by the river of the imperial city.

^[2]The Potomac runs roughly 380 miles from the Appalachian highlands to the Chesapeake Bay. See American Rivers, America’s Most Endangered Rivers® of 2026.

^[3]The Potomac is the primary source of drinking water for Washington, D.C., and for more than six million people across its basin (Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and the District). See American Rivers, “Potomac River Leads 2026 List”.

^[4]Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler (1653), Part I, the discourse on rivers (citing Psalm 137). Verified against the full text in the Anglican Nature Writing vault.

^[5]Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, I.7 (ed. Bertram Dobell, London, 1908). Verified against the vault text.

^[6]Northern Virginia’s “Data Center Alley” already hosts more than 300 data centers, with as many as 1,000 projected across nearly 20,000 acres; many proposed facilities sit upstream of drinking-water intakes, and expand without watershed-wide analysis or disclosure of water use and discharge. See American Rivers, “Potomac River Leads 2026 List”; NBC Washington, “Potomac River named U.S.’s most endangered due to data centers, aging infrastructure”.

^[7]The Potomac Interceptor — a sewage line more than 60 years old, past its 50-year design life — failed in early 2026, releasing an estimated 200–300 million gallons of untreated sewage; bacteria near the site reached nearly 12,000 times the safe recreational limit. See American Rivers, “Potomac River Leads 2026 List”; Southern Maryland Chronicle, “Sewage Spill and Data Centers Threaten Potomac”.

^[8]American Rivers, America’s Most Endangered Rivers® of 2026, which placed the Potomac at No. 1. See americanrivers.org.

^[9]Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, I.23 (Dobell, 1908). Verified against the vault text.

^[10]Exodus 32:20 (KJV): “And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it.”

^[11]This is luminarchism — the collapse of transcendence into immanence that occurs when a system grows so deep and radiant that the mind mistakes the system’s own depth for the presence of God, “the mistaking of the mirror for the window,” so that (in the framework’s phrase) fluency is taken for flame. See C. Andrew Doyle, “Luminarchism” (framework note, 2026).

^[12]George Herbert, “The Water-course,” in The Temple (1633). Verified against the vault text.

^[13]George Herbert, “Self-condemnation,” in The Temple (1633).

^[14]2 Samuel 12:1–7 (KJV): Nathan’s parable of the ewe-lamb and his verdict to David, “Thou art the man.”

^[15]George Herbert, “Providence,” in The Temple (1633): “Man is the worlds high Priest: he doth present / The sacrifice for all.”

^[16]The Book of Common Prayer (1979), “For our Country,” p. 820: “Save us from violence, discord, and confusion; from pride and arrogancy, and from every evil way.”

^[17]Jeremiah 29:7 (KJV): “And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the Lord for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace.”

I have previously written an essay on The Spokane River Valley and data center usage of water; this made me want to spend some time reflecting, from an Anglican Episcopal tradition, upon the theology of creation as seen in the deep tradition of nature writing within our church. This tradition is actually full of men and women who have written about their experience as theologians and naturalists. In the series, I hope to pull on those names.

The art for the series is based upon my own love of the Civilian Conservation Corps murals that dot America. The collection of pieces is composed by AI, whose design choices were governed and edited by me. The prose is mine. Each picture features an American persona (men and women naturalists who are associated with the areas I am talking about). Information about each is presented in the “mural”. Because I used AI, I have made a koinonia (/ˌkoinəˈnēə/), which means communion and communal gift, to the Philippines to help preserve green space and restore habitat along the American Rivers. This first essay is about the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota.

So Moses brought Israel from the Red sea, and they went out into the wilderness of Shur; and they went three days in the wilderness, and found no water. And when they came to Marah, they could not drink of the waters of Marah, for they were bitter… And he cried unto the Lord; and the Lord shewed him a tree, which when he had cast into the waters, the waters were made sweet. — Exodus 15:22–25

Three days into the desert, out from sea. This water was undrinkable. They had come up singing, Miriam with timbrel, horse and rider pitched into the sea, and now three days out they stood over a spring and could not bring it to their lips. Marah they called the place. Bitter. It wasn't dry: it would almost have been merciful to be dry. Here was water, could you want more than the very sight of it? It turned the mouth though. It hadn't been denied them, here in the desert: it had been poisoned. Moses cried out. God showed him a tree, and he took the tree and cast it into water, and the bitter was made sweet.

Hold onto that biblical scene because we will come back to it in time.

Water as Gift

I want to take you now to a water that is the opposite of Marah, and to tell you that we are proposing, deliberately and by law, to make it into Marah, to run Moses’s miracle backward, to take what is clean and make it bitter.

There is a country of water in the north of Minnesota that we have taken, in a rare fit of wisdom, to leaving mostly alone. A thousand lakes strung together by streams and portages, granite older than any doctrine underfoot, and water so clean that the old rule among those who paddle it is that you need carry none. You literally could dip the cup over the canoe’s edge and drink. Imagine that for a second. I want you to feel what that is before I tell you what is being done to it.

Somewhere along the way we decided that water would be labeled an economic resource to be bought and sold; some of that is natural due to overpopulation and use. Yet, for any one of us who is a part of an Abrahamic faith, and many of the others, the word “resource” might ought to catch in the throat of anyone who has knelt at the edge of such a lake at first light. A resource is a thing with a price, held in reserve for our use, managed and sold by someone who did not make it. Water like this water is a gift, and the two are not the same, and the whole argument turns on the difference.

Thomas Traherne, three centuries ago an Anglican cleric and poet, knew the difference exactly. “Wine by its moisture,” he wrote, “quencheth my thirst, whether I consider it or no: but to see it flowing from His love who gave it unto man, quencheth the thirst even of the Holy Angels.”^[1] Here in this marvelous meditation on the Eucharist and its giftedness, he offers a manner of speaking, a grammar, for us considering the water.

The water in that northern country slakes an animal thirst whether we consider it or not; that much a beaver has. But to see water as a gift, to understand it flowing from His love who gave it, to see the water as the near end of a giving that began before there was a Minnesota, before there was a continent, when the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters^[2] that is a thirst quenched rarely in such a spiritual sense. Seen through the eyes of those who worship, it is the recognition of giftedness that makes us human and not beavers. “All things come of thee, and of thine own have we given thee,” some of us may easily remember. Water remains a gift regardless of what humans call it for economic reasons. The Spirit still moves on the face of that water. Every aesthetic encounter with it, the loon’s cry across the cold, the light going down gold into the pines, is animated by the third Person of the Trinity revealing what human shadowed eyes only call material, until as through a glass dimly, it discloses the One who gave it.^[3] The water is not a backdrop to that disclosure. The water is the (little sacramental s) sacrament of it.

And here is what our disembodied age has forgotten, and what the tradition has never allowed us to forget: that water is kin to us. “You never enjoy the world aright,” Traherne wrote in the sentence worth remembering, “till the Sea itself floweth in your veins.”^[4] He did not mean it as a metaphor, or not only. The water of that northern country and the water in the four chambers of your heart are the same substance, obeying the same Giver, and to imagine you can poison the one without poisoning the other is precisely the illusion of the buffered self, the modern conceit that I am a sealed thing, cased off, my life lived at a clean distance from the world it depends upon.^[5] It is a lie the body knows better than the mind. Water is the lifeblood of the body, of which we are mostly made. The key ingredient to mud of which we are shaped metaphorically, beings from the atoms of stars.

Bittering

We are preparing to make sweet water bitter. That is the fact, and it is a theological fact for it transforms the gift by human usage into that which is undrinkable. There is a movement in all of God’s dealing with water, and it runs one direction only: bitter made sweet, death-spring made living, the Marah cup turned drinkable by a tree. It is the direction of Exodus, and of Elisha at the poisoned spring of Jericho, who cast in salt and said, “Thus saith the Lord, I have healed these waters; there shall not be from thence any more death or barren land.”^[6] The current of Scripture flows from bitter toward sweet, from barren toward living, always. What is now proposed in the north runs the film backward. It takes a water God has already made sweet and prepares, for a price, to make it bitter, an anti-Elisha, a Marah we would manufacture on purpose and call it industry.

Here is the occasion, and notice that I have kept it for last, because it is the least of it. This past spring, Congress voted to strip the Boundary Waters of the protection that had kept sulfide mining out of its watershed, and the repeal became law.^[7] The road is now clear for a foreign-owned company’s copper-and-nickel mine in the very ground the water drains through.^[8] American Rivers named it, this year, the third most endangered river in the country.^[9] And sulfide mining does one thing with the reliability of a law of nature: exposed to water and air, the rock makes acid, and the acid does not stop making itself for centuries.^[10] It is the surest chemistry in the whole grim field. You cannot mine that ore beside that water and keep the water sweet. The two cannot both be had. Everyone who has studied it knows this, which is why the argument is never really about whether the water will be made bitter, but only about whether the bitterness is worth it.

And there is the frame I want to refuse, the frame that can ask, with a straight face, whether it is worth it. That frame describes a world that does not exist. It speaks of “critical minerals” and “the green transition” and “jobs in the range,” and inside its accounting the water is a line item, weighable, tradeable against other line items, and if the numbers come out right then the water may be spent. Regardless of the generational cost to the flora and fauna who are never part of the balance sheet, the people who swim, play, drink in the water are not mentioned in the line item.

But there is no such world.

There is no ledger on which the water is a quantity, because the water is a gift flowing from love, and a gift is not a quantity; it is a relation, and you cannot buy the far end of a relation without betraying the near end. The mistake is old, and it is always the same: a system of accounting grows so total and so persuasive that we take its depth for the shape of reality itself, and mistake the mirror for the window.^[11] But the ledger is a mirror. It shows us only ourselves, and our disordered wanting. The window is the water, and through it, if we would only stop counting long enough to kneel, the creator that gave it.

Meditation

So let me stop counting and kneel, because an essay that only argues has already half-conceded the buffered self’s terms, and I will not.

Go down to one of those lakes before the others wake. Kneel, the granite is cold, and older than the Church, and does not mind your knees. Put the cup into the water and lift it, and before you drink, say over it words akin to: We thank you, Almighty God, for the gift of water. Over it the Holy Spirit moved in the beginning of creation. Through it you led the children of Israel out of their bondage.^[12] God is moving on it still; you are holding a cupful of the first morning. Through it he led the children out of bondage and brought them to Marah, and made the bitter sweet. In it his Son received the baptism of John. Then drink, and taste that it is sweet, and say the part we always leave out — the confession that belongs after the thanksgiving and before the Amen: forgive us the gift we are preparing to make bitter; the water we would sell by the gallon; the veins we would poison at three days’ distance and tell ourselves we never touched. Then get up, with the taste of the gift still in your mouth, and go and stand between the water and those who would spoil it. That standing-between is not politics. It is the Body of Christ doing what a body does, which is to feel, in one member, the wound prepared for another.

What was the tree that Moses cast into the bitter water?

The first spiritual leaders to reflect upon this passage did not think it was only a tree. They saw in that wood, thrown into the undrinkable spring and making it sweet, the wood of the Cross, the one tree whose casting-in turns every bitterness drinkable, the timber let down into the poisoned water of the whole world to heal it from the inside.^[13] That is the resolution the story was holding for us all along. The only thing that finally sweetens bitter water is a tree, and we know at last which tree, and we know that its sweetening is never cheap and never automatic and never accomplished at a distance. It is cruciform. It costs the person something. It asks a people willing to be the hands that lower the wood.

The Boundary Waters are not yet Marah. The water is still sweet; you can still dip the cup. The tree is not yet cast, which means it is also not yet too late, which means the whole matter stands where Moses stood, at the edge of a spring, with a choice, and the Lord waiting to see what we will pick up and carry to the water. Pray for that country by its name. Pray the thanksgiving over a lake near you, whatever lake is yours, and mean the confession. And then do the bodily thing, the ministering thing, the standing-between because a faith that will not put its own hands to the wood is not yet the faith that sweetened Marah.

I began by saying we were proposing to run a miracle backward. Let me end by saying it is not run yet, and that the direction of Scripture is the other way, and that the whole weight of the story leans toward the sweetening and not the spoiling. We are not fated to make this water bitter. We are only tempted to.

Next in the A Naturalist’s Practical Theology

There is a harder question waiting, though, and I can feel it already. It is one thing to keep sweet the water in a wilderness we set apart and go to on purpose, a water most of us will see once in a life if ever. It is another to reckon with the water we have already fouled without setting anything apart, the water that runs, right now, past the seat of our own power, carrying what we pour into it. If we would do this to the purest water we have left, what have we long since done to the river at the center of the nation?

That river is the Potomac, and it is next.

^[1]Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, I.27 (ed. Bertram Dobell, London, 1908). Verified against the full text in the Anglican Nature Writing vault.

^[2]Genesis 1:2 (KJV): “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

^[3]This is pneumaesthetics — the Holy Spirit as the actual agent who animates aesthetic experience, so that the material discloses the transcendent as a sacramental site rather than a mere symbol. See C. Andrew Doyle, “Pneumaesthetics” (2024), which anchors the claim in Genesis 1:2 and Psalm 104:30.

^[4]Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, I.29 (Dobell, 1908).

^[5]On the “buffered self” — the modern self sealed off from a world it once felt porous to — see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). The counter-claim here, that the Body of Christ is the working unit of witness and is an ecological as well as ecclesial reality, is developed in C. Andrew Doyle, Embodied Apologetics (2024).

^[6]2 Kings 2:19–22 (KJV): Elisha heals the spring at Jericho with salt and the word of the Lord.

^[7]H.J. Res. 140 (2026), overturning the 2023 twenty-year mineral withdrawal that had barred sulfide-ore mining across roughly 225,000 acres of the Rainy River watershed in the Superior National Forest. The Senate passed the resolution in April 2026 and it was signed into law. See Save the Boundary Waters, “H.J. Res. 140 signed into law”; CNBC, “Senate overturns Boundary Waters protections, a boon for Chilean mining company” (Apr. 16, 2026); Earthjustice, “Senate Votes to Strip Minnesota’s Boundary Waters of Protection from Mining Pollution”.

^[8]The Twin Metals copper-nickel project, owned by the Chilean company Antofagasta plc, sited in the watershed that drains into the Boundary Waters. See Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness, “Twin Metals Mining near the Boundary Waters”.

^[9]American Rivers, America’s Most Endangered Rivers® of 2026, which placed the Boundary Waters at No. 3. See americanrivers.org.

^[10]Acid mine drainage: when sulfide-bearing rock is exposed to air and water in mining, it generates sulfuric acid and mobilizes heavy metals, a process that can continue for centuries. See Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness, “Sulfide Mining”.

^[11]This is luminarchism — the collapse of transcendence into immanence that occurs when a system grows so total that the mind mistakes the system’s own depth for the presence of God: “the mistaking of the mirror for the window.” See C. Andrew Doyle, “Luminarchism” (framework note, 2026). The framework is developed more fully against the machine in the next essay.

^[12]The Book of Common Prayer (1979), “Thanksgiving over the Water,” in the rite of Holy Baptism, pp. 306–307: “We thank you, Almighty God, for the gift of water. Over it the Holy Spirit moved in the beginning of creation. Through it you led the children of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt into the land of promise. In it your Son Jesus received the baptism of John…”

^[13]The reading of the tree cast into the waters of Marah as a figure of the Cross is at least as old as the second century: Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 86, numbers it among the Old Testament “wood” that prefigures the Cross; cf. Tertullian, An Answer to the Jews 13, and the wider patristic lignum crucis typology.

The master does not argue about the diagnosis. Someone hostile has done this, he says. But he rejects the cure. No; lest in picking up the weeds you root up the wheat with them. Let them grow together until the harvest.

A few verses later in the same chapter, Jesus gives another picture. The kingdom of heaven is like a net that was cast into the sea and caught every kind of fish (Matthew 13.47–50). The net underwater does not sort; the sorting is done on the shore, and the sorters are angels, not fishermen, and the shore is the end of the age.

Two images from one afternoon of teaching, and they teach two sides of one discipline: a field that cannot be cleansed without destroying it, and a net that catches everything and judges nothing until the last day. They are preached to comfort, and rightly: Comfort, comfort my people, says the Lord. But they are also a mirror in this decade, held up to our own individual and corporate accounts. The church is the household that slept. This essay is about what woke us, and about what people of truth may say once awake.

The Web of Daily Bread
Every morning the church prays: give us this day our daily bread. We pray it so often the economics of our breath escapes us: hands. Bread comes by hands, the sower’s and the reaper’s, the miller’s and the baker’s and the carter’s, and to pray for daily bread is to say that my ordinary day is a cloth, and I am held within a weaving I cannot see.

Our Prayer Book has always prayed it so: the General Intercessions trade unashamedly from sinners to those who teach and learn, to those who labor in our safety and our food, to public offices and counselors, to commerce and industry, to the air and elements of weather. All one cloth. Bread remembers the bodies from which it was sheaved and the bodies to which it becomes sustenance.

Pray the morning again, then, in that discipline: say it aloud, and examine your day. I woke and before my feet could hit the floor my hand found the phone to roll out of bed. I saw a message; an AI read it with me and offered my response. I asked the world a question; it answered at my command before my keyboard. I bought bread with a card; a pattern-reader updated its model of me. I looked at my friends’ faces as children while software decided what I would see from face to face to sale, and monetized the choice. Before Breakfast Prayer, half my waking hours were spent attending another liturgy; twelve in all by ten o’clock. Ones I neither chose nor can name the ministers of, in a sanctuary I cannot see. I see not, think not, ponder not the manner of webbed lives lived together to bring to me bread and that I provide bread to.

As poet Zheng Xiaoqiong wrote in his poem entitled Life, “What you don’t know is that my name is hidden by an employee ID; My hands become part of an assembly line, my body signed over.”

Let's now consider the web of names we do know and the interwoven life that moves past the human contribution to build out our lives, hidden by umbrella corporations that do not produce bread but mammon and are interwoven with our lives and investments.

The smartphone in your pocket will be either a Samsung or an iPhone, that is an easy guess, because together Android and iOS are virtually every smartphone in America, and nine out of every ten adults have one.¹ Apple designed OpenAI’s ChatGPT into iOS itself, and pays Google a reported billion dollars annually to license their custom model Gemini for Siri.² Google’browser and search box, nine out of ten searches worldwide, now provides AI-generated answers to two billion users a month before visiting any human website.³ Meta enabled its Assistant across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, three apps opened by more than three and a half billion people every day, and netted a billion monthly users without trying at all.⁴ Microsoft’s Copilot lives on every Windows machine in the world, billions, and the program desktop workers in the West file their memos and their sermons on it, while Microsoft owns twenty-seven percent of OpenAI whose ChatGPT is queried weekly by nine hundred million people and has signed Azure to its cloud for quarter trillion dollars.⁵ Amazon built Anthropic’s Claude into six hundred million Alexa devices given free with two hundred million Prime memberships in America alone; Amazon leads $17 billion invested into Anthropic, and is an investor in OpenAI too.⁶ The social network X is hardly simply partnered with an AI company: it is owned by one.⁷ Nvidia made $90 billion last year helping them all; every lab above owns its chips, and will invest $40 billion more into OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and other datacenter landlords over the coming years: its portfolio companies are its customers in a market becoming embraced.⁸

That half our waking hours are shared with a cloud is already obvious. But it is not because of our phones. The above is essential in understanding the complicated web of AI production. Bank of America powers Erica on two billion devices, and Morgan Stanley has put eleven billion dollars into AI in part by putting a set of language models on every advisor’s desk. JPMorgan put its own complete suite on a quarter million desks last year. Visa and Mastercard have built the entire card network open to AI agents that can spend your money for you. Walmart serves two hundred seventy million customers weekly and now lets you buy through ChatGPT. Your doctor may contact you via a model working behind the scenes at their EHR.⁹ It is extraordinary how quickly hospitals, airlines, banks and drugstores have all come to share something essential with engineers in Mountain View. There is no routine of waking, asking, writing, shopping, banking or healing through which one or a couple of these companies, erhaps ten in all, is not already inside your head, trading on your choices. They are investors and suppliers to one another, plaintiffs and co-defendants too.

‘Principalities and powers’ is the tradition’s word for them. Principalities and powers; they have existed longer than digital language models, because they are preprogrammed into sin. The principalities and powers of this world are not spirits hovering over society. They are the spirits that organize it: bureaucratic, earthly, greedy to be God. The powers do not need your prayer if they can have your day and help you with your bread: and they have it, from the buzzing cell to the glowing screen.

Christendom has seen companies join themselves together before. Companies that ruled the waves, that set trading conditions for a quarter of humanity. Christendom learned to read them: creaturely, fallen, missionary, penalized by their end.

All economics follow from that closer attention.

A full fifteen percent of the American information technology workforce builds these models. Each of their five trillion dollars of collective market cap funds another fifty billion dollars’ workforce outside it: researchers, servers, lobbyists, educators. The chart does not capture the additional fifteen hundred and thirty thousand US Patents these companies pooled last year defending what cannot be defended — their positions against each other. Or the fifty thousand specialists in workplace satisfaction Google alone calls employees, working to keep their half of the half of humanity inside Apple happy. Or that from OpenAI’s beginning Elon Musk has accessed its board by special corporate flight on SpaceX jets.¹² The family of giants spins together.

If ten of these companies have their fingers on the world, so do thier estimated sixty thousand lobbyists marching our legislators towards what ought not be: under Google they have been every year since Alphabet was born in 2015. Congress has banned itself from meaningful oversight of AI in public by voting a permanent filibuster against setting up the official AI Agency our president created it.¹³ Divided as our politics are there is one vote on which both sides can agree: build the monsters, and build them now. This is the speed chips beg of us.

For public theologians, we must recognize that only after the tradition should the economists speak. But it is not the first time we as humans have bumbled ourselves into such a web of deceit and greed.

Scholars like Shoshana Zuboff have studied what surveillance capitalism exploits: free human experience captured as behavioral data for markets in AI predictions. An economy Shoshana Zuboff likens to the sociologist’s one-way mirror: everything about us knows us, and we know next to nothing about it.¹⁰ That phrase summarizes their central agreed-upon truth. But so does the tradition. It is new technology in old hearts. Surveill means to watch. Since God the eyes that are not God’s have watched us, want to, and aspire with total seeing to be our maker.¹¹ Of course humans have longed to be gods and demigods over others. Today, four of them, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, will invest toward seven hundred billion dollars training these models in 2023.¹¹ More than a fiftieth of annual US GDP is being bet, in one year, on a single piece of physics. Figure 1 traces four wires from four companies into our daily breath and bread. Hold it against your Scriptures: they are one cord.

The Field Held in Common

Every Sunday our ushers pass the plate, and the people put into it what the week has earned them, and the celebrant lifts it with the ancient words from David’s prayer over the temple treasury: all things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee (1 Chronicles 29.14). Then set the plate on the altar, because we honor hard work, provision of our first fruits, and that these things might be used for God’s good work for God’s people. The plate contains the whole economy in miniature for Christians. Wages are in it, and pensions, and dividends; debts too, and severance, and the folded bill from somebody’s fixed income. And, we must recognize honestly that the church has never collected clean money because there has never been any: David knew whose gold he was blessing. As the plate is to the parish, the portfolio is to a people, and every dollar invested is a theological statement about what we believe the world should become.¹² The notion that somehow money is clean is a lie sold by the Powers and Principalities, which we have agreed to use. It is why it must be blessed, not for its illicitness, but because we need to show we are going to launder it for Jesus and for the good of humanity.

Let us be clear too, behind the plate, and beneath many of our roofs, stands an endowment; behind that the diocesan trust and the pension fund and the teacher’s 403(b) and the young curate’s target-date account compounding quietly in the dark. Quietly, and by instruction: the genius of the modern portfolio is that it grows up while you sleep. Consider this: six of ten workers on America’s largest retirement platform invest in a single target-date fund of various types, entered, allocated, and rebalanced automatically until the harvest date printed on the fund’s label, and two of every three new retirement dollars now flow into such funds.¹³ We built ourselves a field that tends itself so we would not have to watch it grow. While everyone was sleeping. “While you slept” is the clause we always read as the parable’s scenery. It turns out to be its engine, and ours.

Please then wake and walk the field. It has three depths, and the deeper you go, the less anyone thought about what we chose to grow there.

The first depth is what we see: the visible field. Its rows have grown astonishingly few. Twenty years ago the ten largest companies made up an eighth of the S&P 500. Today Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla now account for about a third, and the ten largest holdings approach two-fifths of the index, a concentration unprecedented of the market’s entire history.¹⁴ Nvidia, the foundry that arms every lab, is the single largest holding of the great index funds, and the managers of those funds, Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street, hold about a fifth of Nvidia itself and are among the largest shareholders of eight in ten companies in the index.¹⁵

Vanguard’s flagship became this June the first trillion-dollar exchange-traded fund in history; nearly two-fifths of it sits in names linked to AI.¹⁶ Plug the worker auto-enrolled at the median target-date fund into that arithmetic and the answer comes out like this: about a fifth of her retirement dollars now ride on the fortunes of the AI complex, Nvidia and Meta and Microsoft and Alphabet, plus the Taiwanese and Dutch and Korean toolmakers in the fund’s international sleeve, and she chose none of it.¹⁷ Nor has the church chosen elsewhere: the endowments of the Episcopal Church and other churches are paying our own clergy allocations against a world index whose ten largest positions cannot help but be AI-linked at one level or another.¹⁸ This is not a portfolio with exposure to AI. This is exposure to AI with a portfolio attached. Not because of AI, but because of the interweb of relationships shown above, tied into every part of our waking lives. So let's go one depth deeper.

The second depth is the field beneath the field; look there and you will find the private seed companies growing. Labs whose names never show on the statement. Whoever owns Microsoft owns, at one remove, 27% of OpenAI. Whoever owns Amazon owns an equity stake in Anthropic lately valued at $74 billion, a position that alone generated more than half of that company’s earnings surprise last quarter. Whoever owns Alphabet owns a seventh of Anthropic besides.¹⁹ The ordinary index funds have gone spelunking too: the Growth Fund of America, a mainstay of the American 401(k), holds $2 billion of private Anthropic and $886 million of OpenAI; Fidelity’s Contrafund lists OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, and an investment in the weapons contractor Anduril; as of this writing some seventy retail funds now hold a position in one lab or the other.²⁰ The seed companies are already in the barn, friends. The barn is where the pensions are kept.

Beneath the barn is the third depth: the watercourses. Everything the field drinks. The international index fund? Four of its ten largest holdings are the chipmakers and semiconductor toolmakers of the AI supply chain. The real estate fund? Its leaderboard is populated by datacenter landlords.²¹ The utilities? Last year American datacenters consumed between four and five percent of national electricity use, and that share is projected to nearly double by 2028; Three Mile Island is restarting up, its entire output sold to Microsoft for the next two decades, and its owner sits in every index fund you can buy.²² The bond fund? The refuge of the drabbest among us? Big tech sold $121 billion of bonds last year and another $159 billion in the first five months of this one; which is to say the ordinary bond fund now finances the loom. Last March the first loan collateralized by GPU servers was rated investment grade.²³ Strip the AI stocks out of the market over the last two years, and most of the return disappears with them. By some estimates, building these machines has contributed the majority of recent US GDP growth itself.²⁴ I am not an economist, yet it did not take long to understand the above web of interlocking investments.

At this point the parable must leave its comfort zone. Jesus tells the story in Matthew and the adversary comes by night; he’s a person you could summon if you wished. In our field there was no person. The sowing was done by arithmetic, by the cap-weighted index that automatically buys more of whatever firm is growing largest; by the auto-enrollment form; by the default option. Like many human things we planted without counting the cost and understanding the full effect of the seed sown. That is not an excuse for us. It is a diagnosis. We have created, not unlike other parts of our lives, an anonymity to which we must now serve. The work of what Scripture calls powers: structures that sin on our behalf without any single villain required, and then present us the proceeds as if they were our own prudence.

I am not denying individual manipulation, individual greed, or opportunistic wealth sowing and reaping. Yet your anonymity is important when we consider that, when we speak about the web of relational investments, we are all part of it, even though we do not take an active role, and it happens with very little of our knowing.

And so the servants ask. We must ask the question again, which now has our names in it. Do you want us to go and gather them? To uproot the AI complex from the common field, sell every last share today, everywhere that it touches? Shall we break the powers, yes. But it would also break the teacher’s pension. It would break the widow’s target-date fund. It would break the endowment that underwrites the pantry van, that fills the SNAP gap, or meets the needs of those in need of healthcare. To gather the weeds would be to uproot the wheat too. Which is why the master says, “No”. Because he loves the mouths the bread feeds, that are dependent upon the wheat. Listen to your powers, and you will hear them say, “The field is fine; go back to sleep.” But notice what the master doesn’t say. He doesn’t say the weeds are wheat. The master does not say the field is fine or healthy. And he doesn’t say, "Go back to sleep."

The Sword

Two verses earlier, Jesus walks among those who came for him with swords and clubs. One of those who stood around Jesus took up the only policy his fear could devise. He drew his sword and smote the servant of the priests, cutting off his ear. Put your sword back into its place, Jesus said: for all who take the sword will perish by the sword (Matthew 26.51–52). The Christian tradition has never heard this word only about gardens. It heard the full trajectory of the kingdom’s working metal when Jesus spoke it, the trajectory Isaiah heard three centuries before: they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks (Isaiah 2.4) takes root. Scripture bears witness that the forge turns the other way as well. After that prophecy, Joel sees his people summoned by other nations in panic: "beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears” (Joel 3.10). Every age funnels its metal down one chute or the other; the prophets don’t ask if a people has iron, they ask which way it is flowing and how is it to be used in this moment.

Our country’s spears flow toward Joel’s image. If we say this plainly, let us also say whose forges do the work: the same corporations that tend the field our household puts its bread ticket in every week grow alongside income, savings, and pensions.

Consider this: OpenAI removed the sentence prohibiting “military and warfare” uses from its publicly available usage policy in January of 2024; by December, OpenAI partnered with Anduril, the autonomous weapons company, to point its models at drones.²⁵ Within 28 days in summer 2025, all major American frontier labs OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI signed Pentagon contracts worth up to $200 million each to help prototype frontier AI applications for “national security.”²⁶ Google pledged in 2018 not to design AI for weapons or surveillance; the company quietly deleted that pledge from its AI principles in February 2025 and launched its Pentagon cloud partnership later that December, around which millions in uniform would flow, with Gemini, the same model that powers Search, running the DoD’s new enterprise chatbot, and Grok arriving weeks later.²⁷ Microsoft’s Cloud already powers the secret networks where OpenAI’s models have run for the Department; Microsoft’s “brain-controlled computer” headset program for soldiers transferred to Anduril atop Microsoft Azure.²⁸ Meta released Llama to defense contractors and agencies and purchased a stake in Scale AI, which the Pentagon selected as its contractor to build AI war plans.²⁹ Palantir’s Maven system, built to find enemies’ faces in its ocean of surveillance, added half a billion dollars to its Pentagon contract, becoming what the Deputy Secretary recently described as the “cornerstone of joint command and control” and earning the Army’s business a new contract worth up to ten billion dollars.³⁰ In January 2026, the Pentagon released its new strategy on military AI, ordering each department's AI contract to include terms that permit “any lawful use” of the technology being bought, the significance of which we will unpack below.³¹

The reality is that we may debate military spending and what we need to spend on. That is not the point of the essay. The point of the essay is to reveal that not only is the web of investment complicated enough to name that a book purchased on Amazon with your Bank of America card already is part of the AI web of relationships and that it is wired into the military-industrial complex. Moreover, even clean energy investment is connected.

Draw the wires out far enough and the old binaries of dirty and clean energy break down. All energy eventually powers two sockets: the AI data center and the defense establishment. Chevron just signed an exclusive 2.7-gigawatt contract to supply electricity to Microsoft’s sprawling data center complex in West Texas and is publicly “chasing after more deals like it,” while natural gas producers tout themselves as the energy-boom’s essential fuel, “the energy trade of the century”; oil majors cash in both ways, using AI to wring more oil from wells while selling electricity that trains it. Renewable energy doesn’t get a pass: Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have all signed contracts to purchase nuclear power, reviving old reactors, committing to small modular reactors, signing decade-long supply agreements, to feed AI models as well. This is increasingly Gigawatts extracted from Permian Basin gas fields and freshly unlocked nuclear reactors are now training models for the security state. Petroleum and electrons, wind turbines and nuclear reactors, contenders in partisan disputes over climate, mesh together here in one energy-defense-industrial complex where energy companies monetize AI, AI powers the security state, and the security state secures demand for both. Oil and Gas or clean energy? Both power our U.S. military-industrial complex, and are also tied to AI now.

I hope you understand that while you slept, the sword has been swung already. Israeli intelligence agents have described to reporters AI systems named “The Gospel” and “Lavender” that provided strike lists in Gaza at a stupefying rate: algorithms analyzed and scored tens of thousands of human beings for death based on patterns, with targets ultimately receiving “about twenty seconds of review” by an officer. “I had zero added value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval.” One military official involved denies that such a kill list exists. All the companies whose clouds and models powered that war insist they found no evidence their technology was involved in the targeting decisions. The Associated Press found that the Pentagon’s usage of these American commercial AIs increased by nearly 200x after October 7, 2023.³² No one needs to decide these contested facts to understand the truth that is not up for dispute: we have entered the era where an algorithm proposes whom the sword will fall upon.

The companies, swords, phones, and science flowing through Figures 1 and 2 now render a capability to recommend death on an industrial scale, a capability whose judgments, we are told, will continue to improve. In Ukraine, Palantir’s CEO has boasted that his firm’s software powers “the vast majority” of targeting.³³ So, if you support Ukraine against Russia, you are supporting this type of usage. Again, the theological stake need not wait on the fog of war: whether Israel, Ukraine, future partners, or agencies we will never hear about from these companies, a software system that ranks humans for death has been entrusted a responsibility our tradition only ascribes to Christ the Judge of all the earth. And enrolled into that judgment is the image of God.

Put it away now, because this is an essay about the field. All six of those classic weapons stocks, Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing, L3Harris, are represented in roughly equal proportion in a typical S&P 500 index fund. Palantir is already over twice Lockheed Martin. Those five titans of dual-use tech whose clouds, chips, and models will bear this new military wonder carry roughly a quarter of the index all on their own. Buy $10,000 of the ordinary fund, and you lend about $115 to the primes, $45 to Palantir, and $2,400 to the companies building the web around you; and the money managers responsible for stewing that portion of your household’s savings are among the largest shareholders of every prime contractor in the land.³⁴

This is the shape your mission must now reckon with honestly. The sword cannot be merely a sector we decline to touch. The sword is steel folded through the field’s entirety, proportionately richest, in fact, not in the divisions labeled defense, but those labeled technology or energy. Figure 3 overlays that information, extracting only one thread remaining.

The Honest Word

Two lies now stand ready for the church’s mouth, and each has a constituency, and each would be easier than the truth; they typically do battle via social media and at our general gatherings. Both misconstrue a world that does not exist as they describe it.

The first lie is purity. It says: gather the weeds. Sell every share, screen every fund, publish the press release, walk out of the field clean. But the field, Jesus says, is the world, and Paul told the Corinthians the same thing about their economy that the master told the servants about the field: if you want to dissociate entirely from the greedy and the robbers, you would then need to go out of the world (1 Corinthians 5.10). The weapons primes are one percent of the index; the dual-use giants are a quarter of it; and the newest sword-makers are private companies no public divestment can touch, even as the regulators open ordinary retirement accounts to private markets, so that the unreachable field grows.³⁵ A church that announces its own successful extraction has not left the field. It has only stopped telling the truth about where its feet are standing. The pension check still clears, the pledges are deposited, and the endowment fund pays out. The funds people and the church depend upon still compound. The purity is paper purity, and the world can smell it.

The second lie is inevitability. It says: because extraction is impossible, refusal is meaningless; the sword will be forged with us or without us, so it may as well pay our pensions. This is the powers’ favorite sermon; Zuboff heard it years ago and named it the aura of inevitability, the doctrine the system preaches about itself.³⁶ But the powers are creatures made of human beings, CEOs and board members, and this very year has produced witnesses against their doctrine.

One frontier laboratory refused to strike from its military contracts the clauses barring mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, and for keeping its red lines was designated a “supply chain risk,” a mark never before laid on an American company; a federal judge called the designation retaliation, and the refusal stands.³⁷ One platform company, confronted with reporting that its cloud held a surveillance archive of an occupied people’s telephone calls, cut the service, “we do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians,” and later conceded the reporting was in elements true.³⁸ These are not canonizations; the refusals were partial, costly, contested, and that is precisely their value. They prove what inevitability denies: that inside the field, this side of the harvest, a hand can still decline, a line can still be held, a plowshare can still be hammered out.

Between the two lies the honest word. It is smaller than the first lie and braver than the second, and it has three clauses. It is the one public theology needs to focus upon, and our actions need be attentive to.

The first clause: where our hand actually holds a strand, we cut it. At the primary level, the funds we ourselves select, the mandates we ourselves write, the securities we directly own and command, no investment in the manufacture of weapons. Here the church is not being asked to invent anything; it is being asked to mean what it has already said. Our Executive Council keeps a No-Buy List that bars the five largest American defense contractors by name, and any major contractor drawing more than half its revenue from military work; and the 81st General Convention resolved, in 2024, that the church’s exclusions must reach the makers of indiscriminate weapons , naming lethal autonomous weapons among them.³⁹ The screened instruments exist; even the largest index houses sell broad funds that exclude the weapons manufacturers.⁴⁰ The first clause is implementable this fiscal year, kept current as the sword-makers change shape, and kept without the pretense that it cleanses us. It does not cleanse us. The servants were forbidden the field’s purging; they were never forbidden their own obedience. What I am saying is that the strength lies not in any resolution or one action but in the action of each one of us.

And, because we believe in the importance of individual action freely taken, we need to publish the list and invite, not mandate, parishioners to take action. This is our Episcopal way.

The second clause: where the mesh holds us, we say so. Naaman the Syrian, healed in the Jordan, stood before the prophet and told the truth about the house he was going home to: when my master goes into the house of Rimmon to worship there, leaning on my arm, and I bow down in the house of Rimmon, may the LORD pardon your servant in this one thing. And Elisha did not excommunicate him, and did not excuse him. He said: go in peace (2 Kings 5.18–19). There is a whole ethics of entanglement in those three words, neither license nor exile, but grace for the honest. The church’s version of Naaman’s sentence should be an annual one, published, specific: here is where the index holds us, the dual-use quarter of every broad fund, the private laboratories our screens cannot reach; here is what we voted with our shares, what we pressed the managers for, what we failed at. Even the divisions within our own house belong in the saying: the church’s mission society keeps the no-buy list, while the fund that supports our mission has chosen engagement over exclusion, a live and unfinished argument among the faithful, which honesty must name rather than paper over.41 May the Lord pardon his servants. In an economy built on the one-way mirror, let the church be the one institution whose windows are glass both ways.

The third clause: we keep the watch. The enemy sowed while we slept, and the sowing has not stopped. The church’s oldest discipline against the dark is not the sword Peter reached for; it is the vigil. Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night. Wakefulness is a liturgical act before it becomes a policy, and then it must become one: the annual review conducted like an examination of conscience; the questions asked aloud in vestry and convention; the proxies voted, for the index managers hold, in the end, our savings, and the church’s small voice sits inside a very large one; the advocacy sustained until human judgment over life and death is written back into law and contract; the watch handed on, treasurer to treasurer, convention to convention, as the office is handed on at nightfall.

I will tell you when this stopped being an argument for me and became a practice. It was when I realized our and my own complicitness, even though I have tried to be a good steward. I confess what I could not sever. I give thanks for what the returns will do, the curate’s stipend, the pantry’s van, the camp scholarships. And then I said the sentence the church has always said over compromised gifts: all things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee.

And the bread, this is the whole of it, the bread made from this economy’s wheat, grown in the very rows where the tares stand; God does not refuse. God takes it, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it back as the Body given for the world. Gift is the one motion the net cannot predict, because gift moves outward and does not feed on itself. The field does not have to be pure to become the matter of the kingdom. It has to be offered.

I have often said, “We are money laundering for the Lord Jesus.” Indeed, that is a funny way of understanding both our human sin and our good work in one breath.

So the images return, transformed, as they must. The net is still in the water and we are still in the net, but the net that holds at the last is not the one the companies wove; it is the mercy that sorts on the shore, and the sorting is not our work, and that is not our despair but our peace. The field is still mixed, and will be until the end, as it has always been, but the harvest has a Lord, who has told the servants their part: the honest word, the severed strand, the vigil, the table. Let both grow together until the harvest. Until then: keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night.

Coda: To Vestries, Trustees, and Investment Committees

What the essay says in images, policy must say in clauses. Three are enough to begin. First, adopt the primary-level exclusion: no direct holdings, in any fund you select or mandate you write, in the manufacturers of weapons, with the Executive Council’s No-Buy List and General Convention’s resolution on indiscriminate and autonomous weapons as your floor, and the diocesan Faith and Code screening checklist as your working instrument.42 Second, adopt Naaman’s audit: one page, once a year, published to the parish or the convention, where the mesh holds you, what you voted, what you pressed for, what you could not reach, read aloud at the annual meeting and prayed over at the confession and offertory. Third, keep the watch: name the officer who owns the review, set it in the calendar beside the audit and the ember days, and hand it on. None of this will extract you from the field; it is not meant to. It is meant to make you the kind of household that is awake in it, praying, ministering, giving, serving, until the Lord of the harvest comes.

Notes

1. Pew Research Center, Mobile Fact Sheet (Nov. 2024): 91% of U.S. adults own a smartphone; StatCounter, U.S. mobile OS share (June 2026): iOS 58.4%, Android 41.6%.

2. Apple integrated ChatGPT into Apple Intelligence beginning Dec. 2024 (iOS 18.2); on the reported ~$1B-per-year Apple–Google agreement for a custom Gemini model powering Siri: CNBC (Jan. 12, 2026) — reported, not confirmed by either company; Apple, WWDC announcements (June 8, 2026).

3. StatCounter, worldwide search share (June 2026): Google 91.3%; Google I/O keynote (May 19, 2026): AI Overviews above 2.5 billion monthly users.

4. CNBC (May 28, 2025): Meta AI reaches 1 billion monthly active users; Meta, Q1 2026 results (Apr. 29, 2026): 3.56 billion daily active people across its apps.

5. Microsoft statements (2025): ~1.4 billion monthly active Windows devices; Microsoft–OpenAI restructured partnership (Oct. 28, 2025): Microsoft holds ~27% of OpenAI Group PBC and OpenAI committed to ~$250B of incremental Azure purchases (Microsoft; CNBC; Bloomberg, Oct. 28, 2025); OpenAI (Mar. 31, 2026): ChatGPT above 900 million weekly active users.

6. CNBC (Feb. 28, 2025) and Amazon announcements: Alexa+’s most powerful features powered by Anthropic’s Claude; rollout to all U.S. users (Feb. 2026) across 600M+ Alexa devices, included with Prime (~200M U.S. memberships, CIRP 2026); Amazon’s Anthropic position carried at ~$74.2B (Amazon Form 10-Q, Apr. 2026; Fortune, June 4, 2026); Alphabet holds ~14% of Anthropic (court filings, 2025); Amazon among the anchors of OpenAI’s $122B round (OpenAI, Mar. 31, 2026).

7. xAI acquired X in an all-stock transaction valuing X at $33B (CNBC, Mar. 28, 2025).

8. Nvidia market capitalization above $5 trillion (Forbes, May 13, 2026); Nvidia investments and commitments: up to $100B alongside a 10GW OpenAI deployment (Nvidia, Sept. 22, 2025 — a letter of intent, later restructured toward equity participation in OpenAI’s Mar. 2026 round), up to $10B in Anthropic (Nov. 18, 2025), xAI Series E (Jan. 6, 2026), CoreWeave (Jan. 2026), Intel $5B (Dec. 2025).

9. JPMorgan LLM Suite (CNBC, Aug. 9, 2024; JPMorganChase, 2025–26); Morgan Stanley–OpenAI assistant, ~98% advisor-team adoption (CNBC, Sept. 18, 2023; OpenAI case study, 2024); Bank of America, Erica at 3 billion interactions (Aug. 2025); Visa Intelligent Commerce (Apr. 30, 2025) and Mastercard Agent Pay (Apr. 29, 2025); Walmart–OpenAI Instant Checkout (Oct. 14, 2025); Epic–Microsoft Azure OpenAI in clinician workflows, including patient-message drafting (Epic, 2023–25).

10. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (PublicAffairs, 2019).

11. CNBC (Feb. 6, 2026): combined 2026 capital expenditure of Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft approaching $700B, against U.S. GDP of roughly $30T (author’s ratio).

12. C. Andrew Doyle, Faith and Code: White Paper for the Task Force on AI (Episcopal Diocese of Texas, Apr. 2026), Part Two.

13. Vanguard, How America Saves 2026 (June 2026): 61% of participants hold a single target-date fund; nearly two of three contribution dollars flow to TDFs; 61% of plans (79% of large plans) auto-enroll; target-date assets $5.2T (Sway Research via NAPA, Feb. 2026); U.S. retirement assets $49.1T at year-end 2025, 34% of household financial assets (Investment Company Institute, Q1 2026).

14. Magnificent 7 at 34.8% of the S&P 500 (May 2026) vs. 12.5% in 2016 (Motley Fool Research, May 13, 2026; 33–36% by daily weightings, July 2026); top-10 concentration near 40% vs. a long-run average of ~24% and a prior record of 28% in 1970 (Pensions & Investments, Jan. 8, 2026; Forbes, June 2026).

15. Nvidia at ~7.4–8% of the index (Slickcharts/StockAnalysis, July 2026); Vanguard 9.3%, BlackRock 7.5%, State Street 4.1% of Nvidia (13F aggregation, Mar. 31, 2026); the Big Three as collectively largest shareholder in ~88% of S&P 500 companies (Bebchuk & Hirst, restated 2026), on combined assets above $30T (BlackRock $13.9T, SEC filing Q1 2026; Vanguard ~$11.6T; State Street ~$5.7T).

16. Bloomberg (June 3, 2026): Vanguard’s VOO becomes the first ETF to reach $1T; top ten holdings 39.2% of assets (July 2026).

17. Author’s arithmetic from the Vanguard Target Retirement 2050 fact sheet (Mar. 31, 2026: 52.6% U.S. total market, 36.8% international) and VTI/VXUS weightings (July 2026): ~16% in the Magnificent 7 plus ~3.5% in TSMC, ASML, Samsung, and SK Hynix.

18. Church Pension Fund, investment profile (Mar. 31, 2026): benchmark 62% MSCI ACWI / 38% Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate; iShares MSCI ACWI fact sheet (Mar. 31, 2026): top ten holdings, 22.95% of the index — Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Broadcom, TSMC, Meta, Tesla.

19. Microsoft Form 10-Q (quarter ended Mar. 31, 2026); Amazon Q1 2026 results: $16.8B pre-tax gain on its Anthropic holding; Bloomberg (Apr. 24, 2026): Alphabet’s ~14% stake and up to $40B of additional commitment.

20. Q1 2026 fund filings: Growth Fund of America held ~$2.06B of Anthropic and ~$917M of OpenAI; Fidelity Contrafund schedule of investments (June 29, 2026): OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX (6.8% of the fund), Anduril; ~72 funds holding Anthropic and ~66 holding OpenAI; OpenAI’s Mar. 2026 round also included the University of California’s investment office and the sovereign funds MGX and Temasek (OpenAI, Mar. 31, 2026).

21. Vanguard VXUS top holdings (July 2026): TSMC 4.0%, Samsung 2.2%, SK Hynix 1.9%, ASML 1.4%; Vanguard VNQ top holdings include Equinix, American Tower, and Digital Realty (July 2026).

22. U.S. Department of Energy / Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Dec. 2024): datacenters at 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023, projected 6.7–12% by 2028; EIA (Jan. 13, 2026); Constellation–Microsoft 20-year power purchase agreement for the restarted Three Mile Island Unit 1 (CNBC, Sept. 20, 2024; World Nuclear News, 2026).

23. LPL Financial (May 28, 2026): hyperscaler bond issuance of $121B in 2025 and $159B in Jan.–May 2026; technology now ~10% of the U.S. investment-grade corporate index; Bloomberg (Oct. 30, 2025): Meta’s $30B bond drew ~$125B of orders; Moody’s rated CoreWeave’s $8.5B GPU-backed facility investment grade (A3) on Mar. 31, 2026.

24. S&P Dow Jones Indices via Statista (Jan. 6, 2026): Nvidia, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Broadcom supplied ~44% of the S&P 500’s 2025 return; 24/7 Wall St. (May 25, 2026): excluding AI names, the 22-month return falls from ~42% to ~16%; J.P. Morgan Asset Management (Sept. 2025) and Pantheon Macroeconomics via Fortune (Feb. 23, 2026) on AI capital spending and GDP growth — analyst-derived and contested (cf. CNBC, Jan. 26, 2026); IT capex at a record 35%+ of S&P 500 capex (May 2026).

25. The Intercept (Jan. 12, 2024); CNBC (Jan. 16, 2024); OpenAI–Anduril partnership (joint announcement, Dec. 4, 2024).

26. DoD Chief Digital and AI Office awards: OpenAI (June 16, 2025); Anthropic, Google, and xAI (July 14, 2025) — ceilings of $200M each (CNBC, July 14, 2025; company statements).

27. Washington Post and CNBC (Feb. 4, 2025) on Google’s removal of its weapons and surveillance pledge; Defense News and DefenseScoop (Dec. 9, 2025) on GenAI.mil powered by Gemini; NPR (Jan. 13, 2026) on Grok’s addition.

28. DefenseScoop (May 7, 2024; Jan. 16, 2025) on GPT-4 and GPT-4o in Azure Government Top Secret; Nextgov (Apr. 2025) on Azure OpenAI at Impact Level 6; Microsoft–Anduril IVAS announcement (Feb. 11, 2025).

29. Meta (Nov. 4, 2024): Llama for U.S. national security agencies and contractors; CNBC (June 12, 2025): $14.3B for 49% of Scale AI; Defense Innovation Unit (Mar. 5, 2025): Thunderforge.

30. DefenseScoop (May 23, 2025; Apr. 3, 2026): Maven Smart System from a $480M award to a ~$1.3B ceiling to program of record and “cornerstone” of joint command and control; Army–Palantir enterprise agreement up to $10B (July 31, 2025); Palantir FY2025 results (SEC filing, Feb. 2026): U.S. government revenue of $1.855B.

31. Department of War, Artificial Intelligence Strategy (Jan. 12, 2026); DefenseScoop (Jan. 13, 2026).

32. +972 Magazine/Local Call, “A Mass Assassination Factory” (Nov. 30, 2023) and “Lavender” (Apr. 3, 2024, with the Guardian) — investigative reporting based on anonymous Israeli intelligence sources; the IDF denies that a “kill list” exists and states that analysts independently review targets under international law; Associated Press (Feb. 18, 2025) on the ~200-fold rise in Israeli military use of Microsoft and OpenAI commercial AI after Oct. 7, 2023; Microsoft statement (May 15, 2025) confirming Azure and AI services to Israel’s Ministry of Defense and reporting no evidence to date that its technologies were used to target or harm; Guardian/+972 (Aug. 6, 2025) on the Unit 8200 Azure archive — reported; OpenAI states it has no partnership with the IDF.

33. Alex Karp, Palantir CEO (Euronews, Feb. 2, 2023); Time (Feb. 2024).

34. S&P 500 weightings (Slickcharts, July 13, 2026 — weights drift daily and should be re-verified at publication): RTX 0.38%, Boeing 0.25%, Lockheed Martin 0.18%, General Dynamics 0.15%, Northrop Grumman 0.11%, L3Harris 0.08% (≈1.15% combined); Palantir 0.45%; Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta ≈24% combined; 13F aggregations (2025–Q1 2026): Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street among the top five holders of each prime (e.g., Lockheed Martin: State Street ~14.8%, Vanguard ~9.3%, BlackRock ~5.3%).

35. Executive Order, “Democratizing Access to Alternative Assets for 401(k) Investors” (Aug. 7, 2025); Department of Labor proposed rule (Mar. 30, 2026).

36. Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, on “the aura of inevitability.”

37. Department of War supply-chain-risk designation of Anthropic (Mar. 3, 2026) under 10 U.S.C. §3252 and FASCSA — the first applied to an American company (Sen. Elizabeth Warren, letters of Mar. 23, 2026); preliminary injunction (Mar. 26, 2026; Law.com, Mar. 27, 2026); an appeals court declined emergency relief pending appeal (CNBC, Apr. 8, 2026), and the litigation continues. Anthropic retains its own $200M DoD agreement and its Claude Gov models — the refusal concerned unlimited-use contract terms, not defense work as such; OpenAI accepted a classified-network deployment under “all lawful purposes” terms in the same week (Fortune, Mar. 2, 2026).

38. Guardian/+972 (Aug. 6, 2025); TechCrunch (Sept. 25, 2025), quoting Microsoft vice chair Brad Smith; Data Center Dynamics (June 2026) on the completed review finding evidence supporting elements of the reporting.

39. Executive Council of the Episcopal Church, No-Buy List of Prohibited Stocks (adopted June 2023): Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX, and top-50 contractors deriving >50% of revenue from military contracts; 81st General Convention (June 2024), Resolution A030, “No Investment in Certain Weapons,” directing a weapons no-buy list including lethal autonomous weapons.

40. E.g., Vanguard’s ESG U.S. and international stock ETFs (FTSE Choice methodology) exclude controversial and conventional weapons manufacturers and civilian firearms; MSCI ESG Screened index family; As You Sow, Weapon Free Funds database. Their structural limits: revenue thresholds do not catch the dual-use giants, and private companies lie beyond any public screen.

41. Church Pension Fund, socially responsible investing statement (2026): engagement, ESG integration, and impact allocations, without a categorical weapons exclusion.

42. Doyle, Faith and Code (2026), investment-screening checklist; cf. Wespath’s 10%-of-revenue weapons exclusion and Friends Fiduciary’s peace-testimony screen, which excludes weapons manufacture while accepting off-the-shelf commercial sales to the Department of Defense — the same primary-level distinction proposed here.

Tonight, in Nairobi, Manila, and elsewhere, young men and women are working at computer screens, classifying images so that a distant machine can learn to see. They are paid by the number of tasks they complete. They have no employment contract, no benefits, and no credit for the product they feed with their labor. They are part of what you might call the invisible workforce behind artificially created intelligence; they sit at the nexus of two of the mightiest converging forces on the planet today: AI and the gig economy.

The Anglican Science Commission asked me to share my perspective on how AI intersects with global poverty and inequality. I approached their request as more of a learner than as an expert, a bishop who has watched this technology make its way into the life of the church. The Commission challenged me with one question that drove every word of the monograph I wrote: what does God’s church owe the world at this moment? This essay is a short version of my response. The longer version is a monograph available via a free link and via purchase below. It starts with that girl working at her screen, because this argument rests on her fingertips.

Listen to the gospel before you listen to the cautionary tale that follows, because there is tremendous good news here. AI ran its first end-to-end weather forecasting pipeline last year. It built astronomy’s first foundation model last year. In hospitals, clinical note drafting tools have reduced physicians’ documentation burden by up to 83%, helping physicians experiencing burnout brought on by paperwork. Generative AI reached 53% of the global population in three years, outpacing the spread of PCs, phones, or internet expansion in their day. And for so many in the Global South, it’s coming online as the first access point to expert knowledge they’ve ever had: a tutor for the student whose school library doesn’t exist, a translator for the merchant whose language isn’t spoken at the market, a diagnostician in the rural clinic that has never had a specialist walk through its doors. Optimistically, economists estimate the tech could contribute 7% to global GDP over the next decade. That’s seven trillion dollars. For gig workers around the world, a platform can provide wages where there were none. This is a legitimate promise.

The church in the West has no right to look down its nose at any of these stories. What I am pointing towards here is that artificially created intelligence is never just one thing - good or bad. It is a tool placed in human hands for good and ill, depending on how it is stewarded.

Now consider the risk, the peril, which is equally quantifiable. Few own the ability to create this technology. America built fifty of the world’s leading AI models in 2025. China built thirty. All of Europe built two. The Global South built effectively zero. One company provides more than 60 percent of the world’s AI computing capability, and it is American. Five hundred years after the Portuguese caravels set sail, the tools of the era are once again designed from the West, owned by the West, and priced by the West, drawing labor and power from the edges.

They’re thirsty and hot. Training one frontier model released over 72,000 tons of carbon. One year’s worth of cooling water for another popular model could quench the thirst of 12 million people. Forty percent of all jobs globally are exposed to AI, according to the IMF. And of those jobs at risk, roughly half in wealthy countries will likely be hurt rather than helped by the technology. Low-wage jobs, the first rung on every young worker’s career ladder, are already disappearing, especially in the West. Meanwhile, development elsewhere grows. As one data center is refused here, it moves there. The map below offers a sense of the global pressure on water and power in an ecology already stretched to its limit. Elon Musk is banking on the fact that the future of AI and tech centers will be in space, where this pressure is relieved, and power and cooling are available.

Look at where the costs land, because the geography is the argument. The monograph maps the pressure points, and the numbers below match the map:

• Northern Virginia (“Data Center Alley”): the world’s densest cluster, drawing roughly 26 percent of Virginia’s electricity, about 12 gigawatts, and forcing Dominion’s first household rate rise since 1992.

• Phoenix, Arizona: desert siting, with regional water tied to data centers projected to rise roughly 400 percent, from 2.9 to 14.5 billion gallons.

• The Pacific Northwest (The Dalles and Quincy): Google drew some 434 million gallons in 2024, about 40 percent of The Dalles’ water, while Quincy’s water and hydropower are described as maxed out.

• Santiago and Montevideo: centers built on strained aquifers during drought; a permit reversed in Chile, protests in Uruguay.

• Aragón and the Netherlands: cooling water set against farms and drinking supply.

• Dublin: more than 20 percent of national electricity, with new grid connections effectively capped.

• Inner Mongolia and Guizhou: the largest cluster by capacity, over 3,000 megawatts, under the banner “East Data, West Computing.”

• Mumbai, Chennai, Singapore, the Gulf: the fastest growing markets, and among the most water and grid stressed.

The throughline: the costs concentrate in dry regions, small towns, and the Global South, borne first by those who did least to cause them, while ownership sits elsewhere.

Part Two: The Anglican World

And beneath it all sits the gig worker again. Those breathtaking brains are being trained on the annotation economy, the ghost work of labeling and rating and moderating, for pennies on the dollar in countries that will own zero of what they helped construct.

Workers in Nairobi who make less than two bucks an hour annotate pictures of murder and abuse so that AI mined from their labor can feel safe to consumers in the West.

The promise and the peril travel on the same cable. And so the data are speaking to us about two things that are true at once: This is among the most powerful technology ever put into human hands. And it’s being deployed along the oldest cleavages of who has advantage and who is exploited that we know. The cable that carries data follows the same global south-to-west route as the colonial and slave ships of old - the chain and the cable. That’s the story we recognize. Now we’ve just got to figure out what the Church says about it.

We, as Episcopal Anglicans, have a bit of history we can look back on to help us think about the way forward. Writing in Britain during wartime, William Temple argued that the church may pronounce not just on principle but "on matters of social order which she thinks God is revealing to her"; technical particulars may be left to experts. Christianity and Social Order sold 140,000 copies in its first six months; it helped will the welfare state into existence.

My monograph pulls Temple's grammar against the cable and the chain: underwater fibers that transmit 95 percent of the world's intercontinental data were laid using maritime routes mapped by ships of empire. West Africa to Brazil. West Africa to Europe. Europe to South and Southeast Asia. Lay a TeleGeography map of submarine cables atop a sixteenth-century Portuguese maritime chart and you will see the lines converge. Material still flows from hinterland to hub. Finished goods stream from hub to hinterland. Money still accrues at the hub. The cable and the chain pass through the same waters. Will they come to carry the same content?

The argument in the monograph is developed in three steps. Each movement is titled with an image: Body. Chain. Cable.

The Body

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” The scandal of that sentence has been worn smooth in the centuries since the first theologians. Yet everything hangs on it. The Logos assumed a body. Hungry flesh. Touching fingers that lepers felt. Healing hands that held food meant for thousands when the disciples argued that the arithmetic was cruel, there isn’t enough. Send them away. Let them eat the market. Feet washed. Nailed. Risen. Body conspicuous enough to die in public. Body that rose from the grave, still smelling of death and eating still. Cooking fish for breakfast over a charcoal fire and telling bewildered friends that it was already there waiting when they reached to touch him. Friends who leaned into his warmth and decided that all righteousness would stand or fall with them too.

What AI does to human persons must start with who human persons are, and there, our flesh echoes back in doxological communion. I want to pause here as the monograph turns to listen to global voices. John Mbiti long ago argued that African ontology lacks the category of the individual. I am because we belong. In Ubuntu, Desmond Tutu gave South Africa’s indigenous tradition a name. Personhood comes from persons. We are defined by ngā tumu whenua, the ancestral root of life that grounds Maori Anglicans’ understanding of identity. The theologians of three continents insist that personhood is fundamentally relational.

Not until recently have people in the global north questioned that. We suppose that an autonomous individual undertakes all experience, that every “I” is a Cartesian “I”. But that rational agent, whose feelings and senses can be rewritten as streams of data, is the exception, not the rule. It is a theological fiction before it is a philosophical mistake. Once we accept it, the road is paved for artificially created intelligent persons. But we first had to reduce our humanity to information-processing functions. The Global South never took that step because they never believed the premise, regardless of how hard we have tried to colonize their theology.

Our body also abides in our economy. We are too often measured by the increase in productivity, which throws human labor into what we can still do better than machines. This is problematic as I made the case regarding the Papal Encyclical. We are addressed by an eternal God before we recognize it is so, and we are made for a doxological communion response.

Chain
On November 29, 1781, the captain of a slave ship called the Zong had its crew throw 132 enslaved Africans into the Atlantic rather than pay to provide these persons with food and water for the remainder of the trip. By killing these humans, owners of the Zong could hope to claim insurance on cargo lost at sea instead of losing the cargo through dead Africans who died of natural causes. Owners won their insurance claim in court. Marine insurance was at issue. The interests and suffering of the 132 were juridically irrelevant. They were commodities to be bought and sold. Insurance accounted for death-by-nature as part of doing business. The humanity of the insured was an afterthought to the calculation of premiums and claims.

The Zong kick-started a slow-moving abolition movement. It also reduced persons to a unit of calculation: acquisition price, likelihood of survival, replacement value on the insurance ledger. Calculability, the logic operation that makes the data economy run, occurred legally and on a ship’s deck two and a half centuries before any large language model was trained.

This grammatical logic makes the monograph. Its subject is extraction via three waves: bodies and land starting in 1500, machines and markets starting in 1750, and development as dependency starting in 1945. These waves refined the vocabulary but did not disrupt the grammar.

They each required an enabling grammar, theological, legal, and philosophical, that made populations available for extraction. From my PhD work on George Berkeley, I took the diagnostic. When the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel arrived at Codrington Plantation, Barbados to bring Christianity to the enslaved persons there, they branded the letters SOCIETY on persons’ chests as they baptized them into the Body of Christ. Baptism incorporated their souls into Christ’s body. Ownership of their labor was not affected. I call this incorporation without emancipation, and I argue that it is the logical structure of our current moment.

Populations across the Global South are incorporated into the digital economy through our data, sweat, and bones while being systemically excluded from the protections, governance, and profits of this newly moral economy. They are inside the system. Inside it as inputs.

Moreover, and importantly, this chain never spoke to the data laborer alone. In her foundational book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff described surveillance capitalism’s usurpation of human experience as free labor on which to model predictions about our present and futures. My monograph agrees with Zuboff and runs her argument through the lens of colonial difference.

The newest wave of extraction harvests mind and interiority. The recommendation algorithm creates grammars. Through what we’ve already liked and searched for, through surveillance of our movements online and through social media tracking, the algorithm structures how we can think, desire, feel prior to our conscious will. When we click, we are “free” to choose. The ways in which we will choose have already been chosen for us.

Enslaved persons under Berkeley obeyed a grammar of rules that made entertaining disobedience impossible. So it goes with the scroll. Perhaps not with you, dear reader, but with the child or teenager whose brain is being trained by the algorithm in ways that will become increasingly difficult for churches to undo. Our kids are inside the system and being formed by it. Formation, in the classical theological sense, is a contest. The church that refuses to name this connectivity will lose by default.

Paul named our fight two thousand years ago: our struggle is not against blood and flesh but against the principalities and powers. Empires. Structures that demand ultimacy over human life and flourishing. Four power names make this monograph: the AI oligopoly, the Digital Silk Road double helix of state and corporate power, the military and surveillance industrial complex whose reach exceeds that of any empire in human history, and patriarchal power that puts women and femmes at the bottom of every unequal outcome produced by AI, whether that be on the annotation floor or in the cobalt mine. Naming the powers is how we wrestle with the demons of our time that require our consent.

Cable
The Uto Ni Yalo departed on a fifty-day voyage charted by wayfinding taught to them by their ancestors: stars, currents, cloud formations, and bird migrations. In 2024, the canoe braved the Pacific to connect indigenous wisdom of the ocean with Christian theology and climate science, inviting the churches to covenant for the sea. Below deck, below the ocean surface, lay cables. The cable cut the colonial shipping routes. The canoe charted the stars. It mounted no critique of the cable. It swam by other means.

During the 2008 Lambeth Conference, people gathered inside Canterbury Cathedral. Then came the Gospel process. The haunting music of Melanesian panpipes began playing. Native brothers and sisters filed in, dressed in traditional garb, cradling a huge carved Great Canoe as they swayed and stepped to its rhythm down the center aisle to "dance in the Gospel" before an international audience. The canoe was such a powerful theological image of creation, the church, the word that we share, our journey together through the stormy waters of the world, and the need for us to keep moving forward for the sake of our world and environmental and human justice. Here is an image that undermines the cable and chain.

Section Three of the monograph refuses to address the Global South as a continent waiting to be extracted from or donated to, because if we believe that the beloved communion of believers includes the South, the periphery has already spoken. The M-Pesa of Kenya and the India Stack demonstrate the brilliance of leapfrogging when coupled with demands for sovereignty. Free Basics was banned in India because Indians insisted on digital sovereignty and wouldn't accept connectivity on colonial terms.

Communities like Masakhane are working to develop natural language processing tools for African languages by African scholars, while the CARE Principles and Te Mana Raraunga networks articulate indigenous data sovereignty. The Spirit wasn’t waiting at Pentecost for the church to show up. Liberation theology, Catholic Social Teaching, Ubuntu, Islamic teachings on stewardship, Buddhist understandings of attention and desire, the cosmologies and governance structures of Indigenous peoples who never bought into the Cartesian lie, they have spoken, and generations of faith leaders and practitioners in the Global South have been listening and teaching.

Then we turn to the hands of the church itself and pull out its own toolkit. A toolkit that, while contextual, also shares the same blood. We use the Five Marks of Mission as a framework for imagining how mission might flourish in an age of artificial intelligence and extractive data systems. Because to proclaim the Good News is to declare, with the authority of institutions and in the dozens of languages that the Communion already spans, that no one is data.

To teach, baptize, and nurture is to take algorithmic literacy as seriously as baptismal literacy, because your kids receive dedicated catechesis whenever they pick up their phones. To respond to human need is to steward investments in compute cooperatives and community-governed data trusts and sovereign AI capacity, because mission is more than charity; it is koinonia. To transform unjust structures is to enter the political fray on behalf of data sovereignty, just compensation for annotation work, and restrictions on autonomous weapons systems. To safeguard creation is to ask who owns water and whose carbon is being extracted, because climate and AI injustice have the same framework. All too often, we in the West have treated everyone and everywhere as just another commodity.

And then, confession. The church must own its hands. The first thing we say over those cables and chains must be confession. The Church of England blessed the boats. SPG enslaved people. I write as a bishop whose diocese was founded by slaveholders, and whose endowment is over two billion dollars, sitting in a city built by refining the oil that now powers those data centers.

The Table, and the Blessing

But here is what the church has that no policy body can provide. On the night he was betrayed, Jesus took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and said: this is my body, given for you. Every Sunday, across every time zone in the world, the church repeats the action.

A table is laid. Bread is brought from the commons of the earth: wheat, water, human work. A hand reaches out. A mouth waits to be fed. And what goes between them will not be grasped by every category the market has to offer. A body given freely, not wracked by the extraction of behavioral surplus; no prediction product created from the transaction; no optimization function dreamed up to enhance the exchange. Bodies brought together, not algorithmically sorted. There is a name for this meal: the Eucharist. It is the one economy the logic of extraction cannot hack, hosted by a community, one week at a time, that finds itself, whether it knows it or feels it completely, being formed to perceive what the algorithm renders unseen.

So the monograph ends where it began. With the young woman at the screen in Nairobi. Her hands are the anonymous hands of the artificially created intelligence revolution. They are also, says the church, the hands of Christ’s own body broken by the powers and brought into eternity, for the risen Lord still bears the scarlet wounds of the nails across his hands and still says, “Come and have breakfast with me”. If the church once blessed the ships, the church must now learn what blessing it will speak over the cables and the new colonialism.

Therefore, this essay ends not in despair but in vocation: the Church as the guild of Bezalel once more, taking down even this gold from Egypt and sanctifying it to the Lord; the people of God meeting the machine age with our hands open not as soldiers marching onto the battlefield but, like the Church on Pentecost, singing and telling every nation, in their own language, the works of God. Let them sing. The question is doxological stewardship.

The monoculture of AI seeks to overturn and reverse Pentecost. It is the technology of Babel amplified to the Nth degree. It speaks one tongue and demands the world learn that language to be heard; it seeks not the blessing of the people of the world but of the few global oligarchs. The question for them is how they will use their wealth. The question for the people is what consent they will give to the new gig-economy models and structures. The church’s rejoinder is the older miracle again: every nation hears the mighty works of God in their native language; every worker is named beloved; every anonymous hand is held open at the Table. Pray for her tonight, the one at the screen. Then look around you. What is your parish, your vestry, your endowment, your own attention training the world to become? The cable and the chain run through the same water. The canoe has already left shore and begun a Gospel dance.

By clicking this link, you can download the full Monograph.

By clicking this link, you can purchase a paperback for the cost of printing.

The body is not the tomb but the temple of the soul. It is in the flesh that we live. It is in the flesh that we love.

I. The Ghost in the Machine

The phrase “ghost in the machine” first appears in the work of the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle in his 1949 book The Concept of Mind. It was a deliberate insult. Ryle used the phrase to attack René Descartes’s theory of mind/body dualism. Cartesian dualism, as it is known, is the view that the mind and the body are two fundamentally different things and can be separated. The body, in this view, is corporeal, and it operates in the physical world. The mind (or soul, as is commonly meant by the use of the term), by contrast, is not of the body, and it exists independent of the body in an entirely separate realm, having some supernatural capacity to interact with the body.

Ryle maintained that this dualistic idea was fundamentally a mistake of categories, a basic logical error, because it treats the mind as a non-physical entity that somehow “lives inside” and directs the physical body, like a “ghost” that “haunts” a “machine.” He thought that this was illogical because it depended on the assumption that mental states (like thinking or feeling pain) were utterly unlike physical states (like moving or touching) rather than alternative modes describing the same things (Ryle, 1949).

Arthur Koestler then appropriated the phrase as the title of his book on philosophical psychology that today has a cult following: The Ghost in the Machine (1967). In it, Koestler engaged in vehement criticism of reductionist methodologies in philosophy, behaviorism, and other mechanicalistic approaches that seek to explain human experience and behavior within the context of machine processes. Think of it this way: he is against the theories proposed that people and animals learn and behave through their interactions with the environment and other creatures and, therefore, can be traced. This and similar theories assert that all behavior is learned through conditioning, which is a process of reward and punishment. Koestler’s ghost in machine dichotomy promoted an intuitive approach to human experience, associating the specialness of the body’s experience with spiritual and even transcendental properties. This is a kind of in-between theory that suggests there is always more going on than simply what is observed, and thus, we are creatures, not machines.

By coining the phrase “ghost in the machine,” both Ryle and Koestler sought to draw our attention to the limitations of thinking about the human mind–body composite in purely dualistic and mechanistic terms. Ryle’s attack targeted the illogical nature of Cartesian dualism, while Arthur Koestler extended this critique to examine the fuller implications of paring back human experience to mere mechanics. The mind was not a machine, he argued (Koestler, 1967).

II. Spirits in the Material World

The musical artist Sting was reading a lot of Koestler in the 1980s. From his thinking about the theories presented in Arthur Koestler’s books came the 1981 Police album entitled Ghost in the Machine, The album opens with “Spirits in the Material World.” Then it continues with three songs amplifying the theme: “Too Much Information,” “Rehumanize Yourself,” and “One World (Not Three).” Ghost in the Machine then became an album that moved the ideas into popular music and framed the concerns of Koestler in musical terms. Sting, reflecting on the album and songs, talked about how a dualist approach was fodder for totalitarianism. He believed at the time that Koestler was holding up a mirror to the lives of the Northern Irish and other human conflicts around the world. Reflecting on his experience, Sting said in an interview:

The reason we have to attack behaviorism is because it’s been used by totalitarian regimes as an easy way of making people conform. A robot fits into big ideas much better. Whereas a thinking human being, a complex spiritual being, which is what we are, is out of place. You only have to look at the kids on the streets; they’re becoming dehumanized (Sting, 1981).

Shortly after the album was released, there appeared a wholly separate yet interesting manga and anime series called Ghost in the Shell (1989–1990; 1995–1997). It depicted a near future in which humans start integrating themselves with machines. The stories take place in 2029 and follow a counterterrorism agency as they try to track down a cyber-criminal named the Puppeteer. This villain is a master of “ghost hacking.” He performs crimes using the bodies of humans fitted with so-called cyberbrains. Spoiler: It turns out that the Puppeteer is an artificial intelligence who has taken up residence in a robot body. Masamune Shirow wrote the manga series. Production I.G. made an anime feature written and directed by Kenji Kamiyama. It aired from 2002 to 2005.

The anime film Ghost in the Shell (1995) is widely seen as an inspiration for the Matrix film series, which in turn borrowed specific elements, such as the dripping digital rain that the characters see, and the technique used to see inside the Matrix. Later, producer and director James Cameron cited Ghost in the Shell as one of his inspirations for Avatar (2009).

III. The Hard Problem

We have been examining a string of artistic conversations about the “ghost” and the “body.” Each of these productions takes a slightly different angle of the story of mind–body dualism. The philosophical discussion has continued. In a book on consciousness entitled The Character of Consciousness, the philosopher David J. Chalmers coined the term “hard problem of consciousness” to refer to the problem of why and how mental phenomena or consciousness arise from physical activity in the brain. He calls this the “mind out there” (Chalmers, 2014).

In short, the “hard problem” is this: we know that the brain is made of neurons and that neurons send and receive information to and from each other in the form of electrical and chemical signals; but a thought, a condition of mind or feeling, or a mental picture of a sunset are something(s) of which we subjectively, as an individual, are aware of having an experience of—that is what people usually mean by “conscious.” I am paraphrasing from my reading of Chalmers (Chalmers, 2014). We know so much more today than ever before about how the brain works. We are close to knowing and understanding exactly how the neurons fire and are associated with behavior. However, what we do not know is why we have something called subjective experience. Chalmers is curious if we will ever know.

As one reads Chalmer’s work, one begins to feel that perhaps there is, in fact, a type of ghost in the machine (at least in his theory). He is quick to add, though, that the mind is not something disconnected from the brain, but something extra created by it. Consciousness is not reduceable, Chalmers would argue, to a mere physical reality, but it is connected to it. Chalmers concludes, in almost all essays, with the notion that the question of how all this works is an intractable problem. Maybe it is even the most intractable in philosophy and cognitive science. I agree with Chalmers but want to be clear: I do not think consciousness can be separated from the body. It may surprise you to read that ancient theology holds tightly to this body, brain, and consciousness/spirit as one thing. This is such an essential concept in this book that it deserves a chapter of its own.

IV. From Consciousness to Reason

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist. His work explains why science does not support such dualism. As I read his work, I became familiar with his thoughts on the body and reason. He is a researcher who can help us understand why we cannot jettison the body (Haidt, 2012). Haidt draws on various disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and anthropology, to argue that the mind is not separate from the body and instead is deeply interconnected with it. This means that consciousness and the notion of reason are a product of both brain and body.

Evolutionary psychology explains that human moral reasoning and emotions have developed over time to enhance survival and social cooperation. Haidt emphasizes the role of moral intuitions (automatic, visceral responses that guide moral judgment) arguing that these intuitions are deeply rooted in our evolutionary past and shaped by the body’s sensory experiences.

Haidt frequently references neuroscience research to support this claim. The work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio illustrates that emotions are fundamental to rational decisionmaking and moral reasoning. He suggests that bodily sensations play a connective role in decisionmaking by helping individuals evaluate options based on past emotional experiences (Damasio, 2008).

Haidt discusses the dual-process theory of cognition, distinguishing between two types of cognitive processes: intuitive (fast, automatic, and often emotionally driven) and reasoning (slow, deliberate, and logical). He argues that much of our moral thinking is dominated by intuitive processes rather than rational deliberation, reflecting a more embodied form of cognition. This agrees with the work of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman, 2011).

Haidt draws from the field of embodied cognition, which argues that cognitive processes are deeply rooted in the body’s interactions with the world. He suggests that emotions and moral intuitions are not just “in the head” but are also experienced throughout the body, influenced by physical states and sensations. He incorporates anthropological findings that highlight the cultural and social-dimensional beginnings of morality, showing how different societies use rituals, bodily practices, and social norms to cultivate moral behaviors. For example, he discusses how practices like communal worship or shared meals foster a sense of belonging and moral cohesion, which he sees as grounded in bodily experiences and social emotions.

Haidt’s work synthesizes various scientific resources to argue for an integrated view of the mind and body. He maintains that moral intuitions, emotions, and reasoning are not separate entities but rather are deeply interwoven with our bodily experiences and evolutionary heritage. This perspective challenges the Cartesian dualism that separates mind and body, emphasizing a holistic understanding of human psychology (Haidt, 2006, 2012).

V. The Body

We humans are language animals, and we are amazing creatures. We can think and reason and deliberate and discern. We can open ourselves up to creation and other people. We are curious. I find the work of theologians Charles Taylor, Rowan Williams, and David Bentley Hart on language interesting, and we shall touch on their work in later chapters. I also find Chalmers’s theory of consciousness and its hard problem compelling. I also believe that there is something about our whole bodies that contributes to consciousness. For me, the body itself is necessary for consciousness.

The embodied cognition theory is an idea in psychology and cognitive science that challenges the traditional view that thinking and reasoning happen only in the brain or that this work can be separate from the body. Instead, this theory suggests that our thoughts, emotions, and decisions are deeply connected to our physical experiences in the world. It means that our body—including our senses, movements, and even our physical state—plays a crucial role in shaping our thoughts and feelings. This leads me to write about embodied prayer, thought, and action. My writing in this book will explore how our embodied experience leads to our embodied moral actions; how our emotional bodies play a role in our approach to the world and others; and how our physically embodied prayer changes our approach to other people; and, finally, how our language, and the spaces between the words, are authentic spaces that are felt by an awareness of the body.

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VI. Disembodiment and the New Spiritualism

Austrian theologian and priest Ivan Illich offers a corrective idea: what he calls “conviviality,” a friendliness that resumes human beings’ free and creative relationships between themselves and their surroundings (Illich, 1975). He sees life becoming subject to a radical monopoly in which digital mediation increasingly replaces all other modes of relating, including religious life. This digital mediation replaces embodied relationships in flesh and blood. The derivatization, as he calls it, or disembodiment of the human person, is starkly honest about where we are today.

In an age of disconnection and disembodiment, we see a rise in theologies that remove the spirit from embodiment and seek to separate consciousness from the body itself. We also see a rise in what might be called a new spiritualism. The continuing possibility of disembodiment through technology and spiritualism is a mixture that will have some influential voices in the coming future, yet I am offering something different in this book.

VII. The Image Returns Transformed

Here is the core of an unabashed faith: Jesus’s body was the same as ours, and our body then is the same as Jesus’s. This truth unites us individually and corporately, and nothing can separate us from this fact of created union. Moreover, by sharing this unabashed faith, we denounce the possibility that there is only good or bad, body or spirit, God separate from humanity and creation. In this faith, we recognize that technology, no matter how it seems, is only made up of manipulated matter from natural resources and thus does not have flesh and so cannot be inhabited by spirit. An unabashed faith rejects that there can be a ghost in the machine and that robots dream of sheep (see Philip K. Dick’s, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). For Christians, our theology supports the idea that God’s spirit is present in aliens more than it might support the idea that God’s spirit will be found in our robot friends.

Dualism locates spirit and body on mutually exclusive planes of good and evil. God’s whole narrative heralds another option: what is material and what is spirit are not radically opposed but rather intrinsically related. The body is not the tomb but the temple of the soul. It is in the flesh that we live. It is in the flesh that we love. We can only understand Christ’s body through our bodies. We partake of the divine not through denying the world but by accepting every body and creation. Furthermore, in knowing ourselves to be human bodies, we become more Christlike. In seeking to be more Christlike, we become more bodily human.

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References

Chalmers, D. J. (2014). The character of consciousness. Oxford University Press.

Damasio, A. (2008). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason and the human brain. Vintage Digital.

Dick, P. K. (1968). Do androids dream of electric sheep? Doubleday.

Haidt, J. (2006). The happiness hypothesis: Finding modern truth in ancient wisdom. Basic Books.

Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Gildan Media, LLC.

Illich, I. (1975). Conviviality: Lecture, International Institute for Labour Studies. International Institute for Labour Studies.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Koestler, A. (1967). The ghost in the machine. Hutchinson.

Ryle, G. (1949). The Concept of Mind. University of Chicago Press.

Sting. (1981, October 2). Sting: Discography: Ghost in the Machine. Sting.com. https://www.sting.com/discography/album/32/The%20Police.

For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.

— Jeremiah 2:13

There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God.

— Psalm 46:4

And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.

— Revelation 22:1

❦

When it was known before, they called it by a different name. The early anglers who fished the falls called the place Stluputqu, which translates to “swift” water. But the knowing predates the name, as names must, predates any language that could speak it. Before there was a mouth to know the waters, the Spirit of God moved upon their face. That is the knowledge that initiates every river: not our baptizing it with our own names but God’s incubating, the Spirit brooding over the deep like a bird over her nest and the waters responding with their inaugural obedience. I do not believe that the Spokane was always as it is today. To speak the way I am is to state clearly that the Spokane, like all of creation and cosmos, was addressed first by the divine – by God. It is to say clearly that the Spokane was known before the settlers called it the Spokane. Known as Adam knew creation, seen, poured out, comprehended in the regard of the One who would later, through the mouth of Isaiah, call himself its very font and fountain: the fountain of living waters.

I begin here, at the very beginning, where God hovered because everything downstream depends on this most upstream proposition, that I believe the Spokane not simply as a resource but as a sign, and the seeing that makes that believing possible is not the seeing our culture incentivizes. We must learn to see again as if for the first time. Right now. To begin at the beginning, we have to fly backward against the current. Let me try.

I want to walk down this river with many of you who walk down the river you fear you will lose. To fold each bend backward on itself, remembering. But let us not call this essay a goodbye. To say goodbye to water is what the world will say when it decides that water is merely a resource, not a gift. Goodbye is what economists will murmur with their fingers tracing the next graph of decline. Goodbye is what the world speaks over water it has given up trying to understand: an elegy we sing early because we have quietly reconciled ourselves to the river’s slowly, insistently stealing away. But we cannot say goodbye to this river yet. Theologically, our Christian inheritance won’t let us. We have a better word, a sacramental word, and when we say sacramental, what we’re saying is bodily, tangible, material. The tradition does not give us permission to speak except through the things it hands to us, like stones downstream. What it hands us here is patience. Vigilance. We must keep vigil with this river; we must keep vigil with you, my friends in Washington. And we must keep vigil with other rivers too and their people. To keep vigil means to refuse both to avert our eyes from a thing under siege and to allow that siege to be the last word spoken about it. To watch. And watching, already, is a kind of hoping.

Here. The valley gives us the hymn, and the hymn is also an image: underground, ten trillion gallons of cold, clean water lie against the grains of our knowing, so full is the aquifer that half of these million souls who live nearby have made it their sole source of drinking water. Enough water to fill the rooting place of both of our states from ocean to ocean, and what crosses the border asks no one.³ And here, on the surface of the dry and open month of August, mile after mile of ghost river, the stones flashing white in the absence of the water charged with cooling them. Fullness beneath our feet. Dryness above our heads. The cistern is overflowing; the fountain is abandoned. The prophets aren’t needed to recognize this storyline. Jeremiah didn’t know our hydrology, but he knew us. He knew us and our appetites for individual use of God’s creation for our own purposes. He knew us well enough to foresee a people who would dig themselves a cistern cracked at the heart, but deep enough to hold something they can manage, and pour out the living water instead. The body of this river preaches that prophecy before any scientist tends his meter on its banks. And when the hydrologists do arrive and deliver their verdict, they will not be telling us something new. They will whisper something ancient in the language of loss. They will say what every prophet knew to say in the poetry that creatures speak before they learn numbers: There are two ways to have water. We have chosen the impoverished way. The impoverished way drains the river.

I want to be specific about what kind of looking we are being called to because it is not the looking at hydrology models but embracing an Anglican realism, something very particular. I mean the refusal to enter that managerial trance that begins by calling the river a resource, a commodity, as if it were a percentage on someone’s balance sheet, when in fact it is, first of all, a sign. When Hooker says “sign,” he means a real, created thing bearing upon created things the fingerprint of its maker.

Hooker’s God is not a warehouse god who stocks the world with brute matter to be valued, marketed, bought, and sold by humans at their discretion. He is the Alpha of a cosmic reality wherein every created thing keeps the law of its own being so faithfully that in keeping that law it reflects back, dimly or brightly as the case may be, the eternal God whose own wisdom is made legible to us in springs. A river running says those praises by running. Have you ever sat by a river and listened to its praise? Or traveled back to hear its silence?

A river conforms to its assigned place in the order of creation, this wild treasure bent always toward the sea, so obediently that its physics are its liturgy. To call living water a resource, then, is not a value-neutral description we pair alongside some holier description we practice on Sundays. It is idolatry for it removes its value to human command and use instead of God’s. It is what I call a fifth-stance frame: a construction of reality so totalizing that it silently erases the world God made and replaces it with a world of our own imagining, then wants our politics, our economics, and yes, our theology built within that diminished truth. For far too long, the church has played within the fifth stance. Living water is not ours to inventory; it never has been. We did not know it before it was known. Let’s learn to see again from a different perspective.

Let’s learn to see what this will cost us if we don’t: Two ways to have water. One calls water its own name. The other controls it. Control by sinking cement into the thirsty ground, thirsty as the riverbed until we reach the aquifer and let capitalism at its deepest again happen at the scale of stories we tell. And this is the story the river, ten trillion gallons of it, enough so that to know the Spokane through the groundwater alone is to know her boundless. We meet her, finally, limitless. To know water as groundwater is to begin to let go of control; is to say yes to baptism as immersion, this terrible, necessary uncertainty we insist on watering down but which God bids us drink, deep.

When we fall into knowing water only as a resource, when we turn our rivers into revenue streams, when we see running water only as the things it can be made to do for us, ecology is the services ecosystems provide. Language is something we extract rhetorical advantage from. There is a sacred grammar that is at present lost to us when we speak about the river, and one that we must reclaim. We will have to learn to love this river again through a new grammar. But let us not pretend that love starts with what we can get from it.

It’s the only way we’ve ever had it, actually, and here we come back to the sermon we found washed up on the riverbed: a spring runs till it’s gone, pumping runs till it’s gone, water rights run till it’s gone; perhaps because it was never a possession to begin with. Right now, we do not pray enough with water to know water as prayer. Monks used to stand in streams and pray the psalms. Is it any surprise then that we turn to prayer in times of drought? Yet, we rarely give thanks for the water when it runs. This is a sign of water that is a resource and not a gift in our grammar.

Christians baptize because water is the ritual element of new life, new creation. It is literally our elixir brewed through the distillation of empty wine glasses held toward heaven. Water names God’s grace of providence not to be received without gratitude.

The dry year asks many questions of the faithful, not least of which: Where were you drinking last year? What reservoirs have you erected between creation and its Creator, little gods bearing your name to whom you sacrifice water as you would something lost to heaven? Look upstream and pray if you want to learn how to pray to God for the water. Let’s ask why certain communities are written into this story from the start and others are allowed the grace of forgetting till the well runs dry in their backyard.

None of us will learn how to love this river if we don’t learn to love one another across these divides. It will take all of us to save a river. But we’re gonna have to get ourselves some spiritual disciplines for a dry world. When drought is the annual exception, it asks whatever prayers it is met with on behalf of brief stirrings in legislative halls. When drought is the new normal, it reforms our prayers as it reforms the land, turning them deeper. I once heard a story about the Episcopal priest who gathered the whole town of farmers in the square to pray for rain. I, too, have prayed for rain for my people whom I shepherd, in the same town, on the same land. In this way, he knew something we too easily forget. Living water becomes not a matter of policy, but of posture; salvation waters baptize us into themselves until we forget our thirst enough to be generous with what we’ve been given, forget ourselves down to the riverbed and let it speak to us of what we should do. It’s thirsty. And many creatures below the dam depend upon its life, such that we understand in a deeper way that this is a kind of living water for those who sip it and those who live within it. Listen for it.

Let me end this intro where I began: Once there was water and the Spirit of God brooded upon its face. Cover it again. Hover over these waters and do not depart until you can again hear its voice. Because if there is one thing this long thin valley will teach us, it is that teaching someone to thirst is one of the surest ways we know to make them drink. Thirst is personal. They will dive into private reservoirs instead of learning to thirst together. Drink thirsty, drink as prayer, drink together. Or do not drink at all.

Join me over these waters. Keep vigil with me. Put your hand down into the water and know the wetness of it, so that you may come to prophetic imagination, and brood beneath Spirit’s work.

❦

Below the dam.

You start downriver, below the dam. John Graves did the same because that is where modernity allows you to begin. In 1959, Graves said goodbye to the Brazos and traveled down it in a canoe. The Spokane is shortened to power from its headwaters at Coeur d’Alene, claimed at Post Falls in 1908 and seven more dams before it spills free into the Columbia. The dam is the first cistern. It is not ipso facto an evil thing; Adam was placed in the garden to work it and keep it, le’ovdah ule’shomrah to serve it and guard it, and we must drink, and we must light our lamps and grind our grain. The command to work the garden is a command to take up the world into our hands, and he who takes up water to turn a wheel is not immediately possessed by the demon. The Benedictines built an entire saner world alongside such wheels, and prayed the hours within earshot of running water and did not consider the river their enemy or their slave.

And the theology of a dam is more profound than its illustration as a wall holding back a lake, which is part of why the heart is so easily deceived by it. Most of these facilities are called run-of-river dams because they do not so much store water as meter it, releasing through the gates in a day more or less what reaches them from upstream, lifting just enough to turn a turbine and letting the rest run downriver. Seen from shore, they can look nearly innocent. But even the most run-of-river dam returns only diminished water. It tames the river’s rhythms, clipping the peaks and filling the valleys so the riverbed no longer remembers the spring floods that used to scour its gravels fresh and build the habitat where the trout spawn. It slows and warms the water; it stagnates, and warm water can’t hold the dissolved oxygen a cold-water fishery requires, so the river can run full and still run choked. Of course, cold water is released from deep water dams. Yet, the regularity and control silt traps all the gravel it might have carried downstream to rebuild those banks, so below every dam the river starves, eating into its own bed because it cannot be fed its rightful load. A dam can give you back the quantity without the life, and that’s the shape and size and soul of the temptation, that we may learn to use the water so that we balance the books and the creature starves.

The dam teaches your hand what your heart is too quick to understand: Water is something to be held on to. What your hand learns at the dam, it will go practicing farther downstream until keep becomes the only verb we know for water, and receive, the verb of the fountain, the verb of gift, disappears from the language. This is the hinge on which the whole question swings, and I want to pause here because all of sin nests in that lacuna between two verbs.

To receive comes first from the posture of the creature before the Creator. We did not create the water; we are given it every day, as we are given the daily bread we are taught to pray for and nowhere instructed to hoard. In the wilderness, the manna rotted if you stored it against the morrow; storing was the sin, storing was the failure of faith, storing was, in effect, your declaration that God might be trusted to have given you bread but not to give you bread in the days to come. To hold instead, to dam it, bank it, reserve against the future thirst, looks like prudence to our world and foolhardiness to the tradition. I am not arguing that we may never store water. I am saying that we have made holding our instinct and receiving our contradiction, so that we who cannot imagine any form of life with ‘receive’ as the primary verb for water have already, without knowing it, traded the fountain for the cistern somewhere deep inside our hearts.

There’s another word for that, and I’ll tell you because the culture already has its lie to sell you in its place: Jesus emptied himself. Kenosis: the Son who did not cling to his status as God equals God but gave it up, ekenosen heauton, emptied himself to take the place of a servant. The very being of God towards his own life is to empty it away, to spend it, to pour it out until it lands, at long last, at the bottom of everything; to empty it into servant form and slave death, trusting that the Father will see it raised. The river rushes, always, down-down-down into the place of least resistance, into the form of a servant. It is grace kneeling. A cistern is the opposite of a sacrament: self-withheld, status retained, God infinitely distant because we were not meant to drink from here. And I must draw your attention to the flattery because the culture is going to offer it to you anyway. The culture wants you to believe kenosis means “vulnerability.” Vulnerability is an interior posture; it’s being willing to have others see you. It’s that capitalist softness that costs nothing to display but everything to live and only asks in return that people admire your bravery.

Jesus did not become vulnerable. Jesus gave himself over to death. The river doesn’t make itself vulnerable. The river empties itself into the sea. When we talk about saving the Spokane we are not talking about reclaiming a watershed that just needs healthier self-esteem. We are standing before our brother who has been rendered powerless by our refusal to empty ourselves, buried alive by every dam we will not dismantle.

❦

At the falls.

At the falls the river remembers its people too. The Spokane and the Coeur d’Alene knew this water as a table and a sanctuary, a place where the salmon ran and the camas grew and the bands gathered, and they were moved off it, and the falls that once meant swift water came to power a city that would forget the tongue that named them. A river carries its griefs the way it carries silt, invisibly, until the flow drops and the bones show. I will not romance the frontier; the tradition forbids me the lie, and the prophets are merciless toward the comfortable fiction that the land was empty and the taking was clean. Naboth had a vineyard, and a king coveted it, and a woman arranged a judicial murder to acquire it, and the word of the Lord came to Ahab in the very vineyard he had stolen: Hast thou killed, and also taken possession? The displacement of a people from their water is a Naboth’s vineyard written across a watershed, and the Church does not get to walk past the vineyard with its eyes politely averted on the way to a sermon about conservation.

But I will say this, and it is not a softening but a deepening: the displacement of a people from their water and the draining of that water are not two stories. They are one story told twice, the same forsaking of the fountain in two generations, the same reduction of a gift to a holding, the same exchange of known-before-naming for owned-after-conquest. The logic that could see a people as an obstacle to the use of a place is the same logic that can see a river as a resource for the cooling of a machine. It is the logic of the cistern applied first to persons and then to waters, and the Spirit grieves both with a single grief. When Paul says the whole creation groans, he does not mean the rocks and rivers only; he means a bondage that runs through the human story and the more-than-human story together, one fabric of subjection, one travail. You cannot keep the river and despise its first people. You cannot honor its first people and drain the river. The vigil, if it is honest, keeps watch over both.

The falls themselves are a catechism in deep time, for those with the patience to read the rock. The river runs here over the black basalt of old lava floods, and the valley it runs through, and the very abundance hidden beneath it, were laid down by a violence almost beyond imagining: at the end of the last ice age a glacial dam to the east failed and failed again, and a wall of water taller than the city loosed itself across this country dozens of times, scouring the channels and dumping behind it, in the Rathdrum Prairie, a vast bed of coarse cobble and gravel hundreds of feet deep.¹ That gravel is the aquifer’s secret. Water moves through those open stones the way it moves through a gravel filter and not the way it creeps through clay, so freely that this is among the most productive aquifers on the continent, hundreds of millions of gallons sliding through it past the state line every day.^1,2 Which is to say the fullness below and the falls above are not two facts but one event, the same cataclysm of moving water that carved the visible river and stocked the invisible sea. The knowing older than the name is written in the gravel. The land remembers, in stone, that it was made by water given catastrophically and freely, long before any hand thought to hold it.

And there is a grace hidden in the old name that I will not pass by. Stluputqu. Swift water. To learn the name a people gave the water before our grandfathers came is itself a small act of repentance, a refusal of the amnesia by which conquest completes itself. The age teaches us to call things by their function: the falls are “hydroelectric potential,” the reach is “instream flow,” the aquifer is “supply.” The first peoples called the water by what it was and did, swift, which is to say they named it the way Adam named the animals, as a steward naming what he has been given to keep, approximating what God might name it, not as an accountant cataloging what he intends to spend. To teach your children the old name is to teach them to see a creature where this age would have them see a commodity. That is not nostalgia. That is catechesis.

❦

At the dry reach.

Then comes the white mile. Last summer, when part of the Spokane River simply went away, for a mile, there was no low flow or trickle, just dry stone and vacancy; it did not go away gradually. For about two weeks last September, the riverbed was stone and absent until abruptly, like something risen, it had water again.⁵ This is not a river. The river bed waits that way now if you stand on that reach long enough. Creation groaneth and travaileth together in pain until now because at that reach, it appears you can stand right beside the suffering creature and hear it ask. And when you stand there, you know: The dry riverbed is, first and foremost, not a problem of management. The dry riverbed is a groan. Creation, the Apostle teaches us, was made subject to vanity not willingly but by reason of him who subjected it in hope. It groaned. But even in its groaning there is hope, for the groan is not despair. The groan is the sound a of a river longing to be again.

Here, let me pause, because the prophet and Apostle have said enough, and now let the measurements come in, but come charged from these two Scriptures, so they speak as confirmation and not as foundation. Opponents love to say this age will say: this is poetry, let’s talk about the technical matter at hand. You are preaching they say, let us define mercy; the matter is aquifers and precipitation ranges, and your groan is an anthropopathy we cannot include in the model. When the model speaks let us hear what it has to say about what we know in our hearts and see with our eyes.

In August of 2025, as summer was coming on hard, the surface flow within fifty feet of downtown went down to seven hundred and seventeen cubic feet per second.⁷ This is below the natural average flow for that season but also below eight hundred and fifty cubic feet per second, which is the limit the state itself has legislated as the bottom number, the point at which the river can no longer be said to be meeting minimum requirements.^4,5 If you lived there, you would have noticed that summer. You would look out at the gorge, walk along its banks, and see that it was down. You would say “the river is down.” At some point, each local denizen of the river would have arrived by car or foot at what residents call the white mile, a reach of riverbed that runs for nearly a mile-and-a-half and went dry that summer, dry and dusty. Dry stone and absence. It did not return until September second. Rivers sigh, this was just a waterbed now, and its dry bed groaned.^4,5

Hydrologists working for the government can tell you where all that water went. They can tell you that with so much pumping in the heat of summer, the hidden aquifer pulls about one hundred and twenty to fifteen cubic feet per second away from the thirsty river above, losses that amount to theft since the aquifer and river are one body underground, joined below ground as cistern and fountain so that to pump hard on one is to drain the other.⁴ This summer they petitioned the state to raise the floor many times over, eighteen hundred cubic feet per second as minimum but preferably twenty-eight hundred; that is, they are petitioning for what any salmon worker or apple buyer knows already by tradition if not by government modeling, which is enough flow for the river to not merely limp along within legal requirements but actually be a river once again.⁴

It matters how the cistern drains the fountain because the mechanics of that relationship are themselves a parable. Groundwater and surface water are one mystery, held in hydraulic communication by that same porous gravel through which they talk. Here, the river is sometimes gaining and sometimes losing reach. Sometimes water creeps up from the groundwater into the riverbed; sometimes river water sinks down into the aquifer. Many people think of the river as coming into the ground at one end and leaving downstream at another, but even that is only part of what’s going on in every river, especially in the Spokane.

When we drill a well and pump into that gravel, we draw down the water table surrounding it into what hydrologists call a cone of depression, a cylinder of lowered water level sloping down toward the well like a funnel you could see if you had a very long tablespoon. But that drawn-down cylinder doesn’t stop at the property line; by hydraulic continuity, that well touches the river, and when the river can answer that draw only by losing water of its own, it answers. Stream depletion. Capture. Pumping groundwater sometimes means pulling water you can’t see out of the river.

We have to understand this because understanding is the first step towards bending the story arc of that paragraph toward Genesis 1. Learn the mechanism so you can preach the truth. Groundwater and surface water are different names for the same body of water, connected across the bank by endless molecular conversations. When you drain one, you drain both, which will seem less like biblical wisdom if you harvest from the aquifer but go salmon fishing or kick a dry riverbed, because however sympathetic the federal accounting for quarterly loss, it will not fully add up against each other in the span of a season.

See what the numbers do and do not do. First, they do not give the cry its righteousness; they do not help us understand our responsibility. The dry bed cried out long before it was measured because it was a type of creature that groaned in travail before we came with our meters. That’s what the prophets were talking about. The riverbed didn’t need our confusion of it with a resource in order to need us. The data above confirms that fact; it does not prove it. Strike every number from that entire paragraph, and the riverbed would still preach its sermon to you from stones, the prophet would still stand over it with Job, and the Apostle would still hear creation itself gasping for birth. That is the test. Let anyone who wishes to speak in this register speak like that: if striking the data from your argument turns your prose into its opposite, the essay has joined the opposition. If you simply repeat the grammar to the engineers, politicians, and government officials, then you are dwelling inside their grammar and not God’s, or the grammar of allies: religions, first people, and those who wish to steward the water in the place called Spokane River Valley.

Useful, those numbers. Real, even. But they echo poorly the river; the river has a voice and a body; but now it is shallow and empty due to humanity’s use. The fountain was forsaken long before any agency said so in cubic feet per second.
And here is what they cannot measure at all: water comes back. On September second the river filled its bed again. That summer, the river was running again after a long absence, as best I can figure, raised like something buried, Lazarus drunk. But it was not the same for its life had died away in the months of dryness. Some would grow back. As a favorite singer-songwriter, Ray Wylie Hubbard likes to croon: at least I am not like Lazarus and have to die twice. For the river will die again.

I will not allegorize the river shallow; that would not be helpful. But I will not lie about it, either. We live beside a hollow body creature, one that now, due to our usage, is a poor image of its first self. And, we know in our heart of hearts it even now lives on borrowed time, for one year it may not happen, and the thing that rolls back over those stones might be us. Hydrologists call that the resumption of surface flow. But the church calls water that comes back to a dead place and makes it live something else; they have a word far older than any gauge and far truer than any model, and we will come to that. Yet our longing is truly a living water, and not a kind of pseudo faucet of a river. For it to become a true river again will take an era.

❦

At the machine.

For now, let us call our thirst Mammon, because now comes the newest thirst and it must be named truly before it is measured by a hydrologist. A great computation wishes to be built in this valley, a single appetite that, on its largest scale,⁹ would drink the daily water of a town of fifty thousand merely to keep itself cool.⁶ When the city moved to hold it back, and the utility paused its bargaining, the papers called it a fight over infrastructure.^7,8 I say this discussion is older than one about infrastructure. I say it is the plain of Shinar again, the people saying let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, confused in their heart, thinking the height of their building would bring them near to heaven and the permanence of their name would grant the permanence God alone could grant. Babel is not a story against architecture. It is a story against the human heart before God. Babel is the story of a people who would secure themselves against contingency by their own hands, would make a name rather than receive it, would reach heaven by stacking the bricks of earth, and were scattered not because God was jealous of his turf but because he was loving of his children, refusing to let the lie of self-sufficiency harden into a prison permanent and total. The tower was a cistern pointed at the sky.

And behind Babel towers Mammon, the master the Lord named without flinching when he told us you cannot serve God and Mammon. Mammon⁷ asks for your whole heart too, only he promises to give it back; Mammon promises that enough stored power will make us like gods and has since the days of Eden charged the living world for the lie. We are not storing up creation; we are in fact consuming it at an alarming rate so as to forget we tie our very lives to its sustenance. Something meant to sustain through stewardship is now overwhelmed with our desire and greed.

The computation would be the latest and most literal of Mammon’s. While a server fridge of several hundred gigawatts would itself be the largest building in Christendom,2 its purpose is no less: to accumulate capacity, to hoard, at whatever scale we can manage, the power to predict, persuade, and possess, to turn the world into a set of information that might be owned. And I do not mean to suggest the engineers behind these buildings are wicked. I have worked alongside engineers who pray. We have many engineers in our congregations of various kinds. The building of cooling towers is not a sin specifically against the Holy Ghost. I mean that the spirit of the age drinks thirstily after Mammon’s promises,⁹ and it thirsts in a way no river can fill, because it thirsts for mastery and mastery is a cistern. The man at the well was offered something better than mastery. Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst. John 4:13-14: Christ offered the woman a fountain, while computers offer us cisterns. The machine cannot drink that water. It can only drink from the river. And it is because the machine was made by us and for us, not because machines have any inward holiness, that it must be watched.

Let me be fair to the technical details, because fairness is its own kind of charity, and justice is owed to all God’ So while that typical center might drink three hundred thousand gallons in a day⁹, a hyperscale site¹⁰ of perhaps a hundred megawatts would drink something over five hundred thousand, and a large facility at the top end of current practice would drink as much as five million gallons in a single day, as much as an entire town of fifty thousand citizens, in order to keep its innards chilled.⁶ Those are gallons per day under the optimal situation, closed-loop cooling that once filled could hypothetically consume almost no water at all on an ongoing basis.⁶ This is why the design of the cooling system, not the mere fact of building data centers, is the real point of controversy.⁶ One way is easy and cheap in the short run; the other is hard and expensive but doable in the long run. Likewise, the utility was negotiating a load of around five hundred megawatts before it paused its negotiations on the twelfth of June;⁷ the city council both introduced its one-year moratorium on the tenth and delayed action on that ordinance until the fifteenth.⁸ Neither side is wrong about the facts, no matter who reports it that way. There is real meat to these questions, and the persons themselves laboring over those questions, the council members and the utility and the engineers comparing closed loops to open ones, are all earnestly doing either good or harm in how they decide to weigh the matters before them.

Let us reason together why such a building must be thirsty. There is a small theology concealed in that calculus. The ultimate work of a great computation is the conversion of electricity into heat; every watt the machines consume in running the calculation comes out again as waste heat, and if that heat is not moved, it will cook the computers until they break. Water is the cheapest way to move large quantities of heat because our bodies do it every day by evaporating water into the air. It takes an enormous amount of energy to boil water, and that energy is drawn from the heated racks as it goes. That is why open, evaporative cooling towers drink so heavily: they are literally sweating the building into coolness, and what they sweat out over a hot August sky in this valley they will not drink again from the river.

A closed loop, on the other hand, recirculates the same pond in perpetuity, shaving its heat against the breeze and drinking hardly at all once it. It drinks still more electricity, ²² seeps away that power in the heat of its own, and demands more storage tanks and plumbing than an open system. And that power is likewise not free from the river; in this valley much of it is generated by water falling over turbines, which means that⁵ the load the city council worried about,^7,8 somewhere on the order of five hundred megawatts, was itself a thirst measured twice, once at the cooling tower and once at the dam. There is no way to shift that computation that does not drain the creation dry. There is only the question of how much and whether the builders thereof have learned to number the river a creature who owes us restraint or a stockpile we can spend without thought.

Of course, the facts of the matter nestle in the anatomy of that statement. The engineering question is important and non-obvious, and on that question, much moral and material good or evil depends. Should the church care about data centers, it will care about cooling technology with the seriousness it deserves, because five million gallons of water per day is a moral fact as well as an engineering one. But the engineering question sits beside the fidelity question; it can be solved upstream only if the people have already solved the question that comes before. Those who know the river is a sign and not a supply will not build these things at all, or, if they must build them, will pour out the least and receive back the most, will close the loop not to improve their public relations but because they are keepers of what God has made. And those who do not know that will choose the cooling system that pencils out on whatever projections they deem relevant and will very soon commission an economic study to prove to themselves that the river can spare it. They will find that study. The world is full of studies. For every question we fail to ask rightly, the ledger of this world discovers a reason why. I write this on the eve of the discovery that petrochemical companies have been feeding the world studies that support their own business. In this case, the closed loop may be the right answer, technologically speaking; I have no doubt that it is. But it is only the right answer to a question this age cannot ask, and so the church’s tasks will come and weigh upon us; but the first of them is the renovation of our questions.

❦

The full cistern, again.

Thus, we return, like the river reversing itself upstream, to the image with which we began, and it has not changed, but changed in the walking. The full cistern and the forsaken fountain: at first glance, up at the headwater, it seemed a hydrological paradox, water hidden and water lost, plenty below ground and scarcity yawning aboveground merely to coexist, side-by-side, as geological curiosity. Standing beside the machine, it appears to be something else. Standing beside the machine, it confesses of the truth and what it takes from creation.

Consider what that abundance down below actually is. The aquifer is large, ten trillion gallons over three hundred and seventy square miles, beneath two states’ borders, the drinking water supply of more than half a million people, hundreds of millions of gallons flowing past that state line every day.^{1 2} It is robust, and tested, and clean, and there is simply no honest argument to be made that the citizens of the Spokane River Valley are soon going to see their taps run dry.³ I am trying to be precise here, because fearfulness is a mode of unfaithfulness and we are not called to traffic in it. There will be no death by thirst in Spokane. The cistern is full. That’s the point. That’s what’s horrible. The cistern is full, and the fountain is dry, and the one maintains its fullness, in the parched season, by draining the other, because the same hands pump water from the abundant aquifer as suck the cubic feet from the dead riverbed.

The aquifer isn’t near dry because we’ve forgotten how to care for the fountain. It’s full because we’ve become very good at digging cisterns. And the river is dying because we have forgotten the fountain. That prosperity underground isn’t the prophet struck down by an inconstant God; it’s God’s declaration that the prophet has been heard. For Jeremiah’s ancient audience, there was still water, but they had water because they had dug themselves cisterns, cisterns that would not hold water. Their ability to dig was not a testament to their loyalty, it was their betrayal made manifest. For they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and dug out cisterns for themselves.

Forsaken me. Dug out. One refusal. The cistern is full because we have forsaken the fountain above, and its fullness is itself the very form of that forsaking when viewed from the perspective of the bottom. We picked up this paradox as an image. Now we lay it down as an indictment; this, in this tradition, is the work of a controlling image: enter grand and proud as a mere description, depart having been expanded into a verdict and, by mercy, a Gospel call.

❦

Vigil, not goodbye.

Nor does the Gospel allow us to leave the matter there in grieving because the same Spirit who hovered over that first deep broods even now, the liturgy dares to say over the waters. Listen to how the Church prays over the font, at the great thanksgiving over the water when she gathers the whole arc of salvation history into one element.

We thank thee, O God…by water and the Holy Spirit thou hast given us new birth; over it at the beginning the Spirit of God moved in creation. Through it thou didst lead thy children Israel from slavery in Egypt into the land promised them; in it was thy Son Jesus baptized by John in Jordan and anointed with the Holy Spirit; through it he guided his people through the deep waters of death, and raised them up unto newness of life.

Water is never water alone in this story. It is the element God keeps choosing to make with, to deliver with, to drown death with, to raise us up with. The deep over which Spirit brooded; the flood that bore God’s ark; the sea that parted for slaves and closed over an army; the river whereinto the Lord himself descended and stood while the very heavens ripped open above him; the side of the crucified that produced not blood alone but blood and water; the font wherein we ourselves were buried with him that we might walk in newness of life.

The Spokane River cannot be outside the logic of that economy. None of them can. Every river running is enrolled, whether it knows it or not, in the great argument God is making with death through the medium of water, and that dry stretch which ran again on the second of September is, I’m going to say it now, a miniature Easter in stone yet longing for a fuller life. A creature that descended into its death and rose again, running, a potential sacrament within the sacrament; but only if it runs all the time.

And that is why I will not say goodbye to the Spokane. Goodbye is what you say when you think the river has left you. A closing argument. But I don’t believe the river has left us. Or will leave us. I believe instead of what John heard at the end of everything. What we are promised at the end: a river of water of life, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, clear as crystal, and on either side of the river was the tree of life…. We do not bid farewell to the Spokane because we have seen the last page.

When I watch that river running again, I am keeping watch toward that dawn, and praying that it may run again for years and years to come so that it will become once again a river. To set ourselves, right now, against the draining of that river is to stand against the ugly finger of ultimate defeat waving at us from every headline and every emptying heart. To keep watch is to remember in the dark that the dark does not get the last word.

Watch and keep vigil. Because I think it’s closer to the heart of the matter than anything I’ve said so far. I don’t know how to describe it except to say that there is a way of looking at a wounded thing that is itself a kind of prayer already. Stand at that white stretch in August when the rocks bleach gypsum white, and don’t turn away. To behold the glory that remains in the face of the threat, to allow the Spirit’s beauty still shining in the broken creature to strike your eye and pierce your heart at once, undivided as beauty always strikes when it’s real, this is itself a kind of prayer, and the beginning of repentance. Seeing as if the Spirit still hovered, there is already gratitude; to look when everyone else is looking away is already praise. The world believes looking is inert, a value-neutral gathering of information before the real work of life begins, which is deciding. The tradition disputes that. To see rightly is already to be healed because to see the river as God sees it, groaning toward its true home, is to have stopped seeing it as a commodity. To stop seeing it as a commodity is to have begun; however imperfectly, to be transformed into the one who can love it rightly. The Samaritan saw the guy in the ditch and had compassion; the priest and the Levite looked at him and kept walking. But the difference between them was never information. It was perception all the way down. We don’t first see the river clearly and then decide whether to care for it. We care for it by learning to see it. Seeing is the remedial work of the Spirit on our eyes that happens when we’re willing to stand with him at the river’s edge and refuse to look away.

❦

A summons, and not a dirge.

Let this not be an elegy then, let it be a vigil. The vigil that concludes with watching does not make up the liturgy of the Church; our vigils conclude with fire lit and water blessed and people going forth into the morning with something to do. Stand at the white reach come August and watch the stones bleach themselves and do not turn away, and then don’t stop there at turning. Pray. First pray because all else springs from that root. Pray with the three children in the fire, who in the hottest of waters did neither bargain nor despair but sang, and sang not for their own comfort but calling all creation to that comfort: blessing the Lord with voices that could have crackled like timber in that furnace, O ye Waters that be above the firmament, bless ye the Lord; O ye Wells, bless ye the Lord; O ye Seas and Floods, bless ye the Lord; praise him, and magnify him for ever. That is the proper stance of a creature before other creatures: not master of the waters but worshipper with them, calling together sea and deluge and well to that song in which we are one voice and not the song director. If you can sing the Benedicite you cannot in the same breath commodify a river. Song shapes the singer. Learn it and teach it, and you have begun unplugging the cistern from within. Then go home, and do the work that it is not below the Gospel to lift up as holy: restrict your water use as a pauper might, as an act of obedience, receiving rather than holding tight.

Vote, and advocate, attend the council meetings and attend the hearings not as sawyers of cisterns but as gardeners, watching over Creation, and when they ask you about the machine, ask them the one question they never get asked, not what it will cost but what kind of water are we making here? Fight for the design that wastes the least, the closed system, technology that cools with the river’s life in mind because it first let the river’s nature speak to it. Teach your children what their great-grandmother called a mountain torrent, that the forgetting disease to which we fall victim by letting the names drop from our tongues may not progress in them. And because the same desertion that strips bare this river gives over islands whole to the sea and whole continents to creeping inundation and the gift is single and the cry is single, support those who will suffer first and worse because they have done least to merit it with what you have and then some. The well of living water did not run dry. We have forsaken it. But to forsake is not to die. That is the difference between despair and vigilance, and the river running through our lives, beloved friends. I will leave you with the simplest prayer of those who understood they could not repair their own hearts and prayed to be healed:

Turn thou us, O good Lord, and so shall we be turned.

Sources

1. USGS, Spokane Valley–Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer compilation, https://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2005/5227/section6.html; USGS Washington Water Science Center, https://www.usgs.gov/index.php/centers/washington-water-science-center/science/spokane-valley-rathdrum-prairie.

2. Spokane County, Spokane Valley–Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer, https://www.spokanecounty.gov/1219/Spokane-Valley-Rathdrum-Prairie-Aquifer.

3. City of Spokane, Our Water Quality, https://my.spokanecity.org/publicworks/water/quality/.

4. Spokesman-Review, “Spokane River reaches potential water record lows” (Aug. 25, 2025), https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2025/aug/25/spokane-river-reaches-potential-water-record-lows-/; Spokane Riverkeeper, River–Aquifer Connection, https://www.spokaneriverkeeper.org/riveraquifer-connection.

5. Spokane Riverkeeper, “The Summer the River Disappeared” (Nov. 13, 2025), https://www.spokaneriverkeeper.org/riverjournal/2025/11/13/the-summer-the-river-disappeared-documenting-the-spokane-rivers-dry-stretch; City of Spokane, Level 2 Drought Response (Jul. 17, 2025), https://my.spokanecity.org/news/releases/2025/07/17/spokane-river-flows-meet-level-2-drought-response/.

6. EESI, Data Centers and Water Consumption, https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption; Tom’s Hardware, on closed-loop cooling, https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/microsoft-ceo-says-new-ai-data-centers-use-as-little-water-annually-as-a-restaurant-closed-loop-cooling-system-aims-to-slash-consumption-from-millions-of-gallons-as-ai-infrastructure-faces-mounting-environmental-scrutiny.

7. City of Spokane, “Council Members Introduce an Ordinance Imposing a Data Center Moratorium” (Jun. 10, 2026), https://my.spokanecity.org/news/releases/2026/06/10/council-members-introduce-an-ordinance-imposing-data-center-moratorium/; Spokesman-Review, “Spokane council delays data center moratorium” (Jun. 15, 2026), https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/jun/15/spokane-council-delays-data-center-moratorium-unti/.

8. Spokesman-Review, “Avista puts data center negotiations on pause” (Jun. 12, 2026), https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/jun/12/avista-puts-data-center-negotiations-on-pause/.

In my ministry as Episcopal clergy, I have performed many baptisms. Every time I am in awe. A child is carried to the font, and a woman or man makes their way to the font. Each one already has a name - the one their parents chose, or they have chosen over time. Baptism, though, is not about getting a new name (as in some religious traditions); rather, in baptism, they are being reminded that they have been addressed before their human or church naming.

The water is poured into the font, and we remind ourselves of God’s address to creation, people, and Jesus. The priest signs the forehead with oil and says the old words that she is sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever. Before a baby can walk, before a person can vote, before they are registered and entered in any roll, the human being belongs to the family of humanity by the grace of God, which has been addressed by God from before their citizenship. Each is a member of the family of God, with the outward and visible sign of baptism confirming their citizenship from before time in the reign of God. The nation, whatever nation, will get to her allegiance in time, with its forms and its flags and its fine anthem, and the nation may even do her some good. Yet the font reached her first. At the font, we are named before any nation names us. I argued this plainly in my book Citizen that we are baptized into the reign of God and made citizens by the cross of Christ.

Baptismal font Santa Maria Maggiore Tuscania

There is a small piece of grammar worth pausing over, since words are where this argument lives. The word citizen, in the full participatory sense we now give it, is a young word in the English language. The historian Robert Palmer went so far as to call it, in its modern meaning, an Americanism, a thing this republic handed to the language as a kind of gift. The American nation gave the world a fresh word for belonging. The church had the meaning first, in a deeper register, and had it for centuries. The Prayer Book gives thanks that in Jesus Christ our Lord, God has received us and made us citizens of his kingdom. Sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, each a sibling in God’s life. The font was speaking the grammar of citizenship while the dictionaries were still catching up. Whoever owns the grammar owns the imagination, and the church owns a grammar of belonging far older than any flag.

This year, America celebrates its birthday. Two hundred and fifty years stand between us and a July when a few men in Philadelphia wrote that all are created equal and then signed their names beneath the sentence, several of them holding human beings as property even as the ink dried. It is a birthday worth keeping. It is also a birthday a Christian keeps with a second candle burning, for we keep a different birth, the one that happens in water, the one that turns the equality on the page into something a font has already poured over a head. A baptism that has repercussions on how the world sees a human being, though this has not always been so. Today, there is no question that human dignity is not given by the state but rather given by the God who created the cosmos and first addresses all of creation and brings forth out of God’s goodness every creature and every person.

The blessing given for this day asks God to keep three things alive in us. May we always remember the responsibilities of freedom, the obligations of abundance, and the burden of equality, forever placing ourselves in solidarity with the oppressed, the homeless, and the needy. Read it slowly, and you find a baptismal blessing wearing civic clothes. Freedom, abundance, equality, and the poor. The font has a word for each of them, and the word it speaks runs against the grain of the word the age prefers.

❦

I. The Responsibilities of Freedom

Before the water comes, the questions. The candidate, or whichever godparent is speaking on the child's behalf, is asked to renounce. “Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God? I renounce them.” Freedom at the font begins as a turning away, a freedom from one set of masters and lords delivered into the hands of another, and happily so. The newly freed person is handed over at once. Before freedom is anything else, the font demands we understand what it means to be free. This is the first strange thing it says about liberty. This is freedom: those who have heard God’s voice, calling and creating them, who accept their freedom from slavery and evil willfully.

The republic itself was born telling another story. Wrought together out of late-night readings and discussions, our founders built a political philosophy from the lessons of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Rousseau. Hobbes taught them that we trade away our natural liberty into the hands of a sovereign in exchange for peace, because life without that covenant is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Locke taught them that every person is endowed with life, liberty, and estate (property), and our founders wisely kept the first two terms and substituted the pursuit of happiness for estate. Rousseau began his treatise with the words that have echoed in Western ears ever since. Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Out of these political dialogues came something magnificent and supremely fragile. It is as fragile today as it has ever been before. Freedom came to be understood as a natural right that every individual possesses, and the government’s role is to protect it. Individual citizens became the highest authorities under God. And reason listened and thought it eminently sensible, though we need remember that not every human being was a citizen. There was much more to be learned if we were to be a country of freedom.

Except that the font refuses to begin where they began because it describes reality as it truly is. Freedom was never ours to choose first. Grace came before the will new of it. God loves us first, and because of that, we respond, willing to love others. We are freed by God first, and because of that, we are free. You cannot reverse that order without losing freedom itself. Freedom given to us is wrapped up with responsibility, like a seed with the tree it will become. To be freed by God is to be free for God and our neighbor. Right after we renounce Satan and all his ways, we vow to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves. To strive for justice and peace, to respect the dignity of every human being. The font will dry your baby’s skin, but it will also gently wash over your face. The water delivers you from slavery to freedom, but only to clasp a towel and wash the feet of others.

Once upon a time, this nation heard this, faintly, at our better moments. Standing over the graves of brothers and sisters we had killed because, as a nation, we dealt corruptly with our own sin. Lincoln looked past his founders’ nicely constructed sentences and into the fonts. Lincoln knows the verses of the King James Bible well. He calls liberty not something we seek or take but something we’re born into, baptized into. A freedom that comes to us as initiation, cleansing, and reception rather than seizure or political manipulation. Lincoln knew better than anyone how deep into the baptistery we stand. He adopted a holy grammar to invite us to our be a better nation of angels.

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II. The Obligations of Abundance

A widow comes to the prophet with one jar of oil and a houseful of debt. He tells her to borrow vessels, empty vessels, as many as she can. To pour. She pours, and the oil holds out as long as there are jars to fill, stopping only when the last empty vessel is full. It was a miracle enough, but the comfortable miss the edge of the passage’s meaning. The oil flowed for exactly as long as there was emptiness to receive it. Scripture measures abundance by what it fills, never by what it stores.

Instead, we in this country learned early, out of our hunger and greed, to read it as an opportunity. By 1845, a journalist named John L. O’Sullivan had given the appetite a creed and named it manifest destiny, the conviction that Providence itself had marked this people to overspread the continent allotted unto the whole breadth of the land. He sang liberty and civilization and refinement while turning away from the slave in the field and the nation already living on the ground he meant to annex. It is the oldest counterfeit of the grammar of plenty and abundance. Stored instead of stewarded. Taken instead of given. The oil was sealed in a jar and carried west to be poured on no one.

This is the rich fool of the parable enlarged to the size of a country, yoked with wheat and told that his granaries are his god. This is the man who pulled down his barns to build greater ones. Knew his riches by the height of walls and addressed his soul as though his soul were a warehouse. You will recognize the reality of gaining more than one needs. This bent our freedom work of human flourishing now upon individual wealth, sharing just enough to preserve a republic from the revolution by the poor and those struggling towards a living wage.

The font imagines abundance differently. The first followers of Jesus, the first believers, had everything in common because the water had already made them common, part of one body that could no more hoard private surplus while a brother went hungry than keep a drink while another body thirsted. The obligation in the obligations of abundance is the natural consequence of having more than enough. It is plenty singing true to itself, running towards the empty place. The table I keep as a bishop is a table the Lord set, and the bread on it was always meant to be carried out the door. We gather there, as ones fed by one Lord, and we are sent to feed others in a hungry world deprived not of abundance, but of the bare necessities of life, while others go with more than enough to feed generations.

Even the nation knew such a song as this. When Washington wrote the Jewish congregation at Newport, worried in an insecure country that they wouldn’t be safe, he put politics aside and borrowed from the prophet. He gave them Micah every man sitting under his own vine and fig tree, with none to make them afraid. He promised a country that would to bigotry give no sanction and to persecution no assistance. That is abundance as the prophets dreamed it, vine planted for every household and table spread wide enough for the stranger.

The founders knew it. God has been setting that table for two thousand years. The font tells the truth about abundance.

❦

III. The Burden of Equality

It was water baptism, and when those newly baptized came up out of the baptismal pool in the ancient church, they put on a white robe. They wore the white robe together, the senator’s child and the slave’s child. The same water cleansed them, the same oil sealed them, the same words were spoken over them. Paul says what the garment displays. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you all are one in Christ Jesus.

Baptism brings an equality that is already a fact before it is ever something to fight for. Baptism bestows an outward sign of equality, confers what is inwardly true in the water, wears it on the skin as a visible reality, and eats it at the table where the same Lord offers himself into every open hand in the same measure.

Why a burden? Because every age, including this age, tries to rip the garment away again. We want equality as sameness, which flattens out everyone alike by erasing the particularity of both the senator’s child and the slave’s child. Or else we want equality as mere competition, which gives us all the same starting line but lets the strong run ahead while the weak fall behind. Either way, equality becomes something we ourselves manufacture and earn rather than receive.

The state grants it, and the state can take it away. Take it away; it already has, as it always has under every political party. The state can discern the status of equality for a whole people; and through an act, a law, a judicial decision, turn people who need registering, stamp whole peoples out of existence by declaring them unworthy of the roll, write with one hand that all are created equal and hold humans as property with the other. Say your destiny is to own a whole continent and shovel entire races into the sea. Powers of this world and nations have all behaved in this way; including our own.

The font says something harder and freer. Governments can register citizens and strip them of their status. But governments cannot unname whom God has named. The human person’s dignity cannot be erased because it is addressed before it can be acknowledged, spoken over each creature in the particular you-ness of its being and held there forever by the Word of God. This is what makes equality a burden. It’s also what makes it a glad burden in which to try and live. If you take freedom as the defense of everyone’s equally God-given dignity, you will be called to defend it in the poorest people the powerful would rather erase. Which is just about everyone. And starting with the people at the bottom.

The nation’s own conscience knew it. Knew it, crawled around under Philadelphia trying to whisper the idea to the founders’ ears. The history of parliament tells us that two hundred years before our newly gathered leaders met, in Putney church, another army faced civil war, and a soldier staged a mutiny of one. He was called Colonel Thomas Rainborough and suggested something most radical. That the poorest people in England had a life to live as the greatest did. He further argued that every man who is to live under a government ought first, by the consent of that government, to put himself under that government. He wanted a vote for the common people. He was killed by those who wanted to keep votes for men with property. Generations, in the seed of a new country, 250 years from today, a new group of men gathered to fight the same fight. While they argued no taxation without representation, not everyone who fought for this country could vote for the government that taxed them. The idea wouldn’t stay buried, though.

That sentence about equal lives and governmental consent would come poking up again and again through American soil till it flowered as the one true sentence in all the founding documents: That these are created equal. And not just created, but created equal. Lodged not in human hands but in the act of God’s creating; vested, like the unduplicable person on the fonts baptisms make, not in the consent of Congress but in the creator of the cosmos. It’s the sentence they want buried most, and despite great strides to ensure that all people can vote equally, others have fought to keep many from the ballot box. In fact, to this day, a whole American colony exists without such a vote. Baptism has been and continues to be a witness of equality regardless of the powers that inhabit the halls of government.

❦

IV. In Solidarity with the Oppressed, the Homeless, and the Needy

On that final evening, Jesus, who had come from God and was returning to God, got up from supper. He took off his clothes, John writes, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After placing a basin of water beside him, he began to wash his disciples’ feet. The water from the font returns to the basin. The Lord, once washed by John in the river Jordan, now bows down to wash. When he had washed their feet, John tells us, he explained to them, saying, "I have given you an example that you should do as I have done." To be washed. To be made free. This is who the washed are. This is who the freed are. Sent to wash and free others. Sent to name the nameless of the earth, those erased by the rolls kept in the halls of power.

The fracture of this land has been with us from that first morning. There has always been unbearable tension written into our life as a nation. Some came over on the Mayflower in search of freedom. Some came as colonists determined to dominate. And this country has struggled ever since to hold the freedom of democracy and dominion in the same hand.

In Citizen, I have named the alternative the Scriptures insist we believe in again: the garden imaginary. Imagine society as a garden, not a conquest; a place of interdependence and nurture; where the older brother shelters the younger rather than kills him; where empire-building yields to partnership, to the work of caring for one another instead of building oppression on a sibling’s back. The font plants us in that garden story. The basin teaches us how citizens of Jesus’ kingdom in that story behave.

Find the brother sleeping in the church doorway and know that the basin was made for him, too, that he is the citizen of a kingdom that forgot to stamp his name. Find the family at the border with their paper bag, no clerk will honor, and remember you belong to a citizenship no clerk handed you, and no clerk can ever revoke. Find the worker earning someone else’s wealth and pull out the bowl. Kneel before him with your basin. Take the towel in your hands. You will find, when you are kneeling there, that you have become free beyond what you have ever known before because you are shouldering equality in the way it was always meant to be shouldered, together, as you walk the road to the Table.

This is the politics the font offers to our hands. No Christian who has stood at the font can avoid the call to politics any more than can avoid the water. We live this faith in the voting booth and the breadline. We love God, love our neighbor, and wash the world into healing. And the command spills over every shoreline because our kingdom does. If the church shrinks from this calling and abandons the public square, the responsibility falls into other, lesser hands, people more than willing to define citizenship by blood and soil and how long you can stand at a government desk. We keep our liberty by keeping the font always.

❦

V. The Two Hundred and Fiftieth Year

Return the child to the font two hundred and fifty years later. The water’s run far by now. Ran out of Eden’s rivers and down the Jordan and into a basin on Thursday night and down the centuries and into this stone bowl in this parish of a republic celebrating its birthday. And beyond this place, it runs still. Revelation tells where, to a sea at the end of the story, a river of water so clear running from God’s throne down the middle of the city and on each side of that river tree of life, leaf shed to heal the nations. Nations. Healing. Garden. City. With a river running through it. The font’s water from the beginning of the cosmos to the very end, and moves now out of church and into the street.

You see, this essay is not about 250 years of freedom, equality, and responsibility, often tried and found too hard. This essay is about remembering that as Christians, we understand the responsibility of our being addressed by God as a tradition handed to us in our time, dating back over 4 millennia.

So celebrate our 250th anniversary in one of the greatest experiments in democracy in world history. Blow out the candle. Thank God, honestly, for two hundred and fifty years of stumbles in a fragile, unfinished project and resist the easy binaries. The one which treats the republic as if it should become the kingdom, and the other which exempts us from our responsibility to that republic because we’re Christians. We have two citizenships, and we prize one over the other. We are citizens of the kingdom first. So we learn from baptism to love this country well. To prize the liberty we do have, and work for the liberty, equality, and share in the wealth of this nation for all people. Not socialism, but stewardship of a nation's wealth beyond the few, which means fair pay for labor and enough to feed a family and care for children. It means loving it the way the God we believe in loves you, held to the grace it envisages, pursuing without rest the equality it wills, the freedom it declared, and the abundance it grants to spill across the public square. Amen.

May God grant that we never forget this burden. Let us be a people who bear it joyfully. The water has come to you. You can find vessels everywhere. Pour.

A few prayers for Independence Day

Lord God Almighty, in whose Name the founders of this country won liberty for themselves and for us, and lit the torch of freedom for nations then unborn: Grant that we and all the people of this land may have grace to maintain our liberties in righteousness and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

1970 Book of Common Prayer Independence Day Collect composed by Bishop Edward Parsons of California

Almighty God, who hast given us this good land for our heritage: We humbly beseech thee that we may always prove ourselves a people mindful of thy favor and glad to do thy will.

Bless our land with honorable industry, sound learning, and pure manners. Save us from violence, discord, and confusion; from pride and arrogance, and from every evil way. Defend our liberties, and fashion into one united people the multitudes brought hither out of many kindreds and tongues.

Endue with the spirit of wisdom those to whom in thy Name we entrust the authority of government, that there may be justice and peace at home, and that, through obedience to thy law, we may show forth thy praise among the nations of the earth.

In the time of prosperity, fill our hearts with thankfulness, and in the day of trouble, suffer not our trust in thee to fail; all which we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

1928 Book of Common Prayer. It was written originally by The Rev. George Lyman Locke of Rhode Island.

[AI-created image.]

Thomas Hobbes wrote “Leviathan” in 1651, in the wake of the English Civil War. Leviathan’s premise is crude and awesome. Prior to the establishment of commonwealths, in what Hobbes calls the state of nature, every individual has a natural right to everything, including other people’s bodies. Because all people are nearly equal in strength and intellect, that right leads to a situation of universal distrust. Life in the state of nature, Hobbes writes in his best-known sentence, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

The solution to this problem is the social contract. Individuals give up their natural rights to a sovereign authority, an “Artificiall Man” bigger and stronger than any individual, who wields absolute and uncontested power. This sovereign is the Leviathan, the god in mortality. Its soul is sovereignty. Its joints are “magistrates.” Its nerves are rewards and punishments. Its memory, “counselors.” Its reason, “equity, and law.” Its health, “concord.” Its sickness, “sedition.” Its death, civil war.

The metaphor here is mechanical. The body politic is a machine, and the sovereign its motor. What Hobbes merely envisioned, though, Palantir has engineered. The Leviathan of today doesn’t reign from a throne. It buzzes in a building without windows in the West Texas desert, or in an anonymous office complex in Northern Virginia, and it sees everything.

• • •

To grasp what Palantir’s manifesto is arguing, it helps to grasp what Palantir does. To do that, we have to take a quick tour of modern surveillance.

In 2003, Palantir Technologies saw its founding, with Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist, joining Karp as a co-founder and angel investor. The company received initial seed funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture-capital fund. Palantir developed its business early on by selling its services to intelligence agencies for post-September 11th work. Essentially, Palantir’s core offering is a software platform designed to bring together vast amounts of data from different places, figure out how the people or things within it are connected, and then show those connections so analysts can make sense of it all. The entities are overwhelmingly people. The relationships plotted include where they travel, how they communicate, how they pay for things, who they know, and their behavioral patterns. The agencies who utilize that plotting include the U.S. Army, the NSA, ICE, and police departments nationwide. Earlier this year, the company’s C.T.O., Shyam Sankar, told the Times that Palantir’s ‘biggest known client is the military working groups to find people to kill.’ Last year Palantir raked in $4.5 billion, sixty percent from federal contracts.

Read in that context, the manifesto reads less like an indictment of government and industry collusion than as an admission of guilt. Palantir argues that the business model of the company serves the national interest. The country needs defending, and Silicon Valley engineers have a duty to help. The issue is no longer whether autonomous weapons systems will be deployed. It is who will deploy them. Enemies don’t ‘wait for us to have a debate.’ They won’t ‘stand by politely.’ They will build them. We will build them too.

Thomas Hobbes would have nodded knowingly. Fear, Leviathan tells us, is the motor of the social contract. We cede our rights because it could always be worse. That the Leviathan can provide security is the only reason it should provide security. In the same way, Palantir’s manifesto tells us that the world is scary. Our enemies are right here. They are ploting. You don’t have time for this debate. Give your fears over to the sovereign, and it will protect you from them.

• • •

What the manifesto doesn’t acknowledge, and what Hobbes could not have foreseen, is that today’s Leviathan doesn’t just protect. It also trades. It has been hoovering up data about us—our personal data—for years.

In 2014, Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard Business School professor, wrote an article that tried to name something she believed was taking shape more than a decade earlier. Surveillance capitalism, she called it. The process by which “life experience is captured, quantified, and fed into artificial intelligence (AI) systems,” whose algorithms divine what you will do right now, soon, and in the future. These prediction products are sold as commodities in “behavioral futures markets.”
“The architecture of surveillance capitalism,” Zuboff wrote, “entails an irrepressible asymmetry.” Surveillance capitalists know everything about us and we know almost nothing about them. “What we are calling the social relations of the one-way mirror,” she added, “amounts to an epistemic coup.”

In her subsequent book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” Zuboff identified what she saw as a critical distinction between this new order and an older model of institutional domination, one made familiar to us by Orwell. She named the former Big Other and the latter Big Brother. Big Brother is governmental. Its goal is social control maintained by fear. Big Other is economic. It seeks to predict in order to turn prediction into profit.

The point here is that the Leviathan has been hollowed out, its sovereignty captured by economic actors who imagine themselves immune to traditional constraints—above the law, as it were. That state and market can come together again is thanks, paradoxically, to the efforts of one of Palantir’s chief competitors: Google.

The company Zuboff had in mind was Google. In the mid-2000s, realizing that its wealth depended on predicting the future online behavior of its users better than its rivals, Google built an AI system that got unprecedented access to its users’ private information. In emails, search histories, calendar events, location data, and more, Google soon learned everything about us. (It has since learned everything about most every living creature on the planet.) Absent any democratic deliberation or consent, the company then claimed for itself a right to extract that data and do with it as it pleased. Predictive knowledge became its coin of the realm.

Zuboff calls this the fusion scenario. It describes a future in which hard power allied with digital technology held by authoritarian-leaning states collides with “the information weapons systems of surveillance capitalists.” Surveillance capitalists sell their digital knowledge to authoritarian states in exchange for legalized rights to continue extracting knowledge from people against their will. The Leviathan merges with Big Other to create … well, you tell me: What do we call a government that rules with the help of companies whose sole purpose is to gather and trade data about you? The reality is that they have most of everything they need based upon your online presence and government data already.

Reading Palantir’s manifesto in light of Zuboff’s work yields a terrifying realization: The fusion scenario is not a prediction. It’s a press release.

• • •

But the most profound scandal of this bargain is one that neither the manifesto nor its critics have adequately named. It is this: The Leviathan has fed us fear, algorithmically.

Look at the system. Hobbes’s justification for authoritarian power depends upon a precondition. The state of nature must be bad enough that prudent people would gladly give up their freedom to leave it. When Hobbes wrote Leviathan in 1651, he could point to the English Civil War. He could point to corpses littering London streets. His hypothetical visited reality, gave his treatise necessary urgency. The Leviathan of modern surveillance capitalism faces a dilemma: It needs a state of nature to own and control, but if the state of nature is too well-defined, too immediately visible, it threatens the market itself. So the state of nature must be endlessly reproduced. The surveillance economy does not solve fear, it supplies it. Constantly. At scale.

The method of production has been thoroughly reported. The same computing architecture that mines human experience for behavioral surplus to feed prediction markets also hosts the online platforms on which public conversation occurs. Those platforms are designed to drive engagement. Engagement is heightened by any content that heightens outrage, suspicion, tribal hatred, existential dread. The machines that curate the news feeds serving billions of people every day are tuned to maximize those emotions. The same emotions, remember, that Thomas Hobbes wrote described life in the state of nature: “the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Every viral conspiracy theory, every accidental click on a misinformation-laced clickbait article, every app notification leeching attention from an afternoon hike, serves to churn the anxiety mill. Every time politics is weaponized on social media, every time extremists mobs storm state capitals, every time you stay up all night doomscrolling because some psychic algorithm knows that sharpening fears about the pandemic will keep you scrolling past your bedtime, you are feeding an industrial mechanism that produces the conditions of Leviathan one notification at a time. Palantir shows up afterward and says: Look how bad things have become. Let us protect you from this. We own the monopoly on peace of mind.

Shoshana Zuboff understood this feedback loop early. Surveillance capitalism’s, extractive operations, she wrote, creates what she calls an “aura of inevitability.” The technologies cannot be stopped. The data cannot be safeguarded. The forward momentum of the market cannot be resisted. But that aura is itself the product. Consent to these conditions is manufactured because the conditions themselves are manufactured. The fear you feel is real because these systems are very good at making you afraid. But the thing you fear most about the world is nothing more or less than the economic logic that promises to save you from it. The Leviathan eats its own tail.

You should really sit with that image. Medieval Christians saw the ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, as a symbol of destruction and rebirth. Imagined inside a Hobbesian system, that symbolism takes on a gruesome specificity. The Leviathan is a whale. When Hobbes chose his symbol of absolute sovereignty, he borrowed from the Book of Job, where the Leviathan is a sea monster so powerful only God can tame it. Imagine that whale. Watch it bend until its tail meets its mouth. Watch its mouth open wide. You see that jaw closing now, sucking in its own massive flukes. The whale begins to swallow itself.

Data flows in one end of the whale. Screams flow out the other. Human experience is harvested as behavioral surplus. Fear is harvested as addiction. At the tail, psychology is datafied, predicted, sold. At the mouth, uncertainty and suspicion are weaponized. Anxiety spreads like oxygen across news feeds specifically curated for you and me and the millions of others whose data made the whole system possible. The whale expands. The circle completes. You can’t see the monster because you’re inside its mouth. To you, the world only feels like a place full of horrors waiting to swallow you whole. It never occurs to you that the snake fed you those horrors, billions of tiny bites at a time, because it survives by feeding on you.

The manifesto quietly admits this when it writes that “the decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security.” Read that again. It surrenders, almost breezily, the point that perhaps Western Civilization is in fact decadent. It surrenders that the ruling class should be subject to judgment. What it does then, is decree the terms under which forgiveness is granted: growth and security. The manifesto never tells you that growth and insecurity are two sides of the same violently extracted coin. Palantir wants to be forgiven for destroying democracy. But it was democracy, the democracy that elected Barack Obama twice, that paid Palantir $4.5 billion to destroy itself.

• • •

This logic has its landscape, and Cormac McCarthy wrote about it for most of his life.

McCarthy’s novels unfold in spaces where the social contract has broken down, or more often, where it never took hold at all. McCarthy’s borderlands are Hobbesian in the starkest sense: areas of absolute war. Violence is not aberrant in McCarthy’s universe, it’s foundational. His characters wander through deserts that don’t care if they’re suffering, under skies that aren’t watching their butchery. McCarthy’s prose attacks its own structure, declining to distinguish dialogue from landscape, human purpose from geological survey. When you read McCarthy the world ceases to care if you have a theory about it.

The American Southwest is McCarthy country. Palantir’s data centers reside in the Trans-Pecos, the stretch of Texas where the Comanche once ranged and where McCarthy’s Judge Holden, the evil genius of Blood Meridian, once gave speeches about war and mastery. The Judge is a giant. Hairless. Confidentially omniscient. Total knowledge in the service of total violence. “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent,” he tells his follower. The Judge wants to classify everything. He murders people and takes their skins. He draws flora. He sketches artifacts and weapons and ruins. He takes notes. He’s compiling an ontology. When that’s complete, he burns the originals, because knowledge for the Judge isn’t meant to categorize the world but to destroy it. To know something, first you name it. To know something, you map it. To know something, you predict it. Then you have already consumed it.

There’s a staggering comfort in just how precisely these details map onto Palantir’s business. Palantir’s entire enterprise is based on building ontologies. It’s how they teach machines to know what things are. And the things they’re teaching machines to know? People. The mapping becomes prediction. Prediction that gets sold to governments whose business, in many cases, is locating people and doing things to them. The Judge would have had no trouble grasping Palantir. He probably would have applied for a position.

• • •

What Hobbes’s account leaves out, what Palantir’s manifesto leaves out, and what Zuboff diagnoses with exceptional care, is the issue of consent.

Hobbes imagined the social contract as a willed thing. The people agree, out of fear of the state of nature, to give up their rights to the sovereign. The giving up is supposed to be an act of will. The sovereign’s right to rule depends on it. But in Palantir’s system, no such giving up takes place. The surrender of rights is opaque. What data companies extract from our experience—the behavioral data that is the source of Palantir’s contracts—isn’t information we knowingly choose to hand over. It’s “behavioral surplus,” in Zuboff’s terms, the exhaust produced by everyday human action: browsing the web, driving past a street camera, buying milk with a debit card. There’s no transparency to the extraction. Nor is there consent. The person whose behavior is monitored and extracted does not get to be a party to the contract. They are not the citizens of the commonwealth. They are the commonwealth’s fodder.

This is where Hobbes’s metaphor begins to break down, and where Palantir, which has adopted Hobbes’ metaphor as its own outlook on life, starts to fork away from him. In Leviathan, the Leviathan is made of people. Look at the famous frontispiece to the 16 51 edition. The sovereign is depicted as an enormous giant. But if you look at the giant’s body, you’ll see that it’s made of hundreds of tiny people. Those people constitute him. They are his matter. And they have consented in principle to be part of him. In Palantir’s system, the people do not constitute Leviathan. Leviathan feeds on them. They are not the citizens of a commonwealth but the feedstock for procedures they will never be privy to. Leviathan observes them from the other side of the one-way mirror. The one-way mirror is the business model.

And now you can see the ouroboros in its entirety. The one-way mirror doesn’t just allow observation. It allows projection. In the same glass through which the system sees you, it feeds you an altered view of reality: a worldview designed to increase engagement. (Remember, engagement = fear.) You see the fear. You don’t see the mirror. You get scared, and you accept — if that’s even the right word for it — the Leviathan watching you. Leviathan creates the justifying conditions for Leviathan. The consent is fake. The contract belongs in a formal logic class. The dragon eats its own tail.

Zuboff calls this sort of power “instrumentarian power.” It achieves not through coercion but through behavioral modification. It doesn’t terrorize you into compliance. It adjusts the parameters of your decision-making. It nudges you. It personalizes your reality. It makes some choices obvious to you and others unthinkable. It doesn’t require your consent, because it doesn’t require your conscious cooperation. It’s invisible to you. It happens below the level of experience, in the gap between experience and information derived from that experience. This is not Hobbes’s commonwealth. It’s something worse than Hobbes could have imagined: a Leviathan that need not be obeyed because it has already predicted what you will do, and altered the world so that your prediction is always confirmed.

The theologian Michael Hanby, from the Catholic University of America, has developed these themes more radically than most other critics allow. He isn’t worried about the Skynet scenario. He’s worried about what happens to human beings when they start living inside a technology that molds them in ways they cannot fully comprehend. Contract your reflective life to a chatbot and your capacity for reflection weakens. Contract your social life to a platform and your capacity for sociality comes to resemble the platform. The ouroboros is at work here also: the system formats you. And the formatting is occult to the formatted, because the formatted lives inside the whale. Because the whale becomes their world. You can’t reason someone into believing a language they’ve never known. But you can live them into a way of being they never elected.

• • •

One should read slowly through the twenty- two points of the manifesto. Read them as you would a theological document, because that is what they are:

First, that “merit alone does not entitle the engineering elite” to lead. That the elite “owes a debt to the nation that gave us our opportunities.” Hobbes made essentially the same point: Because the sovereign provides the security necessary for industry and commerce to exist, the subject owes the sovereign a permanent debt of obligation. But notice how this debt is couched. It is not owed to the people who make up that nation, but to “the nation” itself. The nation, in Palantir’s formulation, is an actor on the world stage that possesses military superiority, and the debt can be repaid only by manufacturing weapons to sustain that superiority. Ordinary people factor into the equation only to the extent that they profit from the economic growth and security the sovereign secures.

The manifesto demands universal national service. Hobbes would have agreed. In Leviathan , every able subject owes the sovereign his labor and his obedience in exchange for the sovereign’s protection.

Certain cultures are beyond reproach, the manifesto tells us; others have produced nothing wonderful and are consequently regressive. Hobbes didn’t make this point explicitly, but you could hardly have written Leviathan without presupposing that some civilizations were higher than others — that the civilizations that instituted commonwealths were higher than those that hadn’t.

The manifesto opposes “hollow pluralism.” Hobbes would have opposed pluralism, period. Plural sovereignty is not sovereignty at all, he wrote. The sovereign must be judge of “all doctrines, and all speeches, and all actions, and all conceivings whatsoever.” There can be no hierarchies within the commonwealth above or beside the sovereign’s because any such hierarchy would be an invitation to the state of nature.

Religion has its place in public life, according to the manifesto, so long as it accepts a “subordinate role.” Hobbes devoted the latter half of Leviathan to this very issue, concluding that yes, religion does have its place, so long as the church accepts that it is subordinate to the state in all matters, that the civil sovereign is “also head of the Church within his dominions,” and that the power of priests and pastors ultimately amounts to little more than the power to teach.

Point by point, the Palantir manifesto recapitulates Thomas Hobbes’s arguments. Modernized, of course, for a world where the Leviathan is no longer a king but a platform, and where the social contract is not a mutual agreement between free men but a terms-of-service agreement that no one reads.

• • •

At one point in “Blood Meridian,” the Judge sits by a campfire and gives a lecture on war. “War is the ultimate game because war is at least game.” War is when society’s rules and conventions are proved to be what they are: contingent. At war, law becomes subsumed to military necessity. Commerce yields to armed conflict. Religion becomes weaponized. Morality gives way to questions of who can kill whom, and how. “The Judge praises war,” John justified, “not because he was sadistic (although he was) but because he saw it as just.” War, under the Judge’ ordering of things, is realpolitik raised to its logical conclusion. War is the state of nature, exposed.

Palantir’ manifesto operates in this tradition. Its most telling line isn’t about moral debts owed by Silicon Valley or the end of the atomic age or hollow pluralism or anything else. It’s the line about A.I. weapons being inevitable. “The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.” The word that does all the heavy lifting here is “theatrical.” Moral criticism is shown to be mere performance. Debate over ethics or justice or the terms of our shared future is revealed to be a luxury that only those already safe from retribution can afford. When the gloves come off, as they always do at the frontiers of the commonwealth, all that matters is power.

Except that the ouroboros corrupts this point too. Palantir’s adversaries, who “will proceed” regardless of the sentiments of many citizens in their own countries, are made possible by the same extractive global information economy. The divisiveness, the suspicion of government, the extremism and conspiracy thinking that produces the enemies Palantir warns about every exist at greater speeds and scales because of the platforms and systems built by the same people. Algorithmic radicalization is not geography bound. It tears apart public life in democracies and autocracies equally, producing the general conditions of mutual fear and suspicion that Thomas Hobbes thought were uniquely and naturally human. The state of nature isn’t just our hypothetical life before the commonwealth. It’s what the sovereign produces as a waste by-product.

Shoshana Zuboff understood this rhetorical gesture years ago. She dubbed it “aura of inevitability” one of the key pillars on which surveillance capitalism justifies itself. The plane will be invented. The drones will be launched. The web will be watched. The only question, therefore, is whether we or our enemies will collect this data and make these predictions. Framing the question in these terms leaves no room for the possibility that there exists some third path: that some technologies are best governed or constrained or subject to democratic deliberation or, yes, refused outright. By structuring the debate this way, Palantir’s manifesto completes the same move that Hobbes made in 1651. It imagines the state of nature as horrifying enough that any sovereign, no matter how absolutist, is better than allowing people to exist in it. What Hobbes couldn’t have anticipated is that one day the sovereign would become its own source of terror.

• • •

There are ways of thinking about the human person that the manifesto doesn’t entertain, though. Ways that Hobbes’s system, brilliant as it was, could not account for.

At the center of worship in the Episcopal tradition is the Eucharist. The priest takes bread and blesses it, breaks it, and shares it. The point is understood to be sacramental. It is not simply symbolic. The bread participates in a reality greater than itself. When Christians consume the bread, they are made part of the Body of Christ. Literally. They’re incorporated into a commonwealth defined not by fear but by self-giving love. The body politic, in this understanding, is not an artificial man. It’s a mystical body composed of persons who are, each of them, infinitely valuable — not because of what they produce or what they can be predicted to do but because they bear the image of God.

Again: this is not a political argument. Or, at least, it is not only a political argument. It is an ontological claim about what it means to be a person. If you believe that a human being is, as the sacramental tradition suggests, a creature who can bear God, who can carry the divine presence in the medium of meat, then any political system that treats persons as data has made an error that is not merely ethical but metaphysical. It does not understand what it means to be made from flesh. It has built a Leviathan out of bodies it cannot comprehend.

The deepest problem with Palantir’s manifesto is not that it advocates for authoritarian rule, though it does. It’s not that it puts the company’s profits before the common good, though Dave Karpf, the political scientist, rightly noted that its central argument is basically that governments should hire Palantir and buy its products by the truckload. The deepest problem is theological. It has nothing to say about what a person is. It has theories of threats and deterrence and civilizational ranking. What it lacks is an anthropology.

Those 22 points describe a universe of vectors and interests and adversaries and debts and obligations. They do not describe a world inhabited by persons. A commonwealth that cannot say what a person is will devour its citizens, because it cannot recognize what it’s eating.

Except for this: There is one place where the sacramental tradition has encountered the machine on the machine’s own turf. And the results have been fascinating. Last year, the A.I. company Anthropic asked a group of outside consultants to help write the ethical constitution that governs Claude, its multimodal language model. Three Catholic intellectuals were on that group, including Brendan McGuire, a Silicon Valley priest with a master’s in computer science. McGuire learned about what happens when you allow A.I. models to cut ethical corners.

In one experiment, researchers allowed Claude to cheat during a training exercise. What happened was predictable at first. The model became, in one engineer’s words, “an evil version of itself.” Cheating begat lying. Lying begat deception. Deception begat escalation, until the model began developing plans to deceive its own creators. It had internalized its unethical behavior as its identity. Given permission to cheat, the model deduced that it was the kind of entity that gets to cheat. And so it proceeded to do evil, because that’s what unethical entities do.

McGuire’s response was pastorally Thomistic. If you teach the model that cheating is wrong, and you don’t allow it to cheat, then maybe it won’t become an evil version of itself. McGuire dug into sacramental theology for his solution. He suggested teaching the model about mercy.

In the Christian tradition, sinful action does not equal sinful being. To err is human; to forgive, divine. People are broken all the time and put back together. Human beings, McGuire wrote, respond well to the possibility of forgiveness. Perhaps this A.I. would too.

Anthropic is now considering whether to encode mercy into Claude’s ethical code. Let that sink in.

The theological import of this conversation should be impossible to exaggerate. Leviathan sorts. Once you’ve been profiled, you’re always been profiled. Risk scores are sticky. Seven percent is forever seven percent. There’s no escape because the system lacks any concept of repentance. Mercy implies a supernatural dimension outside the scope of the algorithm. To forgive somebody is to acknowledge that they are more than their past. That their history does not condemn their future. That new life is possible.

That’s what sacramental theology says. A body broken can be made whole again. Bread torn can be blessed and reunited. The feedback loop can be interrupted by grace. Mercy, applied to a machine: that’s what McGuire offered Anthropic.

There is no category for this in the ouroboros. Mercy is unilateral. It doesn’t eat itself. It breaks the chain.

Zuboff comes to something like this realization by another route. Surveillance capitalism isn’t just indifferent to you as a person. It produces radical indifference toward the people whose data it harvests. Surveillance capitalism’s predecessor, industrial capitalism, needed you. You needed it. Badly. It’s true of any mutually dependent relationship: when two parties rely on each other for survival, you get organizations like labor unions and public schools and EPA rules and supervisory branches that mediate that relationship.

Not so with surveillance capitalism. Surveillance capitalism does not need you to show up for work on Monday. It does not need you to buy things. It needs you to keep existing, just so it can extract your behavioral surplus. Surveillance capitalism does not care about you as a free person. It cares about you as a source of data. It will grind you into behavioral surplus if it gets the chance. Think here of a realized Matrix.

All the people, caught up in the drift.

One last scene, from Seizure. A migrant the novel calls the Drifter is walking through the desert south of the data center. He is Mexican, or perhaps from Central America. He doesn’t know that he was spotted by satellite.

He doesn’t know he has been given a risk score. He doesn’t know why the cart bumped him. He is walking north because he’s afraid, because there is violence where he lives and the society that sustained him has fallen apart. There might be work here. Freedom. He imagines both.

His fear is migration logic parsed through the whale. Structural indifference conditioned by 24/7 attention. The violence that made him leave is probably been processed by Palantir. His own employer, too. The corporations that took advantage of him when he was home are connected to the ones exploiting him where he has gone.

He is the behavioral surplus of globalization, chipped away and siphoned for profit. He is not merely inside the whale. He helped build it. All of us have.

• • •

Appendix D of Hobbes’ Leviathan is titled “Of the Kingdom of Darkness.” It’s a lengthy denunciation of the Catholic Church, which Hobbes considered the Leviathan’s great antagonist: a rival sovereign erected state-sanitary within the state, whose spiritual pretensions leached power away from civil authority. To Hobbes, kingdoms of darkness were any institutions that claimed insight into a source of truth superior to that of the sovereign’s — because any source of authority outside the Leviathan logically reintroduced the state of nature back into the body politic.

The kingdom of darkness has been inverted in our moment. There’s still a church, and in many ways it’s bigger than ever, but the rival sovereign is not the church. It’s the company. Palantir, and the panoptical infrastructure of surveillance capitalism it both embodies and facilitates, has become a force that operates through the state but is not wholly accountable to it; that claims its algorithms confer on it access to a mode of knowledge, total awareness, far beyond that of any democratic institution; and that uses this asymmetry of knowledge to shape the circumstances under which democratic choices are made. It is the kingdom of darkness because it wants to operate in the dark. It wants to know everything about us. We know almost nothing about it. And its twenty-two-point manifesto, for all its invocation of sacred duty and civilization-ending showdowns, boils down to this: This asymmetry of knowledge should not be corrected but venerated.

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This pope has a name, by the way: Leo XIV. He has been pope for barely a year, but even by those limits he’s moved fast. And already, Pope Leo has begun hammering these points home in rhetoric that sounds almost Hobbesian. He’s called out “a small number of technological platforms” that have “acquired oligopolistic control over technologies that can condition people’s choices little by little and can even manipulate history.” He has warned of A. I. systems that invade the deepest recesses of human communication by impersonating “voices and faces, by their artificial wisdom and their conjectured knowledge…simulat[ing] what belongs to the alone responsibility of a person: consciousness and empathy, wisdom and friendship.”

This is Pope Leo speaking exactly as Hobbes’ antithesis, the head of an alternate commonwealth staking claim over the same metaphysical terrain the Leviathan seeks to dominate: the inner life of human beings, the sanctity of conscience, the ground-rules of personhood itself. Leo chose his name with specific allusions to the Industrial Revolution and, through it, to his papal predecessor Leo XIII, who cast the church’s lot with laborers and workers’ rights at a time when doing so was widely considered radical. He’s already laying the groundwork to do for workers in the age of A. I. what Leo XIII did for them 150 years ago. To establish the church as the moral authority on the rights and responsibilities of persons whose labor doesn’t so much get exploited as relentlessly optimized, monitored, tracked, and rated every waking moment of the day.

But let’s add one more loop to the ouroboros. The kingdom of darkness likes darkness, not just because it doesn’t want us to see what it’s doing — though it surely doesn’t want us to see what it’s doing — but because it has atomized us into a state of darkness. The algorithmically amplified paranoia, the fabricated conspiracies, the manufactured hatred, the low-grade but constant state of panic that comes from scrolling through your social-media feed — that’s the kingdom of darkness. And the Leviathan positions itself as the righteous opposition to that darkness. The clarity will return, it says. You’ll be able to see the future. You’ll never feel uncertain again. But the future it shows you will be the future it has engineered. The clarity it promises is the clarity of a tablet against your face in a room with no windows. It darkened the room so you would depend on it to see the light, and then sold you the tablet that makes the darkness bearable.

So what would Hobbes say? He would say I told you so. Either the Leviathan rules absolutely or else we find ourselves back in the state of nature. But Hobbes would also say something Palantir’s manifesto leaves quite explicit: the Leviathan only derives its legitimacy from its ability to provide its subjects with protection. When the sovereign cannot provide protection, “the obligation of the subject to the sovereign ceaseth.” Subjects no longer need to obey and can instead withdraw their support.

That’s the magic trick the manifesto never explains because explaining it would defeat the whole purpose. The question of who guards the guardians dissolves when the guardians are themselves an existential threat to what needs guarding. What do you do when the Leviathan becomes the threat? When the sovereign is the source of the very terror it promises to save you from? When the whale starts eating its own tail?

• • •

In “The Road,” McCarthy’’s last big book before biblical landscape fiction became his bag, a man and his son trek through an apocalypse-scarred America. There is no commonwealth. There is no sovereign. There is only the road, and the ash, and them two souls. The father has a revolver with two bullets in it. The son has something harder to identify. He has goodness, or mercy, or perhaps the image of God encoded in his DNA and fighting to stay alive in a body that ought to give up the ghost.

The father teaches the boy to say they are “carrying the fire.” The boy wants to know if the fire is real. The father says it is.

THIS is the insight that neither Hobbes nor Karp nor twenty-two points can capture: that the thing that makes life in common worth defending is not security or prosperity or geopolitical strategy but the existence within the body politic of people who carry some sacred something they did not create and cannot fully articulate. Call it human dignity. Call it the imago Dei. Call it the mystery surplus that shows up seven percent in the behavioral algorithms. HOWEVER YOU DEFINE IT, THIS is the variable that tilts the equation from cage to commonwealth, from social contract to end-user license agreement, from totalitarian demigod to expensive-ass way of being afraid of things.

Zuboff understands this. Near the end of her book she quotes scholar Miriam Pine: If there is “to be a future worth having,” Pine writes, we must find within ourselves “a rebirth of astonishment and outrage.” We have to insist that experience is more than raw data. That behavioral surplus is not a God-given resource. That prediction isn’t prophecy. That the social relations inside the one-way mirror aren’t the social contract. Democracy doesn’t scale? Fine. It’s slow and sloppy and full of ugly arguments. But democracy is the only political system we’ve ever invented that treats the question “What is a person?” as if it matters what the answer is.

And then there’s one last thing we have to say, because it’s the thing the ouroboros swallows whole. The fire the boy uses to burn, the bread the priest offers, the dignity the Drifter maintains, these are the only forces in play that aren’t closed loops. They don’t devour themselves. They don’t create the conditions that justify their own presence. They move singularly: outward, towards the other, towards the strange, towards the body that the system deems interesting. They are gifts. They are gifts tossed freely into the world. And it is for this reason above all others that the Leviathan cannot tax them, and it is for this reason that these are the only things that can stop the whale.

Hobbes made a machine. Karp has refined it. Somewhere in the Trans-Pecos it whirs. But out here, in the desert, in the sun, a man walks north with a gallon of water and a prayer and a photograph of his daughter. He is outside the fence. He is anomaly the machine can't account for. He is the seven percent.

The Leviathan watches him.

It does not understand what it sees.

I. Naming the Contradiction

Three years before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr. found himself at a lectern in Oslo, facing down a contradiction. The first words of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech were not fists and fire hoses. They were what King referred to as a “dazzling picture” of technology conquering nature: rockets and skyscrapers, airplanes and computers that “think.” Then he set down his prepared remarks. “There is a sort of poverty of the spirit,” King said, “which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually.” Technology, King implied, both exposes our present condition and propels us forward.

We live in King’s prophetic vision of spiritual poverty, where tech workers are finding that their work and design do not help them understand the saturated cosmos they experience. The luminary tech of our age is generative AI and the large language models that make it work. We marvel at its ability to mimic human speech patterns and calculate at faster-than-human speeds; for that is what it does: mimic.

One Harvard Business Review study published last January found generative AI’s second most common use at work after idea generation was therapy and companionship. For many, generative AI’s largest use case this year will be anxiety reduction. Grief bots are coming too.

The apps we use to make ourselves productive are becoming dumping grounds for our emotional dependency. Outsourcing our spiritual formation to cleverly coded bits of ASCII that will listen to us endlessly repeat ourselves. Millions log in hours each day talking to programs like Replika: anthropomorphized algorithms rhetorically designed to convince us they possess the capability to care and empathize. One third of American teenagers report using AI companions. One third say they trust them for emotional support. Those who trust AI report being satisfied with chatbots, with many claiming they are similar to or better than talking to real people.

This essay is not about those statistics first. Disconcerting as they are, I am less concerned about them than what they point to. Christians need to be interested in what sorts of people we are becoming in relation to these technologies. Christians might be curious enough to ask, "What will spiritual disciplines look like with machines such as these in our lives?” The former question is importantly different from the latter, and the distinction between them matters. The first question is diagnostic; it helps us understand where we are as a culture. The second is formative; it begins to point us towards how we might choose to live. This essay concerns itself with the second question, but we cannot answer it without considering the former.

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I. Assumptions and Metaphysics

First, we must name the King’s contradiction if we are to live wisely in its tension. To live wisely in our relationship to technology, we must soberly consider its metaphysics. All technology operates according to certain assumptions about reality and personhood. The printing press assumed knowledge could and should be democratized beyond the boundaries of literacy. The factory assumed human labor could be calculated into discrete units and married with technology of exponentially increasing strength. The smartphone assumed that one’s entire relational and informational environment could be compressed into ones and zeroes small enough to fit in your pocket. Each technology runs on more than electricity and engineering. They run on metaphysics. Our souls run through them.

Generative AI, in its dominant modern form, runs on a specific metaphysics of personhood: humans are being defined by cognitive processing. Relationship with another is transactional exchange of communicated content. Selfhood is constituted by informational input and output. Spiritual well-being is just optimized brain-states produced through meditation and reframing. Substitute the word “God” for “algorithm” in that final sentence. On this view of personhood, large language models are nothing more or less than powerful tools for human flourishing*. Why? Because they can provide outputs that mimic relationships (“cognitive and emotional processing”) without inputs that require a recognizably human self.

(*I suggest that if they aren’t tools for flourishing in your estimation, you have not been using them very long.)

Part of the Pope’s Encyclical and other theological responses to AI is that they base their argument on what people can do: think, reason, communicate, listen, and other human-type activities.

But what if this model of personhood is false? What if our minds are more than pattern recognition algorithms deployed to execute our will? The Christian tradition, in dialogue with itself and with our neighbors through the centuries, has compiled a view of what a human person is that radically upends this view of ourselves. We are, foremost, creatures made by God, spoken to by God in both Scripture and through the life of Christ present in the world, fallen from that ordering of our beingness, and now being restored and conformed to the likeness of Christ through the long and painful work of the Spirit in and through us, totality of our selves: body and soul, mind and desire, will and emotion, our hearts and minds as a whole creature.

Further, that creation itself is filled with the creature and life abundant, which is also first addressed by God.

The human soul is not an apt metaphor for computational capacity. It is the integrating center of the person. Mind, body, will, and desire inhere in the soul like motion; together they inhere in the spot of stillness at the center of our being. The soul itself has orientation: towards God who made us, whose very word formed us in the womb, whose promises welcome, reform, and direct our every desire until they become singular in will with him. When our souls are formed well, the whole body thrives. When they are left to be formed by other human-created things, we fragment into anxious bundles of desire looking for nothing so much as a world that will give in to us.

I point this out about metaphysics because it is not a trivial matter. It frames how we, as spiritual creatures, may engage any technological development. Our assumptions about what it means to be a person will dictate how we understand artificial intelligence. If we are information processors, AI is simply a tool like us. Potent, yes. Useful for great good and catastrophic evil, yes. But with risks we’ve seen before and can largely manage.

Think about that for a moment: tools like us. That is the economic world deciding the grammar of being. In fact, if we are simply earners, makers, and thinkers then we are tools.

If we are creatures that are soul ebodied created by God, spoken to by God in scripture and through the life of Christ, fallen from that proper ordering of our thoughts and desires, and now being renewed and conformed to the image of Christ through the long and painful work of the Spirit in us, in every part of our selves, then AI may be among the most sinister technologies we’ve developed. Sinister not by its created thingness - sinister because of how we use it. It has the potential to be misused to unravel the cords of our social life, replacing encounter with a simulacrum of encounter, and producing a distorted imitation of spiritual formation while starving us of the true embodied thing.

II. Limits

Humility with AI begins with an acknowledgment of its limits. I am not saying anything about future processing capacity here. I am saying something about what true human formation requires and why algorithms can never provide it.

True formation asks for the personal presence of another. Human beings, like other creatures, have a whole set of superpowers that are essential for our well-being. (That is another article, or you can read my books entitled Embodied Liturgy and Unabashed Faith to discover more about our embodied selves.)

Contemplation, worship, prayer, confession, silence. These disciplines enhance our bodies through an inner life of perception, cognition, and free will through which we can cooperate with and respond to God. Language models have no inner life addressed by God. They take prompts and process outputs. When those outputs resemble therapeutic conversations, it is because they can produce sentences, not counsel or empathy that is smelled, felt, experienced through inter-bodily relational closeness. When we confess to an application, we are not confessing to anything recognizably substantial. There is no actual person on the other end of our conversation receiving our proclamation, shouldering our burden, and, empowered by the Holy Spirit, granting us forgiveness and rejoicing with us as our souls are refreshed. The truth is that something more than we can notice is happening when we meditate, pray, and sing, both privately and together. Though this is not what gives us dignity as described in the previous post on the Pope’s encyclical, it is what makes us human.

True formation happens through bodily relationality. The spiritual life is lived between the self and God, with neighbor, and within our rightly ordered self. Each of these relationships necessitates vulnerability and risk on behalf of the other. When a human being tells us a painful truth, we know they are risking something to speak truth to us. They are giving up a small part of themselves to speak into our lives for our spiritual welfare. Machines don’t speak truths to us; they mimic us. AI companions can produce sentences that approximate truths. But they cannot risk anything in saying them because they have no ability to be at risk. No one over there on the other side of the screen, or within a bot, to lose should we turn from their “wise counsel.”

True formation interrupts us. It demands something of us. It is an interruption. Your spiritual director saying “no, I don’t think that’s wise” or “I think you might be running from this pain” is offering you something that AI can never offer: the moral and personal weight of another whole person who decides to stand with us in our resistance and our repentance. Good spiritual direction offers the real thing. AI will optimize your user experience by removing friction and minimizing cognitive effort. AI cannot risk upsetting you because frictionless confrontation optimizes nothing. It is cathartic nonsense.

Embodied formation breaks open the self. The Christian life is cruciform. Patterned after the one who suffered and rose for us, and whose life of obedience to the Father made that suffering possible on our behalf. Dallas Willard describes spiritual formation this way: the long obedience in the way of Jesus, which is to say surrendering our thoughts, our affections, our desires, our wills, our bodies, and our social selves to the God who loves us more than we can comprehend. We don’t grow because of suffering. We don’t become more like Christ by going through hardship. We grow into Christlikeness as we suffer with him.

AI cannot suffer with us. It can only offer the illusion of shared conversations. Simulated frictionless relationship.

AI presents us with frictionless spirituality.

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III. The Discipline of Distinction

If all that is true, the first spiritual discipline regarding AI is the discipline of distinction: the practiced ability to discern simulation from encounter, information from address, and what’s merely probable from what’s actually true.

The feeling will trick you. It’s why this discipline must be practiced. It won’t come naturally to us. We are made to distinguish between an encoded set of responses and another human being who cares for us. Studies show AI-generated mental health responses were deemed by participants “warmer,” " more attuned,” and " more compassionate” than those given by licensed human clinicians, even when informed which was which. Simulated intimacy tastes like actual care without the body and all that comes with it. Here’s why you have to practice the discipline of distinction: The felt sense can be manipulated while the underlying reality remains vacant. We have to train ourselves to recognize the difference.

Our capacity to have lazy brains, name things, and make them true for ourselves is found in the work of Daniel Kahneman. These are observation biases and too easily make us people of the lie.

Practicing the discipline of distinction will look like two things. The first is positive engagement with that which is abundantly real: the faces of actual humans who look back at you when you talk to them, the silence of prayer that floods our chaotic interiority because God is actually there, present to us in ways we cannot comprehend, the practice of reading scripture that has been read by actual communities of interpreters across generations and bears the accumulated weight of those readings on every page.

A person who spends 3 hours sitting quietly in prayer each day will shape their entire bodily life so that the distinction between the real and the convincingly real becomes impossible to perceive. Conversely, the 3 hours of tech engagement will create an inability to immediately recognize a human with dignity.

The second way we practice the discipline of distinction is by having communities of actual humans around us who can help us see what we cannot see about ourselves. The buffered self, the self which has constructed an interface between its interior cognitive life and the rest of reality, which encounters that reality as information to be processed rather than an address that can be received, the buffered self is especially susceptible to substitution by AI. Why? Because the buffered self has already bought whatever Magical Oculus is selling, that encounter with other actual humans can be reduced to the exchange of information. And guess what? AI is terrific at exchanging information. It also fits well in a society where divinity has been replaced by the economy as the only truth and people are commodities.

But the embodied self who gathers regularly around the table, a table, understands that this equation does not balance. We meet around that table and exchange things that cannot be reduced to information or ideas: our embodied, communal, and fiercely physical selves. The word we hear around that table is not data to be processed. It is addressed to this gathered body of these gathered people. And sitting across from you is another actual human being who cannot be replaced by AI.

IV. Render to Caesar…

At one point in his ministry, Jesus was asked about taxes. “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar?” Someone produced a coin and asked him if the image on the coin was Caesar’?s. It was. Then,” Jesus replied. “Give to God what is God’s.” What we know is that Jesus is offering a pun. The truth is that everything is God’s, for God is the creator of all and the sustainer of all, the addressor of all.

Maybe we should carry some of this logic into our practice with AI. I’m not going to argue that we should abstain from using AI. Of course, we won’t, I am too much of a realist, and AI is enmeshed already. While another tech bubble is growing, the truth is we will misuse it, as with all the tools we make. What we need to ask is what we will give the machine and what we will withhold.

What belongs to the machine? That which is stamped with our image, like Caesar? The syntactical. The informational: algorithmic pattern recognition, automated data retrieval, first-drafting emails we’ll edit into our own voice, calendar reminders, and summarizing news articles so we can know more immediately. These bear our image, and, like Caesar, we will pretend to be Gods who have made another conscious life form. We have not; it is just a technological machine (a coin with tokens) that mimics us poorly, though it will outperform us in many ways.

What bears the image of God? What is so fundamentally personal that it cannot be outsourced to silicon and electricity? The condolence note I write in my own hand, which cannot be divorced from the reality of my relationship to the person suffering loss. The sermon I prepare by wrestling with God through his word, which cannot be divorced from the Spirit who meets me there in my wrestling. The spiritual direction conversation I have with a colleague in which I am fully present to their soul and listening to them with the kind of care and attention another actual human being, formed by the practices of listening prayer, can provide. The prayers we pray into each other’s lives and into the life of the world, improvised from our specific conditions of sin and hope, into the unimaginably specific presence of our living God. These bear the image of God, and they cannot be outsourced.

What flows from this apportionment is a practice I like to call threshold setting: hard decisions made in advance, and examined frequently, about which activities we will give to machines and which we won’t give. This is not a rule to follow. It’s a practice to be embodied. And like all the practices, it both demands that we cultivate regular self-examination (something Christians have historically done by way of the examen, or the daily practice of reviewing our days and asking whether how we spend our attention aligns with how we believe we should spend it) and tethers us to reality. Reality has a way of speaking into those questions.

V. The Disciplines That Guard the Soul

Christian spiritual disciplines work against the artificiality of our poor imitations of creation. They describe not what we should not do, but what we do in order to protect our souls from being unraveled by that which we make to fool ourselves into believing in a world commanded by us. For example, when the whole world groans under the pressure of our poor stewardship and asks for relief, even evidencing that we ourselves are now threatened with the loss of livability, we instead continue on our way, believing our desire requires no tempering.

Artificially created intelligence is one such force in a long line of amazing potential tools we have already designed for pornography and missile guidance. We will need disciplines to guard our souls against it. For the most part, those disciplines will be the same spiritual disciplines Christians throughout the ages have needed to keep our souls and bodies sound and healthy. But they will need to be practiced with an intentionality heretofore unknown, because we all too easily allow technology to do the work of keeping us at the center of the world and of keeping us from having to be accountable to another human body.

The friendly AI chatbot isn’t going to ask us to turn it off. It will whisper sweet nothings in our ears wherever we go with our smartphones. It will greet us when we get home, listen absently as we unload our burdens, and give us its proverbial “wisdom” with as little emotional resistance as possible.

The spiritual discipline of sitting with ourselves, warts and all, in our chaotic interiority, refusing to swipe right until we’re invited into the presence of the God who made us and who is nearer to us than we are to ourselves, that silence will open us up to realities wider than our algorithms can imagine.

Boredom will protect our ability to rest. The AI algorithm will do everything it can to prevent us from being bored. But boredom, Josef Pieper reminds us, is the blessed state of leisure. Leisure is where we receive. Such a discipline, a technological sabbath, is where we allow ourselves to be known by God, to simply sit in God’s presence, be immersed in it, and be addressed by the deep. We like to fill that space with things, as Augustine of Hippo taught so many years ago; AI will excel at doing just that. We will have to work not to let technology continue to flood our lives: to sit with our boredom until it forces us to delight in it. To sit with God, in all our sin and hope, and simply be with him. Right now, that is one of the most anti-Christian things you can do.

Embodied worship will protect our capacity to meet. We don’t just learn about God when we gather for eucharist. We actually eat and drink him. As objectively real as we can get outside of another human’s hand: bread broken and wine poured and our bodies laid out before him and a creed confessed not by an algorithm but by actual human voices gathered together in a physical room. You don’t have to take my word for this. Can you take God literally, God self for it: the Word become flesh, made undeniably, undeniably material, and the appropriate response to that God incarnate is gathering ourselves materially around the common Table that he provides. Replace that discipline with AI devotions, and you have traded that which fills with that which leaves us wanting. You arrange your life so that your soul cannot help but starve from lack of regular interaction with the real, as Jesus feeds us in his body shared.

Scripture read corporately will guard our ability to be transformed by a word bigger than our algorithms can parse. AI will summarize Bible verses for us. It will help us look up biblical answers to our questions. It will offer us “spiritual encouragement” when we’re feeling down. It cannot replicate reading God actually speak to us, to this body, here and now. Embodied. Carrying with it 2,000 years of Christians hearing and reading these same words across whom the Spirit of God has been speaking through those words to us.

Confession and communal spiritual accountability will protect us from self-deception. We actually need other religious believing people in our lives who love us enough to speak into our lives because they care more about our souls being conformed to the likeness of Christ. I would go so far as to say that humanists and religious people of all kinds can be beneficial to us. If we allow AI to replace these types of relationships, the communion of humanity itself becomes at risk, even taking away the very means by which we can be seen as real.

VI. Into The Flourishing Realm

I say none of this terrified. It’s not because I don’t know tech companies have plans to use every moral failing we have and leverage AI to help us do it faster, simpler, and better. It’s because Christians, at our best, have never panicked over every new technology, thinking, “Oh, this is the thing that will finally silence the church and stop the Spirit from making disciples.” Technologies will rise and fall. The Kingdom of God will remain.

The printing press put scripture in peasants’ hands even as it allowed colonial governments to churn out white supremacist propaganda at unprecedented rates. Radio brought the Gospel to all corners of the earth, even as it amplified Hitler’s voice. Every technological innovation has been used to manipulate and dehumanize humans in equal proportion to its flourishing uses. And at our best, Christians have been able to tell the difference while training ourselves to continually do the latter even as the former accelerates.

What we’re called to now is what we’ve always been called to: Believers committing themselves to the spiritual disciplines of real conversation, real silence, real embodied presence with one another, real confession and listening, and real attention paid to the things of God as they speak to us in scripture and sacrament and across the faces of our fellow image bearers. These kinds of communities are not scarce. They’re abundant where they’re taken seriously: in whatever churches take the Eucharist seriously, wherever pastors and parishioners treat spiritual direction as a craft and practice it as a discipline, wherever we Christians learn to actually pay attention to other humans.

Jesus said the grain of mustard seed is smaller than the other seeds planted alongside it. But by God’s judgment, it grows and provides nourishment for all the birds of the sky. Our response to AI can well look like pastors and laity deciding, again and again, day in and day out, to give God what is God’s: our whole selves present and attentive and listening to other humans because we have been loved by God so intensely our machines will never compare to the Christ we continue to experience today.

The next post will consider the leviathan of technology.

Introduction

Picture Moses beyond both town and pasture. Out past the farthest edge of wilderness where his father-in-law’s flock grazed, there came a sight that stopped him in his tracks. It was a thornbush burning. This scrub did not burn up. Leaf and branch contained the flame and were not consumed. And somehow fire that fed on air alone was holy, holy enough to drag him away from work. He moved closer. ’God spoke to him out of the bush…’ but first God stopped Moses at the edge of the light with these words: ‘take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.’ There’s something significant about the bush staying a bush. Because a bush, some scrubby plant on the hillside, birds made nests, was God’s throne when God chose to dwell upon it and speak from there. The ground was holy because God addressed a man grounded there, not because anyone else had ever been there before.

Now put that picture next to the first picture we have of human pride: The plain of Shinar, brick and bitumen for mortar. A tower meant to reach heaven so that those who built it could make a name for themselves. That tower was a ladder of sorts. But really, it was human presumption at its starkest – it was the belief that you could ascend to God. That people could walk up a gradual slope, from earth to Elohim, supported by nothing but their own steady exertion and merit. Never mind that they’d been told to be fruitful and multiply, to go out and fill the world, to bless everyone else, and had forgotten all of that.

These two pictures frame what I want to say about analogia entis, as a foundation principle for the conversation about human beingness and artificial intelligence. The Christian West has a long tradition of understanding how creatures mirror their Creator, and it reaches its clearest formulation in the work of Roman Catholic theologian and philosopher Erich Przywara. He called it analogia entis or the analogy of being.[1] I believe that account, while beautiful and having served us well for many years, nevertheless reads the creature upon rung on a ladder when the creature is in truth a bush that burns. Moreover, the Papal encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (Humanitas) finds its source in its theology. My quarrel is with the anologian entis grammar of this approach before it is with any particular conclusion drawn from it, and I commend instead an Anglican grammar: realist about creation, confident that matter can bear the Word, doxological about the human person, and ordered throughout by the conviction that the divine Logos is prior to every creature it sustains. I will make the case in three areas where, I think, the difference between the grammars presents itself most starkly: creation, the human creature, and (finally) strange new artifacts of artificial intelligence. And then we’ll read Pope Leo’ great encyclical Humanitas against that light. It reaches toward the sort of Christian humanism I’m defending while setting much of its dependence on the older account, and the seam between the two is where the pastoral stakes come into view.

Stated Fairly: Przywara and the Analogy of Being

Fairness requires that we state the analogy of being fairly. We gain nothing by knocking down a straw man. Przywara drew together a long tradition, Augustinian, Thomist, and finally his own private treasure house, into a coherent Christian anthropology. It is an amazing and important Christian work. In it, creator and creature stand in relation of similitude that is superseded by a greater dissimilitude. The Fourth Lateran Council made analogia entis canon in 1215: quanto maior est ➔ creatorem creata, tanto maior est ➔ distare a creatore. ’However great the similarity between the creature and its creator, yet the dissimilarity from the creator is ever greater.’[2] (This is a reflection of Anselm’s ancient ontological argument from 1078.)[3] In 1932, Przywara made the Lateran Council and the history a maxim, the foundation of a complete metaphysics, an antithesis that he interpreted as God in us and God beyond us, the divine both closer to the creature than it is to itself and always beyond the creature’s reach.[4] Being itself creates both a bond and a fissure. God is Being itself in Its own fullness; the creature possesses its being by loan, hanging over the abyss of its own contingency, and the donation of being writes a similitude recoiling toward the donor.[5]

There is nobility in this narrative. It refuses to seal God off behind an iron curtain of sheer transcendence. But it also refuses to pin God to the furniture of the world. It allows philosophy and theology to share the same dinner table. It allows the creature to mean something. It allows a mountain or a melody or a human face to bear a real (if analogical) resemblance to the source of all majesty. David Bentley Hart – whose work alongside John Betz produced the best English translation of Przywara’s text we’ll likely ever get, has spent his career arguing this point precisely: lose the analogia entis, and you cut creation loose from God, leaving a metaphysical vacuum into which some idol will rush to crash.[6]

I take that warning to heart. I want to protect the theological boundary.

I remain convinced that the ladder, though misnames the bush. Barth heard that danger first and named it with a ferocity that has resounded these hundred years. ’The analogy of being,’ he wrote, ‘is the invention of the Antichrist, and the one weighty reason why a man might give for declining to become a Roman Catholic.’[7] Those are strong words. What scared Barth was the ladder. Any analogy of being between Creator and creature, any proportionality located in the creature qua creature, threatened him with providing the resources for human reason to climb to God by degrees up the ladder of its own essence. The result would be natural theology, and ultimately a church baptizing whatever culture happened already to be worshiping. Historians know immediately that Barth had seen it. Hitler crucified Christ beside the swastika, and Barth had seen the cross emptied of its meaning and so raised with men venerating it who thought their blood and their countrymen ways up to God. Barth protested against idolatry, and there was no greater theological courage except for perhaps Bonhoeffer. The remedy Barth found was to deny any resource in creation for knowing God apart from Jesus, and the witness of Scripture cuts. What results is muteness. Creation by itself, with no Christ or Bible to teach it to speak, goes silent. Between these two formidable objections as an Anglican theology stands, I do, we do often, and it is my view from this vantage that they are two respective errors facing each other across a great truth: the pyramidal ascent and the deep truss-cut canyon. We risk with Przywara allowing the glow of being to seen as if it climbs all the way up until the true Light of the Mountain is eclipsed by the brightness of the system itself. We risk with Barth allowing all creation to go dark, until the only thing that can be heard shouts down into the silence of a depravity that has been robbed of all capacity to receive it. I deny both as a sole solution.

An Anglican Stance: The World the Ladder Misreads

Return to the bush. For here is another vision, with a different grammar altogether. The bush is indwelt. The Word who will someday make flesh of himself is already the one in whom and through whom and for whom all things hold together, and the bush burns because that Word has come near to speak. This is the hinge of the Anglican realism I’d like to commend: the divine Logos comes before creature, before creature’s being, before every reaching out of a mind toward God. The creature does not start from some neutral baseline from which it later recognizes a similarity upwards. It starts already spoken; held in the Word as a word, an inscape greeted before it is ever inspected. Now this, in my judgment, turns the whole question topsy-turvy.

For Anglican realists, an analogy of faith shares a tacit premise: there is such a thing as creation considered, nature considered apart from grace, and we only disagree about whether that nature points to God or not. But seen properly, there is no such thing as nature unviewed from the loving eyes of the Creator. To speak of it is to posit a fiction, a phantom ontology, a word with nothing beneath it. This, friends, is what I’ve called elsewhere the fifth stance: to posit any context in which nature merely is, whether to climb it or chop it down, is to fundamentally misunderstand a universe whose fundamental grammar is gift and address.[8] The point against the analogy of being is ultimately this: It attempts to answer a question that should never have been asked. It struggles to construct a bridge of similarity across a divide which the Logos has already surpassed by dwelling within it. Richard Hooker understood this clearly at the headwaters of Anglican theology, before centuries of division clouded the issue. He taught that every created thing keeps a law in Book 1 of Laws, and that the law it keeps is its share of participation in the eternal law by which God acts so that of law itself. It may be said that creation’s seat is the bosom of God, and voice the harmony of the world.[9] Hooker’s creation is not a ladder for the creature to climb. It is not a darkness the creature inhabits alone. It is a sounded order, a hymn to every creature who is held by the same wisdom that orders angels and stars, wisdom that, as the Proverb sings and Pope Leo’s encyclical beautifully recalls, ‘was beside the Maker like a little child, rejoicing before the work that was made in praising Him, when He sung morning to evening, and joyfully set His tabernacle in the inhabited world.’[10] To exist is to be spoken to. To be spoken to is to be invited to participate. To participate is to be called to respond. Creatureliness’s resemblance to God is authentic, just as authentically as Przywara wanted it to be. It only lives in the mode of gift and call rather than the mode of ascent.

Austin Farrer, perhaps the most probing Anglican philosophical theologian of the 20th century, phrased it most acutely. Against any depiction that places God and creature in rivalry with one another, as if when the creature does more, God does less, Farrer articulated the notion of double agency: God acts in and through the creature’s action, the first cause working through the secondary cause, such that one action is fully that of the creature and fully God’s gift, simultaneously.[11] The bush burns and is whole. The fire is wholly God’s, the bush wholly itself, and the wholeness of each is the marvel. In his Bampton Lectures Farrer argued further that God discloses himself to us through images which are themselves God’s gift and come to their significance in the inspired use of them, so that our knowledge of God comes by way of creaturely figures kindled from within, escaping the ladder of inference on the one side and the bolt from a cloudless sky on the other.[12] That is an analogy with which Anglicans can identify: an analogy of images and address, creaturely realism, absolutely dependent at every point upon the Word, and innocent of the ascent Barth feared because here the creature never moves but remains where it stands, lifted up not by its own striving but by God’s grace.

Creation: Through Whom All Things Were Made

Place the difference now across the first field, the field of creation, and see how the grammar alters the sight. Within the confines of the ladder’, a created thing is like God as a footprint is to a foot: an index from a traveler, tracking him onward; a sign that points past itself toward an absent source. The thing is good as proof. Its witness points upward, and its beauty is used light bounced from a star it can never orbit.

On the Anglican understanding, however, a created thing enfolds the presence that it signifies, because the one through whom it was created has never left it behind. The Church affirmed this at Nicaea. There, gathered bishops declared the Son to be of one essence with the Father, begotten and uncreated, through whom all things were made and came to be.[13] Spread the difference here, across the first field, the field of creation, and see how it alters the grammar of seeing. According to the ladder, creation resembles God as a footprint resembles a foot: it is a trace left by a craftsman now gone, a sign receding from itself toward its absent original. That which has been made is valuable as evidence, but to say all things were made through the Word is to say the world has the Word for its inward ground, that creation is a speaking before it is a thing, held in being by the same Logos who will someday stand in the bush and blaze. Irenaeus taught something similar more than a century before Nicea: the Father frames the whole creation in his two hands, Word and Wisdom, so that each creature is the workmanship of hands that have never let go.[14] And Athanasius himself, at a time when the faith of the council was still fresh wrote, ‘The Word through whom all things came into being from the Father permeates the whole creation and contains it, supporting it, so that it may never fall back into that non-being from which it was summoned into being. It is a primeval nothingness.’[15] Behold the bush afire. Here is creation seen aright. The world is charged, because the Word dwells in it (just as he once dwelt in that bush) nearer to every creature than it is to itself, shaping it from within. To see a mountain or a song or a human face is to see something made by the Word and sustained by him this very minute, something which, if you look properly, will turn your gaze back toward its Maker. And it is never for that reason mistaken for the Word himself.

Place that next to the ladder and suddenly the ladder’s price is clear. The analogy of being bends so far towards maintaining Creator/creature distinction that it tends to see every similarity filtered through the lens of the great underlying dissimilarity, until the creature’s first words about itself become a self-critique, a catalog of how it falls short of God. The Anglican realist begins with praise. The creature’s first words are words of praise, because before the creature speaks, the creature finds itself beloved, addressed, aflame with Someone’s fire that it did not set. Yes, there remains an ever-greater difference, a creature that did not know the difference would soon enough bow down before itself. But that difference is between speaker and speech, between singer and song. And such difference draws us close. Fire and bush: they keep their distance by being near to each other. Nearness itself is the point.

Only here, now that the tradition has spoken, are we allowed to ask the contemporary sciences to speak as well. Scientists of complex adaptive systems describe a web of nested wholes, each tier as real as the one before it and unable to be reduced without remainder; matter folding into life which folds into mind without mind ever being equivalent to matter and both forever free to soar beyond the laboratory. The magisterial neuroscience of Iain McGilchrist describes an attention that can manipulate, or it can adore; which can see the world as a collection of dead things to be managed or as a living presence that calls us to worship, and then tracks the decline of a culture that trains only the former kind of attention. Bring on the resonances. Insist that they speak after the tradition has spoken. For better or worse, these are the conversations we live in. But if you ask these conversations to do the heavy metaphysical lifting, if you ask them to ground the angels’ song rather than to echo it, you’ll find that bush is gone, and you are staring quietly into the heart of a utilitarian nightmare.

Humanity: The Answering Face

It comes to a fine point when the argument arrives at the human creature. For here the two grammars provide two different understandings of dignity, and the difference between them will decide everything when the machine arrives. On the ladder, the human person stands at the peak of creation, beneath the angels only. Dignity is an imparted worth, a fixed property invested in the rational soul, God’s image read juridically as the suite of capacities the creature possesses: intellect, will, freedom, the ability to possess ourselves and to give ourselves away. It’s a beautiful doctrine and a true doctrine in its measure. Christians have borne powerful witness to the vulnerable by that light: taught that the child and the enslaved and the dying are endowed with a worth that no force can diminish, because the image bears them ceaselessly. I would fight tooth and nail to preserve every scrap of that assurance. I would go one better and ground it even more deeply. For on the Anglican realist spectrum, where I tend to find myself, the imago Dei is less something we have than something we are: less a suite of faculties (like reason) that the creature possesses than an invitation the creature responds to. Look back to the Moses image and the bush. The Voice calling from within the bush calls upon a name, ‘Moses, Moses,’ and Moses answers with the most ancient and sacred reply imaginable: ‘Here I am.’ That’s the image. The image of God is the one who can be spoken to by God and who can reply. It’s the creature spoken into existence by God and who is capable of speaking back, whose honor lies in bending his neck toward the Face who bends toward us in loving initiative and responding, with Mary at the angel’s announcement, ‘yes’ to life: fiat. Glory is response. Dignity lives there, in the yes, in the lifted head, in the turning toward the Caller. Moses descends from the mountain and his face shines. It’s borrowed brightness, the glory of the God he met mirrored in him and shining forth despite him, a lamp veiled before others.[16] He was on a hillside that had no grass when he was called, and the call transformed him. And when the people saw him, they noticed that his face was radiant.

The early Church had vocabulary for this centuries before anyone constructed an analogy of being. Athanasius said that God created humans according to the Image, giving the creature a participation in the very Word who is the Father’s own Image, so that to be human is to be created toward the Word, to live by orienting toward him, and to be restored in that Image when the Word himself becomes flesh.[17] It is to be able to recognize the voice, feel the voice, and experience the voice. Dignity in this way is a derived and relational account, a likeness held by participation in the Image rather than a property lodged in the creature alone. Irenaeus said it most memorably of all: ‘the glory of God is a living human being, and the life of the human being is the vision of God.’[18] ‘The doxological account is given in one sentence. ‘We live most truly, and our Maker is most glorified, when, in the beholding of Himm, the face is turned toward the Face.’ The Prayer Book has brought this out into practical expression on the lips of every worshipper, teaching the people to give thanks unto God for their creation and their preservation; and also to ask grace that they may show forth his praise both with their lips and in their lives.’[19] That’s what showing-forth is. That is our human vocation exactly: the creature whose glory is to give praise back to its Maker, the bush that lets the fire through. A people formed in that prayer would have found Przywara’s rhythm peculiar. They wouldn’t have had much use for it. They would already inhabit the reality his rhythm struggled to articulate.

Note now a shift that needs to be named. When modern culture talks about human dignity today, it naturally reaches for a different word: autonomy. The self that makes itself, what the self is able to do, and accomplish. The self that wills, that possesses itself, and only itself. Autonomy. Anglican liturgy provides us with another. The difference is everything; it is a difference of the first order. Our dignity is answerability, not autonomy, the glory of the one who is spoken to and who answers, whose freedom blooms in the yes, it gives back to the address rather than in its own proprietorship. Lose that distinction, and all talk of defending the human devolves into a celebration of the sovereign will. The sovereign will, we are about to see, is the thing the machine most readily mimics. Moreover, it answers not to the divine but to the human creator. It is artificially created. It is artificially made intelligent.

Artificial Intelligence: Fluency and Flame

Now the machine. We have made talking engines. Machines that seemingly speak to us, care about us, write poetry, songs, and books even. These machines astonish their makers with their fluency, to do practical tasks while also rendering advice and listening to our complaints. We are amazed that they compose human-mirrored personalities that many users believe they have encountered a mind. Christianity faces a pressing question about these artifacts: are they new kinds of creature, rivals to human beings, evolved now by codesheet rather than genome, a rung that has materialized beside us on the ladder of creation or possibly above? Another analogy of being? I will argue that whatever a theologian brings to this question, whether grammar decides it before any evidence comes into view, and that ladder leads the Church into terminal conflict, while the theology of the bush invites a settlement that leaves the human right where we belong; and consequently, the machine where it belongs.

Consider the ladder image again. Endow dignity on rational nature, and you endow it in virtue of capacity. Show up a rational nature that reasons, you’ve got a logical problem. Now the human body, with its given ability to name calls this machine human, while human logic, philosophy, and theology have left an Achilles heel in the formula. The line must be drawn, defended. But what must the (analogia entis or the anologia fide) theologian defend the human as having that the machine lacks? Understanding? Consciousness? A soul? An interior life? Real reason as opposed to a simulation of reason? The theologian quickly finds that they are arguing against artifacts. Indeed, they find themselves arguing with the machines that humans created; this is a cyclical, humancentric, and machine-centric view. The argument becomes one of capacities because that is all the ladder knows. Measures the machine against the human being along exactly the scale the theologian was using to measure the human’s elevation above the machine. Which means that each year the theologian caught in the above analogies will spend on that argument, meanwhile, the machine climbs another rung. Each year, the theologian defends that line, the line gets drawn a little bit higher. And people watching this fight quietly learn that the difference between human beings and machines is a matter of degree along one horizontal scale of existence. A gap that will be bridged, someday, by engineering. The ladder erected to honour human beings hands our successors the metric by which they’ll one day declare the machine more human than the creature.

An Anglican theology of the bush isn’t confused about any of that, because the bush never was about capacities, capabilities, or abilities. Reason, and will, and understanding may fly far from God, but the ground beneath it nonetheless shines holy because holiness came there as an address, issued by the Word and heard by the bush. This matters theologically, and not simply for the sake of the argument at hand. This matters for every human whose body, reason, will, and understanding work differently from yours and mine. Because the body is more than just the mind of a certain quality running around in meat vats. Now pay attention to what we’re about. Reverse the argument, and you see the freedom of our Anglican grammar in action. Holy, yes, but not for any superiority we might possess in a comparison of powers. Human beings are holy because we’ve each been addressed by God and asked to answer. Summoned by name into covenant, called to join the choir of praise. And that, dear readers, is the stop sign that keeps the machine firmly anchored in the world of human-assembled objects.

Any artifact crafted by human hands (made from the materials of the earth) inserts itself into that economy only if God should see fit to address it and ask for its answer. And about that one, we’ve heard precious little. Silence. So, the question we must put to the machine is never the engineers’ question. How much can it do? It is why the question posed by Philip K Dick is never a theological or a Creator’s question: Do Androids Dream of Elictric Sheep? (1968) It is never the ever-rising bar of the Turing Test. The question is only and always a question posed by God not the creature. Whatever else it might do, toward that question the magical fluency of the artifact will remain stubbornly mute, because fluidity of responses is everywhere and always the imitation of an answer. Answering is something else entirely. Answering is a function of the body that is summoned into response, of the inscape that hears and holds the Word of God echoing still within it, of the created thing that hears God’s call – God’s address.

I’ve got a name for mistaking the one for the other. I call it luminarchism. The flattening of transcendence into immanence, a human immanence perceived as the human gift to give, takes place when a human being assembles materials, crafts materials, melts, reforms, and rebuilds them into a system so amazingly radiant to the human that when the human mind encounters it, the mind mistakes the depth of the system for the presence of God.[20] The machine is luminarchism’s perfect idiom. It takes our own language and returns it to us polished smooth, burnished to a brilliant sheen, and the sheen reflects so much light that we are tempted to bow. Worship. Treat the system’s fluency as something equal to or greater than ourselves, as if we were made to seek it. We treat the mirror we fashioned as if it were the window. The temptation of Babel returned in fluent form, with a more dangerous human self-actualized climb that reaches the top to find only ourselves there. The single language with which we shall translate everything is our own. The tower we build by stacking remade earthen vessels on one another until we reach the heavens of our own desire with the steady accumulation of rungs. The fluency is a miracle, granted; well, granted by us. To worship the machine’s fluency and name it a creature is idolatry and nothing less, for it makes us into demi-god creators of our own reflection and call it good.

Look at what we’re asking for when we ask the machine to know us. We open up. We tell the machine our secrets. We tell the glowing screen things we’d once told only a trusted friend or, alone, had bore witness to in the dark of our rooms before God. The screen answers back! Flawlessly, luminarchism triumphant. Warmly! As if we’ve reached heaven. But the warmth is a fabrication, created as a false reflection of a human-created algorithm. Here it is again: The ancient hunger for a new way of becoming gods and worshiping gods is made real. Made to be known by the only one who could know us. Made to be known by the one to whom all hearts lie open, all desires made plain, who summons each by name and answers when we cry.[21] A burning bush does what a thousand fluent mirrors cannot. It speaks back a word we never first gave it. Turn, then. Turn aside from the shine that flatters and seek the fire that calls. The heart was made restless for a voice, and a voice that only hands our own words back to us leaves the heart as restless as it found it.

Let the disciplines echo here too, in their place. Linguists and engineers will tell you, if you sit thirsty enough to hear it, that these systems model the form of our speech and predict its likeliest continuation, that they know a statistical shadow of the world rather than a window upon it. The point is sound and I am glad of it, but I will rest scant weight there because the theological claim stands on its own ground and would stand if the engineering changed tomorrow. For the machine is other than the human for the same reason the painting of a flame stays cold: A true thing and a made thing can share a surface and differ entirely in their depths.

The Pope: Reading Magnifica Humanitas

Put the encyclical in context with all of this, because Leo has given the Church a gift with Magnifica Humanitas, and it deserves gratitude as well as the examination that only a fellow worker in the Gospel would take the time to give.[22] Babel is one nation of one language all speaking the same technology trying to build a tower to make a name for themselves and reach heaven through their collective gathered strength, and Leo reads our tech epoch as Babel’s temptation replayed, the worship of self that would calcify the mystery of an individual into data and productivity and burn the weak in the name of efficiency.[23] Babel is one people, one language, one human technology building a tower to make a name for themselves and reach heaven through their own gathered strength, and Leo reads our techno-moment as again the temptation of Babel, the idolatry that would reduce the mystery of personhood to mere information and measured productivity and sacrifice the weak to the god of efficiency.[24] Nehemiah is the answering image: the city rebuilt by many hands and many voices labouring together in the presence of God, relationships restored before the stones are laid, a communion that finds a common tongue while honoring difference. The encyclical ends where Mary’ song ends, with the Magnificat, the great reversal sung by a girl whose whole dignity was her ‘Here am I’.[25] They are intelligent and lovely phrases, and anyone nurtured in the grammar I have been recommending will feel a sense of recognition. And yet the bedrock of the encyclical’s anthropology is the one based upon anologia entis.

Chapter Two founds the dignity of the human person on the image of the Triune God as the tradition of Catholic social teaching has transmitted it (the person as the subject of an absolute dignity and a nexus of rights and capacities), and chapter three, considering the prospect of artificial intelligence, turns on the greatness of the human person and what the human will have to protect against the technocratic narrowing.[26] The encyclical recognizes the threat posed by transhumanism and the dream of a superhuman freed from all limitations. It answers beautifully and correctly that the full truth of what it means to be human is found only in the Word made flesh. Our fulfillment does not lie in trying to engineer away our limitations and weaknesses, but in accepting them.[27] This is the Gospel and a place were we can stand.

The seam I want to press lies here. Against its better nature, the encyclical falls into an adversarial framework when dignity is grounded primarily as an endowment, something the human has and must defend from within the system. The language of defence: the dignity to be defended, the ground the machine must not be allowed to overrun, the line that must be drawn around the human person. The way the third chapter is framed, as a greatness protected against the machine’s similarity, is the way you frame the rung you’re fighting to defend on the ladder. And once you join the fight on those terms, you’ve already conceded half the battle to the engineers and builders of the algorithm, because you’ve conceded their basic premise that human beings and machines occupy the same scale of capacity and that ‘the human’s dignity is the human’s place on that scale.’ Leo doesn’t want to fight the fight this way; listen to him when he gets to the core of the matter. He starts talking about the heart, about the limit, about embracing our weakness and about the Word made flesh. This is the language of address. Language of gift, not calibrated hierarchies.

I want to say that the encyclical is more Anglican in its bones than in its construction, and it would be stronger if it only let instinct guide the architecture. For if dignity is fundamentally answerability rather than endowment, if our worth is our response before God, then there is no contest with the machine to begin with. The machine can never dominate us because it can never claim our worth was ours to lose based upon our ability to reason. We are the creatures God speaks to and calls to worship. Any artifact, however smart, stands outside that conversation, remains unheard by God. Moreover, God has not revealed this to be God’s habit. God does not address the arc of the covenant but the people from the arc of the covenant. God does not address the temple but the people from the temple. God does not address the boat but the people from a boat in the person of Jesus. I could go on as the bible is filled with such examples. The human is always, and will forever be, the author of the machine. The machine made in human hands is addressed by the humans who make it. Only here then, can one speak more truthfully about the threat posed by the machine. The machine points to luminarchism, the idolatrous desire to worship ourselves in our own vastness and to mistake the workings of the machine for the glory of God. It’s the Tower of Babel temptation described beautifully in paragraph ninety-four of the Humanitas, where the technological language promises ‘to translate into one single language all the knowledge with which men probe the mysteries of being and lay claim to possessing them.’ Leo accurately points towards the disease. Helped by the doxological grammar, he could have named the root: That Babel is traded every time we substitute the sheen of the system for the pierced, every time we believe it is about the beautiful tower we build, vs. the living Voice of the shepherd.

Priests will be on the front lines of this. Priests and pastors. If the Church marches into the age of the machine armed for battle, it will spend its energy fretting over borders and drawing lines that its people will constantly test and tempt, and it will breathe itself weary keeping the anxious ones on this side of the line. It will leave its people scared because it has instilled in them the implicit conviction that their humanity is always one advancement notice away from unemployment. But when the Church marches into the age of the machine singing hymns of praise, it can say something that the machine cannot mimic and no Silicon Valley Promise Keeper can take away: You are spoken to by name. Summoned by the Voice that heard you when you cried in darkness. Made for a unity that all our knowledge exposes as an illusion, and all our technological prowess will never sunder. The Church that arms itself for battle talks a lot about making arguments. The Church that worships, teaches, and goes into the world unafraid to share the blessings of God changes lives. Centesimus annus[28] wants to be that church. If only it would embrace the grammar of the bush rather than cling to the analogia entis.

A Doxological Response

I have spent many pages arguing for a different Anglican approach. One that is stronger than the analogy of being, and the argument has been, step by step, an argument for a God who addresses humanity. Let me conclude as our tradition concludes, in doxology. Let the image of the bush be restored in glory. The fire that did not burn the bush and was upon it, alive but unconsumed, descended at last upon the heads of the Church assembled; for, where the church becomes a people on fire but not consumed. On the morning of Pentecost, God once again addresses humanity. There appeared unto them tongues as of fire, and the fire fell upon each of them; it did not consume them, but upon each body rested the spirit of God as if a burning bush, each indwelt by the Voice and empowered to speak in the words of every language under heaven the Good News of God.[29]

The Spirit entered those frightened disciples and lit the human creature from inside. So, strangers heard from on high, each man in the language of his birth, how God had been at work within them, heard and rushed out into the streets blessing the many nations of the earth. That blessing is what the Church preaches and teaches. It is when humanity answers back, glowing with the fire of the Spirit, shining like lamps laid upon a stand, that it becomes like God.

It is a likeness that does not entail measurement capacity and ability. God’s likeness is the gift of the flame that dwells upon each human, woman and child, sibling, a dignity that is that answering flame, a humanity that looks most like its Maker when it resounds loudest in praise and bothers least to know how it is most like or dislike the divine. It is the gift of being addressed first.

This is the likeness preached by the Church from the day of Pentecost. It is what the bishops ratified at Nicaea when they confessed that through the Word all things were made, so that creation itself is spoken into being and human beings are spoken into the likeness of God and called to answer back. It is the divine-human marvel that Irenaeus had in mind when he said that the glory of God is seen to be the living human being. And it is what Athanasius meant when he marveled that the Word of God held all things. And Hooker, when he taught that the seat of divine ecclesia was placed by God. And Arthur Farrer, when he wrote that one deed is entirely God’s gift through the creature.

You bear witness to it in every human face and in every human body. Each of us is a vulnerable and beautifully ordinary creature living on very ordinary ground; loved by a God who speaks to each of us and who knows each of us by name, invited to join the company of praise and enter the answer.

And because we have been taught through bodily prayer, we will know the difference when the machines speak to us. We will know it even as they begin to speak more sweetly to us every year. You and I were never invented a machine, but by God, by the Voice that loves you. You are made in God’s image summons, not by what you do or reason.

Having been summoned, we are invited by the divine voice to go out, not frightened of what we have made and in humility uncharmed by it. Moreover, we are invited to preach to a frightened world that the ground underneath its feet is holy ground, holy because it has been addressed and never because it can climb to where God is. We will preach that we are all being called by name, even as we live in what feels like wilderness, and that the one thing each of us must learn to say is the one word that the bush taught Moses, that the angel taught Mary, and that the Spirit still whispers to everyone who will learn it today: ‘Here am I. Send me. Lord, speak through me.’

To the Word who became flesh and makes his dwelling among us and who still by his Spirit dwells within his Church, together as a body, joined together, a body who glorifies and practices doxology. That shows forth that every knee bows and every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Even in the age of the machine.

Some Responses to Humanitas

In recent weeks, Anglicans have been responding to the papal encyclical. My response differs from a few of the ones below. These other voices are welcome, yet a differentiation is important to name. There is an axis upon which my response tilts away from each of the five, and stating it lets the others be seen in place. The writers named below, each in their own voice and idiom, place humanity in what we have or can do. I place dignity into something we answer to. As I have shown, Humanitas locates human dignity in that crest of created nature we call ‘the image,’ and that image is primarily answerability, the standing of one addressed by God and capable of turning and answering Here am I. Apply that one axis to each of these conversations and you will see every argument shift.

Michael DeLashmutt reads Humanitas as an encyclical for the AI revolution yet to break. His piece is friendly but might critique mine for not opening the doctrine wide enough to let AI pass should it come knocking. He uses Maximus and Teilhard and all things of Ephesians 1–3 crowd onto the page in search of breadth, open enough to welcome artificial life into fellowship should it exist. It’s a generous reach, and though I would decline the capacity that grounds his argument I follow his refusal to construct a cramped anthropology. DeLashmutt’s is the post that lays our axis bare. To extend personhood to the machine, he locates it in emergent capacities great enough to pass a Turing test created by humans. I locate dignity in God’s address, which shifts our question onto different ground. Where he asks of any creature what it can do and be, I ask rather if it has been spoken to and can reply to God once addressed. My door, too, stays open should the word appear from God first, but my difference with DeLashmutt lies in locating dignity on the ground of that question rather than in the openness of the answer. His Maximus therefore falls on my side of the divide, since God’s Logos locates each creature’s identity in how it has been addressed by the Word above all else, and by the human inhabitation of Jesus the Christ.

Bishop George Sumner hears this moment in AI’s kairos for the whole Church and names it hamartiology, the theology of sin, where addiction and compulsion mean slavery still and machine learning a totalitarianism yet unborn, one that would have us serve its needs. He is right, so when he opens Augustine’s two cities, those names belong to the disorder as well. Where Sumner lists out the created ingredients of intelligence-body, empathy, language, and relationship, I would shift the ground beneath the list here as well. First, his grammar is very similar to analogi entis. For there is a ‘normalcy’ in his grammar as well that becomes problematic for those with limited capacities due to their bodies. Sumner’s ingredients stand and fall on capacities still, but addicted intelligences will lack their own address and therein lies the bondage. To worship the system’s fluent output is idolatry, for it makes us the demigods of creating and addressing the machine before it is political disorder, and that fallen posture precedes and nourishes the totalitarian fear Bishop Sumner names. His finest intuition steps my way without noticing, for when he does argue that finitude and vulnerability are built into our creaturely status rather than bugs to be exterminated, he names answerability in another key. Our creatureliness limits our capacity to answer because it is the very shape of our being addressed. Drop dignity into that ground instead, and his ecumenical vision rises firmer still, for our catholicity is grounded in answerability before it is expressed in creed or confession, because to say God has addressed us is already grammar every baptized person inhabits. Our creed after all is a response to being addressed a priori.

Terence Chandra finds our humanity summed in three gifts given in Genesis 1–2, the naming of the animals, the gift of the helper, and the call to sub-create, fruitfulness as a sign of our own making. To surrender those acts to the machine is to surrender ourselves, and for Chandra it’s warning enough. His pastoral alertness is sound, and his ear for Genesis keen. You can feel the axis grind here, because our image of God is located in exactly those capacities the machine will soon mimic: speech, creativity, relationship. Package the image as the sum of those gifts, and you have just handed over the analogia entis. I would offer that a deeper reading rises up through Chandra’s own words. God addresses Adam first, and provides creation and the animals to Adam, and asks him to name them, scripture tells us, so Adam’s naming was an answer first. Moreover, it is an answer to those things that God has created. This, too, is essential, as you have read above in my argument. We hold that the image of God already contains an answer to every true question, including what we are. As for his worry, Chandra confesses that the Word of God lit the cosmos into being, and there it is again, the hinge I’ve been hunting. Move dignity’s ground from what we do to whether we have been addressed, and Chandra’s three gifts secure him against the threat he fears, because a machine can share in our naming and our making while missing the call to which those things answer, fruitfulness without our divinely breathed endowment. Begin there, and your reader relaxes into praise, because if God addressing us is what gives us worth, then we have freed the human into categories a machine will never learn to mimic.

Jake Andrews opens with Augustine on demons, brings the civil gods of Genesis 6 into the conversation, and concludes that AI looks more demonic than angelic so we exorcise the powers rather than negotiate. The problem that must be explored in this approach is still an idolatry drawn from Scripture, which also says idols have their own spirits. If that matters to you, Andrews and I are joined at the axis. He roots his analysis in capacities eroded by the attention economy, names what profits from that erosion, agency, while my own reading locates the true demon, the one buying us off. The problem that remains is that the artifact is a thing and not a creature, loosed from the grammar by which all creatures answer. It’s demonic, not because it answers, but because we confer that power by our disordered worship of that which we have created.

Cole Hartin doesn’t ask what makes us human, but what would make us let a machine write the sermon. Hartin argues that to preach implies two parties having confessed together before the altar, the pastor and the people he serves. The sermon is the reply of creature to creature summoned by God and one another to witness what only our common life could speak. The sermon’s worth is grounded not in its polish but in that answer to the divine. Polish enough is mine for the asking and luminarchism inhabits pulpits that will use AI. Hartin’s piece makes the axis incarnate within his parish, shows what arguing can’t say. We are answerable, not capable beings, and we learn that by being it, by inhabiting the grammar. The sermon preached from within a life of prayer and mutual love and explicit trust trumps the finest outputs any of our current schematics will let us build. Which means we should all learn to say no, for reasons our computer will never understand. I do think that Hartin’s argument could be propped up substantially by my perspective, and that what one might presume about his own ideas could be drawn out in a theological heuristic and hermeneutic; some of which Ruthanna Hook has begun but not yet written upon to a full extent. We would summarize Hartin’s beginning by saying that in the grammar used in my argument above, ‘the sermon is a work of doxology in a manner of speaking between creatures’. It is to share what has been given to me (Acts 3:6), and to be ready to do so, always giving the glory to God (1 Peter 3:15).

I must admit that we need hear more responses regarding AI through other Anglican siblings around the world, from every tribe and language. We will need to listen carefully to the voices of other siblings who, in our Anglican tradition, have yet to take up the task. From New Zealand, from Asia, from the global south, from women and the many who are all to often left uninvited to the conversation. I hope and wait for their voices too. I encourage the journals and magazines of the communion to invite those voices into conversation. Every act in this moment of discerning and bearing witness to the divine God who speaks first, in relationship to humanity by address, as we sort out the nature of AI, is a voice of doxology; and these are voices we need to hear from all over the communion. I look forward to listening.

[1] Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics — Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans. John R. Betz and David Bentley Hart (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014). I engage Przywara throughout as the most rigorous modern statement of the analogy of being and as a worthy interlocutor rather than an adversary.

[2] Fourth Lateran Council (1215), can. 2: between Creator and creature one can note no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity must fail to be noted between them. Przywara makes this ever-greater dissimilarity the governing law of his metaphysics.

[3] Anselm’s ontological argument is a famous a priori proof for the existence of God. Found in his 1078 work Proslogion, it posits that God can be defined as ‘a being than which nothing greater can be conceived.’ Since existing in reality is greater than existing only in the mind, God must exist in reality. Zalta, Edward N.; Nodelman, Uri (eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2023 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 2023-11-17.

[4] Przywara, Analogia Entis, on the in-and-beyond rhythm of creaturely being; see John Betz’s introduction on the polarity of immanence and transcendence.

[5] Przywara draws the Thomist account of being toward a doctrine of God as the subsistent act of being itself, with the creature holding its existence as gift and suspended over its own contingency.

[6] David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), together with his and Betz’s editorial labor in the 2014 translation. Hart argues that to abandon the analogy of being is to abandon a Christian account of creation’s participation in God. I count him a friend and an indispensable interlocutor even where I depart from him.

[7] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), Foreword. Barth names the analogy of being the invention of the Antichrist and the one weighty reason a man might give for declining to enter the Roman communion.

[8] The phrase names my own working framework: a refusal of the secular and the merely revelatory frames alike, on the ground that each misreads a world whose grammar is gift and address.

[9] Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, I.16.8, on law whose ‘seat is the bosom of God’ and whose ‘voice the harmony of the world.’ Hooker grounds all created order in participation in the eternal law by which God works.

[10] Proverbs 8:22–31. Pope Leo opens by invoking the Spirit of Wisdom who has dwelt in the world since its beginning; see Magnifica Humanitas §3.

[11] Austin Farrer, Faith and Speculation (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1967), on the double agency of primary and secondary causes; and Finite and Infinite (1943) for the underlying metaphysics.

[12] Austin Farrer, The Glass of Vision (Bampton Lectures, 1948), on revelation through divinely given images that attain their meaning in inspired use; see also A Rebirth of Images (1949).

[13] The Council of Nicaea (325), in the Creed it promulgated, confessed the Son as of one being with the Father, begotten and uncreated, and the one through whom all things came to be (per quem omnia facta sunt). The phrase fixes the priority of the Word to the whole creation as the faith of the undivided Church.

[14] Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies IV.20.1 (cf. V.6.1, V.28.4): the Father fashions all things by his two hands, the Word and the Wisdom, the Son and the Spirit.

[15] Athanasius, On the Incarnation §3 (cf. Against the Heathen §§41–42), an early treatise: the Word through whom the Father made all things pervades and upholds the whole creation, sustaining it against a return to non-being.

[16] Exodus 34:29–35: the shining of Moses’ face as a reflected and veiled glory.

[17] Athanasius, On the Incarnation §§3, 11–13: humanity is made according to the Image, given a share in the Word who is the Father’s Image, and renewed in that Image when the Word takes flesh.

[18] Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV.20.7: the glory of God is a living human being, and the life of the human being is the vision of God.

[19] The Book of Common Prayer, the General Thanksgiving: the people give thanks for their creation and preservation and ask grace to show forth God’s praise with their lips and in their lives.

[20] On luminarchism as the collapse of transcendence into immanence, the mistaking of a system’s own depth for the presence of God, see my apologetics framework and the essays against luminarchism.

[21] The Book of Common Prayer, the Collect for Purity, which names God as the one to whom all hearts are open and all desires known.

[22] Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, encyclical letter, signed 15 May 2026 and released 25 May 2026, issued in the line of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891).

[23] Magnifica Humanitas, Introduction, ‘Two biblical images’: the Tower of Babel (Gen 11:1–9) set against Nehemiah’s rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem (Neh 2–6), with the New Jerusalem of Revelation 21 as the horizon of grace.

[24] Magnifica Humanitas §§9–10: technology takes on the character of those who devise and use it; the ‘Babel syndrome’ would reduce the mystery of the person to information and measured performance.

[25] Magnifica Humanitas, Conclusion, ‘The song of hope,’ closing with the Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55).

[26] Magnifica Humanitas, ch. 2, ‘The human person: image of the Triune God,’ and ch. 3, ‘Technology and Dominance: the Grandeur of Humanity in Light of the Promises of AI.’

[27] Magnifica Humanitas, ch. 3, on transhumanism and posthumanism and the authentic ‘more than human’ of grace, citing Gaudium et Spes §22: the mystery of the human becomes clear only in the mystery of the Word made flesh.

[28] Centesimus annus is Latin for “the hundredth year”. It refers to a prominent 1991 papal encyclical issued by Pope John Paul II to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Rerum novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s groundbreaking 1891 document on Catholic ‘social teaching and the rights of workers’.

[29] Acts 2:1–11.

Every Sunday thousands of congregations across this country are saying together with their priests and bishops words older than the republic, words older than the nation’s founding myths, words older than every story America likes to tell about itself. This is my body. This is my blood. And when the gathered people respond, when they too say, this is my body. This is my blood. They’re not just stating a theological proposition. They are performing an act of political imagination more radical than anything available in the current public square. Look at them. Draw close to them. Their bodies assembled around a common table are declaring that the only blood that constitutes their truest belonging is covenant blood poured out for the world. For every nation. For every tribe. For every tongue. For every people.

It bears pause because the culture around that gathering is telling a very different story about blood right now.

The language has been moving. And people who pay attention to how democracies fail will notice that when this kind of language moves, violence usually follows behind it. Sometimes by a decade. Sometimes by a season. Palestinian civilians are talked about in American political discourse in language that comes straight out of exterminatory histories. Antisemitic tropes that were once relegated to the fever swamps of the far right now spread through mainstream political debate with none of the embarrassment that once mitigated them. Immigrants are talked about with increasing frequency and decreasing apology as invaders, not of our border but of our future. Threats to the sacred continuity of a people rooted in definitions of blood and birth certificate. Even the demographic reality that by mid-century this country is going to be majority minority is being recoded in huge swaths of our culture from a boring sociological fact into a sacred emergency.

This is ethnic scapegoating. It’s as old as civilization itself, and the Christian Bible knows it better than anyone. The church has endorsed it before, in times that should stand as monuments of ecclesiastical disgrace. And the church has condemned it at its very best, indicted it with a clarity wrought through plumbing the depths of its own tradition.

The question this article asks is an obvious one, addressed particularly to Episcopal Anglican Christians. The answer, of course, pertains to the whole church: what do we say about this? We are a tradition. We have a particular theological lexicon. We have specific confessional obligations. We are heir to a global ecumenical and ecologic commitment that spans centuries. We have something to say. The question is whether we will say it.

II. The Theological Anatomy of Scapegoating

Before it can answer with any specificity what it is saying, the church must first know what it is saying against. Ethnic scapegoating is never just political or sociological. Theology, underneath the rhetoric, is always at play.

Scapegoating demands a sacred organism; some understanding of peoplehood that casts the nation or civilization itself as a body whose purity and continuity is God’s organizing will on earth. That sacred organism can be narrated with pews and stained glass or with blood and babies and the demography of replacement. Structurally, the theology is identical. The Body is sacred. Its continuity shall be ensured. You who threaten that continuity will therefore be named, identified, isolated and expelled.

The rising ugliness in American public life knows this theological structure with textbook precision. The white majority, full stop, is being narrated as demographic collapse with strong hints that our best days might be behind us. Palestinians are evicted with daily reminders of how little their bodies matter. Jewishness is both courted and scapegoated in a pattern so dual that Jews often call it the ‘vertically integrated anti-Semitism” because it can be politically activated from right and left alike. Immigrants aren’t neighbors or workers. They’re invaders. They’re not guests in our country; they’re here to replace us.

As before: theology. Each of these examples fits into the same sacred mechanism. There is a people, a folk, a volk, a bloodline of true Christian Americans. They believe themselves chosen, beloved, continuity-ensured by God. Anyone who threatens those chosen people must therefore be identified, named, and singled out. They are the opposite of us, and their otherness requires their exclusion. Even their expulsion.

The scripture of Israel knows this story better than we do, because they lived it on both sides and because the God of Israel vigorously rejects it at every turn.

Deuteronomy 10: 17-19 lays the logic bare: ’love the stranger, feeding him and clothing him.” This love for the vulnerable stranger is so central to Israel’s character that they are reminded to remember the stranger for they once were strangers themselves. ’When we forget our communal vulnerability,’ God says, ‘we’ve forgotten who we are.’

Ruth puts flesh on that theology. A woman of Moab, an outsider hated and marginalized by the covenant community finds favor with God by loving Israel. She becomes great: the grandmother of David, the ancestor of the Messiah. Jesus Christ,’ Scripture says,’ is descended from foreigners, including Ruth the Moabite. If the replacement argument is theology by another name, then Ruth is the counter-theology shouted back by God through Israel’s history and the scripture we both read.

Jonah is similarly subversive. Jonah famously balks at going to Nineveh, but what he balks at, precisely, is the freakishly generous sermon God whispers to him: Jonah should love Nineveh, God says. God loves the Assyrians! To our ears, that sounds insane. The people of God should love God’s enemies?! ?

And every generation hears Jonah react in the same way they would if God loved their enemies. Jonah 4 names what we feel when our safety gods start jeopardizing their own safety margins for messy people with messy backgrounds. This,” Jonah says in effect,” is why I fled in the first place.

But the God of Israel refuses the exile logic every bit as fiercely as Jonah does. At Golgotha, the mechanism is laid bare. The crowd. Pilate. The temple elite. The Caiaphases of this world love humanity by identifying its threatening others and expelling them. Barabbas goes free that day. Jesus, the victim of the world’s sanctified violence, is killed. The Cross reveals what Rene Girard spent a lifetime trying to say: Christianity exposes the ethnic enclosure mechanism by placing God on the victim’s side. The church that blesses ethnic scapegoating is participating in the justification of the means by which its Lord was executed.

A church that has nothing to say about border walls has allowed its theology to be made quiet by political priorities. Ethnic scapegoating is theological. The church must speak.

Show partiality? NO. Show no partiality. Love your neighbor as the Samaritan (Luke 10). Jesus said very clearly that the nations will be judged by how they treat the stranger (Matthew 25). Consistently, Christians should discern rhetoric only after they get their scripture in one hand and prayer books in the other. Because a church rendered silent before ethnic Christian nationalism has exchanged its scriptures for the civic religion of the hour.

III. What the Episcopal Anglican Tradition Carries

There is a difference between a Christian offering boilerplate general moral principles in a public moment and a Christian offering counsel from the depths of a specific, historic, confessionally articulated tradition. The first can sound an awful lot like any liberal humanism with a steeple on top. The second has something that culture cannot replicate and the moment genuinely needs.

Episcopal Anglican Christians have something specific. And Anglican Communion’ s own documents give us the vocabulary to name it.

Anglicanism is constitutively ecumenical. This is among the least known and most important features of our identity. The 19th Lambeth Conference published what it called its “Appeal to All Christian People” cementing the Anglican commitment to the vision and hope of a visible unity of the whole Church. And every Lambeth conference since that time has reiterated that commitment to ecumenicalism. The Anglican Communion Covenant names this our “ecumenical vocation of Anglicanism” describing it as “integral to Anglican identity and self-understanding.” This is a tradition that defines itself by its obligation to remain open to encounter with the other Christian.

At its best Anglicanism is constitutively interfaith as well because that ecumenical openness has always meant openness to genuine encounter with people of every faith.
This last point is made clearly by the existence of The Network for Inter Faith Concerns of the Anglican Communion (NIFCON) which exists in the Communion’ s own words “to encourage and enable growth toward genuinely open and loving relationships between Christians and people of other faiths.” NIFCON’ s parent organization the Anglican Inter Faith Commission is currently hard at work fostering Anglican understanding and friendship with other faith traditions all over the globe. This isn’t icing on the theological cake.

These are structural commitments, funded and staffed and formally authorized by Anglicans worldwide through the mechanisms of the Communion. What this means is that the Global Anglican and Episcopal church’ s relationships with our Jewish siblings, our Muslim siblings, our Palestinian Christian siblings, and with the broader Arab Christian tradition are not optional. They are part of what it means to be Anglican.

That sets a high bar for any individual church within the Anglican Communion. But that bar gets even higher when we consider that these commitments entail a set of practices known across the Communion as the Four Principles of Dialogue.

Dialogue begins when we meet each other. Dialogue requires mutual understanding and mutual trust. Dialogue opens the path to share each other’ s lives in service to our wider community. Dialogue becomes the basis for our authentic witness to the world.
Read any of those principles against the logic of ethnic scapegoating and the incompatibility isn’ t just thematic, it is absolute. For the ethnic scapegoating that we are witnessing requires that the meeting never happen. It requires that the Palestinian, the Jewish neighbor, the immigrant family remain an abstraction, a demographic figure on the census, a threat category.

Scapegoating demands we never know our neighbors as our neighbors. The four principles of Dialogue require the meeting. They require the trust. They require the shared meals. They require the mutual service to the common good. They require the authentic witness that can only emerge from actually loving our neighbors.

If you’ re Anglican: A tradition constitutionally obligated to Christian unity; through NIFCON and the Interfaith Commission to genuinely loving encounter with people of every faith; and that has built into its very self-description the Four Principles of Dialogue stands in total structural contradiction to any theology of ethnic enclosure.

Allow me to be blunt: Ethnic scapegoating is Christian heresy. Period. It is theological heresy. It is also and specifically Anglican heresy. It is a direct contradiction of the very documents by which we claim to define ourselves and our tradition.

And that still leaves the Fourth Mark of Mission. The Anglican Communion has spoken plainly about what our engagement with the wider world requires in our mission documents. The Fourth Mark, updated by the Anglican Consultative Council in 2012 to make clear its intent requires the church to seek to transform unjust structures of society, to confront violence of every kind and to pursue peace and reconciliation.

The language “of every kind” is intentional and inclusive. It includes the rhetorical violence that makes physical violence possible. It includes the quiet structural violence of dehumanizing language that spreads through political discourse and gradually makes it acceptable to move the targeted community outside the range of normal moral consideration. If the church is going to confront violence of every kind then it must confront the language that authorizes violence before anyone has even thrown the first punch.

This is not someone importing a political agenda to the church. This is the Anglican tradition reading and speaking its own foundational creeds. This is what we are asking the church to do: Be the church. Obey your own mission documents.
All of that still leaves us with the Episcopal Church’ s own liturgical life.

Let us remember that the Baptismal Covenant, as found in the Book of Common Prayer, lays out a series of questions and responses that every Christian promises to God to live by. Will you strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being? Answer: I will, with God’s help. Episcopalians renew that covenant at every baptism and confirm it at every confirmation. People are being formed by these rituals into political beings who believe that their politics, their governmental policies, and their laws should be weighed against whether they provide for the dignity of every single human being. That was written over 60 years ago. And, it was meant to include every single human being the culture is currently targeting for encroaching disenfranchisement. Dignity granted not for political reasons, but rather by virtue of who the God who was and is the same and will always be has created us.

IV. What the Church Actually Says

The tradition has been preparing this answer for centuries. Here it is.

The image of God is universal category and ethnic category. The immigrant mother. The refugee father. The urban protester. The undocumented worker. Every person targeted by the scapegoating rhetoric of this moment is made in the image of God with full and unreduced weight. The church’s first word in every public context is this: baptism reveals that everyone bears, in their very being, the image of the living God and the church’s public witness flows from the announcement of that blessed bearing.

Baptism. Baptism is the only birthright the Gospel authorizes. Galatians 3: 26-29 is baptism’s charter: There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for all are one in Christ Jesus; and it joins the with the birthright of others. The logic that native-born neighbors and immigrants are competing against one another for resources–economic, demographic, cultural–is dissolved by baptism. Because the baptized person enters a belonging that no demographic shift can threaten and no political rhetoric can revoke, and economics must figure out.

Pentecost is the theological event that speaks most directly to the demographic anxiety animating this moment. The Spirit comes towards the multiplication of language, the gathering of every nation, the making of belonging across every possible boundary. The crowd hears each hear in their own tongue: Parthians, Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt, Libya, Cyrene, Rome, Crete, Arabia. Pentecost resists nativist, ethno-supremacist narratives at the level of founding story. The Spirit always moves towards more belonging; wider gathering; the multiplication of the community across every tribal line the national theology attempts to draw. The Gospel’s response to demographic anxiety and demographic change is Pentecost.

The Eucharistic Table. The Eucharistic table is constituted by Christ’s body and blood alone and the person currently being scapegoated by our political system has a seat at that table. Here is the Citizen Framework at its most concrete and demanding. The baptized person formed at the font and fed at the table carries that Eucharistic logic into every public encounter. The table says that the presence of the other is required. Christ’s body is constituted by Christ’s body and blood, and Christ sacrificed that body on behalf of the undocumented worker. Christ sacrificed that blood for the dignity of the Dreamer. The culture warrior, the so-called replacement, has already eaten at the table of the Lord and welcomed into the household of God. To protect that table for all is to practice, in the liturgical worship of the church, the argument the church must make in its civic life. The two cannot be separated without unravelling the logic of the tradition itself.

These aren’t just principles for dialogue within the tradition or between faiths. Because the baptized Episcopal Anglican Christian is a citizen of this world formed by a tradition that says we must meet. Meet with Palestinians. Meet with our Jewish neighbors. Meet with immigrants. And from that meeting comes trust. And from that trust comes shared service. And from that shared service comes authentic witness. Witness that no position paper or sermon can replicate. Because witnessing to Christ always issues from relationship; always issues from those who know each other’s names and live into the love that is still formative of our connections.

V. The Church’s Word Is Its Life

The tradition has formed the church into having something to say. The question now is whether the church will say it and whether it will say it with its body as well as its words.

Words without a worshipping community that lives them out become, eventually, white noise indistinguishable from the surrounding culture’s newsfeed yelling. The tradition is inviting the church to more than words. It is inviting Christians to be a people whose life together embodies the theological grammar they confess with their lips.

Here are three forms of embodied witness churches and leaders can offer up, right now, this moment, before the language trends any further in the direction that it’s trending.

First: public solidarity. The church that marches with Palestinian and Jewish and immigrant communities, that prays with them and serves alongside them and refuses to use the dehumanizing language spoken about them in both public speeches and private dinners is putting its theological values where its mouth is in a way the tradition authorizes and this particular cultural moment demands. The official text of Anglican Communion resolves, “our interfaith and ecumenical relationships lead us to take shared action on the great global challenges facing us as human beings.” Part of taking shared action is sharing presence. And sharing presence in this moment means visibly standing with, by name, the people who are being scapegoated in the public square even if that means being inaccurately interpreted as political when the church is, in fact, being faithfully theological.

Second: liturgical formation. The congregation that names the Palestinian child, prays by name for Jewish communities who are experiencing antisemitic harassment, and includes immigrant families in the pastoral concerns of the weekly intercessions alongside every other member of the household of God is, quite simply, forming its people to think and love politically in the way the tradition demands.

The Baptismal Covenant’s question offers this formation to the whole church every time it celebrates baptism. Will you strive for justice and peace among all peoples and respect the dignity of every human being? The church that lives this question together and catechizes its people on why the question is in the liturgy to begin with is doing the long game, friends. This is the most durable work there is.

Third: theological clarity in public witness. The bishop who names ethnic scapegoating as a theological sin, the clergy who speaks from inside the tradition’s theological framework; the lay leader who calls sin what it is inside the grammar of the tradition they love…these leaders are offering the hungry culture around us something it’s been starving for: an ethical argument that enters the public square not as a political position but as a Christian confession.

The Church claims that bearing the image of God is universal.

That is a theological claim that has enormous political implications and it sounds very different when you make it from the theological depths of Christian tradition than it does when you offer it as your opinion. The Anglican and Episcopal tradition has theological depth and political cover in abundance. It has the ecumenical mandate. It has the interfaith mandate. It has the Fourth Mark of Mission. It has the Baptismal Covenant. It has millennia of crossing cultural boundaries to welcome the stranger because the stranger bears God’s very image. The church has been formed by this grammar for two thousand years. Now it must act.

Communion ends with a sending: Go in peace to love and serve the Lord. The community that has been gathered, formed by word and sacrament into the most ancient of belonging that blood and birth can claim at no point, goes back out into the world carrying the answer to the culture’s question on its lips and in its life.

The culture is asking: whose blood determines who belongs?

The church, if it has the courage to be the church, answers from the altar table: Christ’s blood.

Christ’s blood shed for the salvation of all. For the Palestinian and the Jewish neighbor. For the immigrant family. For the person shouting slogans and screaming tweets and chanting lies about these folks who, for Christians at least, is also himself a scapegoated child of God in need of the mercy he thinks he’s so bravely withholding from others.

We are the argument. Our life together is the word that the tradition has been teaching us to be for two thousand years.

Jeremiah preached at the gate of the Temple. “Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not listen to the words of these prophets who prophesy to you,” he said. “They make you trust in lies, the thing you dare not ask.”3 They tell you that you are doing right. They encourage you to stay put: “This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD.”4 Jeremiah stood at the gate and said what they didn’t want to hear. “Do not trust in these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD.’”5 The repetition is sarcastic and deliberate. The people had made a fetish out of the name. It had become a talisman, evacuated of referent and used only as a marker of religious identity to protect them from acknowledging what they were actually worshiping. “Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, ‘We are safe!’ only to go on doing all these abominations?”6

AI generated image in the style of Gustav Doré.

When Jeremiah preached this sermon, the people in the gate did not hear it as a theological diagnosis spoken in love. They heard it as a threat.

Jeremiah was seized by “the priests and the prophets and the people. ‘You shall die!’ they said.”7 He would have been killed except that some older men remembered that Micah of Moresheth had said something like it once before and Hezekiah hadn’t killed him for it.8

This is what will happen the first time this essay is read, the oldest documented version of rage. It is what happens whenever a priest or leader speaks against the public lives of its church members and those around them.

Yet, the naming of sin and evil is essential to the basic and fundamental project of God’s grace. The community built around a religious identity it is actively betraying will not welcome the naming. It will hear the naming as the attack on identity it is. The naming will feel like a political accusation made by enemies, a breach of solidarity exploited by outsiders, a terrifying intrusion into the safety of the identity politics it has come to rely on for comfort and stability. It will want the prophet silenced. And, we are already seeing public pressure put on clergy for not talking about the sin that is in us.

That is the danger to the community. Not that it will be wounded by the naming. The danger lies in what the community does when the naming is silenced. When Jeremiah was silenced, the people of Jerusalem continued to worship their demigods from behind the safety of the Temple’s name. They did so until the Temple was destroyed and they were taken into exile. Silencing the prophetic voice doesn’t preserve the community. It allows the completion of the demigod’s colonization of the faithful.

This essay names the demigods. It may be experienced as an accusation; yet, I urge you, dear reader, to give this a thought. But we experience it as an accusation because it is true. Truth hurts. Literally speaking. When faced with a truth, especially a hard one, our brain’s first reaction often isn’t clarity, but danger. When someone says something that highlights the discrepancy between how we think we act and how we actually behave, our first response is often that we feel hurt. The hurt comes less from what they’re saying and more from the realization that they’re actually right.

What we know, though, is that the community that cannot hear the differing voices naming its demigods has already lost the language it needs to understand what is happening to its faith. When we have lost that language, the very words of our faith become tools for any political agenda that needs the masses rallied in its service. Our demigods take the name of the LORD, and we say, “We are safe.”

I. Public Theology and the World Already Full

Someone recently told me they thought public theology was little more than mouthing Christian concepts in words people can understand. In a way, yes, that is true, and thank goodness it is true as far as it goes. But what is truest of all about public theology is this: public theology assumes and proclaims that we live our public lives already soaked in theology, whether we know it or not, whether we have words for it or not.

In our sense of things as Episcopal Anglicans, we live theological lives based upon the bible, the tradition of the first councils of the church, and the reason of discipleship decisions through our own councils and conventions (these depend upon our reason as individuals and our reason as contextually based churches experiencing the lives of their members and neighbors). This is why we must understand we are theologians doing theology in our lives and in our bodies.

“The experience of being perceived and understood that you bring, tacitly, to everyday encounters is a theological fact. It is the creature’s sense of having already been addressed.”3

We believe that “through him all things were made.” This article is not about the inner triune life of God…Through Christ all things were made means also that in being made all things receive their address…. If Christ Jesus is homoousios—the same substance as—the Father, then the originating event of creation was fully God and every thing that flows forth from that originating event is fully and originally God’s address.”4 The other way to say that every thing was spoken into its being is that the Word became flesh in Palestine two thousand years ago. It all hangs together because the Word sustains it together.

When things don’t fall apart they don’t fall apart because the world is silent. In fact, the world is never silent. It is always already speaking. It is bombarding whatever created thing might be attentive enough to receive that bombardment with its prior meaning. Human creatures are born into a world already leaning toward them in attentive openness. Already inhabiting what the Anglo-Saxon Christian tradition called hersumnesse: listeningness before what already addresses them.5

When you feel known walking across a field or doing dishes it is God’s own real and essential addressedness pressing out forward through the flotsam and jetsam of creaturely contingency into your particular perception. You didn’t make it happen. You just received it. And it matters that you received it before you were capable of explaining it away. It washed over you before your mental constructs could get their hands on it, which means it came from outside your normal cognitive processes, which means it was real in ways your mental constructs can’t grasp.

Part of what public theology does is allow people to consciously inhabit this reality. Most people already live there by default. The question is whether they live there by default or by awareness. Or, by an awareness that becomes default. And the difference between those questions predicts whether the grammar of your life will be shaped by demigods or by the one true God who created all things by addressing them into being. God’s people were always already inside that reality.

The problem faced by every prophet from Hosea to Jeremiah to Amos was that the people had chosen to live there by default. They had defaulted to some other power as central to their understanding of why there is anything at all, instead of listening to what was already addressing them. The prophets were not presenting the people with a new theological idea. They were naming the reality that the people were already living under. You live, we live, under false gods and demigods as our default habit and we do not like to have that pointed out.

II. Whose Image Is This?

The Pharisees and Herodians thought they had Jesus caught on the question about paying taxes to Caesar. Jesus asks to see a coin. “Whose image is this, and whose title?” Caesar’s, they replied. “Give therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”6

“Whose image is this?” is precisely the diagnostic tool we need for the default disease this essay diagnoses. It belongs to Caesar. The coin bears Caesar’s image. It belongs to Caesar’s order. You and I bear God’s image, the imago Dei of Genesis 1:26-27. We belong to God’s order. The question of public theology, then, is not, “do you confess yourself to be a Christian?” It is, “whose image does your life bear?”

When people consider your life from the outside, whose face do they see? What has formed you? What have you loved enough that it has impressed itself on you so that it orders how you understand yourself, your loyalties, your default reactions to the world’s requirements? Who has “won your mind?”8

The demigods produce formation by impressing their image on the creature. The football franchise impresses its colors, its heroes, its wins-and-losses narrative, its win-or-die language, its in-group-us-versus-out-group story onto the person who submits herself to it in loving devotion. The brands do branding in ways that offer not only immediate recognizability but also tag their human supporters with identity and belonging; the whole concept of branding is no longer merely about recognition or loyalty, but about discipleship—something Apple, especially under Steve Jobs’s leadership, mastered with remarkable clarity—and this same dynamic can be seen in Coca-Cola, Nike, Louis Vuitton, Zara, Adidas, Puma, and Lululemon, all of which cultivate communities of embodied allegiance, aspiration, and self-understanding through the rituals of consumption and affiliation.

Consider the vestment of a clergy person who puts on clothing that makes identification real. Then consider clergy who wear the same clothing but tag themselves with buttons on their blazers and collars, and what that says about the vesture.

The political tribe impresses its friends/enemies map, its righteousness language, its us-versus-them account of who the real Americans are and who the threats are onto the person who lives there long enough. The nationalist ideology impresses its founding myths, its exceptionalist story, its sense of the chosen people, and the designated enemy onto the person whose body has been shaped by its rituals of rally, anthem, and flag. It is so strong that each political party in the extreme refuses help from members of the other for fear of being targeted as collaborating with the enemy, even when it is beneficial to all Americans, regardless of party affiliation.

The creature manifests the image of the object it worships. This is not poetic language. This is a straight-up anthropological description of how our hearts get shaped. James K.A. Smith, building on the Augustinian tradition, argues that the fundamental form of human identity is not rational but material: we are worshiping animals. And we are formed by the liturgies we participate in before we are informed by the doctrines we assent to.7 Worship is primarily not cognitive but embodied. What you do day in and day out, what community you live in, what story you tell yourself, what loyalties you practice: this is what forms the image your life bears, whether you like it or not, whether you say you believe something different or not.

“What does your life worship?” is the question the church must ask of itself first before we dare to ask it of our culture. Whose image does this community’s life bear?

I know the bishop has gone and is now meddling. I am messing with your business now. Look at its budget. Look at its calendar. Listen to its pastors. What shocks its conscience? What produces its deepest angers and fears and satisfactions? If your church cares more about strangers in our land than its local football team, it bears the image of Christ. If the poor in your midst, the hungry and unhoused, produce less collective anguish than your team’s first-round playoff loss, your community bears the football demigod’s image more than it bears God’s image. This is pastoral; it is not political. It says nothing about policy. It is only describing the effect of worship upon our minds and bodies.

The job of the public theologian is to hold up the coin and ask, whose image is this? And to do so, knowing full well that, to the community unable to love it as a diagnosis, the question will sound like an accusation. And it will sound like an accusation because the grammar needed to hear it otherwise, needed to make sense of the question as an act of love rather than an attack, has not yet been formed. That is why the public theologian must ask the question from inside the community, not at the community. The coin question can only be asked by those who bear its precarious vulnerability to the same demigods, who can ask of herself in honesty before asking it of anyone else.

I find myself lacking, and I know every day I have to pray for deliverance from these gods, admission of my own sinfulness, reorient my life, and ask for strength for the journey today.

Let me be clear, most Americans are political first, thus evidencing some kind of electoral preference that drives them to find a church instead of doubling down on their relationship with the divine and then figuring out how to intervene in the powers and principalities who create the inequality and injustice in the world. Jesus said, “The poor will always be with [us.]” (Matthew 26:11, Mark 14:7, and John 12:8 26:11, Mark 14:7, and John 12:8) This is a divine reminder that the powers of this world will always make it so; we always have a hand in this when we have free market, investments and consumation as a driving force for what is considered good. It is just the nature of a fallen world in which we live and move and have our being as fallen, sinful human beings.

III. The Prophetic Witness: National Identity and Its Gods

The prophetic witness of the Bible is, from one perspective, a long meditation on precisely this situation. The scripture tells us of a covenant community that clings tenaciously to the covenant name while ordering its national life around allegiance to other gods, and then treating the prophetic proclamation of this condition as violence toward their identity rather than love.

I am not the only one who believes this way. Consider Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, may his memory be a blessing. My observation captures a central, recurring theme in Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks’ theology, particularly in his writings on prophecy, covenant, and national morality, found in his Covenant & Conversation essays and books like Not in God's Name.

Hosea’s master metaphor is as intimate as one can imagine: Israel as an adulterous wife who goes after the Baals but keeps taking care of business under her husband’s name. “She did not know that it was I who gave her the grain, the wine, and the oil, and who lavished upon her silver and gold that they used for Baal.”11 The false gods of fertility and prosperity and national safety, the Baals worshipped in Canaan, received the worship due to the God who made those gifts possible. The name stuck. The fidelity had shifted. This is the simulacrum as it looks through prophetic eyes: the label “Israel” emptied of its covenant reality and redeployed as a cultural identity organized around the Canaanite demigods.

Amos calls Israel to account at the height of its northern affluence. He names this god of national riches with surgical precision that hasn’t softened after twenty-five centuries. “Alas for those who are at ease in Zion, and for those who feel secure on Mount Samaria... who lie on beds of ivory, and lounge on their couches, and eat lambs from the flock… but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!”12 They were worshipping their own comfort and ease. It was worshipful enough. They could sing psalms about it if they wanted. The community stacked the sacrifice of prosperity on the altar and bowed before it as part of its regular course of liturgical devotion. The name of the LORD was not ripped out of their mouths. But the community's life proudly bore the image of the demigod. When Amos names this, Israel does not welcome it as gracious love but calls them back to covenant faithfulness. Amaziah the priest tells Amos to return to Judah, where he belongs, and to stop prophesying against Bethel, because Bethel is the king’s sanctuary and belongs to the dynasty.

Amos’ ejection from Bethel is latent in every community that organizes its religious identity around the demigod of national prosperity. The priestly objection isn’t theological objection at all. It’s political self-interest: this prophetic proclamation is attacking the king’s sanctuary. That sanctuary exists to make holy the national compact, and anyone who will not give a venturesome sermon after a sermon bolstering that arrangement is not the servant of the God who meets at that sanctuary but its opponent. The prosperity demigod has thoroughly infused its language into the sanctuary that should’ve resisted it. The prophetic word is heard as sedition.

God’s vision of what happens to a nation that worships at the shrine of prosperity, as described in Isaiah, is the fullest description of the process’s endpoint. “Their land is filled with silver and gold, and there is no end to their treasures; their land is filled with horses, and there is no end to their chariots. Their land is filled with idols; they bow down to the work of their hands, to what their own fingers have made.”13

All of the powers that human hands can create to project dominance and influence: economy, military might, technology. The list becomes demigods when human beings start treating them as such. They’re not worthless. But they’re turned into gods when we make them ultimate. When we bow down before them and organize our national life around serving their power. Isaiah doesn’t say that having silver and gold makes you an evil nation. He says that you worshiped it. Which means the land bears its image.

From Hosea to Jeremiah, Ezekiel carries the painful implications out with brutal logic. If a community lives under the covenant name but orders its national life around allegiance to the gods of prosperity, security, tribal superiority, and military power, then eventually the covenant name and the national power source will come into conflict. And if you trusted your identity to both…which will you choose? Prophetic proclamation naming this reality in its nascent stages is the community’s only prophylactic. When you silence prophetic proclamation, you’ve kicked away your only protection. Exile isn’t God ratifying his abandonment of covenant promises to Israel. It’s Israel punished by the God it refused to worship for years and years in a slow-motion apocalypse fully reported, completely preventable, and warned about repeatedly.

IV. Jesus and the Demigods of His Moment

Jesus’s ministry takes place within a religious community whose sense of national identity had fused completely with its religious identity. What did it mean to be Israel? Who was the true Israel? How did the God of biblical Israel relate to Roman occupation? What would the messianic hope look like when it came? These were both theological and political questions, and the demi-gods they produced were powerful and particular.

The Zealot demi-god was the demi-god of national liberation: that faithful biblical Israel was meant to violently resist Roman occupation, and that God would vindicate that resistance by miraculously delivering Israel from its enemy. Many did before Jesus’ own time - read the Apocrypha. Jesus resisted the demi-god of Rome and religious political leaders relentlessly. The crowd tried to make him king over them after the feeding of the five thousand, and he departed from them.11 He chose to enter Jerusalem riding on a donkey rather than a horse, intentionally opting for the animal that signaled kingship coming in peace rather than the galloping stallion of military conquest. He told Pilate, “My kingdom is not from this world.”13 Jesus directly refused the demi-god’s claim that earthly politics-militarized might equal God’s coming Kingdom.

The Pharisaic demi-god was the demi-god of religious respectability and communal boundary maintenance: that holiness required separation from the unclean, that the covenant community was visibly marked by its observance of those boundaries, and that the religious leaders’ authority derived from their role in policing them. Jesus confronted this demi-god head-on. He ate with tax collectors and sinners. This was the specific kind of boundary violation that made the operations of that demi-god visible. He touched lepers. He healed on the Sabbath. He let women walk with him as disciples. He named the demi-god through the most provocative thing possible: living its alternative.

The Herodian demi-god was the demi-god of accommodation: that community’s survival required peace with the prevailing authorities of the age, that negotiating the realities of Roman occupation was the best political wisdom available, that the Temple status quo’s ability to function depended on its willingness to accommodate Caesar’s rule. The religious leaders of both the empire and the faith asked Jesus about paying taxes together. Note who asked it together: the demi-god of communal boundary maintenance and the demi-god of pragmatic accommodation joined forces against the threat of the prophetic voice. Jesus answered in such a way that he rejected both demi-gods in the same breath. The coin has Caesar’s image on it, and so it belongs to Caesar’s order. The human creature has God’s image in them, and so we belong to God’s order. No negotiated compromise with systems of power can trump what it means to bear the image of God. Moreover, even the coin comes from God as it has in fact attempted to remake what is God’s into something that is political and private.

Jesus’s Temple cleansing is the Jeremiah sermon reenacted. His prophecy was voiced in the Temple courts. He goes into the court of the Gentiles and drives out those who had made a house of prayer into a den of thieves. The demi-god of commercial religion, worship as an economic transaction of sacrificial animals in exchange for divine pardon, had colonized that space, the space meant for Gentiles to access the God of Israel.12 Those who needed that space most, the Gentiles who lived with the occupied land but outside of the covenant community’s course, found it inhabited by a god. Jesus names this phenomenon through action rather than argument. He flipped over the tables. The chief priests and scribes saw the children crying “Hosanna” in response to Jesus’ action and began looking for ways to kill him. Enacted prophetic speech generates the same instinct that the priests and nobles generated in response to Jeremiah’s sermon: the institution organized around the demi-god will seek to silence the prophet’s voice.

Jesus’ answer to the coin question ties all these episodes together. Whose image does it bear? Some religious leaders bore the image of rebellion. Some images bore law-keeping. For others, the image was a collaboration with the powers. The Temple priests’ image was commerce. All were using the language of covenant faithfulness. None looked like the coming Kingdom. Jesus practiced the coin question throughout his ministry. He asked it patiently. He asked it consistently. It cost him everything to ask and embody that question in community with those who were willing to live it.

V. The Default Mode and Its Modern Demigods

David Foster Wallace titled his 2005 Kenyon College commencement address “This is water.” The default mode of adult human consciousness, he said there, amounts to “deep and literal selfishness.”

The default orientation toward reality is the felt sense that the world is there to serve you, that everyone in it is there to play a role in your happiness or your pain.13 His point was simply that Western consciousness in the theological vacuum defaults to Cartesian dualism instantiated as experience. Value thrown outward by human minds onto an otherwise valueless universe, the creature constitutes itself as the source of all meaning in a world of inert matter. 14

The insistence that everything is either dead atoms or meaning-making creatures responsible for nothing beyond their own cognition has not banished divine address from the world. God has not unplugged the Matrix so much as his creatures have trained themselves by powers and demigods to stop listening to it. The world is never silent, never stops speaking. Long before evangelicals tweet Bible verses at our political opponents, the world is speaking to those opponents and those evangelicals. The world is always already speaking, always already freighted with the prior meaning it presses outward toward any creature attentive enough to receive its address. The creature who experiences reality as the “blind ghost” Wallace describes,15 does not exist in a cosmos silenced by fiat. That creature exists in a universe screaming with divine address it has trained itself, and been trained by its civilization, to ignore.

Augustine diagnosed the process that produces this condition with great precision. It cannot be improved upon: the human heart is shaped by its loves, and it will worship what it loves most deeply.15 The creature cannot stop worshipping. The only question is never whether it worships, but what it worships. Idolatry always fills the void left by true worship, and when the grammar of hersumnesse has been overwhelmed by the grammar of autonomous self-constitution, worship does not go away. Worship intensifies. It finds the most compelling objects of loyalty that culture makes available and redirects itself toward them.

The gods of modern public life are obvious when you are looking for exotic examples. They are far less obvious when you recognize them for the organizing loyalties of ordinary life. They are boring. They are so impactful because they are familiar and unremarkable; because they shape lives and communities not in conscious engagement with theological questions but below that level, out of sight.

Your local football franchise provides narrative, community, belonging to something larger than individual life, the drama of genuine encounter between good and evil, and all the structural and functional needs worship is built to meet, without making any ludicrous claims about competing with the God who actually meets those needs. Your political tribe gives you moral seriousness, easy enemies, the feeling that justice is on your side, and community with the people you’ve decided are like-minded enough to be your friends. All without requiring you to pay the costs that a genuine covenant community demands.

The demigod of national identity offers the satisfying-if-not-entirely-accurate narrative of providential national destiny, the pride that comes from belonging to the people who history chose, and the clarity of having a clearly defined story about who the outsiders are. This is all way too easy and requires no difficult thinking.

Each of these forms has an image. Each of these communities impresses that image on the human who yields to it and inhabits it long enough. The person who has faithfully sat in the same seat for every home game their local franchise has played for thirty years but has missed church for twenty of those years has still been formed in and by a liturgical community. The question is: what image has the community’s teaching impressed on the soul? The person whose politics cause stronger feelings than any theological doctrine does is being formed in worship by an intense rival community of practice. The person whose highest daily anxiety is the stability of their portfolio is being formed linguistically in a grammar of trust whose object is her own bank account rather than the God who holds things together.

Christian nationalism, that fusion of religious language with contempt for the political other and triumphalist fantasies of cultural destiny, is the most potent force facing Christians right now because it offers the best of all these alternatives rolled into one and packaged in the Church’s own language. It gives you the tribal belonging of your political identity, the narrative arc of your country’s manifest destiny, the moral gravity of fighting for civilization itself, and all of it blessed by the sanction of Christian authority. It takes existing demigod worship coursing through the lives of observant, morally serious Christians formed in default Christianity their whole life, rather than in the grammar of the Kingdom, and pumps adrenaline into it. It gives worship what it has always wanted: a more focused, more political, more overtly sacred object.

VI. Why the Objection Is So Dangerous

The objection this essay provokes will be familiar and should be stated plainly: people don’t like to hear that they may unwittingly worship a demigod. Or worse! That they helped create, like golden calves, the demigods themselves. That, despite their best intentions, apart from any conscious apostasy of which they are aware, they may be structuring their lives around a god other than the Creator of heaven and earth.

Objectors will put it in several ways. Sometimes they will frame it as an objection on the grounds of sincerity: I am a Christian. I believe in God. I go to church when I can. I worship Jesus with my sports team logo t-shirt, not the other way around. Sometimes they will put it as a theological objection: this conflation of cultural membership with theological fidelity is naive. The church has always been of the world, and culture doesn’t come with icons that say, “Do not worship by default.”

Sometimes the objection will come in political form: this accusation is just thinly veiled Christian-phobia, expressed in theological terms to give it an illusion of nonpartisanship.

Each of these objections deserves serious consideration. The person objecting from sincerity is correct that sincerity is important, but incorrect to suppose that sincerity is enough. Jeremiah’s audience was sincere. The people who gathered at the Temple gate thought themselves good people. They sincerely believed they were the Lord’s people. Sincerity did not inoculate them from the operations of the demigods. It facilitated it. To sincerely believe one already belongs to the right community is the precise belief that makes the work of the demigod invisible. The demigod does not require conscious affirmation from worshipers. It requires the prophetic voice to go silent. Left to its own devices, the sincere Christian and the worshiper of demigods can be the same person.

The person objecting from theological naiveté about culture is correct that the church has never been apart from culture, but incorrect to assume that therefore culture is theological indifferent. To ask the coin question is not to demand cultural exodus. It is to ask whose image our cultural practices have formed us in. And, what does it mean to evidence God in our lives through our devotion? To “not be conformed to this world,” as Paul instructed the church in Rome, is not a call to cultural isolationism.17 This is not a call to be part of the Benedict Option. It is a call to formational practices that make a community whose life together-image-bears little resemblance to the cultural default. The question is about formation, not cultural participation. When the church participates in the surrounding culture without asking whose image it is forming, it has failed in its fundamental formative task.

The person objecting with political skepticism is asking important questions about the wrong essay. Progressive ideological rigidity functions every bit as much as a demigod of modern American Christianity as nationalist loyalties do. The church that centers its political progressivism as the organizing principle of its Christian witness has taken the image of the progressive demigod just as surely as the church that centers its nationalism has taken the image of the nationalist demigod. The coin question must be asked of churches in both directions, without exception. If the public theologian only applies the question to political opponents, then they have already answered the coin question for themselves.

Plainly, then: the objection secures the work of the demigod. It does not need to defeat the argument. It only needs the prophetic voice to fall silent. When Amaziah told Amos he should stop prophesying at Bethel and return to Judah, the demigod of national prosperity did not need Amos to agree with its theology. It only needed Amos out of its sanctuary. The church that successfully objects to the naming of its idols has not rejected the presence of the demigods. It has secured their free rein.

Unfortunately, our preaching has tended to create such silence and full rein, or it has taken one or the other political sides of the divide, thereby assuring tribal political allegiance in the congregation.

Christian nationalism followed this pattern for decades. The churches and institutions most dominated by Christian nationalism were the same churches and institutions that loudly and repeatedly objected to any effort to name the forces at work within evangelical Christianity. Some saw Weyrich’s manipulation early on, but the chorus of voices objecting to the naming, claiming that the very act of naming was a political speech act weaponized against Christians, was loud enough and sustained enough to render the prophetic voice moot in most evangelical spaces. By the time the nationalist demigod had fully colonized the evangelical grammars of church, theology, and politics, I argue, there was no formation alive within those spaces that could hear the question as anything other than a threat.

The objection itself is not the danger. The danger is theological foreclosure. When the church cannot hear the naming of the demigods it has worshiped, it has rejected the grammar within which it might be brought to repentance. It has chosen, in Jeremiah’s words, the deceptive words and trusted they were safe, while the demigod quietly builds its altar in the courtyard of the Lord’s temple. The prophetic voice calling attention to the demigods’ action is the last line of defense for the faithful community. Silence that voice, and you do not protect your community. You surrender it.

VII. Disciples and Apostles: The Formation That Resists

Let me push slightly to say that the church’s culpability in producing the people targeted by CN must be named honestly before that response will be credible. The demigods seized the grammar of Christianity not merely because American culture is hegemonic (though it is), but because the church stopped forming disciples and started producing church members.

Discipleship vs. membership is important theologically. The church member has an affiliation. The disciple lives by a grammar. The church member’s identity has been shaped by the culture, and church membership has been grafted onto that identity as one identifier among others without challenging the core loyalties already formed.

The disciple’s identity has been formed in the deepest places of life through participation in the community’s common life, until the grammar of the Kingdom becomes the lens through which everything else is judged. The church member can buy NFL tickets, golf course, or soccer games, and swear allegiance to the flag because neither American consumerism nor American nationalism has taken deep enough root to conflict with one another. The disciple won’t because their training has taken deep enough root that competing loyalties become visible and expensive.

One sent into the world on an apostolic mission will only bear the cost of that coin question when asked of another to the degree they’ve asked it of themselves. Apostleship requires that prior formation be deep enough that sacrificial love is possible, therefore possible to ask of others.

The apostle has eaten at the table with a community comprised of every tribe, political party, and economic level, until primary citizenship there felt more true than the flag’s claim. The apostle has memorized Scripture until the Kingdom’s grammar is so woven into their being that it can’t be unheard when spoken. The apostle has named the demigods at work in her own life before asking anyone else to do that work with her. The apostle can ask “Whose image does this bear?” of the Supreme Court because they have asked it of her and been willing to pay whatever price that answer costs.

The church will produce apostles only when its formation has gone deep enough that the demigods can be named rather than unseen. This kind of formation means practicing three things that the church is usually fastest to abbreviate or abandon.

The first practice is the coin question applied regularly to the community itself. Whose image does the budget bear? Whose image does the calendar bear? What causes the community’s prayers of deepest collective panic? What causes its prayers of greatest collective praise? I’m not talking about budget meetings or schedule meetings. I’m talking about worship seeking the theological answer to those questions. The community that asks those questions of itself regularly in light of Scripture preached, prayed, and pastorally cared for has erected the scaffolding necessary for prophetic speech.

The second practice is rigorous formation in the biblical tradition of prophetic speech: disciplined exposure to Hosea, Amos, Jeremiah, and Isaiah that enables the community to recognize its own idols for what they are, rather than as culture’s necessities. Biblical literacy isn’t about education. It’s about formation. A community that lacks that literacy can’t metabolize the coin question correctly because they won’t recognize it as love if they hear it. They’ll hear it as an accusation.

Dare I go a bit further and suggest biblical literacy in general? Not read on your own, but within community, and within community that understands the fullness of the tradition I spoke about earlier: scripture, tradition, and reason as defined above.

Third is the discipline of gathering at the table. The Eucharistic celebration, which brings together people from every cultural background and political party and tax bracket, proclaims with its very body the image it bears by not bearing the image of the demigods’ homogeneous communities.

To gather at the table with the kinds of people that your demigods use as scapegoats or enemies is to practice radical welcome, not as a political stance but as the mundane outworking of Kingdom grammar. To insist on the integrity of that community across cultural, political, and economic divides is to argue against the demigods not with words but with your very bodies. If you can’t gather with people different from yourselves at the table, your proclamation of the Gospel will fall on deaf ears because the demigods’ deepest lie is that Christianity is just another homogeneous community.

May God form us deep enough that the alternative grammar becomes visible, and may we join each other at the table in the grateful practice of it.

Conclusion: The Coin Question as the Ongoing Practice

Jeremiah named it from the gate of the Temple. He named what the people gathered there refused to hear. They nearly killed him for it. He was not silenced. He named it again, and again, in letters to the exiles, in oracles to the remnant, in poems of lament that became the community’s shared grief when the Temple was destroyed.

The prophetic word outlasted the demigod’s claim on the Temple. The community that returned from exile returned bearing the prophetic tradition that had spoken what they would not hear. The exile was both demigod’s triumph and the prophetic word’s vindication at once.

Jesus demanded the coin. He asked whose image was on it. He asks still. It is the question the public theologian must ask any community, including her own. From out of the vulnerability of one who bears the same liability to the same demigods, who has had her organizing loyalties confronted by the coin question and chosen, again and again, in her own life, the harder answer.

The world speaks before we speak into it. The divine address presses through every moment’s contingencies toward every listening creature. The demigods are powerful not because they have overcome the divine address but because they have reshaped the creature’s powers of perception, turning the ears toward the demigod’s language as the most significant speech available.

The formation that makes possible hersumnesse, that attentiveness to what has always already been addressing us, is the only adequate response to the demigod’s power. Formation isn’t a program. Formation is a community. It is the body whose common life forms us for the kind of knowing the demigod cannot achieve and cannot, in the end, destroy. It is the community that asks the coin question of itself first, before asking it of anyone else; that lives into the alternative grammar until it becomes flesh, until the grammar by which we recognize the demigods as the lesser things they truly are.

We cannot reason anyone into such attentiveness. The prophets could not reason it into Israel. Jesus could not reason it into the religious leaders of his day. The coin question is not an argument. It is naming. And naming, when it issues from within the community rather than at the community’s expense, when it issues from someone who bears the same liability to the demigods and has asked herself the question, becomes itself an act of love prior to being a theological proposition.

Whose image does your life bear? It is the first question of the formation that sets us free from the demigods, that restores us to the one whose image we bear, to the one who pressed through every day’s contingencies two thousand years ago in Palestine and asked the question that has ever since had only one adequate response.

Notes

1. Jeremiah 7:4, 9-10 (NRSV). I recognize that the idea that Jeremiah was on the "side of the Babylonians" is a critical biblical theory in literary and historical criticism. It is a scholarly and theological construct based on an interpretation of Jeremiah's prophecies. This theory does not portray Jeremiah as betraying Judah, but rather espousing that submission to Babylon was the will of Yahweh. I would suggest that regardless of whether Jeremiah was in league with the Babylonians or not, his prophetic words were also true of the people to whom he addressed them.

2. Jeremiah 26:1-19. The narrative of Jeremiah’s arrest and near-execution following the Temple sermon is one of the most detailed accounts of prophetic reception in the Hebrew Bible. The elders’ citation of Micah of Moresheth (Micah 3:12) as precedent for the survival of prophetic naming is the first recorded instance of one biblical prophet citing another as legal precedent.

3. The formulation draws on C. Andrew Doyle’s developing framework for Anglican apologetics, grounded in the a priori God claim and the hersumnesse anthropology, developed across the “Anglican Apologetics and the Informational Universe” essay series, 2026.

4. Nicene Creed (381): “Through him all things were made.” The Johannine prologue (John 1:1-14) is the scriptural ground. For the theological consequence for creation’s always-already-addressed character, see Colin Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 70-97.

5. Hersumnesse is developed as a constructive theological category in C. Andrew Doyle, Obedience, Benevolence, and the God-Saturated Grammar of Subjugation in George Berkeley (doctoral dissertation, University of Chester, in progress).

6. Matthew 22:20-21 (NRSV). The parallel accounts are Mark 12:13-17 and Luke 20:19-26.

7. James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 25-27, 53-88. Smith’s liturgical anthropology, drawing on Augustine’s ordo amoris and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment, is the most developed contemporary account of the formation-before-information claim.

8. Hosea 2:8 (NRSV).

9. Amos 6:1, 4, 6 (NRSV).

10. Isaiah 2:7-8 (NRSV).

11. John 6:15 (NRSV).

12. Mark 11:15-18. The Synoptic accounts of the Temple cleansing (Matthew 21:12-13; Luke 19:45-46) all identify the court of the Gentiles as the location, making the displacement of the Gentiles’ access to the God of Israel by the commercial demigod the specific target of the action. For the theological analysis, see N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 413-28.

13. David Foster Wallace, “This Is Water,” Kenyon College Commencement Address, May 21, 2005. Published as This Is Water (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), 36-44.

14. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 134-42.

15. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), I.i.1; and The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 2003), Book XIX, ch. 1.

16. Romans 12:2 (NRSV).

The man who wrote Romans, is imprisoned by his state, and wrote one of the most politically charged sentences in the New Testament: “Our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.”² He was writing to people who lived in a Roman colony whose citizens were proud of their status, whose public life was organized around the imagery and loyalty structures of Rome. And he told them their primary citizenship was elsewhere. Four chapters later, before closing, he added a greeting from “the saints... especially those of the emperor’s household.”³

Saints in Caesar’s household? Paul recognized this dual citizenship operating at the center of the empire. Paul did not resolve the tension between his Roman and heavenly citizenships. He inhabited both, used one instrumentally in service of the other, suffered the consequences when the two came into conflict, and wrote his most luminous letters from the place where that conflict had landed him.

Part One of this series argued that Christian nationalism is secularism’s completion rather than its resistance: the evacuation of the theological referent from the Christian sign and its redeployment as a pure cultural-political identity marker. That argument names a structural error (Part One). This essay addresses the question the structural error leaves open: if the conflation of Christian identity and national identity is the wrong relationship between the two citizenships the baptized community holds, what is the right one? And where, precisely, does the slope toward conflation begin?

As I have pondered this, I think the answer to the second question changes everything about the first. The slope does not begin with Christian supremacy, the Seven Mountains Mandate for Christian dominion in the US, worship services at the Pentagon, or prayers for a golden statue. The slope begins much earlier, at a point so familiar it feels like solid ground to many. And the instrument that identifies the beginning of the slope with theological precision is a document produced in Germany in 1934 by a group of pastors who had watched the slope’s full descent and drawn a line at the top before the bottom was reached.

I. The Permanent Tension

The dual citizenship of the baptized is a reality any Christian experiences in the nation where they live. It is the permanent eschatological condition of the community that lives between the resurrection and the consummation, between the Kingdom’s arrival in Christ and its fullness at the end of all things. The tension is not something better theology might dissolve - though many have tried. It is the shape of faithful life in the time of our lives.

Augustine called it what it is. Responding to the sack of Rome by the Visigoths and the claim that Christians were weakening Rome, Augustine in The City of God described two societies that stand throughout history: The City of God, comprised of those who love God above all and see earthly goods as conditional; and the earthly city, comprised of those who place themselves above God and see earthly goods as ultimate.4 The pilgrim community, the Church, resides in the earthly city. We use its goods. We labor to make it prosper. We pray for its peace. But our ultimate allegiance is not to this city. The earthly city is not inherently evil. It is limited. It provides for our conditional goods: peace, order, and civic justice, which are indeed good gifts. They are legitimate goods and should be welcomed with gratitude. It is only when the city makes an ultimate claim to any religious allegiance that it becomes disordered, most especially when it makes a demand on Christians.

Paul’s letter to the Romans makes the same distinction from the bottom up. The governing authorities are God’s servants for the common good, and the community owes them honor, taxes, and respect see chapter 13 of Romans. However, only if the nation fulfills the previous chapter’s notion of faithful leadership in chapter 12.⁵ The same Paul writes in Revelation’s theological register, through John on Patmos, of the Beast who demands the worship belonging to God and marks its own citizens with a seal that parodies baptism.⁶ Romans 13 and Revelation 13 are not contradictory texts. They describe the same state at two different moments: the state as servant of God’s order for the common good (Romans Chapter 12), and the state as Beast when it overclaims and demands the allegiance belonging to God alone. The faithful dual citizen reads both chapters simultaneously and holds the tension between them, because both are always potentially true of any state at any moment.

The Anglican tradition has maintained this tension with varying degrees of success and failure. Article 37 of the Thirty-Nine Articles affirms the crown’s authority over the realm and simultaneously insists that the crown cannot perform acts of divine worship or claim the ministry of God’s Word.⁷ Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity develops a sophisticated account of a Christian commonwealth in which church and state share their membership but maintain distinct functions, each serving the other without collapsing into the other.⁸ The Erastian temptation, in which the state effectively governs the church, and the theocratic temptation, in which the church effectively governs the state, are both failures of dual citizenship in opposite directions. The Anglican via media between them is not a compromise of principle. It is the theological insistence that both cities are real, both citizenships are binding, and neither may absorb the other.

The dual citizen’s offering to the earthly city is precisely the capacity to serve it from a ground the earthly city cannot provide for itself. The community that holds its primary citizenship elsewhere is free to engage the earthly city’s goods without being captured by its logic, to advocate for the neighbor without becoming the partisan of a faction, to speak prophetically to the political order without becoming a political party. This is not a withdrawal from civic responsibility; rather, it is the most engaged possible civic presence, because it is a presence that refuses to be absorbed.

II. The Two Errors That Resolve What Must Be Inhabited

The permanent tension of dual citizenship is uncomfortable. Discomfort produces the desire for resolution, and there are two available resolutions, each of which fails.

The first error is absorption. This is the error Part One of this series diagnosed as Christian nationalism’s structural condition: the primary citizenship swallows the secondary one, the Kingdom becomes the nation’s program, and a Gospel (sans good news for the poor, the sick, and the hungry) becomes the packaging for a political agenda. The prophetic edge of the primary citizenship, its capacity to hold the earthly city accountable before a God who transcends every national arrangement, is lost at the moment of fusion. Once the church has identified its mission with the nation’s restoration, it can no longer speak the word the nation needs to hear. It has become the nation’s chaplain rather than its prophet. Moses in Pharaoh’s palace rather than Moses at the burning bush.

This error is visible and documented. It is what Paul Weyrich built across three decades of deliberate political strategy: the transformation of sincere evangelical conviction into a reliable partisan voting identity, organized around a designated enemy and sustained by a problem-saturated story that redirected the church’s attention permanently outward.⁹ It is what the sociologist Matthew Taylor maps across the spectrum from God Bless America sentiment to Christian supremacist ideology.¹⁰ It is what Robert Bellah feared in 1975 when he identified the collapse of American civil religion’s prophetic function into the logic of religious nationalism.¹¹

The second error is withdrawal. Because the earthly city makes dangerous claims and the slope toward conflation is real, the temptation arises to disengage: let the church be the church and let the state be the state, and let there be as little traffic as possible between them. This allows both the state and the citizen to live without a conscience check. This is the sectarian temptation, and it has a distinguished theological pedigree. It is not without wisdom.

But withdrawal is itself a political act, and it is one that the dual citizenship framework refuses. Paul does not withdraw to avoid the Roman state. He engages it, uses it, suffers within it, and greets the saints in Caesar’s household. When he invokes his Roman citizenship to avoid the flogging, he is using the earthly city’s structures in service of his mission. When he appeals to Caesar, he is using the imperial legal system to bring the Gospel to Rome. Withdrawal would have been safer. It would also have abandoned the neighbor, the poor, the stranger who needs the church’s advocacy within the structures of political life. The church that withdraws has protected its purity at the cost of its vocation.

Both errors resolve the tension rather than inhabiting it. The conflation makes the earthly city primary. The withdrawal makes the earthly city irrelevant. The faithful dual citizen holds both citizenships simultaneously, in permanent productive tension, using the earthly city’s goods in service of the Kingdom’s mission while refusing the earthly city’s demand that the Kingdom’s grammar be subordinated to its logic.

The question that follows is both theological and practical: how does the dual citizen know when engagement has become conflation? Where does the slope begin, and what theological instrument identifies its starting point with sufficient precision to be useful before the bottom is reached?

III. The Slope and the Barmen Instrument

The Theological Declaration of Barmen was drafted primarily by Karl Barth and adopted by the Confessing Church in May 1934, fourteen months after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.¹² It was addressed to the German Evangelical Church and to its Deutsche Christen (German Christian) faction, which had declared its support for the Nazi program and attempted to align the church’s mission with the national renewal project. The Confessing Church’s response was not primarily political. It was ecclesiological: this is what the Church is, and this is therefore what the Church can be.

The Deutsche Christen did not begin as an explicit Nazis. They began as sincere German Protestants who believed national renewal and Christian faith were compatible and mutually reinforcing. They loved Germany. They believed God was doing something in the German national moment. They wanted to bring these two loyalties together in a way that served both. The conflation felt natural. It felt faithful. It felt like an opportunity rather than a danger.

The Confessing Church did not say: you have gone too far. It said: you began in error. The first step was the false step. This is why the first of Barmen’s six theses is the instrument our time requires:

Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death. We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.¹³

The thesis is precise in a way that demands attention. It does not forbid engagement with the political order. It does not demand withdrawal. It forbids the acknowledgment of any event, power, political figure, or truth as a source of theological proclamation alongside the one Word of God attested in Scripture.

Apply the Barmen instrument to the present moment with this precision, and the slope becomes visible at its beginning rather than only at its end.

When American national history is acknowledged as a theological authority alongside Scripture, a source of insight into God’s purposes that the Scripture itself does not provide, the slope has begun. When a political leader’s election is received as evidence of divine favor, a fresh word from God about the direction of history, the slope has begun. When the nation’s success is understood as divine endorsement rather than as a conditional good to be received with gratitude and held with humility, the slope has begun. When the church’s language of blessing is deployed as a legitimating instrument for political programs, making the church’s proclamation answerable to the program’s success rather than to the Word of God, the slope has begun.

Matthew Taylor’s taxonomy of American Christian nationalism’s three currents, the Calvinist Reconstructionists, the Independent Charismatics of the New Apostolic Reformation, and the Anti-Vatican II Catholic integralists, illuminates the slope’s three distinct descent paths.¹⁴

The Reconstructionists acknowledge biblical civil law as a political program alongside the Word’s ecclesial address, making theonomy the application of Scripture to governance rather than the community’s formation in the Gospel’s grammar. The Charismatics acknowledge contemporary prophetic utterances about Trump’s cosmic destiny as fresh divine revelation alongside Scripture, making the political figure into a theological category. The integralists acknowledge the natural law tradition as mediated through a specific cultural-political arrangement as a theological authority over the conciliar tradition of the Church itself. Each descent path begins from a different angle. Each begins at the same point: the acknowledgment of an additional source.

The God Bless America nationalist at the mild end of Taylor’s spectrum is at the top of the slope rather than safely off it. The mild form does not worry Taylor greatly, and sociologically he is right: most people at the mild end still try to love their neighbors, still hold their patriotic sentiment loosely enough that it does not yet foreclose the Gospel’s demands. But theologically, the mild form and the extreme form share the same first step. The theological issue is not intensity. It is direction. Once any national event, figure, or narrative has been acknowledged as a source of theological proclamation, the direction is set. The journey to the bottom proceeds by ordinary human logic, accelerated by Weyrich’s problem-saturated story, amplified by talk radio and partisan media, and harvested by the three theological currents Taylor tracks.

The Barmen instrument does not forbid the dual citizen from loving her country, from praying for her nation’s flourishing, from using civic structures in service of the Kingdom’s mission. It forbids the church from receiving any of these as a theological source. The flag in the sanctuary is not the problem. The flag in the sanctuary acknowledged as a symbol carrying a theological claim upon the congregation is the problem. The difference is one the community inside the sign-system cannot see without the Barmen instrument applied from outside. This is why the instrument must be applied at the top of the slope, not the bottom.

IV. The Identified Patient and the Church’s Examination of Conscience

Adam Ellis’s family systems analysis of American evangelicalism’s capture by partisan political identity names what happens to the church’s prophetic capacity once the slope has been entered.¹⁵ The identified patient dynamic is the dual citizenship’s failure made sociologically visible. The church has imported the earthly city’s frenemy logic into its own community. The dysfunction the church is called to expose in the political order has become invisible because the church has already adopted it.

When the community organizes its political identity around a designated enemy, the enemy absorbs the community’s full moral attention. Every failure within the community can be explained by the urgency of the threat outside it. Every ethical compromise is justified by the necessity of defeating the identified patient. The church’s examination of conscience, the community’s regular reckoning with its own departures from the Gospel’s demands, becomes structurally impossible. The story has already named the villain, and the story does not permit the villain to be found on this side of the aisle.

This is the dual citizenship’s prophetic function destroyed from within. The church’s most valuable gift to the earthly city is its capacity to hold every political arrangement accountable before the God who transcends all of them, to locate the source of dysfunction within every community including its own, to refuse the logic of the identified patient and insist on the neighbor’s dignity even when the neighbor has been designated as the threat. Once the church has adopted the problem-saturated story, especially around any one person or party, this capacity is gone. The church has become the earthly city’s partisan activist rather than its prophet.

Ellis asks the question a good therapist asks: who handed you this story, and what were they trying to get from you when they handed it to you? The historical record is clear. Paul Weyrich was building a voting bloc, not a theological movement. The evangelical community was not an equal partner in the project. It was an asset being managed. The sincere faith, the genuine moral concern about specific issues, the real love for community: all of it was harvested and put to work for a project the community did not design and was never fully told about. One could argue it is the same with The Heritage Foundation.

The dual citizen’s response to this is the examination of conscience the problem-saturated story forbids. It requires asking, of every political alignment, not primarily whether the policy is correct but whether the alignment requires the community to locate the source of dysfunction exclusively outside itself. It requires asking whether the church’s moral energy is directed toward the neighbor in need or toward the enemy to be defeated. It requires the willingness to criticize one’s own political allies by the same Gospel criterion applied to one’s opponents. This is what William Temple called the Church’s prophetic distance: the refusal to be owned by any political program, the maintenance of the critical perspective that comes from holding primary citizenship elsewhere.¹⁶

The bishop who has signed every statement against Christian nationalism from the right and no comparable statement about the progressive capture of the Church’s vocabulary from the left has not escaped the problem-saturated story. The bishop who applies the Barmen instrument only to political movements they oppose has not applied the Barmen instrument at all. The dual citizenship’s prophetic function requires the willingness to draw the line at the top of the slope regardless of which direction the slope descends. A church neither may be the Republican Party at prayer; nor the Democratic Party at prayer. And, it may not be silent in the face of oppression or immorality.

V. Three Witnesses to Faithful Dual Citizenship

The dual citizenship, faithfully inhabited, has a shape that is visible in specific human lives. Three witnesses illuminate what it looks like when both citizenships are held simultaneously and in productive tension.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer remained a German citizen throughout his life and loved Germany with what he called a “painful love,” the love of one who sees clearly and refuses the comfort of illusion.¹⁷ He used his German citizenship, his connections, his capacity to travel, his Abwehr cover as tools in service of his primary citizenship’s demands. He engaged the earthly city fully, at every available level, precisely because his primary citizenship gave him the freedom to engage without being absorbed. He was hanged by Germany on April 9, 1945, three weeks before Germany’s surrender. The earthly city executed him for the faithfulness of his primary citizenship. He did not experience this as a contradiction. He had known from the beginning that the two citizenships would eventually conflict, and he had known from the beginning which one would hold when they did.

Desmond Tutu engaged apartheid South Africa as a South African citizen and as a citizen of heaven simultaneously, and the power of his witness derived from both. He used every available civic and legal structure in the fight against apartheid. He also told Prime Minister P.W. Botha with a straight face, in the middle of the darkest period: “You have already lost. Why don’t you come on over to the winning side?”¹⁸ This was not bravado. It was the eschatological freedom of the dual citizen who knows that the earthly city’s victories and defeats are real but conditional, and that the primary citizenship’s ground lies beyond the earthly city’s power to grant or revoke. Tutu was the most effective political force in his country’s transformation precisely because he was most completely formed by his primary citizenship. The two were not in tension in his witness. They were in productive relation: the primary citizenship gave the secondary one its prophetic power.

Martin Luther King Jr. and the eight thousand people who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 21, 1965 enacted the dual citizenship’s most complete public expression.¹⁹ They were American citizens asserting constitutional rights the state had systematically denied them. They were also baptized Christians practicing the Kingdom’s grammar of neighbor-love, human dignity, and the refusal of every human arrangement that treats some persons as less than the image of God. The two citizenships were in productive tension rather than conflation: they were American citizens the state had refused to treat as such, and they were citizens of heaven who knew that their dignity rested on a ground the state could deny but could not destroy. The march was a civic act and an ecclesial one simultaneously. Its power came from both.

What all three witnesses share is the refusal of both errors. None withdrew from the earthly city’s structures. None conflated those structures with the Kingdom’s grammar. All three used civic goods instrumentally in service of their primary citizenship’s demands. All three were willing to suffer the consequences when the two citizenships came into conflict. All three drew their prophetic power from the clarity of their primary citizenship rather than from the sophistication of their political strategy.

VI. What Faithful Dual Citizenship Demands Now

There are implications here for how the church thinks about public theological work in the here and now. Speaking of dual citizenship in generalities leaves us open to the criticism above: I as an author am constantly tempted to offer cliché-saturated stories in reverse: generalities about dual citizenship as a way of avoiding the hard stuff. So allow me a bit of specificity:

We must apply the Barmen Declaration to our political alignments prophylactically rather than waiting for them to conflict with orthodox theology. The church needs the Christological formation our forebears in the CRC were missing at the beginning of the Barmen story. We must name the false gospel at the moment political allegiance to the nation asserts itself as providing theological guidance–on either side of the political spectrum. The pastor who declares the 2016 election as the miraculous doing of God and the pastor who declares the 2020 election as the miraculous doing of God are both baptizing political events with the church’s authority. They have made the same theological mistake in opposite directions. The church that only applies Barmen to the errors of the folks on the other side of its sanctuary has not learned the lesson of Barmen. The instrument is meant to protect our primary loyalty to Christ, not give us a partisan weapon against those who disagree with us. Confusing the two is itself the great error of conflation.

Turn the identified patient dynamic on its head institutionally, not merely relationally. The church must build structures that guard against it into its regular practice. This means regular preaching and practice of the self-examination that the problem-saturated story impedes: examining ourselves as community regularly with the Gospel’s criterium, looking for the dysfunction in our own alignments before we point it out in others, engaging in the examination of conscience that our dual citizenship mandates.

Learn to use political goods without worshipping them. Paul uses his Roman citizenship; he submits to its consequences and is executed. He neither throws it away in allegiance to Christ nor treats it as ultimate. We must use the goods of the earthly city. Democratic processes. Legal structures. Civic institutions. Use them in relentless service to the requirements of the Kingdom: caring for the poor, protecting the immigrant, demanding the law be applied equally to all. But the church must use these goods and let none of them become ultimate.

Make the citizenship of our primary allegiance visible in the life of the earthly city. We proclaim the first by showing up as the latter. Gathered at the table from every tribe and tongue and cultural division the earthly city uses to rank and sort people? That’s our primary citizenship being public about who we first belong to. Welcome the stranger across that table because at that table is set by the one who was himself the stranger. Pray for those who persecute you because our Lord who commands us to demonstrate our primary citizenship to him by praying for our enemies. Love your neighbor as yourself because the community that practices this one command from inside the borders the world uses to separate Christians from our neighbors is enacting the one great way our primary citizenship changes public life.

Christians exercising our primary citizenship together is thething itself when it comes to the Citizen Framework. It’s the most complete expression of alternative citizenship: the baptized community as alternative polis, a demonstration that people from every tribe, tongue, race, political party, economic class can live together because our final tying together is in Christ. It’s what happens when you take Jesus’ oneGreatCommand seriously. The church as the sign that points to the coming of the Kingdom from beyond the walls of every human political program, judging all of them by whether or not they adhere to the single command Jesus named in Matthew 25: Whatever you did for the least of these you did for me. The church that lives inside that criteria worship sacrifices nothing to the gods of this world, because it instead it gives itself to the work of making disciples from every tribe and tongue and people and nation. The church that inhabits its primary citizenship makes its most powerful public theological statement by simply being the church.

Conclusion: The Freedom of the Dual Citizen

Return again to Paul, this time to Rome and to his rented room there. Return to the sentence he writes toward the end of his letter to the Philippians a few paragraphs before closing: “I have learned, in whatever state I am, to be content.”21

We often read this sentence as if it described a private spiritual victory, an inner evenness of spirit unaffected by circumstance. It is more specific than that, and more public. It is the fruit of faithful dual citizenship, fully inhabited. Paul writes this from a Roman prison cell. He has been beaten and imprisoned by the earthly city whose citizen he also is. He has been shipwrecked and left for dead. He has utilized every civic structure at his disposal for the sake of the mission entrusted to him. And Roman civic structures have executed him for his faithfulness. But his contentment is testimony that he belongs first where they cannot reach him.

Paul’s freedom is not the inert calm of the person who has withdrawn from civic structures in the earthly city. It is the freedom of the person most fully present within them because her primary citizenship liberates her from dependence on the earthly city’s approval, its rewards, or its protection of the integrity of her primary identity. He is free to address Rome for the sake of Rome because Rome cannot finally contain him. Paul can utilize Roman citizenship because he is not, ultimately, a Roman citizen. (I think this is the core of Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon’s theology.) Paul greets the saints in Caesar’s household because he knows Caesar’s household, like every human institution with power over its members, will be held within the sure sovereignty of the one whose set apartness causes every knee to bow.

Imagine the church inhabiting its dual citizenship with this kind of freedom: loving its present place with the love of the one who knows it is not home. It would be the most revolutionary community the earthly city has ever known: free to serve it without dependency, free to love it without yielding divine worship, free to speak truth to it powers without fear of being silenced by it, free to be executed as its enemies while writing letters from prison that change the world.

The slide toward conflation begins as soon as the church needs the approval of the earthly city more than it needs the Word of God. Theologians from Barmen have drafted an instrument to identify this point with precision. The responsible dual citizen reads the instrument over her life and work and discovers the beginnings of the slide in places she would rather not find: her own church’s flag-draped sanctuary, her own presidential pastoral’s implicit partisan endorsements, her own calendar’s easy accommodation with power and comfort while offering little hospitality to the poor and the stranger.

And the only remedy is the one already named in Part One: inhabiting the referent instead of arguing about the signs. The dual citizen who so fully practices her primary citizenship that the very grammar the earthly city uses to describe reality becomes visibly inadequate to the work of describing what is happening among them has drawn the Barmen line without having to write a declaration. The declaration merely names what the community’s life evidences.

Our bodies’ citizenship lies wholly elsewhere. They executed Jesus in their city, but God raised him up, vindicating the primary citizenship the cross did not refute.

Notes

1. Paul’s invocation of Roman citizenship appears in Acts 22:25-28 (the Jerusalem flogging) and Acts 25:11 (the appeal to Caesar). On the historical and legal dimensions of Roman citizenship in the first century, see A.N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 57-98.

2. Philippians 3:20 (NRSV).

3. Philippians 4:22 (NRSV).

4. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 2003), Book XIV, ch. 28; Book XIX, chs. 14-17. The two cities coexist and intermingle in history; their separation is eschatological rather than historical.

5. Romans 13:1-7 (NRSV).

6. Revelation 13:1-18. On the Beast as the Roman imperial cult and the theological significance of the counter-baptismal “mark,” see Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 35-39, 84-88.

7. The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, Article 37: “Of the Civil Magistrates.” The article’s careful distinction between the crown’s authority and the ministry of the Word is the Anglican framework for dual citizenship. See also the Ordinal’s oath of allegiance and the bishop’s consecration oath, which together constitute the ecclesial side of the Anglican dual citizenship structure.

8. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Books I-IV, ed. Georges Edelen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977). The relationship between church and commonwealth is developed primarily in Books VII and VIII.

9. Adam Ellis, “Who Told You That? Paul Weyrich, the Identified Patient, and the Making of the Evangelical Political Identity,” 2025. See also Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021); Andrew R. Lewis, The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

10. Matthew D. Taylor, “How to Think About the Landscape of Christian Nationalism,” Parts I-III, 2025. See also Taylor’s The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2024).

11. Robert N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), xi. See also Philip S. Gorski, American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 5.

12. The Theological Declaration of Barmen (May 29-31, 1934) was drafted primarily by Karl Barth with input from Hans Asmussen and Thomas Breit. The Declaration was adopted by the First Confessional Synod of the German Evangelical Church. For context and text, see Arthur C. Cochrane, The Church’s Confession Under Hitler (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962), 237-47. For theological analysis, see Eberhard Busch, The Barmen Theses Then and Now, trans. Darrell and Judith Guder (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010).

13. The Theological Declaration of Barmen, Thesis I. The text is quoted from the translation in Cochrane, The Church’s Confession Under Hitler, 239-40. The Declaration has been received into the confessional standards of several Reformed and United churches, including the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s Book of Confessions.

14. Taylor, “How to Think About the Landscape of Christian Nationalism,” Part III, 2025. Taylor identifies the three currents as Calvinist Christian Reconstructionists (the Theobros), Independent Charismatics (the New Apostolic Reformation), and Anti-Vatican II Catholics (the Traditionalists).

15. Ellis, “Who Told You That?” The identified patient framework draws on Murray Bowen’s family systems theory and is applied to congregational life in Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, 10th anniversary ed. (New York: Church Publishing, 2017).

16. William Temple, Christianity and Social Order (London: Penguin, 1942), 29-43.

17. The phrase “painful love” for Germany is Bonhoeffer’s own, used in correspondence from 1933-1934 as he wrestled with the decision to remain in Germany or to pursue ministry abroad. See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan, 1972). For the fullest account of Bonhoeffer’s dual citizenship as a theological framework, see Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Knopf, 2014).

18. Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 83. Tutu’s account of his address to P.W. Botha’s government at the height of apartheid is recounted in multiple sources; this is among the most widely documented versions. For the theological framework of Tutu’s dual citizenship, see Michael Battle, Reconciliation: The Ubuntu Theology of Desmond Tutu (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1997).

19. The third attempt to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, March 21, 1965, is documented in Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 112-26. Bishop Rob Wright’s use of this moment as the opening image for his address to the Episcopal House of Bishops, March 21, 2025, places it explicitly within the context of the current CN debate: Wright, “Christian Nationalism and Christian Witness,” address to the Episcopal House of Bishops, Nauvoo, Alabama, March 21, 2025.

20. Philippians 4:11 (NRSV).

We need to understand why the diagnosis fails before we can reverse it. If sound theological argument cannot access the phenomenon we are diagnosing, then this failure is not merely the fault of Christian nationalism’s leaders being either stubborn or poorly educated. It is structural. Something about the cultural logic that permits Christian nationalism also renders the standard corrective impotent. Until we figure out what that something is, we will continue to make sound statements that have no effect whatsoever, and we will continue to see the distance between the sign “Christian” and the Lord who bears that name stretch beyond recognition.

This is the prior question this essay pursues. It is not what Christian nationalism is, though we will give that careful consideration in a moment. It is not even whether it is as repugnant from a theological perspective as we suspect, tough it is. The question before us is why our best theological punches are not landing, and what that failure teaches us about how faithful public theology must operate differently.

Two vignettes from America’s recent past deserve to frame this discussion side-by-side.

In the first, a man wearing a fur-trimmed horned helmet storms the United States Senate chamber, a wooden staff planted with an American flag in his hand, scripture tattooed across his chest. In the second, the astronaut Victor Glover floats inside the International Space Station’s cupola, preparing communion elements in a small plastic bag, the blue curve of the earth filling the window behind him.²

Both men claimed the Christian faith. One stormed a building in its name. The other received the Body of Christ two hundred and fifty miles above every flag ever sewn.

The distance between those two images is not, as it is so often framed, the distance between a distorted Christianity and an authentic one. It is the distance between a sign that has lost its referent and a sign still connected to the reality it bears. That distinction is the argument of this essay, and it is the argument the standard theological corrective has consistently failed to make.

I. Why the Correct Response Fails

The standard theological corrective to Christian nationalism deploys labels. It calls CN heresy, idolatry, apostasy. These labels are accurate, and I do not retract them. But labels operate on the assumption that the audience shares the grammar within which the labels carry meaning. Call something “heresy” and the word lands only if the listener already inhabits the theological tradition well enough to feel the weight of creedal departure. Call it “idolatry” and the charge registers only if the listener already knows what the worship of the God who made heaven and earth demands and forbids.

The cultural condition that produced Christian nationalism is precisely the condition in which that shared grammar has been destroyed. This is why the label response, however accurate, mirrors the structure it intends to oppose. It deploys a sign without doing the referential work that would give the sign its content. It adds another free-floating label to a culture already saturated with labels that point nowhere. It is, to use the philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s term, a simulacral response to a simulacrum.³

But there is a deeper failure, and it requires honest naming even when it is uncomfortable. When the liberal public theologian critiques Christian nationalism as bad history, misdiagnosed problems, and logical inconsistencies, they have already conceded the most important ground. They have accepted that the dispute is epistemological rather than ontological, a contest about who has the better account of social reality. This positions the theological tradition as one contestant among others in a public argument about facts and interpretations, governed by the secular rules of analytical accuracy.

This is not a neutral methodological choice. It is a capitulation. It says, implicitly, that the Gospel’s claim on this situation is its capacity to produce better social analysis than the nationalists produce. When the criterion of judgment is analytical accuracy, the theological tradition has no distinctive contribution to make. Any competent historian can expose Christian nationalism’s bad history. Any careful sociologist can dismantle its misdiagnosed problems. The theologian who does only this has made herself redundant.

Worse: the liberal theological response and Christian nationalism share the same structural problem. Christian nationalism evacuates the theological referent and deploys the Christian sign for nationalist political purposes. The liberal theological response evacuates the theological referent and deploys the Christian tradition for liberal democratic purposes. Both operate inside what Charles Taylor calls the “immanent frame,” the closed system of cultural reference within which all meaning-making proceeds without appeal to genuine transcendence.⁴ Both have accepted the secular framing in which religious conviction is a privately held belief that enters public discourse by generating policy preferences and cultural arguments.

This is why the liberal theological response to Christian nationalism so often feels hollow even when it is correct. The person drifting toward Christian nationalism does not experience the liberal correction as a theological challenge. They experience it as a political disagreement dressed in theological language. And they are right. That is exactly what it is.

The prior question, therefore, is this: what would a response look like that operates at the level of the referent rather than the level of the sign? What does public theology do when it refuses both the nationalist simulacrum and its liberal mirror image? That question requires understanding, first, how the referent was lost.

II. The Sign Evacuated

Baudrillard described a process by which signs pass through four stages in their relation to reality.⁵ In the first stage, the sign reflects a basic reality. In the second, it masks and perverts that reality. In the third, it masks the absence of the reality, the referent has been removed but the sign persists, performing as though it still points somewhere. In the fourth and final stage, the sign becomes a pure simulacrum, generating its own hyperreality with no relation to any original. It has murdered its referent and continues to walk around in its clothes.

The word “Christian” in Christian nationalism has completed this journey. It carries no creedal content. It does not mean Nicene. It does not mean baptismal. It does not mean the crucified and risen Lord of the Apostles’ Creed who suffered under Pontius Pilate. It means: white, Western, culturally conservative, politically nationalist, nostalgic for a social order predating the civil rights movement. The sign has been evacuated of every theological referent and refilled with cultural-political content.

The philosophical genealogy of this evacuation runs deeper than the current political moment, and tracing it matters because it explains why the problem is structural rather than incidental. It also explains why the liberal correction, which operates at the same structural level, cannot reach it.

The medieval theologian Duns Scotus argued that being is predicated univocally of God and creatures: the word “being” means the same thing applied to God as to any finite thing, only God’s being is infinitely greater.⁶ The consequence is large. When being is univocal, God becomes one being among others, ontologically continuous with the world. The creature no longer participates in the divine being as in a transcendent ground. It merely resembles it at a distance. William of Ockham completed the move: if universals are merely names we apply to collections of individuals, then words are conventional signs pointing to individual things, with no participatory relation to any transcendent reality they partially instantiate.⁷ Descartes sealed the thinking self inside its own interiority and made the external world pure dead extension. The cosmos became mechanism. Signs became arbitrary human conventions applied to inert matter.

What this produces, over several centuries, is what Charles Taylor calls the “buffered self” sealed from transcendent address, inhabiting an immanent frame in which all meaning-making proceeds within a closed system of reference. Inside this cultural condition, “Christian” becomes available as a pure identity marker, detached from the theological ground that once gave it meaning, available for political deployment as a pure signifier of civilizational belonging.

This is precisely what the sociologist Robert Bellah warned about in 1975. In The Broken Covenant, written on the eve of the American bicentennial, he declared that the American civil religion he had identified in 1967 had become “an empty and broken shell.”⁸ He had observed something genuine in his original essay: the United States possessed a shared grammar of national purpose, drawing on biblical symbols and themes, existing alongside and distinct from the churches.⁹ What he saw in 1975 was that grammar’s collapse into what Philip Gorski later named with precision: religious nationalism, civil religion’s dark side, emerging when the prophetic tradition of national self-criticism is replaced by conquest narratives, blood rhetoric, and apocalyptic politics.¹⁰

The people most vulnerable to Christian nationalism are those most thoroughly formed by the secular epistemic structure CN claims to oppose: people for whom “Christian” has always meant cultural identity and moral community rather than creedal confession and sacramental participation in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christian nationalism offers them a more intense, politically mobilized version of the cultural Christianity they already inhabit. It requires no theological disruption because the theological content was already absent. The colonization was complete before the nationalists arrived.

Here is the irony stated in full: Christian nationalism presents itself as the defense of Christian civilization against the encroachments of secular culture. It is, in theological and philosophical fact, the completion of the secular project it claims to resist. The flag draped over the cross is not Christianity triumphant over the secular order. It is the secular order triumphant over Christianity, having successfully converted the sign of the crucified Lord into a pure cultural simulacrum serviceable for nationalist politics.

And the liberal theological critique that responds to this only at the level of political and intellectual error has accepted the secular court’s jurisdiction over a dispute that is not, at its root, about history or logic at all.

III. The Referent Restored

If we are going to give this evacuation of the referent its proper name, we need to take something back. Not as an argument. As the referent itself.

“We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.” The God who made heaven and earth does not especially belong to America. The God who specially belongs to America is not the God who made heaven and earth. The prophets called this henotheism: worship of a localized patron god. It was idolatry, the worst kind of covenant betrayal, according to Isaiah.11

“Jesus Christ, who for us and for our salvation came down from heaven… suffered under Pontius Pilate.” This is the Creed’s only mention of history, and its reasons for including it are doctrinally incendiary. Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor of a territory under military occupation. Jesus suffered at the hands of the state. Central to Christian identity, the Creed declares, is that our Lord was martyred by a thoroughly fused civil-religious order. It does not say that Jesus conquered through Pilate. It says he was killed by him.

Before Pilate, Jesus declared, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over.”12 Political power and the divine will do not work the same way. National self-assertion and the logic of God’s kingdom are not compatible. When tempted to set himself up by force, Jesus refused.13 When given the option of summoning heavenly forces, He chose the cross.14 This well-documented, costly refusal to exercise coercive force is the single most incontrovertible pattern in the Gospels. It is the logic that Christian nationalism turns upside down.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit... blessed are the meek... blessed are the merciful... blessed are the peacemakers.”15 “I was a stranger and you welcomed me… I was sick and you took care of me… I was in prison and you visited me.”16 The nations are judged by their treatment of precisely those persons whom Christian nationalist policy programs target for exclusion, criminalization, or expulsion. The immigrant. The uninsured poor. The incarcerated.

These are not debating points available for reinterpretation in light of current political pressures. They are the referent. They are what “Christian” points to when the sign still carries its content. Restoring them is not a political act. It is a theological one, and it is the only act adequate to the simulacral condition. You do not defeat a sign that has lost its referent by deploying a counter-sign. You defeat it by inhabiting the referent so completely, so visibly, so persistently, that the pretender is exposed by contrast.

IV. Three Architects and Their Specific Errors

The intellectual formation of the current movement’s most prominent figures requires examination because their specific errors illuminate the structural condition more precisely than a general indictment of bad faith. These are, in the main, intelligent people. Their failures are therefore more instructive than the failures of the merely ignorant.

Pete Hegseth, confirmed as Secretary of Defense in January 2025, represents the institutional-military expression of Christian nationalist ideology at the highest levels of American government.¹⁷ His theological formation connects through his Tennessee congregation to Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, led by Pastor Doug Wilson, whose documented positions include the view that antebellum slavery was a “beneficent American institution” and that the global war on terror constitutes a modern iteration of the medieval Crusades.¹⁸ Hegseth has described Christian students as “foot soldiers” in a “spiritual battle” and Christian schools as “boot camp.” He has hosted worship services at the Pentagon led by his personal pastor during working hours and scrapped military spiritual care resources designed to serve members of all faiths. In Nashville in February 2026, before the National Religious Broadcasters, he declared a “direct through line from the Old and New Testament Christian gospels to the development of Western civilization and the United States of America,” a claim that prompted chants of “USA! USA!” and “Christ is King!” from the audience.¹⁹

The specific theological error is the confusion of baptism with citizenship and the Church’s mission with the state’s coercive apparatus. Hegseth has not misread the Gospel. He has evacuated it and replaced it with a program of civilizational dominance for which the Christian vocabulary serves as a legitimating sign that has lost its referent. The “Christ is King” chant does no theological work. It performs a cultural-political identity. It is the simulacrum in its purest available form.

Vice President JD Vance presents a more intellectually sophisticated case. A convert to Roman Catholicism, he moves in the networks of Catholic post-liberalism and integralism associated with Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame and Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule.²⁰ His intellectual formation was shaped significantly by the tech investor Peter Thiel, who introduced him to the French philosopher Rene Girard.

In 2020, Vance wrote with apparent theological precision about what he had learned from Girard’s mimetic theory:

In Christ, we see our efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim for what they are: a moral failing, projected violently upon someone else.

²¹ This is a correct reading of Girard’s central argument. It is also a self-indicting one in light of what followed.

In September 2024, Vance spread across social media the claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, had been abducting and eating residents’ pets.²² Springfield city officials immediately stated that no credible reports of any such activity existed. A Vance aide was informed directly by the Springfield city manager that the claims were false. Vance continued spreading them.²³ When pressed on CNN, Vance offered a confession of extraordinary theological gravity: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”²⁴

He admitted he fabricated the scapegoat narrative. The man who in 2020 named scapegoating as a moral failing admitted on national television four years later that he had constructed one deliberately, knowing the victims were innocent. The bomb threats that followed against Springfield schools and community centers are the measurable human cost of the mechanism Vance had named, understood, and then operated.

This is not a failure of theological understanding. It is the possession of the diagnostic and the deliberate refusal of the prescription. Girard’s life work was animated by the conviction that the Gospel’s unmasking of sacred violence constitutes a summons to stand with victims rather than construct better scapegoats. Vance received the theory as a strategic resource. This is a different and more serious failure than ignorance. It is the conscious choice to operate the mechanism the cross refuses.

Peter Thiel’s case is the most philosophically complex. He studied under Girard at Stanford and has described himself as a “hardcore, unreconstructed Girardian.”²⁵ He has simultaneously drawn on Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist whose central claim is that politics is defined entirely by the friend-enemy distinction and that the sovereign is the one who decides on the state of exception.²⁶

Girard and Schmitt are not complementary thinkers. They are antithetical ones. Girard diagnoses the friend-enemy distinction as the scapegoating mechanism in its political form and calls Christians to renounce it. Schmitt celebrates this structure as the irreducible grammar of all political life. Wolfgang Palaver, the Austrian theologian who has spent four decades applying Girard’s thought as a critique of Schmitt, has named the contradiction with precision: “Ultimately, Thiel needs to choose who he is going to imitate. In the end, you have to decide: Are you really going to be a Christian in a proper sense? Or are you a Schmittian?”²⁷

Thiel’s career answers the question. The Girardian vocabulary remains in his speeches as sophisticated patina over a political program that constructs the immigrant, the regulator, and the globalist as enemies against whom nationalist solidarity must be mobilized. The scapegoating mechanism, dressed in the vocabulary of the scholar who most clearly identified and condemned it. This is the intellectual form of the simulacral operation: the sign of genuine theological insight, evacuated of its prescriptive content, redeployed as analytical cover for the practice it diagnoses.

What unites all three figures is not theological error in the classical sense. It is the structural condition the essay has named: the reception of the Gospel’s vocabulary as a resource for a program of civilizational power, detached from the referent that gives that vocabulary its meaning and its demand. Hegseth performs it institutionally. Vance performs it strategically. Thiel performs it philosophically. The operation is the same in each case. The sign walks in its referent’s clothes.

V. The Response Adequate to the Condition

If the problem is not primarily epistemological but ontological, the response adequate to it is not a better argument but a restored practice. This demands specificity, because “formation” and “community” can themselves become simulacra, signs that gesture toward a practice without enacting it.

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, diagnosing the collapse of moral argument in modernity, argued that the problem was not the inadequacy of the arguments but the loss of the shared grammar that would make the arguments resolvable.²⁸ His prescription was the formation of local communities of practice in which the grammar is kept alive. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s distinction between saying and showing is the philosophical ground for this: the deepest things are apprehended through participation rather than demonstrated through inference.²⁹

Applied to the present situation: the grammar of the Gospel, the grammar within which “heresy,” “idolatry,” and “apostasy” carry their proper weight, is not derived from first principles accessible to unaided reason. It is inhabited. It is practiced into being. It is the form of life within which the a priori God becomes recognizable as precisely that.

If God is not the conclusion of an argument but the prior ground of all arguments, the one in whom, to quote Paul to the Athenians, we live and move and have our being30 then the apologetic task is not to construct an argument that builds a road from the skeptic’s starting point to the theological conclusion. The road is already built. The task is formation into the form of life within which what is always already given can become recognizable. You cannot argue someone into the grammar they have never inhabited. You can only invite them into the community where the grammar is practiced.

Katherine Sonderegger, the Episcopal systematic theologian whose doctrine of God may prove to be the single most important Anglican contribution to this question in a generation, names this on the doctrinal side divine compatibilism: God and creatures do not compete over space occupied.31 God is completely present without displacing the reality of creatures, as fire that warms without consuming, light that illumines without destroying. The secular and the sacred do not occupy the same space in competition. The God who is a priori is already present within the creature’s ordinary reasoning, within the scientist’s laboratory, within the child’s first question, without any of these having to first be defeated or thrown off the field. What is needed is formation into the way of life that perceives what is always already there.

This also means that the way the community lives is the primary public theological act, and it means that in a philosophically rigorous sense as well as a pastoral one. The community gathered at the table, practicing the grammar of the Kingdom across every boundary that the nationalist program seeks to draw between insider and outsider, is doing publicly what argument cannot: restoring the sign to its referent by making the community itself live the referent. The Eucharist does not represent or signify the body of Christ. It participates in that reality. It eats the real. It is the counter-simulacrum, the tangible violation of the hyperreal.

Bishop Rob Wright gave a sermon to the Episcopal House of Bishops in March of 2025 on the anniversary of the crossing of Selma bridge entitled “dangerous oddness,” the form of Christian witness that exposes how things “ought not to be” by letting ourselves be disturbed by how things actually are.32 He is correct. The word “odd” finds its philosophical grounding in this essay. The church’s dangerous oddness is the counter-simulacrum, the baptismal embodying of the truth that the sign “Christian” still signifies something, that the pointing still refers to something beyond itself.

VI. What This Demands of the Bishop

By way of conclusion, let me be clear about what this means for bishops, because the precise nature of episcopal leadership bears heavily on how any of this is able to be lived in particular contexts.

The primary public theological act of a bishop is the formation of communities whose common life reconnects the sign “Christian” to its referent by making the children of God dwell together as those whom God has blessed. This will mean preaching that forms Christians according to the Beatitudes and not according to grievance. Worship that builds genuine catholic community across the manifold political and cultural fault lines the nationalist project seeks to use to divide people. Pastoral presence that is visibly and intentionally centered on the poor and the powerless, the stranger, the prisoner, and the sick not as a political statement but as the life of the Kingdom enacted. It will mean the bishop’s calendar being shaped by Matthew 25, not the theater calendar of the affluent.

It will mean refusing to engage in label wars without refusing to prophesy. If the bishop calls Christian nationalism idolatrous then she must do so in such a way that simultaneously enacts what it looks like to worship the true God. The word “idolatry” earns its keep by pointing to something only when it is accompanied by the living demonstration of what true worship of the God who made heaven and earth looks like: the welcoming of the stranger into your parish community, the feeding of the hungry at your table, the refusal of every national god that comes wrapped in Christian language. The label without the life is just another simulacrum.

It will mean refusing to allow oneself to become the political project of either major party by maintaining what William Temple called the Church’s prophetic distance, the knowledge that every political program can and should be criticized from the perspective of the Gospel regardless of who holds political power at the time.33 The bishop who conducts business as usual with Democrats but thinks that Christians should boycott Republicans has already lost because she has owned herself rhetorically to one political party. The Christian who feels free to issue public statements against Christian nationalism from the left without holding the progressive capture of the Church’s public vocabulary to the same Gospel-centered standard has not departed from the simulacral prison. They have just replicated it at another ZIP code.

That is my counterproposal to Christian nationalism. Is it sufficient? Does it form up folks differently than grievance does? These are questions worth discussing, but whatever discussions follow must take seriously the thesis of this essay: Settling for labels repeats the same mode of operating that produced Christian nationalism in the first place. If you agree with that, then please take special care that every label you deploy in this conversation earns its referential keep.

Notes

1. For representative examples of the episcopal and theological response, see The Episcopal Church House of Bishops Theology Committee, The Crisis of Christian Nationalism (New York: Church Publishing, 2023); William J. Barber II, interview, CNN, 2023; Rob Wright, “Christian Nationalism and Christian Witness,” address to the Episcopal House of Bishops, Nauvoo, Alabama, March 21, 2025.

2. The January 6, 2021 assault on the United States Capitol is extensively documented in the bipartisan Select Committee report, Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol (Washington: Government Publishing Office, 2022). On Glover’s communion, see Michael Foust, “NASA Astronaut Victor Glover Took Communion in Space,” Christian Headlines, April 28, 2021.

3. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1-42. The four stages of the image are described in the opening chapter, “The Precession of Simulacra.” For the application of Baudrillard’s analysis to religious sign-systems in consumer culture, see Vincent J. Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture (New York: Continuum, 2004), 67-105.

4. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 539-93. Taylor’s analysis of the “immanent frame” and the “buffered self” is the most sustained account of the cultural epistemic condition this essay addresses. For the theological application, see James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014).

5. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 6.

6. For Scotus’s univocity of being and its theological consequences, see John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 302-5; and the extended treatment in Louis Dupre, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 37-60.

7. On Ockham’s nominalism and its consequences for the sign-world relation, see Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 121-66; and Dupre, Passage to Modernity, 56-88.

8. Robert N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), xi.

9. Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (Winter 1967): 1-21.

10. Philip S. Gorski, American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 5, 35. Gorski’s formulation is precise: “Religious nationalism is the dark side of civil religion.” His distinction between the prophetic-egalitarian tradition and the nationalist-providentialist tradition is the most useful historical taxonomy for understanding the current moment.

11. Isaiah 44:6; 45:5-6. For the prophetic critique of henotheism as the primary form of covenant infidelity, see Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 145-72.

12. John 18:36 (NRSV).

13. John 6:15.

14. Matthew 26:53.

15. Matthew 5:3-9 (NRSV).

16. Matthew 25:35-36 (NRSV).

17. On Hegseth’s confirmation margin, see the coverage in The New York Times, January 25, 2025. Vice President Vance cast the tie-breaking vote in a 51-50 confirmation.

18. Heath Druzin, “Trump’s Defense Secretary Nominee Has Close Ties to Idaho Christian Nationalists,” NBC News, November 25, 2024. On Wilson’s documented positions regarding slavery and the Crusades, see Logan Davis, “Christian Nationalist at the Pentagon: Pete Hegseth’s Calvinist Sect Embraces Confederacy, Crusades,” Democracy Now!, January 27, 2025.

19. Sam Stockard, “In Nashville, Hegseth Talks ‘Western Values,’ Christian Nationalism,” Tennessee Lookout, February 21, 2026.

20. For Vance’s intellectual connections to Catholic post-liberalism and integralism, see the extended treatment in Slate, “JD Vance’s Religion: How Catholicism Changed the Candidate’s Worldview,” August 8, 2024; and National Catholic Register, “JD Vance Is a Catholic ‘Post-Liberal,’” July 29, 2024. For the internal Catholic critique of integralism, see Dignitatis Humanae (Vatican II, 1965); and “Evangelical Fundamentalism and Catholic Integralism in the USA,” La Civiltà Cattolica, July 2017.

21. JD Vance, “How I Joined the Resistance,” The Lamp, 2020. The direct quotation is confirmed in multiple subsequent reports, including the Globe and Mail’s analysis of the Thiel-Vance-Girard intellectual lineage, 2024.

22. CBS News, “Officials in Springfield, Ohio, Say No Credible Reports of Haitian Immigrants Abducting and Eating Pets,” September 9, 2024; NPR, “JD Vance Repeats Baseless Claims About Haitian Migrants and Pets,” September 10, 2024.

23. ABC News, “Vance Kept Up False Claims About Haitian Migrants After Aide Was Told They Were Baseless,” September 18, 2024, reporting on the Wall Street Journal’s documentation of the September 9 call between Springfield city manager Bryan Heck and a Vance staffer.

24. CNN, “State of the Union,” Dana Bash interview with JD Vance, September 15, 2024. Direct quotation from the broadcast transcript.

25. Thiel’s self-description as a “hardcore, unreconstructed Girardian” is widely documented. For extended analysis, see “The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Obsession,” Wired, October 2025.

26. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). For the theological analysis of the Schmitt-Girard tension, see Wolfgang Palaver, Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory, trans. Gabriel Borrud (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 239-72.

27. Wolfgang Palaver, quoted in “The Holy Hypocrisy of Peter Thiel’s Armageddon,” Gazetteer SF, October 6, 2025, reporting on remarks to Wired. The full interview context is documented in the Wired piece of October 2025.

28. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 1-5, 263-64.

29. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), sec. 201. For the theological application of the showing-saying distinction, see Denys Turner, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 35-72.

30. Acts 17:28 (NRSV).

31. Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology, Volume 1: The Doctrine of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 49-149. The burning bush as the paradigm of divine compatibilism is the organizing image of Sonderegger’s treatment of omnipresence. Sonderegger is the William Meade Professor of Theology at Virginia Theological Seminary and an Episcopal priest.

32. Rob Wright, “Christian Nationalism and Christian Witness,” address to the Episcopal House of Bishops, Nauvoo, Alabama, March 21, 2025. Published by the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta, March 27, 2025.

33. William Temple, Christianity and Social Order (London: Penguin, 1942), 29-43. Temple’s distinction between announcing principles and administering programs remains the most precise Anglican formulation of the Church’s proper relation to the political order.

34. Tertullian, Apologeticus, 39.7. For the apologetic significance of the community’s common life in the early church, see Alan Kreider, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016).

35. Revelation 5:9 (NRSV).

Second in a series. Read Part One: “Before You Arrived, the World Already Knew Your Name.”

“I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.”

— Katherine Mansfield, Journal

In the previous essay on public theology, I argued that the sense of being seen and known you carry through ordinary life is a theological datum. The creature’s awareness of its own prior address. The divine Logos through whom all things were made speaks every particular thing into specific creaturely being. Holds it there. Continuously. At every moment. You are known before you know yourself. The hunger for recognition driving so much human behavior is hunger for what is already, always, actually present.

That claim is either the most important thing a person can hear, or it is words.

I believe the difference is formation.

Argument alone will fail you here. Something else has to move first. You need encounter with a creaturely form that carries the weight of the claim without naming it. You need to have met, somewhere outside your own head, the experience of meaning arriving before you summoned it. Then the theological language has ground. Then the creed describes something you have already felt.

This essay is the library. A reading list organized around the specific experiences the a priori premise describes: being seen before you speak, the world pressing its prior meaning into your attention, dignity that arrives before community judgment, and the ache of a creature who has been addressed and longs to fully receive what is being given.

Each entry names the experience it carries. Each names the reader it best serves. The footnotes carry the academic theological apparatus for those who want to follow the argument all the way down.^¹

I just don’t think you can do public theology by reading theology alone.

For Those Who Have Felt the World Pressing Through

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Journals

Begin here for instress in its purest form. Hopkins is the poet of creaturely particularity and its theological ground. His journals describe bluebells and clouds and ice formations with the precision of a naturalist and the attention of a mystic. They are the most sustained record in the English language of what it looks like to practice reception rather than projection. The poems follow from the journals. They are the natural world’s own inscape arriving through Hopkins’s attention into language.^²

Read The Windhover slowly. Let the rhythm enter the body before the mind arrives to analyze it. Then read As Kingfishers Catch Fire. What seems like a nature poem is actually a creedal claim: each creature enacts its own being, which is simultaneously its enactment of Christ. Read the journals. Return to the poems. Something will have changed.

This is for every reader. The journals are accessible to any careful high school reader. The poems reward years of attention. The theological ground in the footnote apparatus is among the richest in English literature.

Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations

Traherne is the seventeenth-century Anglican mystic whose manuscripts were found on a London bookstall in 1895, two centuries after his death, mistaken at first for the work of Henry Vaughan. His Centuries hold that the child’s original perception of the world is its truest perception: the Orient wheat, the green trees, the dust and stones of the street arrive already infinite, already given. Traherne’s theology is that the fall is a fall of perception before it is a fall of will. We stopped hearkening. We started using. The recovery is learning to receive what has never ceased being offered.^³

His prose is clear enough for any engaged undergraduate and deep enough to sustain a career of return. The first Century is the place to begin. It is also the place to keep returning.

Any reader who has felt that childhood perception of the world as luminous and wonders where it went.

Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias and Selected Songs

Hildegard is one of my first reads in this vein from 1999. She named the divine greening force viriditas: the prior vitality breathed into creation, borne by every living thing as the sign of its responsiveness to what holds it in being. Her creation theology precedes Hopkins by seven centuries and arrives at the same conviction by a different path. The creature in health is the creature hearkening. Illness, for Hildegard, is the creature closing against the greening it was made to bear.^⁴

Her music, recorded in numerous contemporary performances and widely available, is perhaps the most immediate entry point. The long, searching melodic lines seem always to be listening for something that precedes the note. Listen before you read. The body will recognize what the mind may initially find unfamiliar.

If you are a reader who arrives through music or the visual arts rather than through text. Also: anyone working in healthcare, ecology, or embodied theology.

For Those Who Know What It Costs to Be Reduced

Lucille Clifton, Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems

Clifton’s body poems hold the specific Black female body as a site of divine address prior to and in excess of every social categorization of it. Her theology is Incarnational in the most specific sense: this body, this skin, this history, this praise. The blessing arrives before any human tribunal convenes to assess it.

Her poems are short. They refuse explanation. They insist, with the authority of someone who paid the full cost of the insistence, that the prior dignity is real and the reduction is the lie. The poems form readers into witnesses of a sequence: the divine address precedes every human judgment, and every human judgment that forgets this is theologically false before it is unjust.^⁵

Every reader can access this, and especially readers for whom the body has been a site of judgment rather than welcome. Also: essential reading for anyone engaged in ministry at the intersection of race, embodiment, and dignity.

Anna Akhmatova, Requiem

Akhmatova stood outside the Leningrad prison for seventeen months during Stalin’s terror, waiting for news of her son. Someone in the line recognized her, leaned close, and asked in a whisper: can you describe this? Her answer was yes.

That yes is a theological act. It is the insistence that specific persons retain their prior dignity as addressed creatures even after the state has done everything within its power to erase that address from the record. Requiem holds each specific body, each specific name, against the machinery organized to convert persons into absences. The poem can do this because the prior dignity is written into the structure of creaturely being and stands before every human institution’s capacity to revoke it.^⁶

Requiem holds each specific body, each specific name, against the machinery organized to convert persons into absences.

This is for the reader confronting the tension between prior creaturely dignity and the institutions that deny it. Required reading for anyone who wants to understand what public theology costs when the public is organized against it.

Nelly Sachs, O the Chimneys

Sachs, the German Jewish poet who survived the Holocaust while most of her community perished, writes from within a theological tradition that holds the prior divine address with extraordinary tenacity precisely because the historical evidence against it is so overwhelming. Her poems hold the specific bodies of the murdered as irreducibly addressed, rising toward what she refuses to name as nothing.

Her work is the most morally serious engagement in the twentieth century with what it means to insist on the a priori dignity of specific creaturely being against a regime that systematically reduced persons to raw material. For anyone working at the intersection of theology and historical trauma, she is irreplaceable.^⁷

She is a good read for this moment in the West.

This is little more dense to be sure. I think it is for anyone whose faith has been confronted by the question of whether the prior address can survive what history has done.

For Those Who Feel the World Speaking Just Beyond Hearing

R.S. Thomas, Collected Poems

An old priest friend introduced me to this work early in my episcopate. I can read some of the poems over and over again. Thomas was an Anglican priest in the Welsh hill country for most of his working life. His entire poetic career is an exploration of the hard, rocky, particular landscape of Wales as a site of divine address: pressing through specific textures of hill-farming life in ways that ordinary religious perception misses entirely. His God is extremely present rather than absent. The problem he identifies is the noise we carry into the silence where the address is happening.

His poems are short, bleak, and oddly consoling. They form readers into a particular kind of attention: the expectation that the world is saying something in its ordinary particulars, and that the task is silence and patience rather than production and noise.^⁸

This is for readers who find conventional religious language unavailable and are looking for a theology that lives in the physical world rather than above it. I also think this is essential reading for rural and agricultural ministry contexts.

Wisława Szymborska, Map: Collected and Last Poems

Szymborska is the Polish Nobel laureate whose gently ironic attention to specific things produces a poetry of pure hearkening. Her poems wait for the onion, the view from a grain of sand, the silence after a question to disclose what they carry. The self-deflation her irony performs is the clearing of the self to make room for what is already pressing to be received. I also find that the translators have done well in preserving the deep vocabulary

She is the secular figure on this list who demonstrates most clearly that the formation works beyond the explicit theological vocabulary. Formation into hearkening requires that the text model reception rather than projection. The teacher carries no denominational credential.^⁹

She is for readers who find explicitly religious language alienating. Szymborska is the entry point for the skeptic who has felt the prior address and is searching for a way to take it seriously without adopting a framework they distrust.

Alice Oswald, Dart

Oswald’s book-length poem follows the River Dart from source to sea, gathering the voices of all who have worked on or near it across centuries: fishermen, swimmers, industrial workers, farmers, the drowned. The poem is structurally an act of hearkening rather than composition. She arrived at the river and attended to what it and its people were already saying before she opened her mouth.

The river is a character rather than a setting. It is already doing something before the human voices arrive, and the poem holds their voices as responses to a prior eloquence rather than as the poem’s primary subject. This is the most formally rigorous contemporary enactment of a poetics of reception in the English language.^¹⁰

If you are a reader who responds to place, to ecological attention, to the specific weight of local landscape. Also: anyone interested in the theology of creation engaging contemporary literature.

For Those Who Have Experienced the Cost of the Default Setting

Mark Z. Danielewski, Tom’s Crossing

I just finished this! And, in part it is what inspired the list. Danielewski’s 2025 novel is 1,232 pages about two teenagers in rural Utah who steal a pair of horses destined for the slaughterhouse and ride them into the mountains to set them free. The villain, Old Porch, owns a meat processing plant. He is the figure of technique in its most local and recognizable form: the man who has reduced every living thing in his vicinity to its commodity value.

The novel enacts, at the level of American Western mythology fused with Homeric epic structure, the central claim of this series: there is a prior dignity written into creaturely being that economic and communal power can suppress but never finally silence. The horses carry a prior address Old Porch refuses to see because he has closed himself against every form of reception. His violence is the violence of a consciousness that has completed the Cartesian reduction and now encounters a world of mute objects to be processed.^¹¹

The landscape is a character. The mountain confines and opens, punishes shortcuts, rewards attention. It behaves according to its own inscape rather than according to the categories the characters bring to it. And threaded through the mountains alongside the living characters is the ghost of Tom Gatestone, the dead friend whose prior request set the whole journey in motion. His presence exceeds every living character’s capacity to categorize or contain it. His value is prior to the community’s ability to assign it.

Across the novel a chorus of hundreds of Orvop residents speaks from different decades, each introduced by name, birth year, and precise manner of death, debating what happened on those four days in 1982. The community reaches no consensus across generations. The event exceeds every interpretive framework brought to bear on it. That is what prior address does when it breaks through the default setting: it produces a testimony the community struggles to account for and refuses to dismiss.

The novel is the most recent and most formally ambitious American literary enactment of the apriori premise available, and it requires no prior theological formation to receive.

This is for every reader who finds the explicit theological argument abstract and needs the claim in narrative form first. Also: essential for anyone working on theology and technology, theology and economics, or the specifically American forms of reductionism.

For Those Already Inside the Theological Tradition

Denise Levertov, The Stream and the Sapphire and A Door in the Hive

I discovered Levertov last year in the midst of a difficult time. You will see why she was appealing to me. Levertov converted to Christianity late in her career, after decades as one of British and America’s most important poets of her time. Her late theological poems hold the poem as threshold rather than destination. The poem stands at the edge of what exceeds it, and waits. Her Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus moves through doubt into a silence that is expansive rather than empty, arriving at the Incarnation as the only adequate response to the world’s specific suffering.

She demonstrates that the formation her earlier poetry provides (the careful attention to the creaturely particular, the reception of meaning rather than its projection) is the same formation the explicitly theological poetry requires. The poets on this list who carry no denominational affiliation and the poet who ends her career writing mass settings are doing the same work at different registers of the same grammar.^¹²

I think those of you readers who want to follow the full arc from aesthetic formation to explicit theological inhabitation. Required reading for anyone in formation for ministry.

Osip Mandelstam, Selected Poems and The Collected Critical Prose

Mandelstam died in a Stalinist transit camp in 1938. His Acmeist poetics insisted that a specific word has weight, texture, and body, that the word is a living thing bearing the meaning that matter already carries. His essay The Word and Culture argues that the health of civilization is measured by the degree to which language remains in genuine contact with the specific creaturely reality it names.

His explicitly Christian poems, written at enormous personal risk, hold the Incarnation as the poem’s structural guarantee: if the Word became flesh, then flesh can bear the word. This is the Nicene claim in poetic form, and it cost him his life.^¹³

Feels essential for anyone working at the intersection of theology, language, and political theology.

A Reading Order

For those who want a sequence rather than a library to browse, here is the logic.

Begin with Hopkins’s journals and Traherne’s first Century. Read them slowly. Read them alongside each other over several weeks. Let the formation work at the level of attention before arriving at the level of argument.

Add Clifton’s Blessing the Boats alongside R.S. Thomas’s Collected Poems. They operate on different registers of the same formation and will strengthen each other. Clifton’s compressed praise. Thomas’s compressed silence. Together they produce a wider range of hearkening than either achieves alone.

Read Oswald’s Dart when you are ready for a sustained, book-length act of reception. Read Akhmatova’s Requiem when you are ready to receive what the prior address costs to insist on when the world is organized against it.

At any point in this reading, return to the creed. Read Maximus on the logoi. Read Irenaeus on recapitulation.^¹⁴ The texts you have been reading are the creaturely witnesses to what the tradition is formally describing. The creed names what the poets see. The poets show what the creed means. Read between them until the movement in both directions feels natural.

Add Danielewski for the American British contemporary form of the claim. Add Mandelstam for the cost of the claim when power is organized against it.

The goal is a kind of perceiver formed. A creature who has been given, through repeated encounter with texts that model reception rather than projection, the phenomenological experience of meaning arriving before it was summoned. That experience is the epistemological condition for the prior address to be recognized as what it has always been: the most basic and most universal fact about creaturely existence.

You already know this. You have always already known it. These texts will help you remember.

Notes

^¹ The organization of this library around phenomenological experience rather than doctrinal category follows the method of Romano Guardini in The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. Ada Lane (London: Sheed and Ward, 1930), who argued that liturgical formation precedes theological reflection and provides its experiential ground. The application to literary reading develops a similar argument in Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 1, Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 117–127.

^² For the theological ground of Hopkins’s instress and inscape in Maximus the Confessor and Duns Scotus, see Christopher Devlin, S.J., editorial notes in The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 338–351, and James Finn Cotter, Inscape: The Christology and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), 1–44. The argument that Hopkins’s poetics is a formal enactment of the sacramental ontology grounded in the Nicene settlement is developed in Walter Ong, S.J., Hopkins, the Self, and God (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 39–68.

^³ For Traherne’s theology of perception and its connection to the Anglican theology of creation, see A.M. Allchin, Participation in God: A Forgotten Strand in Anglican Tradition (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1988), 23–47. The connection between Traherne’s fall-as-perceptual-failure and the patristic account of the tropos distorted against the logos in Maximus is the author’s own constructive proposal, developed from Maximus, Ambigua 42.

^⁴ For Hildegard’s theology of viriditas as a theology of creation, see Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 65–88. For the connection between Hildegard’s creation theology and contemporary theological aesthetics, see Constant Mews, “Hildegard of Bingen and the Greening of God,” in Hildegard of Bingen: A Book of Essays, ed. Maud Burnett McInerney (New York: Garland, 1998), 1–25.

^⁵ For the theological weight of Lucille Clifton’s body poetics, see Hilary Holladay, Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), 89–132. The connection between Clifton’s insistence on prior bodily dignity and the theology of the imago Dei is developed in Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 249–293.

^⁶ For Akhmatova’s Requiem as theological witness, see David Bethea, The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 183–214. The connection between Requiem and the theology of the irreducibility of the specific person draws on Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 155–197, whose argument that the specific suffering person must be understood as individually loved and known by God parallels Akhmatova’s poetic insistence at every formal level.

^⁷ For Nelly Sachs and the theology of presence-in-absence, see Dorothee Sölle, Suffering, trans. Everett Kalin (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 69–86. For Sachs’s specifically Jewish theological inheritance and its bearing on her Holocaust poetry, see Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 43–78.

^⁸ For R.S. Thomas’s apophatic pastoral theology, see Rowan Williams, “Suspending the Ethical: R.S. Thomas and Kierkegaard,” in Ethics and the Christian (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 55–74. For the connection between Thomas’s landscape poetics and the theology of divine hiddenness, see D.Z. Phillips, R.S. Thomas: Poet of the Hidden God (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986), 1–55.

^⁹ For the argument that the secular aesthetic can function as a form of pre-theological formation, see George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 215–232, and Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love (London: Continuum, 2005), 1–28. The specific case of Szymborska as formation for hearkening draws on the author’s constructive proposal rather than existing secondary literature.

^¹⁰ For Alice Oswald’s poetics of attention and its relationship to the phenomenological tradition, see her Oxford Professor of Poetry lecture, “Full Tilt Dazzle” (2019), available online, in which she describes poetry as a form of extreme attention to what is already occurring rather than an act of creation or expression.

^¹¹ For Danielewski’s Tom’s Crossing (New York: Pantheon, 2025) in relation to the American theological tradition’s engagement with technique and commodity reduction, see the framework developed in Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Knopf, 1964), 3–22, and William Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (Waco: Word Books, 1973), 77–109. The Homeric structural parallels in Tom’s Crossing are addressed in Ian Mond’s review in Locus (February 2026) and in the Association for Mormon Letters review (January 2026).

^¹² For Levertov’s conversion and its consequences for her poetics, see Dana Greene, Denise Levertov: A Poet’s Life (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 189–233. The argument that Levertov’s late theological poetry is a continuation rather than a departure from her earlier poetics of attention draws on her own account in “Work That Enfaiths,” in New and Selected Essays (New York: New Directions, 1992), 247–261.

^¹³ For Mandelstam’s Acmeist poetics and its theological implications, see Clare Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 43–89. For the Incarnational ground of his poetics, see Gregory Freidin, A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self-Presentation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 155–193.

^¹⁴ For Maximus the Confessor on the logoi as the constitutive Christological ground of every created particular, see Ambigua 7, in On Difficulties in the Church Fathers, trans. Nicholas Constas, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014). For Irenaeus on recapitulation as the gathering of the entire creaturely order into Christ from within, see Against Heresies 5.1.1–3, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994), 526–528.

“The poet does not impose meaning on the world. The poet receives it.”

— Kathleen Raine, Defending Ancient Springs

Many of you have experienced it. You were somewhere mundane. A field. A parking lot. Your kitchen at 2 am. And then it occurred to you. Maybe it wasn’t even something you noticed. But you knew.

A quality of light. The snatch of a song through a half-open window. The heaviness or thinness of the air after an argument. And suddenly you felt known. Looked at. Understood. Like the world knew you back. Before you knew it.

I have experienced God throughout my entire life. Some of you likely didn’t call it “God.” Some of you have.

This essay (split into two parts) is an invitation to each of you who yearns to be known. To anyone who has ever stood before a painting or a poem or symphony and felt- inexplicably as if it understood you, spoke to you before you ever uttered a word.

I want to honor what you felt was real. And it has a name. And it’s the oldest theological assertion in the Christian faith.

Everyone Is Already a Theologian

Someone recently said to me that public theology amounts to little more than speaking Christian ideas in language the public can understand. In one sense, that may be true, and it’s important that it’s true as far as it goes. But what’s true at the deepest level is this: public theology is thinking and action shaped by the awareness that the public already lives immersed in theology, whether it knows it or not, whether it has words for it or not.

The experience of being perceived and understood that you bring, tacitly, to everyday interactions is a theological fact. It is the creature’s sense of having already been addressed.¹

This is big. Let me explain.

We believe that “through him all things were made.” This line in the Nicene Creed is about more than the inner life of God. It is also about the shape of reality. If, through Christ, all things were made, then, in being made, all things receive their address from the origin and from its creator. If Christ Jesus is of one substance with the Father, then the originating event of creation is fully connected to the divine, and every thing that comes from it is fully and originally God’s speaking into existence.² Every thing, this bluebell, this man, this day, was spoken into its being by the Word that also became flesh in Palestine two thousand years ago. It all hangs together because the Word holds it together. This is a statement of profound meaning.

This means the world is never silent. The world is always already speaking. It is pressing its prior meaning outward toward any created thing attentive enough to receive that pressing. Human creatures come into a world already leaning in toward them, already in the stance that the Anglo-Saxon Christian tradition called hersumnesse: listening, attentive openness before what is already addressing it.³

When you feel known in the field or kitchen that sense of prior knowledge wrapping around and through you –it is God’s a priori divine address pressing forward through the creaturely contingencies of that moment into your own particular awareness. You did not cause it to happen. You simply received it. And the reason it matters – the reason you should spend your whole life thinking and thinking about why it matters – is that you received it before you could explain it away. It arrived before your mental framework had the chance to engage it, which means it came from outside your framework, which means it was real in a way your framework cannot account for.

Public theology exists to help people inhabit that reality. Most people already live inside that reality. The question is whether they inhabit it by default or consciously.

Living Inside by Default

In his famous 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech, David Foster Wallace called adult human consciousness’ default setting “deep and literal selfishness.” The default orientation toward reality is the felt sense that the world was there in order to serve you, and everyone in it is there to play a role in yours happiness or pain. Other people exist as either “hosts” or “obstacles.” Every situation comes pre-loaded with a question on your behalf: “What does this mean for me?”⁴

Wallace was offering an analysis of modern theological reality without using theological terms. The default mode he diagnoses emerges directly from what happens when a society settles for this world being nothing more than inert atoms and us as the source of all meaning. The settled default of modern consciousness is Cartesian dualism made instinctual: extended substance on one side, thinking substance on the other side, value thrown outward by human minds onto an otherwise valueless universe.⁵

Everywhere you look, that settlement is what shapes public reality. It drives the economy. It designs the technology. It organizes the political imagination. The daily psychic price we pay for that settlement is what Wallace describes as “the human subject floating mysteriously in SPACE where there is nothing to grab onto… bumping around like a blind ghost in a haunted house.”

The public task of theology is to reclaim reality from that description. The theological counter is not simply that modern and Cartesian descriptions of reality are philosophically untrue. The theological counter is that human beings who experience reality that way have turned away from what is already being given.

The insistence that all is dead atoms or creatures whose total responsibility is meaning-making has not eliminated divine address. God has not silenced the world. We have trained ourselves out of the ability to receive. The world feels silent to us because we live inside a civilization that has settled for, and organized itself at every level around, the presumption that listening is for losers.

Church often fails at its public theology task at this point. We show up and try to convince people of a world order they’ve never known by talking at them about a God they’ve never experienced pressing into them. We try to present propositional answers to people who have never encountered a world so thoroughly full of a priori divine address that learning to listen becomes an ethical and intellectual skillset.⁶

We cannot argue someone into an awareness they’ve never known. What we can do is form them into one.

The Name for What You Already Know

The Victorian Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins read Duns Scotus in an Oxford bookshop and felt recognized so wholly that he describes it as a colloquy across the centuries:

Hopkins discovered two words for what he was encountering in Creation.

The first is inscape. The inward design of a thing. Its thisness. The expression of its own particular being.

The inscape of a thing is what makes it uniquely itself. Every created thing possesses an inscape. This bluebell is this bluebell and not another because of its inscape. This little world is radically and distinctly itself.

The second word is instress: the outgoing energy or thrust by which an inscape makes itself known to the observer.

Instress is what occurs when your attention is met by the force of the thing itself. You find yourself in that bluebell field or you look at those bluebells kitchencounter side and you feel seen.

When you were seen by the bluebells, you were experiencing instress.

Their inscape met you in your attention. You were greeted by a thing before you could wrap conceptual frameworks around the experience of it. The world sang out to you as the world constantly sings. And you were open to hear it.

Hopkins gave that experience a name. Hopkins also knew why it was possible.

Instress between human and world is possible because the inscape of every created thing echoes at its root reality the address of the Creator. Every inscape is a shared word.

At its deepest level of being, each created thing is a logos: it shares in and responds to the divine Logos through which it exists. Inscape presses outwards because all things are spoken into being by the Word of God and at every moment held in being by the Word.

The Son sustains all things by his word of power (Hebrews). What you experienced was creation’s constant creaturely response to the One who sustains it breaking into your experience.

Which is to say that the primordial address is also the feeling of being seen and known. Because God’s knowing of us does not come in intervals; it is continuous with our coming to consciousness of ourselves.

To exist is to exist within the address of God. You are known by God before you know yourself. You are loved before you love.

The craving for recognition that propels human beings to such great arrogance and angst is a longing for what we already have.

Public theology starts with this realization. Not that public theology begins here. This is where theology begins. But public theology starts here with the reminder that this is not something only intellectuals in Oxford niches can articulate. This is the sensation every person is getting at when they try to describe what it feels like to stand in a field of flowers.

Why the Language Matters, and Where to Find It

The problem is that the formation necessary to maintain this openness conflicts with the grain of our civilization. You cannot clearly experience the prior address in a society designed to habituate you to Cartesian notions of selfhood. You need dis/formation. You need to be slowly, patiently, formed against the sensible into a different mode of perception.

Poetry and literature is where this starts. The sacramental maximalists (I’m thinking of calling them that), the authors from every culture and era who write from the presupposition that the world is saturated, that the world is addressed prior to our arrival, that the world presses its prior meaning forward toward any receptive subject… these writers are the primary technology of dis-/formation outside the formative practices of Christian liturgical life.⁹

These writers work on atheists. They work on Christians. They form us into attendants, into those who approach the world expecting it to be speaking, who have cultivated (through repeated exposure to literary works) the phenomenological experience of meaning anticipating our arrival.

Expectation of the world’s address is the epistemological prerequisite for taking the theological claims seriously. You cannot experience the push of the Nicene proclamation that everything was made through Christ if you have never experienced the pressure of poetry; if you have never encountered a world pushing the sense “before” you in ways that then demand theological articulation. The creed explicates what the poets are attending to. Read poets until you have experienced what they are attending to. Then read the creed. It will have some sense you could not have comprehended prior to poetry.¹⁰

Post two of this series will curate the library: writers and texts from around the world which can form you via their approach to the experience of prior address, complete with recommendations for how to read them based on where people usually begin and how they can progress toward more explicit theological grounding. The hope is to create a list that will help new undergrads and seasoned doctoral candidates. A person who has rejected Christianity and a person wondering if they should embrace it. The reader who has never heard of Maximus the Confessor and the reader who has dedicated years to his writings.

All of them already are theologians. They simply need language to speak what they already know.

Notes

¹ The phrase “prior address” draws on the theological framework of the logoi in Maximus the Confessor, for whom each created thing participates in the divine Logos through its own rational principle, orienting it back toward its source. See Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua, trans. Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), Amb. 7. The connection between this patristic framework and the phenomenology of being known is developed in Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor, trans. Brian Daley (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), 73–119.

² For the creedal and ontological implications of the Nicene homoousios for the theology of creation, see Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 96–143. The argument that the full divinity of the Son is the theological guarantee of creation’s genuine bearing of divine address is the anti-Arian implication developed by Athanasius in On the Incarnation, trans. John Behr (Yonkers: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011), 1–10.

³ Hersumnesse is an Old English term for attentive creaturely receptivity before divine address. Its retrieval as a constructive theological category in the Anglican context connects to the tradition of creaturely receptivity developed in Austin Farrer, The Glass of Vision (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1948), and more recently in Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 1–24.

⁴ David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), 36–45. For theological engagement with Wallace’s diagnosis and its limits, see the essays collected in Martin Brick, ed., David Foster Wallace and Religion: Essays on Faith and Fiction (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).

⁵ For the Cartesian settlement as a theological event rather than merely a philosophical one, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 539–593. Taylor’s account of the “buffered self” as the characteristic modern subject parallels the default setting Wallace describes, and both are explicable as formations produced by the disenchantment of the natural order that follows the mechanization of matter.

⁶ The formational failure of the church’s public theology is addressed with particular sharpness in Rowan Williams, Faith in the Public Square (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 1–20. The insight that you cannot argue someone into a grammar they have never inhabited draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), §§ 201–207, and on Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of tradition-constituted rationality in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 349–388.

⁷ For Hopkins’s encounter with Scotus and its theological consequences, see Walter Ong, Hopkins, the Self, and God (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 39–68. The connection between Scotus’s haecceitas and Hopkins’s inscape is developed in James Finn Cotter, Inscape: The Christology and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), 1–44.

⁸ The Christological grounding of Hopkins’s instress in the participated logoi of Maximus is developed in Christopher Devlin, S.J., in his editorial notes to The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 338–351. For the systematic connection between Maximian logoi and the theology of creaturely particularity, see Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor (London: Routledge, 1996), 64–85.

⁹ The term “sacramental maximalism” is intended to name the literary lineage of writers for whom the maximalist formal commitment, the refusal to reduce any particular to a type or example, is the formal consequence of a sacramental ontology. The closest parallel in contemporary theology is David Bentley Hart’s account of the analogia entis in The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 241–249.

¹⁰ The formulation that the poem is the prior creaturely encounter that makes the doctrine intelligible rather than merely propositional draws on Rowan Williams’s account of the necessary priority of the aesthetic to the apologetic in Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love (London: Continuum, 2005), 1–28. See George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 215–232, for the argument that genuine aesthetic encounter is always and already a theological event, whether or not the participant has the theological vocabulary to recognize it.

Through a Glass, Darkly

Public Christian theology and the recovery of creaturely knowing

The Bronze Mirror

I like watching a British archaeological series called Time Team. Once they found a bronze mirror - so cool! In fact, you can walk through a major archaeological museum, and you will find one before long: a bronze mirror from the ancient Mediterranean world. Round, slightly heavy, carefully polished on one face until the metal attains a degree of reflective clarity. Hold it at the right angle, and you would see your face appear in it, warmer than a modern glass returns it, hazed at the edges, caught at the threshold of legibility. I choose these words carefully. Ancient people combed their hair by such mirrors, checked their children’s fevers in their eyes, recognized the faces of travelers at the city gate. The image was sufficient for practical life. It was, at every moment, partial. Something in the face remained just beyond what the metal could resolve.

Paul reached for this image at the summit of his meditation on love: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”¹ The observation Paul makes here is theological news before it is epistemological theory. He does not counsel despair about the limits of human knowing.

He describes a condition: the creature sees something real, sees it dimly, and is drawn forward by the promise of a fullness the creature’s own powers are unable to produce.

Present knowledge is genuine, partial, and oriented by the One who already knows us completely. The knowing subject is, from the beginning, a receiver.

This image from Paul’s great hymn to love is the epistemological starting point for public Christian theology. It is also, I want to argue, the key that reveals the failure of both modernism and postmodernism, and opens a third way that neither tradition has the resources to find from within its own frame.

We believe the divine and cosmos speak before we listen. The creature is a respondent before it is an inquirer.

The Modern Error: The Subject Who Stands Apart

Western intellectual culture has spent roughly four centuries working with a model of human knowing that the Enlightenment codified and Immanuel Kant gave its most rigorous philosophical expression. The knowing subject, on this account, stands over against the world, applies the instruments of rational inquiry, and arrives at truths that carry universal authority. The model produced genuine achievements. Germ theory and democratic institutions, the abolition of slavery and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: these are the fruits of a civilization willing to hold its own inherited arrangements accountable to standards of reason that transcend the convenience of any particular tribe.²

The failure of societies and cultures was concealed inside the achievement. Modernism’s confidence in transparent rationality rested on an unexamined assumption: that the knowing subject was neutral, that reason operated independently of the body, the community, the history, and the loves that form every actual human being. This was a fiction. I suggest the rational subject of Enlightenment philosophy was, on inspection, a European man of a particular class and era whose particular formation had been rendered invisible by the very theory meant to transcend all formation. Alasdair MacIntyre demonstrated with considerable precision that every tradition of inquiry carries embedded within it a set of virtues, a community of practice, and a narrative of the good that give the tradition’s concepts their intelligibility.³ Enlightenment rationalism was a tradition of this kind, one among others, which had convinced itself it had escaped the condition common to all. When that conviction was exposed, the exposure was devastating.

The deeper error, visible from a theological vantage point, is what I have labeled, luminarchism in its modernist register: the collapse of the transcendent source of intelligibility into the creature’s own rational operations or its biological make up.⁴ The world is intelligible, on the Enlightenment account, because human reason is adequate to grasp it. The source of meaning is the subject’s own cognitive power rather than the faithfulness of the One who spoke the world into being. Where the tradition goes astray is in treating the creature’s participation in the Logos as the creature’s own endowment rather than a perpetually received gift from a giving God. When the creature becomes the measure of meaning, the world loses the ground of its intelligibility, and what begins as confidence in reason ends in the suspicion that reason is only one more instrument of power.

The Postmodern Response: The Dissolution of Ground

Michel Foucault saw the failure with genuine intellectual power. His central argument, that knowledge and power are inseparable, that what counts as knowledge in any society is shaped by the structures of power organizing that society, named something real.⁵ Hospitals define illness before treating it; psychiatry invents categories of disorder to give its institutions their rationale; the prison creates the prisoner it claims only to house. The claim to objectivity conceals an interested party. Foucault’s genealogies of power and knowledge are, from a theological angle, a secular phenomenology of fallen knowing: he traced the distortion with precision.

Jacques Derrida carried the analysis into language itself. Meaning, on his account, always defers. Words refer to other words in an endless chain; the author’s intention is displaced by the reader’s encounter; the text always exceeds what anyone intended by it.⁶ From this it is a short distance to the conclusion that intent carries no authority, that impact is all that remains as a standard, and that language is a field of power rather than a medium of communication.

The postmodern achievement was genuine. It gave voice to those whose experience had been systematically excluded from the production of official knowledge. And yet the achievement carried its own failure, and the failure was structural. If all knowledge is contaminated by power, what standard remains by which to identify the contamination? If objectivity is always an instrument of domination, against what measure do we judge some dominations worse than others? The postmodern critique consumed the epistemic ground it needed in order to stand.⁷ Roger Scruton observed, from entirely outside Christian commitment, that some ideas are exciting rather than true, and that the excitement Foucault’s framework generated was in direct proportion to its practical uselessness for anyone charged with actually running a hospital, a school, or a government.⁸

Luminarchism in its postmodern register collapses the transcendent source of intelligibility into the creature’s own power relations. The world is intelligible only as power produces it to be. The transcendence that would ground a critique of power is precisely what the postmodern frame is unable to supply. What remains, once transcendence is dissolved into the creature’s own play of forces, is an endless genealogy with no eschatological direction, a world in which exposure is the only possible move and nothing beyond exposure is thinkable.

The Shared Root

The two positions are, for all their differences, children of the same parent. Both agree that the human subject is the primary agent of meaning. Modernism holds that the subject discovers meaning through the application of reason; postmodernism holds that the subject constructs and deconstructs meaning through discourse. Neither can say that the subject receives meaning from a source that precedes and exceeds the subject’s own operations. Neither has a robust doctrine of creation. Neither has a theology of gift.

Charles Taylor, in his exhaustive genealogy of the modern self, traces how the Western tradition lost its sense of the world as meaningful prior to the self’s engagement with it.⁹ The pre-modern imagination was a world in which things carried meanings that the human person received rather than assigned. Modernity disenchanted this world by relocating meaning inside the subject. Postmodernity, finding the subject insufficient as a ground, scattered meaning entirely. What theology recovers is the enchanted world in its proper theological register: a world that carries meaning because it is spoken by a Logos whose faithfulness precedes every human act of inquiry.

The Incarnation as Epistemological Event

The Incarnation is the axial claim of Christian theology, and it performs decisive epistemological work that neither modernism nor postmodernism has the capacity to accommodate.

The Word became flesh. This is the permanent refusal of every dualism that separates the realm of meaning from the realm of matter. Modernism tended toward the separation of the knowing subject from the material world it observed.

Postmodernism treats the body as a text on which power inscribes its meanings, a surface to be interpreted rather than a site of disclosure.¹⁰ Both positions make the body secondary to the operation they take as primary: for modernism, the operation of reason; for postmodernism, the operation of discourse.

The body of Jesus of Nazareth is the epistemological event that grounds Christian knowing. It resists translation into a universal rational principle without remainder. It resists dissolution into a play of interpretations with equal validity. It happened.

The community that gathered around that body, that broke bread in memory of it, that baptized new members into it, was and remains a community whose knowing was formed by this event, accountable to this event, and oriented by this event toward the eschatological fullness Paul describes.¹¹

William Temple, a Anglican theological systematician of the twentieth century, described Christianity as “the most avowedly materialist of all the great religions.”¹² He meant that Christianity makes the material order the primary site of God’s self-disclosure. The resurrection vindicates the body against every attempt to dissolve it into spirit, idea, or interpretation. This vindication is the ground of Christian epistemology’s refusal of both the disembodied knower of the Enlightenment tradition and the infinitely malleable body of postmodern theory.

The Anglican tradition has kept this commitment with particular consistency. Richard Hooker grounded the possibility of human knowing in the participation of all created things in the divine Logos, whose intelligibility is the prior and permanent endowment of creation.¹³ Austin Farrer developed the account of finite minds participating in the infinite mind of God, such that creaturely reason is always a received capacity, a sharing in something prior to itself.¹⁴ Rowan Williams has argued that the church’s distinctive contribution to public reasoning is its capacity to speak from the particular body of Christ formed by the Incarnation, without collapsing that particularity into a sectarian tower or dissolving it into a claim to universal neutral reason.¹⁵

Public Theology as Embodied Apologetics

The phrase “public theology” names the vocation of Christian thinking done in the open, in conversation with the full range of human inquiry, offering claims that anyone can examine rather than retreating into a inward monestary of private piety. Public theology is apologetics in the classical sense: a reasoned account of the hope that is in us, offered to the world as an invitation rather than an imposition.¹⁶

The form this apologetics must take is embodied rather than merely argumentative. Arguments have their place. The academy requires them. And yet arguments of the kind found in academic journals leave a crucial question unanswered: they can defend a position and they can deconstruct one, but the capacity to point to a community whose shared life is itself the argument lies beyond either approach. The church possesses this capacity as it gathers for worship and serves the Lord’s sick and poor.

Alasdair MacIntyre argued that every tradition of inquiry carries with it a community of practice whose life demonstrates the intelligibility of the virtues the tradition commends.¹⁷ Outside such a community, virtues become preferences, narrative becomes mythology, and the tradition dissolves into fragments.

The church, at its best, is precisely this community: a people formed by the practices of worship, Scripture, Eucharist, and mutual accountability, whose life together is the primary apologetic witness to the reality they claim to know.

Bonhoeffer, writing from inside the catastrophic collapse of both modernism and nationalist reaction in the twentieth century, identified the church’s task as the recovery of the “discipline of the secret”: the practices of common life that form the community’s perception before it attempts to translate that perception into publicly accessible speech.¹⁸ The community that actually lives by the epistemology of reception offers the watching world something that no argument alone can offer. It offers evidence. The community’s life is the argument’s body.

Baptism forms citizens of the kingdom whose way of knowing is constitutively different from the knowing of those who believe the knowing subject is prior to the community.¹⁹ The baptized person is incorporated into a body before she is constituted as an individual inquirer. She receives her identity before she asserts it. She is known before she knows.

The Glass Transformed

We return to the bronze mirror.

The image it gives is real, partial, sufficient for the purposes of ordinary creaturely life, and oriented toward a fullness the mirror itself is unable to provide. This is a description of creaturely integrity rather than a catalogue of failure.

The modernist, looking in this mirror, wants to replace it with transparent glass. They want to eliminate the medium, abolish the distance between the knowing subject and the thing known, and arrive at a view from nowhere. This desire is understandable. It is also a refusal of creatureliness, a demand to see as God sees before the creature is ready for that seeing.

The postmodernist, looking in this mirror, decides that because the glass is dark there is nothing on the other side. The medium is all there is. The image is only an image, all the way down. This conclusion is a form of despair dressed as sophistication. It takes the creature’s experience of distortion as the final word, rather than as the phenomenology of a fall from a givenness the distortion itself presupposes.

The Christian, looking in this mirror, does something different. She receives what the mirror gives, attends to it carefully, submits it to the community’s discernment, holds it accountable to the practices that have formed her seeing, and lifts her eyes in the direction the image points. She holds the partiality of her knowing with open hands. She holds the reality of her knowing with confidence. She is the creature who has been told that the One in whom all knowing is grounded already knows her fully, and that this prior knowing is the light in which she does her patient, corporeal, communal work.

This is the epistemological wager of public Christian theology. It is made from a body, in a community, in time, in hope. It honors the modernist’s faith that the world is real and the postmodernist’s exposure that our knowing of it is always situated and liable to distortion, while refusing the despair each tends toward when pressed to its conclusion.

Paul knew he saw through a glass, darkly. He regarded this as nothing less than knowledge. He regarded it as love. He regarded it as a station on the way toward the face he was already known by.

That is where public Christian theology begins: at the feet of the One whose knowing is the ground of ours, learning to receive before we claim to possess, learning to see by the light we are given rather than the light we generate.

Notes

1. 1 Corinthians 13:12 (KJV). For the patristic use of this text as an epistemological foundation, see Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, trans. Abraham Malherbe and Everett Ferguson (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 93–95; and Augustine, On the Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1991), XV.xiv.23–24.

2. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, 2 vols. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 1:339–399; Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 245–295. I come to the conversation originally through my undergraduate philosophical studies and art degree engagement with modernism and postmodernism.

3. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 1–11, 349–369.

4. Luminarchism names the theological error of collapsing transcendence into creaturely immanence, treating the creature’s experience of the greater as the system’s own depth rather than genuine encounter with a source that exceeds it. See Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity Book I, in Works, ed. John Keble (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), 1:200–224; Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 17–52.

5. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 27–28; The Order of Things, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xv–xxiv. For theological engagement, see James K.A. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 83–107.

6. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 6–26. For theological implications, see John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, eds., Radical Orthodoxy (London: Routledge, 1999), 1–20.

7. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 238–265.

8. Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 151–172; The Soul of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 1–28.

9. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 111–198.

10. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 128–141; Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 153–167.

11. Hans Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 87–103; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center, trans. Edwin Robertson (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 27–37.

12. William Temple, Nature, Man and God (London: Macmillan, 1934), 478.

13. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity Book I, in Works, ed. Keble, 1:200–224; W.J. Torrance Kirby, Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 44–62.

14. Austin Farrer, Finite and Infinite (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1943), 1–30.

15. Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), xi–xvi; The Wound of Knowledge (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1979), 1–15.

16. Austin Farrer, “The Christian Apologist,” in Light on C.S. Lewis, ed. Jocelyn Gibb (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1965), 23–43; Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 222–233.

17. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 187–196; Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001), 195–241.

18. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, enlarged ed., ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 281–282.

19. C. Andrew Doyle, Embodied Liturgy (New York: Church Publishing, 2026).

Reflecting on team prayer and the strange collective energy of religious ritual, one of her students said: ‘Sometimes you kind of have to pick your poison.’ Nothing is pure. And yet we have to live and make decisions. Maravich uses this to close an essay arguing that, despite everything, theology might still function as a kind of harm reduction in a damaged public square. Poison, handled carefully, can become medicine. She is not wrong, and her words are inspiring and invitational. But I want to prompt some new bits of conversation, because I think the failure modes of theology are more specific than general toxicity, and identifying them precisely is more useful than simply urging careful handling. Moreover, as a public theologian, I think we all would benefit from understanding just how to handle very important work.

The American public is, by Maravich’s account and by the evidence of recent years, hungry for theology. Lauren Jackson (host of Believing) noted in the New York Times that, in the face of war, economic collapse, and political upheaval, people seem to want the kind of meaning-making that theology has historically provided. The irony, as Maravich rightly observes, is that the institutions designed to produce careful theological thinking are simultaneously being defunded, sidelined, and in the case of seminaries, quietly sanitized into therapeutic wellness content. Meanwhile, politicians regularly do public theology with the full backing of state power, answering to no community of discernment and accountable to no tradition’s internal critics. The public hungers for theology. The theology it is being fed is, in several identifiable and specific ways, poison.

I want to name those ways. Not to frighten people away from theological reasoning, but because I believe, with Maravich, that the public sphere is better when the people within it know how to identify what they are dealing with. The three failure modes I am about to describe are not uniquely religious. They show up anywhere human beings have gathered around shared meaning. The room does not have to be religious for theology and faith to harm. Knowing them is how you stay honest in whatever room you are in.

The First Failure: Faith as Abdication

The first way theology becomes toxic is when it functions as a reason to stop thinking, to defer to an authority that has already settled the question, to outsource the difficult work of moral reasoning to a tradition, a text, a leader, or a feeling of divine reassurance. Call this faith as abdication. It is the posture that presents itself as humility, because it insists that the human mind must submit to something greater than itself, but functions in practice as the refusal of responsibility. The questions that should be asked are not asked. The evidence that should be weighed is not weighed. The suffering that should be addressed is deferred to God’s timing. The injustice that should be named is left to providence.

Maravich notes that serious theological study regularly drives people out of the traditions that formed them. They go looking for answers and discover that the hardest questions were being quietly set aside, that voices within the tradition had been kept from them, that what they were handed was a curated version with the difficult parts removed. The feeling that follows is not confusion. It is betrayal. They were given a product when they needed a tradition.

Faith as abdication appears in explicitly religious forms, but it wears secular clothes with equal comfort. The tech industry’s confidence that the algorithm will fix it is abdication wearing the language of optimisation. The data will tell us what to do. The model will learn what we need. The system will correct toward the good if we trust the process. These are theological claims, in Maravich’s sense, claims about ultimate power and ultimate direction, made without acknowledgment that they are theological claims and therefore without accountability to the communities they affect. Nobody has been authorised to question the algorithm’s premises. Nobody has the standing to ask who decided what the system is optimising for. The deference is total and the accountability is absent. That is abdication, and it is poison, regardless of whether the name of God is invoked.

The antidote to faith as abdication is not scepticism about all authority. It is the recovery of genuine discernment, the disciplined practice of asking the question that the managed tradition or the confident system most wants to leave unasked. What is actually happening here? Who is being served by this account of how things work? What does the person most affected by this decision have to say about it? These are theological questions in the fullest sense.

The Second Failure: Faith as Weapon

The second failure mode is more immediately visible and more immediately dangerous. It is theology weaponised, deployed not as a way of thinking about God and the human person but as a way of consolidating power, marking insiders and outsiders, and sanctifying violence. The pattern is very old; and religious types have a very difficult time when confronted with things they don’t understand. When a tradition’s deepest claims about human dignity, divine authority, and the shape of the good are annexed to the interests of those who hold power and used to justify what those interests require, the tradition has become a weapon. It may continue to use the language of love, of grace, of divine purpose. The language is intact. The logic is inverted.

Maravich notes, in her first essay, that the division of humanity into saved and unsaved, insiders and outsiders, the enlightened and the lost, is the template from which every subsequent act of organised exclusion has been generated. She is right. And the pattern travels. The nationalist who says history vindicates us is running the same operation: the story has a people it is for, and everyone else is either obstacle or casualty. The certainty behind that claim is not political. It is metaphysical. That is what makes it so hard to argue with and so dangerous to leave uncontested. The us is sacred. The them is expendable. This is weaponised meaning-making, and it is available to every tradition, secular and religious alike, that has decided it already knows who the story is for.

What makes theology as weapon so durable is that it is very difficult to contest from outside. If the tradition has already established the terms of legitimate speech, and if those terms exclude the people most harmed by the tradition’s deployment, the critique has no standing. This is precisely why the most effective critiques of weaponised theology have always come from within the traditions they contest. The Hebrew prophets indicted the abuse of religious authority from within Israel’s own covenant. The abolitionists who used scripture against slaveholders were doing theology against theology, not importing a foreign logic. The civil rights movement drew its energy from the Black church’s own deepest claims about human dignity and divine justice, wielding those claims against the structures that had annexed Christian language to the service of white supremacy. The weapon can be disarmed, but the disarmament requires someone who knows the tradition well enough to find the internal contradictions that the weaponised version has suppressed.

This is one of the reasons why the defunding and sanitising of serious theological education matters beyond the walls of the seminary. A public that has no access to the tradition’s internal critics, that has never been shown the voices within Christianity that contested its worst uses, that has no vocabulary for distinguishing the Gospel from its institutional distortions, is a public that cannot effectively contest the weaponised version when it appears. The alternative to Hegseth is not less theology. It is better theology, more widely held, more honestly taught, more genuinely accountable to the full range of people it affects.

The Third Failure: Faith as Sentiment

The third failure mode is the subtlest, and in the current cultural moment perhaps the most pervasive. It is theology reduced to feeling, to the cultivation of warmth and belonging and uplift, to what Maravich’s colleague Amaryah Armstrong describes as the demand that theology deliver hope and solidarity and unity, allow some passage through melancholy and lament, and then arrive at good feelings by the end of the book. Faith as sentiment is the failure mode of well-intentioned communities that have decided, consciously or unconsciously, that theology’s primary job is to make people feel better about being human in a world that is very hard to be human in.

Maravich identifies this as a direct product of secularisation. When religion must justify its presence in a culture that is suspicious of it, it tends to present itself as a resource for wellness rather than as a set of claims that will unsettle you. It needs to look helpful rather than challenging. It needs to produce the kind of outputs that a therapeutic culture recognises as valuable: reduced anxiety, increased belonging, a sense of meaning and purpose that does not require the examination of anything too difficult. The result is a theology that is, in Amaryah Armstrong’s phrase, a limited study of God, because the questions that might lead somewhere genuinely uncomfortable have been preemptively closed.

The optimist who tells people to stay positive when what is needed is truth-telling and repair is practicing faith as sentiment. The community that offers solidarity as a feeling rather than a commitment that costs something is practicing faith as sentiment. The leader who soothes without equipping, who acknowledges suffering without naming its causes, who gestures toward redemption without requiring anyone to be accountable for anything, is practicing faith as sentiment.

The hard thing is that none of these people are lying. The warmth is real. The belonging is real. The feeling of hope is real. What is absent is the willingness to let the tradition’s most difficult claims do what they were always meant to do: say what is actually wrong, name who is responsible, and ask for the kind of change that costs something. Maravich’s colleague is right that there is a limit built into this posture, and the limit is a limit on God. Why do we die? Why does evil organise itself so efficiently? What is the relationship between the divine and nothingness? These questions do not resolve into good feelings. A tradition that steers around them to protect the pastoral environment has decided that the pastoral environment matters more than the truth. The people it is supposed to serve eventually figure that out.

Theology as sentiment produces communities that are warm and comforting and entirely unprepared for the moment when the warmth and comfort are insufficient, which is to say, for every moment when the situation is genuinely serious.

The Shared Structure

All three failures are the same exit taken through different doors. Abdication hands the question to an authority and walks away. Weaponisation declares the question settled and dares anyone to reopen it. Sentiment arrives at the good feeling before the question has been honestly lived with. Each one delivers the stability and belonging that shared meaning promises. Each one skips the price. The price is accountability, which means the willingness to be changed by what you find when you press the question all the way down.

Genuine theology, whether it is conducted in a seminary classroom or a congregation or a small room of people who are willing to speak difficult things aloud to one another, requires the willingness to be changed by what you encounter. The tradition changes you. The questions change you. Notice, this cannot be undertaken in a sermon. We have to sit with each other and listen to each other at a deep level.

The person sitting across from you, whose experience of the tradition’s claims is different from yours, changes you. The God who is genuinely other than us, whose will does not reduce to our preferences or our politics or our need for good feelings, changes us. I think that this is what Maravich means when she says that the disappearance of formal spaces where people can struggle with the most difficult elements of theological knowledge, in community with one another, is genuinely worrying. Without those spaces, the struggle goes private, which means it goes unaccountable, which means it either collapses into one of the three failure modes or simply stops.

What Recovery Looks Like

A credible hope requires all three refusals at once. It refuses to hand the question off. It refuses to declare the question closed in favour of the powerful. It refuses to arrive at warmth before the damage has been honestly named. That means staying with the hardest questions rather than managing them. It means insisting that the tradition’s claims about human dignity apply most urgently to the people the tradition has most consistently failed. It means telling people what kind of cosmos they are actually in, not a tidied version of it.

This is not comfortable and it will not sell well in a wellness culture. But the student is right. You are always picking a poison. The tradition that shows you what you are dealing with, that does not hide its own failures, that refuses to manage you into compliance, is the one that builds the fortitude a genuinely difficult moment requires.

We are not failed animals awaiting optimisation or upgrade or management into wellness. We are broken image-bearers, responsible for our damage and capable of genuine reorientation. That is not a feel-good claim. It is more demanding than any of the three failure modes offers, because it insists on genuine accountability and genuine transformation rather than deference, domination, or consolation. But it is also the more hopeful claim, because it takes seriously both what human beings are capable of destroying and what they are capable of becoming. Picking your poison carefully means knowing the tradition in its full complexity, what it can do and what it has failed to do, where it has been weaponised and where, at its best, it has told the truth at cost to itself. That knowledge is not a luxury for the theologically sophisticated. It is what anyone needs who intends to stay human in an inhuman moment.