Apparently, you can even place bets on when foreign leaders will be captured.

In January 2026, an anonymous Polymarket account made more than $436,000 betting on when Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro would be removed from power.1 In April, federal authorities brought charges against Army Special Forces master sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke. They alleged that he used privileged and classified information from an operation he was part of to place bets on Polymarket—an online prediction-market website where you can place bets on nearly everything.2

This should concern us greatly.

I am thankful that federal authorities were alerted and are holding Van Dyke accountable. But Van Dyke is merely a symptom of a greater issue.

Predictive Markets

When this first came to light a couple of months ago, I did a bit of a deep dive into prediction markets. Users buy “yes” or “no” contracts on future events. The winning contract settles at a dollar; the losing contract settles at zero. As people place contrasting bets on a particular outcome, they are incentivized to learn as much as they can about that possibility, make a yes-or-no bet, and win.3

Polymarket’s founder described it as “a site where you can basically bet on current events.”4

The appeal is that when incentives are spread across a large group of bettors, they will try to gather more information about any given event. The market then concentrates that knowledge into a yes-or-no question with the possibility of predicting an uncertain outcome.

Take an election. If people are incentivized to make money by betting on who will win and who will lose, they might do tons of personal research around current trends, issues, and dynamics. Incentivizing this gathering of information can be more powerful than traditional polls because people are truly putting their money where their mouths are.

This is incredibly powerful.

In the midst of a pluralistic world with so many events happening, prediction markets promise to help people see the greater dynamics by incentivizing more people to gather information. The bettors make money. The prediction markets provide information that could not otherwise be seen.

But here we need to strip away the euphemisms.

But, wait, isn’t this just gambling?

This is not forecasting, intelligence, hedging, or democratized finance in pure form. Actually, as the More Perfect Union inquiry says, “This is people gambling.” They go on to state, “We are in the middle of a gambling public health crisis.”5

Polymarket and its variants are not merely crystal balls we can pull out of our pockets to see what is happening. Rather, “The casino is in your pocket.”6

And people are losing money.

One analysis found that 0.04 percent of traders captured nearly 70 percent of the profits.^[6] Here we have a platform promising that users’ knowledge will become power that can be monetized, yet the advantages are profoundly uneven. The incentives are addictive, but the losses spread downward.

Polymarket claims there is no house. You are not betting against the house; you are betting against other users. But the losses still spread downward.

What else is being incentivized?

Others have noted that the financial incentive also encourages insider trading. How could that possibly be regulated when anyone can place any bet about anything at any time? Those who have insider access to probabilities possess a major advantage—and are incentivized to use that information to make themselves money.

Let us zoom out and ask what is happening.

Humans are anxious about the future and about money

Prediction markets are interesting to people because people want to know the future. We want to have a sense of where things are going. Humans are limited in our capacity to know the future, but we are burdened with the knowledge that there will be a future. And so it makes sense that we want to find ways to secure some sense of what the future will be with whatever tools we have in the present.

Humans also think that having enough money—or access to money, hoarding money, saving enough money, making enough money—will secure that unknown future.

So we have two things coming together: the belief that enough money will secure the future, tied to the ongoing angst of trying to predict the future. Combining those human impulses creates this particular market, in which we commoditize information and predictions, hoping to know more about the future and then secure our personal future by taking that knowledge and monetizing it.

But we must really ask what we are doing.

What happens when another person’s danger appears first as an opportunity for gain? What changes in us when potential suffering becomes a position we can take—a bet we can cast to potentially make money?

The problem is not regulatory. The problem is not an unknown future.

The problem is profoundly spiritual.

Mammon, the god of money

A number of years ago, I read Jacques Ellul’s Money and Power. In it, Ellul demonstrates that money, in its very essence, has spiritual power. He notes that no one has to be convinced that money works. Money is imaginary. Even when it takes the form of precious metals, the metal does not have inherent or intrinsic power. Its power is held in what stands behind it, in what it represents: your ability to acquire goods and services.

We do not have to go through years of training to trust its power. Therefore, Ellul calls money a spiritual force and notes that Jesus calls it Mammon. He says, “What Jesus is revealing [about Mammon] is that money is a power.”7

Mammon is a lowercase god.

All false gods promise what they cannot deliver, and yet their lure entraps us in their service. Mammon says, If you finally have enough of me, you will not have to worry about the future.

Our modern world is obsessed with the future and with insecurity, and we are ridden with anxiety. Prediction markets try to alleviate both the anxiety of the future and the anxiety of not having enough.

The Mammon market loves this combination.

We pursue knowledge in order to secure our future. That knowledge is transformed into resources, money, or power, which also promise to secure our future.

Jesus has a better way

But Jesus says, as recorded in Matthew 6, “No one can serve two masters... You cannot serve God and money.” A few verses later: “So then, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.”

Mammon promises mastery of the future by feeding anxiety about the future. Mammon says: Watch more closely. Hoard more. Get more. Then: Bet more intelligently. Price out these crises. And perhaps you will be secure.

But Jesus teaches trust, daily bread, faithful presence, and confidence in what Walter Brueggemann calls “the abundance of God.”8

Here the Christian does not need to live in ignorance or passivity. The Christian does not need to hear, Do not prepare for tomorrow. But the Christian must hear that we are to refuse the belief that pricing out tomorrow—or making better predictions about tomorrow—can save us from tomorrow.

Tomorrow has enough troubles of its own.

Mammon wants to rule the world. Every god does. And the modern world has bowed deeply by commoditizing nearly everything. The modern world tries to price everything. Everything can be bought, sold, leveraged, or speculated upon. Nothing seems to remain outside the market relation—not even, apparently, tomorrow, a raid on a foreign leader, a president’s capture, or the fear of war.

For the Christian, the issue is not only what people wager on, as Van Dyke allegedly did. It is an imagination formed by believing that everything should have a price.

Money does not rule the world.

So we must refuse this catechism. We must refuse, I believe, sports betting, prediction markets, and the endless attempt to monetize the future through speculation.

We must seek first the kingdom of God. We ask for daily bread, and we live in the present, for the present is the only reality there is. The future is not. It never is. Only the now is, while the past simply was.

Therefore, we can trust that the Father knows what we need before the odds move.

Jesus sounds so irrelevant. He sounds like someone straight out of antiquity.

And yet, Jesus has exactly what we need:

“Seek first the kingdom of God and all else will be added unto you.”9

I believe in extending dignity, compassion, and mutuality to every relational sphere that I occupy space within. Some of my deepest discomforts in life have come in the context of being denied legitimacy arbitrarily.

So I advocate for equality, fairness, and listening.

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When I describe this, I am describing a communal exchange: a group, an organization, even a whole society. Most of us prefer this kind of arrangement, where everybody can express and be heard.

However, I stumbled upon a phrase that caught my attention and caused me to reflect more deeply about dynamics that I see happening on the regular. The phrase is malignant egalitarianism.

I took that phrase to mean that even our good-hearted, generous attempts to include a variety of perspectives on any given dynamic or topic can result in creating dynamics in which everyone, regardless of education or experience, is expected to retain the same amount of credibility as anyone else.

This is dangerous.

It is dangerous because it foregrounds or prioritizes voices being heard over, and often against, expertise. Expertise is sublimated to the value of equal voices.

Of course, we know this is not an actually legitimate way of interacting in a group. Take parents, for example. Parents, because of their experience and education, have more authority and therefore more decision-making capacity than children do. That is not a statement about the intrinsic value of children. It is rather an estimation of the competence of adults.

Similarly, in an age in which information is easily accessible to all, we may not recognize that apprehending a piece of data is not the same as the experience and education of someone who has devoted their whole life to understanding and articulating certain assertions.

Tom Nichols names this confusion directly: “Having equal rights does not mean having equal talents, equal abilities, or equal knowledge.”1 That distinction matters. The problem is not broad participation. The problem is the assumption that participation makes formation unnecessary.

This is where I find myself needing to be more careful. I do not want to abandon egalitarianism. I do not want to baptize hierarchy as wisdom. I do not want to excuse people who use expertise as a way to dominate or dismiss others.

But I also do not want to confuse equal dignity with equal credibility.

My model, of course, is Jesus.

Jesus submitted himself to his parents. Jesus, though God, submitted himself to the form of a human, even a servant. And in his authority, he included those who were far less socially or religiously authorized than he was.

Philippians 2 gives this its Christological center: Jesus does not cling to status, but takes “the form of a servant.”2 Mark 8 gives the discipleship shape: if we want to follow Jesus, we deny ourselves, take up the cross, and follow him.3

That means spiritual maturity cannot be measured only by a person’s ability to lead. It must also be measured by a person’s ability to follow. A mature Christian can exercise authority without grasping for superiority, and receive authority without collapsing into passivity or resentment. To lead well, one must also know how to be led.

That seems important. Jesus does not show us authority without humility. But he also does not show us humility as the erasure of authority.

When it comes to understanding the body, medicine, and healthcare, for example, I am no expert. I listen, humble myself, and assume I have a lot to learn.

In this, I am upholding healthy egalitarianism. In this, I am practicing healthy differentiation.

My status as the lesser-formed person in a given area actually gives place for me to uphold humility, which is the glue of a healthy, democratic, egalitarian society.

Experts do not need to be sublimated to non-experts in a false humility.

And non-experts do not need to pretend they know less than they do. But they do need to know the difference between being included and being equally competent, between being heard and being equally authoritative, between having dignity and having expertise.

I find this to be a fascinating question.

Conflict is not the problem. Rather, conflict may be the sign of mutual differentiation at work.

Differentiation is a word that, in shorthand, describes one’s ability, first of all, to be an individual within a community. Secondly, healthy differentiation is the ability to engage that community with one’s whole self. Furthermore, healthy differentiation is not static or unmoved. Rather, it is able to be appropriately affected by the feedback of the community around it without losing itself.1

So, if one is encountering conflict, the first question should not be, “What is wrong?” Perhaps it should be, “What is right?”

Conflict, in its most basic form, is disagreement between people. That disagreement may concern what happened, which ideas are true, or whether one person has harmed another. Stated this plainly, each of these feels almost neutral. They are understandable, natural, and quite normal.

Yet in every case, the same question quietly presents itself: Am I wrong?

Conflict Over Reality

Sometimes conflict centers on memory—what actually happened.

In those moments, we are forced to recognize the limitations of our own perception. It is terribly difficult to admit that we may not have noticed what we should have noticed, or that we failed to gather, retain, or properly weigh information that later proved important.

Every one of us understands what it is like to be distracted. We have all experienced moments when we could not accurately describe what happened.

When someone else offers additional information, we are forced to ask: Maybe my memory is wrong. And perhaps another question follows: Should I have been paying closer attention?

The German word Vergangenheitsbewältigung is helpful here (Thanks Todd!). It is often used to describe the difficult work of coming to terms with the past, especially a morally burdened past, so that what happened is neither denied nor repeated.2 It is not mere acknowledgment. It is a slow process of internalizing the truth of what happened and allowing that truth to change what happens next.

This is not only national work. It is personal work. Philippians gives the posture: “Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit.” When we are able to tell the truth about the past, we live in the reality that truth created.

Conflict Over Ideas

Conflict may also arise around ideas. An idea is a collection of information that suggests, in abstract terms, the future effects of living according to those ideas—or not.

We live in an ideological age in which many of our identities are built around ideas. We often claim labels—Democrat or Republican, progressive or conservative—long before we can fully articulate the assumptions, strengths, or limitations of those identities. Nor are we often able to admit where our own ideological framework fails to account for the complexity of life.

In such a world, we become accustomed to defensiveness. Our ideas are no longer merely ideas; they become extensions of ourselves.

Yet even here we must ask: Am I wrong? Or perhaps more precisely: Is there more information required? What aspect of reality does my ideology fail to touch?

Conflict Over Justice

Finally, conflict may arise because of injustice. Here the question is not simply whether I remembered correctly or reasoned carefully. The question is whether I acted rightly. Have I been wrong in my words? Have I been wrong in my actions?

At a severe level, there may be legal consequences for being wrong. More often, however, the legal system cannot bear the full weight of the injustices that occur between people. There are harms that are real even when no court can carry them.

The last question we should ask is, “Was I legal?” The first question should be, “Was I loving?”

In shorthand: Was I moral? Was I truthful? Was I circumspect? Did I react intending to harm, or did I respond seeking to heal?

Conflict inevitably presses upon us the question: Am I wrong? Or at least: Am I capable of being wrong? It is terribly difficult to feel wrong. We often reject that possibility and, in doing so, respond with defensiveness at best and accusation at worst.

Back to differentiation. Proper differentiation means there is room for disagreement, conflict, emotion, and even for people to be wrong.

Grace Makes Space

The theological word is grace. Grace creates an environment in which difference is expected rather than feared. It allows disagreement to surface without immediately threatening belonging. There is safety to be different, safety to learn, safety to repent, and safety to grow.3

Grace, as it turns out, is not merely reactive. It is proactive. It gives room for conflict before conflict arrives. It makes space for difference. And where there is genuine difference, conflict is not only possible. It is natural.

For if we are already healed in Christ, then let’s talk it out.

But grace also calls people back into community. Here is the heart of Christian reconciliation.

It is not merely the work of repairing significant harms after they occur. It is a way of life that makes room for genuine difference in the first place.

Cain could not tolerate the difference of Abel. Joseph’s brothers could not tolerate the difference of Joseph. Again and again, human sinfulness seeks legitimacy through homogeneity, sameness. It attempts to secure peace by eliminating difference. But, making everyone the same is not the movement of creation. It is de-creation.

Christianity moves in the opposite direction. The cross does not erase difference. The cross mediates difference. And we become people of grace.4

Our personhood becomes firmly established in Christ. Our communities develop the capacity to metabolize difference—with respect, with robust conversation, and with an unending commitment to repair whenever our differences create fissures in our relationships.

So do not run away from conflict. Instead, be willing to ask the implied question: Am I wrong?

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Every nation-state attempts to define reality for its inhabitants. It tells a story about who “we” are, where “we” came from, what “we” value, and who belongs within that story.

Yet every nation-state is, by its very nature, exclusionary.

William Cavanaugh names the deeper problem plainly: “Nationality is not simply natural or objective... [it] is constructed.”1 The nation-state does not merely discover a people already waiting there in pure form. It narrates a people into being. It gathers and curates and culls memory, territory, sacrifice, law, language, and myth, then calls the result “us.”2

This “us” is chronologically exclusionary because its account of reality necessarily begins at a particular moment. It cannot fully represent the contingent histories of the land and the peoples who came before it. In America’s case, we cannot honestly claim to represent the lived reality of Indigenous peoples whose histories, cultures, and relationships to this land long predate the establishment of the United States.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz presses this point with particular force: “To say the U.S. is a colonialist settler state is not to make an accusation but to face historical reality.”3 That sentence matters because it refuses the easy binary of love or condemnation. Truth is not hatred. Memory is not betrayal.

It is also geographically exclusionary. The ideals it proclaims are bounded by its borders. Freedom and equality, if they are truly universal goods, inevitably exceed the political realities of the nation-state. They cannot ultimately be contained within national boundaries.

This is the tension I feel on the Fourth of July.

I do not write this as an act of condemnation but of description. America proclaims freedom and equality while existing as a bounded political community. Like every nation-state, it must live with the irony that its highest ideals cannot be fully realized within the very structures that define it. We live, therefore, with both a denial of the past and a contradiction in the present.

The Freedom of Christian Memory

For the Christian, these limitations should not surprise us.

Our primary identity is not national but ecclesial. Our citizenship is not finally secured by geography, ethnicity, language, or political allegiance, but by Christ. We are therefore free to acknowledge the histories our nation (almost by necessity), forget, to name the contradictions they cannot escape, and to loosen our grip on identities that keep us postured against those who live beyond our borders.

Miroslav Volf writes, “At the very core of Christian identity lies an all-encompassing change of loyalty.”4 That is not a call to despise the place where we live. It is a call to stop asking the nation to bear the weight of ultimacy. Only God can hold that.

The Fourth of July is, in the first place, a sober reflection on the lengths to which people will go to free themselves from tyranny.

But it is also the beginning of an unavoidable contradiction. Every declaration of independence simultaneously establishes new (exclusionary!) boundaries of belonging. Every border creates an inside and an outside. Essentially, we are this by not being that.

The Kingdom Without End

The point, however, is not that one nation should rule the world. The point for the Christian is that the One who already reigns has established a transnational kingdom.

In Christ, the dividing wall of hostility has been broken down. The kingdom of God extends across time and space, beyond every border and boundary, beyond every nationality and ethnicity, beyond every political identity. The cross mediates where our cultures, polities and nations divide. It equalizes where our systems stratify. It bestows dignity where our histories have denied it.

There is no contradiction in the way of Jesus.

This land is God’s land. Indigenous peoples are God’s people. Immigrants are God’s people. Americans are God’s people. Every tribe, every tongue, every nation belongs ultimately to God.

So today I remember. I refuse to deny the past. I refuse to absolutize the nation. And I place my hope beneath the banner of the One whose kingdom has no end.

So, you won’t see me singing an anthem, you won’t see a hand over my heart, you won’t hear me argue about our greatness or defend our exploits. Rather, you’ll hear me sing anthems to God, reverently bow in prayer to God and make confessions of loyalty and allegiance to Jesus, the one who dies that we might live. And in our death to self, to identities too small, we find life again.

Hauerwas and Willimon say it with almost jarring simplicity: “God, not nations, rules the world.”5 That is not a slogan against America. It is the beginning of Christian sanity within America.

May we apprehend that reality afresh this Fourth of July.

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In listening to commentary about the context of Mary Shelley’s writing, it became apparent that she possessed, even at a young age, an awareness of and concern about the advent of technology, human ingenuity, and science, along with the possible negative effects these endeavors might have. She wrote the book in 1818. She had no idea how dramatically the world would change.

The protagonist of the novel is Victor Frankenstein, a man of ambition and great intellectual power who heads to university and immerses himself in the natural sciences. In his desire to bring something of value into the world, he attempts the unthinkable: he creates life itself.

And it is hideous. But, surprisingly beautiful. Humane, even.

An Unexpected Monster

What I had never considered before is that Shelley gives space for this created being to discover what life is and how it works. We hear his reflections as he learns to distinguish night from day, as he begins to understand plants and trees, as he experiences hunger, cold, warmth, and beauty. He delights in birdsong. He admires human affection. He secretly gathers firewood for the family he watches from afar. He learns language. Eventually, he learns to read.

Most surprisingly, the creature is profoundly moral and remarkably ready to love.

He longs for communion.

Yet he discovers that his hideous appearance ostracizes him from the very community for which he was made. Everywhere he turns, he encounters fear, rejection, and violence. And perhaps most painful of all, Victor, his creator, cannot love his own creation.

The creature eventually tracks down Frankenstein and attempts to force him into creating a companion. He promises that if another like him is made, the two of them will leave humanity forever. But Victor, recognizing the consequences of what he has done, reneges on his promise. The betrayal elicits a great anger that eventually turns into vengeance.

The creature takes his revenge. He murderously haunts Frankenstein’s life.

As Victor loses members of his family and eventually the woman he loves, he too becomes consumed by revenge. He devotes himself to hunting down the creature, but the creature continually eludes him, leading him farther and farther into ruin until Victor ultimately dies pursuing his enemy.

In the final scenes of the novel, the creature stands over Victor’s lifeless body, regretting the vengeance that has consumed them both. Then he disappears into the darkness.

Death brought death. Life that should have brought life ends in death that brings more death.

Mary Shelley gives us a picture of what happens when human beings attempt to create life according to their own ingenuity and ambition. It ends in deformity, aberration, broken promises, discontinuity, and incongruity.

Yet the deeper tragedy may not be that Victor created life. The deeper tragedy is that he could not love what he created.

This seems demonstratively human. We bring ingenuity into the world and then act surprised when it takes on a life of its own. We create systems, technologies, institutions, and movements, and then struggle to love them into maturity. We want the power of creation without the burden of responsibility.

Our Monster is Alive and Lurking

In 1978, Christopher Lasch wrote The Culture of Narcissism. Decades later, it increasingly appears that we have created a world that requires people to function like narcissists. A world of image and prestige. A world of branding, self-promotion, using people, minimizing people, and treating relationships as instruments.

Now this has become monstrous on epic proportions. Books emerge with titles like When Narcissism Comes to Church, The Pandora Problem: Facing Narcissism in Leaders and Ourselves, and Narcissism: Denial of the True Self. Pamphlets circulate under titles such as “Narcissism in the Pulpit”. We seem shocked by the creature before us.

But perhaps we should not be. We helped create it. And now we turn on it with violence. Just as the creature took revenge on Victor, and Victor took revenge on the creature, we find ourselves trapped in cycles of accusation, outrage, retaliation, and contempt. Love cannot seem to interrupt the cycle. The world turns on itself.

Creator and creature become mirrors of one another. Victor and his creation end up sharing the same deformity.

Mary Shelley leaves a question hanging in the air: Are we bound to the same death logic that consumed Victor and his creature? Or will we interrupt this spiral into the hellscape of accusation?

We are not the Creator. We are the created.

But as created beings, we have an obligation to live as we were created to live: To love. To steward what has been entrusted to us toward righteousness. To take responsibility for what our ambition has made. To refuse the lie that we can create without care, expose without mercy, or answer deformity with vengeance.

Victor could not love what he created. That was his ruin. May it not be ours.

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These moments are dramatic, but they did not begin with healing.

They began with someone being seen.

The woman with the issue of blood had suffered for years. Her condition was not new. She was likely known throughout her community by her wound long before she was healed. Jesus is touched by her and then he sees her (Mark 5:30–34).

The woman at the well in John 4 (John 4:1–42) carried years of disappointment, shame, and fractured relationships. Jesus met her in the heat of the day, saw her story, listened to her, and spoke to her dignity before she ever became an evangelist to her village.

The man lowered through the roof had friends who refused to let him remain unseen. They disrupted the crowd because they believed their friend’s suffering deserved attention (Mark 2:1–12).

The man at the pool of Bethesda (John 5:1–15) had been there for thirty-eight years. Thirty-eight years of disappointment. Thirty-eight years of watching others get what he could not reach. Before Jesus healed him, Jesus asked a question: “Do you want to get well?” (John 5:6). Jesus listened.

Again and again, Scripture reveals a God who notices (Genesis 16:13, Exodus 3:7). Moreover, the Christian community is known by its love for one another (John 13:34–35). We love by patiently noticing each other

Paul tells believers to “weep with those who weep” and “rejoice with those who rejoice” (Romans 12:15). He teaches that we comfort others with the comfort we ourselves have received (2 Corinthians 1:3–4). Christian community is not merely a collection of healed people. It is a people learning to carry one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2).

Even Job’s story is often misunderstood. Much of the book consists of long conversations between a wounded man and those trying to make sense of his suffering. The conversations stretch on chapter after chapter. The friends are frequently wrong, but the book itself demonstrates that suffering is not solved by a quick answer. It demands presence, listening, and patience (Job 2:11–13). Have you ever been through a season in which you talked on and on trying to make sense of what was happening to you or around you? If you've ever been shamed into silence, just remember that one of the longest books in the bible is all about an open discussion of suffering. If you talk long enough, you might make it into the canon of scripture! Ha!

Healing is communal. Paul says that we are the body of Christ and when one member of the body suffers, all suffer together (1 Corinthians 12:26).

Jesus himself was prophesied to be a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53:3). He openly weeps (John 11:35), is moved with compassion (Matthew 9:36), and begs his friends to stay with him in his own hour of suffering (Matthew 26:38). The Psalms are filled with lament. Much of Scripture gives voice to pain rather than rushing past it.

Our discomfort with wounded people is often more cultural than biblical. I read recently that we don't mind hearing about the suffering once it is in the past, a bit tidy, with a great story of overcoming. But, for many reasons, we are not very interested in the messy present.

However...

Love is patient (1 Corinthians 13:4). James tells us to be quick to listen and slow to speak (James 1:19).

The Good Samaritan does not walk past the wounded man wondering whether he has become too identified with his suffering (Luke 10:25–37). He stops. He sees. He binds wounds. He carries burdens.

Likewise, Lazarus lies at the rich man’s gate (Luke 16:19–31). The tragedy is not merely that Lazarus suffers. The tragedy is that he is ignored.

There is a freedom that comes when people are seen and heard.

If you find yourself on the road to Jericho and encounter someone’s pain, do not walk by. Stop.

If someone lies at your gate in need, open your eyes.

If you discover that you have become blind to those who suffer, ask God to help you see again.

Healing is a work of God. But one of the ways God heals is through people who refuse to look away.

Before many people are healed, they first need to know that they have been noticed. Healing happens in community.

There is great freedom in being seen, welcomed and supported.

Let's be that sort of community.

“Who?” you say.

He was a prophet in one of the most revealing scenes in 1 Kings.1 The prophet does not flatter the king. He does not help the court preserve its preferred story. He says what is true, and Zedekiah, the court prophet, answers not with repentance, but with a slap.

It is a small act of violence, but it tells us everything.

Power does not want advice. It prefers confirmation. Strokes. Dutiful nods and flattering smiles.

It wants prophets who can stabilize its image, sanctify its instincts, and keep the machinery of the court emotionally intact. Orderly, predictable.

A bit of context. In 1 Kings 21, Ahab humbles himself (what?!) after judgment is pronounced against him, and the Lord responds with mercy.2 That is real grace. But grace is not the same thing as permissiveness. Mercy is meant to lead somewhere. It is meant to produce repentance, obedience, and changed desire. Ahab receives a merciful delay of judgment, but he does not become brave. He does not become truthful. He remains curved inward, self-protective to the core, unable to live by faith.

An all-too-common tragedy.

Ahab can appear humble without becoming holy.

By 1 Kings 22, the mask slips again. We see his fearful heart. The royal system is still built around managed appearances, agreeable voices, and punishments for contradiction. Micaiah becomes the figure to imitate not because he wins, but because he tells the truth when telling the truth is costly. He does not control the outcome. He does not command the room. He does not get applauded for his integrity.

He tells the truth and gets struck in the face. Truth comes at a cost when it interrupts power.

It still does.

Powerful People Don’t Feel Their Lies…Say What?!

I was reminded of this while reading Jeff Roper’s Following Wisdom, Leading Wisely: Proverbs as Ancient Wisdom for Today’s Leader.3 Roper is working in Proverbs: wisdom is not technique. It is formation. It is the slow making of a person who can be trusted with words, power, appetite, correction, and authority.

Jeff’s book referenced a Columbia University study with a title that sounds almost too blunt to be academic: People with Power are Better Liars.4 In the original Columbia paper, Carney et al. tested whether positional power changes the internal cost of lying.5

The experiment was simple in its moral architecture. Participants were assigned to high-power or low-power roles. Then some were instructed to steal a $100 bill and deny it, while others told the truth. Researchers measured moral emotion, cognitive strain, cortisol, and nonverbal leakage. The reported pattern was sobering: low-power liars showed more signs of distress, but high-power liars looked much more like truth-tellers.6

In other words, power did not merely give people more room to lie. It seemed to make lying feel less costly. Similar to how people feel and react when they are actually telling the truth.7

The Bible is not naive about what power does to people. Lies become systems. Courts gather around them. Prophets are paid to bless them. Religious language gets drafted to protect them.

And when the lie has enough institutional force behind it, the person who tells the truth starts to look like the problem.

And the liars who occupy positions of power are less likely to feel the internal checks to lying. And, if you get away with it, you may even crave lying. Roper reflects:

power influences leaders to focus on rewards as opposed to costs, which could shift focus away from a fear of getting caught and toward pleasure in lying successfully.8

Whoa. Sit with that: shift focus…toward pleasure in lying successfully.

Although politicians lie—a lot—the issue is not simply partisan conflict. The deeper issue is that populist-oriented power cannot tolerate limits for long. Once loyalty to the leader becomes the organizing principle, dissent is not correction. It becomes treason.

The pattern it is not hard to see. Truth gets subordinated to image. Public life gets organized around one man’s grievance. Allies are useful until they cease to mirror the story he needs told. Then they, too, become targets.

Christians should recognize this pattern before anyone else, because we have already read 1 Kings. We have read Matthew 14 (Luke 9, Mark 6) about Herod and Herodias, a dancer and John’s head.9 We have reflected on many passion weeks in which The Truth is condemned because he bore witness to the oppressive power of the religious elite.

We (should) know the difference between a true prophet and a court prophet. We know the difference between humility and image management. We know that rulers often want the appearance of divine calling more than the reality of humble obedience. And we know that when a king, a pastor, a president cannot bear contradiction, everyone around him is pressured to become a flatterer.

Cover Up Culture

That pressure does not only live in DC. It lives in churches, institutions, ministries, families, and movements of every kind. Anywhere an institution develops a preferred public image, truth becomes dangerous. Ironically, in Christian circles, the truth is supposed to set us free, but it becomes something to avoid or to cover up. So we have The Roys Report.10 Anywhere leaders choose control over repentance, Micaiah will eventually be slapped. Thankfully Julie and her team help free the truth so we can be set free by that same truth.

But, the slap still comes. It is reputational. A demotion. A whispered warning. Raised eyebrows. A loss of access. Silence. Or, maybe a meeting after the meeting. A sudden concern about your tone. A private reminder that this is not how loyal people talk.

Wade Mullen’s research and writing help us to see the modern ways that truth-tellers get slapped around. It’s subtle. You should read his writing.11

Truth-telling is not a personality trait. It is a spiritual discipline. It requires formation. It is formation. It requires learning to fear God more than the room. That’s the beginning of wisdom, after all.

Wisdom. Not cleverness. Not political or platform fluency. Not the well-managed tone of the upwardly mobile. Wisdom. The kind that can receive correction without revenge. The kind that can tell the truth without needing to dominate. The kind that can stand near power without inhaling its lies.

Let us Be Disciples of The Truth

So the summons is not first to outrage. It is to discipleship. Always, the Christian runs towards the master teacher who says, “let your yes be yes and your no be no...anything else is of the devil.”12

Christian, do not be the court prophet. Do not become so eager for access, influence, or relevance that you lose the nerve to speak plainly. Do not confuse proximity to power with faithfulness to Jesus. Better to stand with Micaiah and be struck than to stand in the king’s chamber, know the game afoot and turn a blind eye.

And, remember, if you have power, lying feels...well, like you’re telling the truth.

Jesus is still the truest witness. He, too, stood before rulers who wanted performance, not truth. He, too, was struck when his words exposed the moral emptiness of the powerful.13 And in him we see that truthful witness is not failure, even when it is costly. The church does not exist to protect the image of kings. The church exists to bear witness to the kingdom of God.

Tell the truth, then. Even when it costs.

Even when lying feels good. Or, like the truth.

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I went to see Masters of the Universe over the weekend.

As a child, I wasn’t allowed to watch He-Man, She-Ra, or, at times, even the Smurfs. Of course, whatever prohibitions were put on me, I did not always follow. An episode here or there was watched.

The world of Masters of the Universe is a world where good and evil are clearly defined, almost caricatured. In today’s landscape, where the good guys aren’t as good as we thought they were and the bad guys evoke sympathy from us, that world has a certain appeal.

It’s not just about black and white, right and wrong. It’s about art doing what it can to evoke desire within us—to make us hunger and thirst for righteousness, as Jesus says. Prince Adam, or He-Man, embodies that goodness to a large extent.

Of course, in the echoes of World War II and the pervasive myth of redemptive violence, the good guys still destroy the bad guys. I still long for movies that evoke peaceful desire, not violent solutions.

Overall, Masters of the Universe fell into the modern trap of trying to do too much. The violence, monsters, and special effects were excessive at times. Much of the humor was appreciated, but even that occasionally reached too far.

Skeletor, played by Jared Leto, was on point. Because he is already a character who caricatures evil, one doesn’t have to think too hard to notice that his narcissistic squeals don’t seem all that distant from certain leaders we encounter today.

Because it wasn’t attempting the nuanced, gritty, realistic nihilism that so much contemporary art strives for, I found myself unexpectedly inspired.

Just be the good guy. Be on the right side of things.

Although it was clumsy at times, the film tried to incorporate themes of empathy and dialogue. And that’s what being one of the good guys is, after all. Diplomacy anyone?

As most of my readers know, I could do with a whole lot less violence. But at the very least, this movie painted a picture in which the good guys are clearly good, and the bad guys are clearly bad.

I don’t think the takeaway is that we’re supposed drill down to figure out who the bad guys are with a big pointy finger. That’s actually too easy to do. Uninteresting, uncreative, unhelpful. We’re supposed to simply endeavor to be good people ourselves. There’s a big difference between humble disciples of Jesus and self-righteous Pharisaical religious people. One is self-reflective and the other stands over others in judgement and accusation.

And maybe what we discover is that the people we think are the bad guys believe they are the good guys. An accurate reading of history demonstrates badness and goodness all around.

Maybe there aren’t that many Skeletors around? Certainly there are a few to eschew, avoid, name and refuse to be influenced by. Maybe that’s a bit naïve or simplistic. Or maybe that’s the idealism that Masters of the Universe evokes within us.

We have the power—to do good, to bring good, to affirm good. I am in. How about you?

The score was great! Loved the 80’s throwback vibe.

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At sixteen, S.E. Hinton began writing The Outsiders. Nearly sixteen, Ponyboy and Johnny found themselves looking out at a a big world full of violence, division and pain, but also, beauty. At sixteen, I sensed a clear call from Jesus—a call that would shape the rest of my life.

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A few days back, sitting in a Broadway theater watching The Outsiders with my daughter, who has just turned sixteen herself, I found myself thinking about beginnings.

The musical was excellent. Tony award winning. Deservedly so. It captured the ache and longing of Hinton’s novel, the struggle to find belonging in a world eager to divide people into categories. Greasers. Socs. Insiders. Outsiders.

But what moved me most was not the story on the stage. It was the story sitting beside me.

Since she was small, Ava has lived with one foot in this world and one foot in the world of imagination. She writes stories. She writes songs. She sings and sings. She learns every instrument she can get her hands on. On our trip, we wandered by New York University’s School of Music just to peek inside. Who knows what God might do? The future remains unwritten.

At sixteen, possibilities feel endless.

She is beginning to hinge outward toward the world. She carries hopes, dreams, and great expectations. Not expectations of fame or success, but expectations that life can be meaningful, beautiful, and worth giving oneself to.

In that sense, she reminds me of another sixteen-year-old I once knew.

I did not come from much. I’m a small-town boy. Donia grew up in the rough neighborhoods of Sacramento. Yet somehow, God keeps inviting us to take the next step. We have spent much of our lives stepping into uncertainty, trusting that obedience mattered more than certainty.

Like the Curtis brothers—Darry, Soda, and Ponyboy—we have known our share of tension, hardship, and misunderstanding. We are still living inside a conflict that shapes much of our daily experience. The story is not finished.

Yet one lesson I continue to learn is that human labels rarely tell the truth—or much of it. The world is constantly inviting us into binaries: us vs. them, friend and enemy, right and wrong, winner and loser. The easiest thing in the world is to accept the labels and start throwing stones.

But the kingdom of God moves differently. Jesus halts the whole stone throwing thing with a simple invitation to self-reflection. He who is without sin, go ahead…cast stones.

We are trying to refuse the labels. We are trying to refuse the making of enemies. We are trying to refuse the gravitational pull of accusation, resentment, and violence. We do not always do it perfectly, but it remains our hope.

Our deepest expectation is that God’s love is large enough for everyone and we believe dignity is not a scarce resource. That grace is not a limited commodity. That reconciliation is possible. That healing can emerge where wounds once defined the landscape. That somehow, in God’s economy, everyone can win.

As I watched my daughter watching the story, I found myself filled with hope. The same God who spoke to a sixteen-year-old boy decades ago is still speaking. The same God who stirred the imagination of a sixteen-year-old novelist is still creating. The same God who is calling young people into lives of courage, beauty, and faithfulness is still at work.

The story is not mine, after all. It never was.

S.E. Hinton wrote a remarkable novel. The creators of The Outsiders crafted a remarkable musical. But behind every human story stands a greater Author. God is writing the story of the whole world.

And sometimes, sitting beside a sixteen-year-old with her whole life ahead of her, you catch a glimpse of the next chapter.

That is enough to give a person hope.

See also:

At 47 years old, I read The Outsiders for the first time. I finished it today. My daughter Ava introduced it to me. Many thanks, Ava! (We head to Broadway to see the musical this coming Saturday! Happy 16th Birthday Ava!)

A young adult novel, written in the 1960s, about teenagers trapped in a world divided between Greasers and Socs. The protagonist, Ponyboy, is unusually reflective about the whole experience. He notices things. He sees the abuse and sadness in Johnny. He slowly comes to understand that his older brother Darry’s anger is, in part, the desperate expression of a twenty-year-old trying to raise a family with no parents. What else could Darry have become?

Ponyboy watches faces. He notices dull gray eyes hollowed out by deadened sensibilities and other eyes still capable of warmth and laughter. He sees that nearly everyone around him is caught in cycles of violence.

And despite how violent the novel is, the undertone is clear: it is all so tragically useless.

Writing in the middle of the Vietnam War, I wonder whether S. E. Hinton consciously understood how much her novel functioned as a quiet protest against violence itself. When the world is divided into social classes, tribes, and rival allegiances, people become reducible to targets. The “final” evening rumble might as well be Hamburger Hill or Nagasaki.

Violence always tells the same lie: that the destruction of the other will finally save us.

But it never does.

In the end, Ponyboy discovers that his attentiveness — his love of poetry, his noticing of sunsets, his stubborn ability to see humanity in every player, Greasers and Socs alike — enables him to write the paper for his English teacher. In other words, he becomes a witness instead of merely another participant in the cycle.

And yet the bodies remain.

Johnny is dead.
Dallas is dead.
Bob is dead.

What about us now?

Will we continue the endless making of enemies? Will we inherit the world exactly as it has been handed to us? Or will we become people who notice what is happening around us? Will we notice how ridiculous the violence really is? Will we notice the Johnnys, the Dallases, the Darrys — all the wounded people trying and failing to survive?

I think we should.

Hinton’s work demands that we do.

And, here is my deepest point: Ponyboy resists mimetic collapse through contemplation. He keeps seeing beauty. The sunset becomes an interruption to tribalism. That is not sentimentalism. That is spiritual resistance.

That is also why artists, poets, pastors, and prophets are often dangerous people in violent societies. They keep reminding everyone that the “enemy” has a face.

See also:

The Aimee Semple McPherson series has been paused for further editorial review. I really want to get this right!

Thank you for your patience.

Isaac

Matthew 4:8-10 (NET)

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their grandeur.

And he said to him, “I will give you all these things if you throw yourself to the ground and worship me.”

Then Jesus said to him, “Go away, Satan! For it is written: ‘You are to worship the Lord your God and serve only him.’”

The Offer Beneath Empire

The third temptation finally says out loud what the first two implied.

All the kingdoms of the world can be yours.

Take the power.
Take the reach.
Take the visible order.
Just worship on the wrong terms.

That is the deepest temptation because it exposes the bargain beneath empire. Empire offers peace, glory, safety, and historical significance at the price of worship. You may have the kingdoms, if you are willing to bless domination as necessary and call coercion wisdom.

This is why war speech so often sounds liturgical. Lincoln read the Civil War through divine judgment: “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” Wilson ended his 1917 war message with, “God helping her, she can do no other.” Roosevelt turned D-Day into a national prayer, asking God to receive “Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.” And after September 11, George W. Bush framed the coming conflict by saying, “God is not neutral between them.”1

Sacred Violence and Holy Language

In his February 28 statement on Iran, Netanyahu cast the war in Purim language: Haman fell, the evil regime would end, and Amos was made to roar.2 In his Passover eve address, he said Israel had dealt Iran “ten blows” and compared one to “the plague of the firstborns.”3

The enemy becomes Haman. Military blows become plagues. Senior officials become the firstborn. National survival is fused with biblical memory until bombardment begins to sound like redemptive history.

That is not a side issue. That is the issue.

Sacred violence is still violence.

And this is not only an Israeli problem, or an American problem, or a right-wing problem. It is a human problem. Every violent order wants more than victory. It wants innocence. It wants moral transcendence. It wants to be told that its bombs are not merely useful, but righteous.

That is why the temptation is worship.

Once domination is framed as sacred duty, the kingdoms no longer look compromised. They look glorious. They look urgent. Even decline can be baptized this way. Economist Jeffrey Sachs argues that American hegemony still rests on the belief that Washington dominates the battlefield, even as that belief is fraying.4 Empire knows it is weaker than it claims. Visible force can still mimic sovereignty after moral credibility has begun to drain away.

So the third temptation is not ancient and abstract. It is alive. It sounds like this:

Take the kingdoms before someone else does.
Rule before you are ruled.
Strike before you are struck.
Worship power if you want order.

Jesus refuses.

That refusal is everything. He does not deny that the kingdoms are real. He does not pretend Rome is harmless. He simply refuses to save the world by becoming fluent in Caesar’s game. He will not worship the logic of domination in order to inherit its results.

The cross is not merely what empire does to innocence. It is God’s judgment on the fantasy that history can be healed through superior force. Christ does not defeat the kingdoms by out-gunning them. He exposes them. He lets their violence be thrust onto his own body and then rises beyond it.

The resurrection is not the Father’s endorsement of better empire. It is the Father’s vindication of an altogether different kingdom. Psalm 2 warns rulers because rulers forget their limits. Be wise. Be warned. God laughs. The kingdoms want us to believe their reach is final.

It is not.

The true king does not secure his reign by shedding someone else’s blood. We live amid constant invitations to confuse strength with coercion. We are told that realism demands force. We are told that order requires overwhelming violence.

We are told that peace is what happens after enough enemies have been broken.

But if the enemy-love of Jesus means anything, it means the church cannot accept those terms without remainder.

One qualification matters. Refusing empire does not mean refusing truth. Enemy-love is not permission to minimize evil, abandon the vulnerable, or ask the wounded to bless their own subjugation. Christian peace is truthful, costly, protective, and morally clear.

But moral clarity is not the same thing as accepting domination as a means to an end. The church must learn that distinction again.

Refusing to Bow

John Kirbow, a veteran and counter extremism writer, makes a practical version of the same point. Writing out of counterinsurgency logic, he warns us to “stop seeing people outside your political community as The Enemy.”5 Empire always needs a definable, visible enemy class. Once everyone outside our tribe becomes enemy, domination starts to feel virtuous.

Kirbow also argues (hopefully!) that “the population is the center of gravity.” For his argument, that is tactical. For Christians, it becomes a spiritual warning/hope. The decisive struggle is won in the imagination of ordinary people: the people being taught who to fear, whose pain counts, whose death is regrettable, and what kind of ruler looks strong enough to save them.

Christian communities are counter-formative communities that can reshape imagination.

But, if the kingdoms of the world can seize that terrain, they hardly need our formal worship. They already have our desires.

We must become people who can name evil without needing their annihilation/defeat/subjugation to feel whole. People who can hear sacred scriptures and memory invoked on behalf of missiles and say, with trembling and sobriety, no. That is not Passover. That is not Exodus. That is not Easter.

Christian, the deepest question is not whether you have political opinions. You do. The deeper question is what kind of kingdom your soul has learned to admire. What kind of peace seems plausible. What kind of ruler feels strong. What kind of future sounds realistic.

If your imagination can only picture safety after domination, then Caesar has discipled you more than Christ.

If your theology keeps drifting toward spectacular force, then you are closer to the third temptation than you think.

The church’s calling is therefore both simple and severe.

Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.

That sounds devotional until war breaks out. Then it becomes sharply public. The church must not become the chaplain of empire. It must not hand biblical language over to the liturgies of national innocence. It must become a counter-people: truthful, nonviolent, unillusioned, hospitable, and brave enough to look weak in the eyes of those still enchanted by the kingdoms.

That will not solve every geopolitical crisis. It will not provide a technocratic blueprint for de-escalation. It will do something more basic and more necessary.

It will keep us from bowing.

And that is where every faithful politics begins.

Then the devil took him to the holy city, had him stand on the highest point of the temple, and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down. For it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you’ and ‘with their hands they will lift you up, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’”
Jesus said to him, “Once again it is written: ‘You are not to put the Lord your God to the test.’”
Matthew 4:5-7 (NET)

The second temptation is about more than drama in the desert. It exposes the desire to force recognition, command attention, and secure legitimacy through display. This essay follows that logic from the temple pinnacle into media culture, church performance, and the political theater that keeps asking for bigger spectacles.

The Temptation of Spectacle

The second temptation is stranger than the first.

The devil takes Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple and suggests a public act. Throw yourself down. Let the angels catch you. Force heaven to validate you in full view of the crowd.

It is a temptation toward spectacle.

Prove yourself.
Demonstrate legitimacy.
Make your identity undeniable through display.

That temptation lives very close to modern political power which is sourced around capturing public attention. If the first temptation is about scarcity, the second is about theater. It is about the anxious need to be seen as strong, chosen, necessary, untouchable. It is about coercing belief through performance.

Timothy Snyder gets at the political logic of this when he warns that the oligarch “governs by invoking myth and manufacturing crisis,” and that “faith that technology serves freedom opens the way to his spectacle.”1 David Brooks makes the media side of the same point: television turned everything into entertainment and social media taught us “to think with the crowd.”2 Put those together and you can see why so much public life now feels staged.

Power does not merely seek results. It seeks an approving audience.

That is why not all violence is strategic. Some of it is demonstrative. It is meant to reassure the home crowd, stabilize a myth, and keep the cameras trained on strength. Once power becomes preoccupied with managing the appearance of control, it starts multiplying the very conditions of chaos it claims to oppose. Escalation becomes a way of hiding weakness. Spectacle becomes a way of delaying truth-telling.

You can hear this in the public rhetoric. Leaders announce campaigns with roaring names. They speak in civilizational tones. They narrate bombardment as resolve, resilience, destiny, and moral clarity. Even when the strategic objectives are unclear, the impulse towards branding remains strong. Why in the world do we need to brand bombing campaigns? It is because the imagery is doing part of the real work. It is holding together the emotional world of the crowd.

And the issue is not only political. It is spiritual and pastoral too. Brooks admits that “the desire for achievement and prowess” can “crowd out the higher desire for contact with the divine.”3 The authors of TrueFaced say it even more bluntly: “In a very real sense, we are all performers.”4 We lose confidence that we will please our audience, so we put on a mask.

Before performance becomes a national style, it is often already a personal habit.

This is why the issue is bigger than one administration or one leader. Trump understands performance instinctively. Netanyahu does too. So do many preachers and media figures who orbit them. They know that image can outrun substance for a very long time. They know that if you can keep the stage bright enough, people may stop asking what exactly is being accomplished or who is paying the cost.

And when the performance starts failing, the system goes looking for a scapegoat.

When the Show Must Go On

That is where this temptation touches Girard.

Mimetic desire is not only about wanting what the other wants. It is also the phenomenon of mimetic contagion. We learn what matters by watching what the crowd gathers around. Spectacle synchs up attention. It creates a temporary common world. It tells people where to look, what to fear, and what to cheer. That is why war speech is so liturgical. It is not merely in-formative. It is formative.

When a nation is trained by spectacle, it becomes hungry for more spectacle. It becomes impatient with patience, hiddenness, restraint, repentance, and slow truth. It wants the dazzling, instantaneous proof. It wants someone to leap from the temple and survive the fall.

Spiritual leaders are tempted to perform for a fickle crowd.

Jesus refuses.

He will not manipulate the Father into a public endorsement.
He will not make faith depend on astonishment.
He will not turn sonship into performance.

That refusal matters enormously for Christians living in media-saturated politics.

Because the church is constantly tempted to perform for God. We are tempted to prove that our side or our opinion is still strong, still righteous, still favored, still capable of commanding the stage. We are tempted to confuse visibility with faithfulness; to make our public witness one more branch of the outrage economy.

What ever happened to being satisfied with abiding with Jesus so we produce the fruit of the Spirit?

Instead church culture often adopts the manipulative manner found in statecraft—demonstrations and appearances are more important than virtue. Scot McKnight notes that because the fruit of the Spirit is hard to quantify, “it’s easier to just count who shows up.” He says Jesus commanded us to make disciples, “not draw a crowd,” and reminds us that Jesus was “always leaving the crowd and looking for that one lost sheep.”5 Performance always prefers the measurable. Faithfulness is usually slower, quieter, and harder to display.

The same distortion shows up in the soul. Safe People warns that “people-pleasing... is not real love,” and then presses the Pauline question: “Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God?”6 Once Christian life becomes a bid for approval, even our obedience gets bent toward the stage.

We stop trusting God and start curating ourselves.

As I wrote in We Must Not Be Enemies, the danger arrives when our tribe becomes coherent mainly by what and whom it opposes. Spectacle accelerates that temptation. It gives outrage a stage. It turns contempt into a public sacrament. It makes denunciation feel like courage.

Once public life becomes performance, contradiction feels intolerable. Dissent becomes betrayal. Complexity becomes weakness. Anyone who interrupts the show threatens more than policy. They threaten the emotional order built around the show.

Christian, this should make us uneasy.

How much of our political imagination is really just crowd formation? How often do we take our cues not from Jesus, but from whatever figure currently has the microphone, the flag, the camera angle, the best line, the hottest take, the cleanest enemy? How often do we feel more alive in the presence of spectacle than in the presence of prayer?

Jesus offers another kind of public life.

Not invisibility. But hiddenness.
Not cowardice. But restraint.
Not silence. But truthful speech without coercive display.

He does not need to leap from the temple because he does not need to make God perform on demand. He trusts the Father’s vindication to arrive in its own time. That trust frees him from the theater of self-justification.

The church needs that freedom badly.

The Freedom of Hiddenness

We need freedom from performative righteousness. Freedom from the addictive cycle of reaction and display. Freedom from the need to look decisive at every moment. Freedom from the fantasy that if we can only dominate the symbolic field, the kingdom of God will come. David Bentley Hart’s warning about “our culture of empty spectacle” fits here. Spectacle can “stupefy the intellect” and blind us to our own disquiet.7 We can be busy, loud, visible, and still spiritually asleep.

True freedom will not come through circus or carnival.

The church’s task is not to compete with empire or to mimic the empire at the level of theatrical power. It is to bear witness. Quietly sometimes oftentimes. Publicly when necessary. Clearly always. We tell the truth. We pray for enemies. We protect the vulnerable. We refuse lies. We do not surrender the stage to Caesar, but neither do we imagine that salvation lies in our ability to master the crowd’s attention.

If the second temptation teaches us anything, it is this: God is not honored by our appetite for spectacle.

Jesus will not throw himself down just to force belief.

And neither should we build a Christian politics that depends on constant demonstration, dramatic enemies, and public adrenaline. Much of what passes for courage in our moment is only theater under religious lighting. Much of what passes for conviction is insecurity amplified by cameras.

There is a better way.

Hidden faithfulness.
Uncoerced truth.
Speech that does not need applause.

The second step out of empire is refusing to make your life a performance that requires someone else to fall.

Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After he fasted forty days and forty nights he was famished. The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become bread.” But he answered, “It is written, ‘Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
Matthew 4:1-4 (NET)

The first temptation in the wilderness is not cartoonish. It is intimate, practical, and frighteningly familiar. This essay follows that temptation into the modern worlds of scarcity, policy, and war, and asks what it would mean for Christians to resist the logic that survival always requires domination.

Hunger and Necessity

Jesus is hungry when the first temptation comes.

Not symbolically hungry. Not vaguely empty. Hungry enough that bread sounds like salvation. Have you ever been that hungry?

And that is what makes the temptation so revealing. The devil does not begin with an obviously monstrous suggestion. He begins with felt need. He begins with vulnerability. He begins with the ache that makes control sound reasonable.

If you are the Son of God, turn these stones into bread. Solve the problem. Secure yourself. Stop depending.

That logic is still with us. It is one of the oldest logics in the world. It appears wherever anxiety meets power. It appears in households, in churches, in markets, and in nations. And it appears with special clarity in the way modern empire talks about war.

Figure out our life. Be self-sufficient.

Much of the current Iran-war analysis turns on a simple claim: beneath the moral theater, there is an economic struggle over oil, trade, currency, and global control. In his interview with Glenn Diesen, Jiang Xueqin argues that the deeper issue is the preservation of the petrodollar order, the arrangement by which energy markets help sustain American dominance. In that frame, war is not first about justice. It is about keeping a world-system in place.

That may not explain everything. Complex conflicts rarely submit to one cause. But it does illuminate something important: empire begins by catechizing us into scarcity.

There is not enough stability!
There is not enough oil!
There is not enough leverage!
There is not enough safety!

And because there is not enough, someone must be controlled. Someone must be weakened. Someone must be bombed.

Scarcity and Scapegoating

The same point sharpens when you look at oil routes, the Strait of Hormuz, and the wider regional order. In Iran’s New Battlefield: The Global Economy, Robert Pape argues that the center of gravity is shifting from military targets to energy markets and that control of Hormuz means economic shocks, then political pressure. Once those systems are imagined as strategically indispensable to imperial survival, escalation begins to feel natural. Not good, perhaps. Not beautiful. But necessary.

That is the moral deformation. What begins as anxiety becomes structure. What begins as hunger becomes policy. What begins as dependence becomes coercion.

And then the rhetoric arrives to make it sound holy.

When systems strain, someone must be named as the cause. Iran becomes not merely a rival state, but the concentrated explanation for disorder. The enemy becomes the container for our fear, our instability, our grievance, and our will to survive without repentance.

This is where Girard helps.

Girard teaches us that scarcity intensifies mimetic rivalry. Under pressure, communities do not merely seek bread. They seek someone to blame for the lack of it. Rivalry escalates. Fear spreads. The need for order grows acute. And then a scapegoat appears, someone on whom the larger disorder can be concentrated. The victim may have real guilt. That is not the point. The point is disproportion. The point is the fantasy that by removing this enemy, peace will return and innocence will be restored.

That mechanism works in a marriage. It works in a church. It works in a nation.

It also works in war.

So when we hear geopolitical language about stability, deterrence, credibility, and survival, Christians should listen carefully. Not cynically. Carefully. Because the Bible has already taught us to be suspicious of orders that secure themselves through sacrifice.

No matter how sophisticated the briefing, no matter how strategic the map, no matter how polished the language of necessity, violence does not become redemptive because it has an energy-market footnote.

Jesus answers the temptation in the desert by refusing to solve hunger through control. He does not deny that hunger is real. He does not romanticize deprivation. He simply refuses to let need become lord.

I think that matters.

Because modern empire always claims to be acting from necessity. It must maintain the order. It must keep the routes open. It must secure the future. It must prove that the system still works. It must turn stones into bread.

Jesus says no.

Not because bread is bad. Because domination is.

He refuses to collapse creaturely dependence into mastery. He refuses to take his vulnerability as evidence that he should seize control. He trusts the Father rather than the system. He receives life instead of manufacturing security through coercion.

A Different Economy

This is where this becomes uncomfortable, because it turns from analysis to discipleship.

Christian, how much of your own imagination has been formed by scarcity? How often do you assume that if you do not secure yourself, you will disappear? How quickly do you accept the idea that peace requires someone else’s defeat or humiliation?

How easily do you let fear turn neighbors into competitors, strangers into threats, and entire peoples into abstractions inside a strategic argument? Think about your own moral outrage. How much of it is sourced in projections and fear, rather than real relationships?

Empire is not only “out there.” It is a system of training, a pedagogy. It forms desire. Empire logic teaches us to think that life is a zero-sum contest and that righteousness belongs to those who can control the supply.

The church must become unintelligible to that logic.

We should be the people who know that manna cannot be stockpiled forever. The people who know that daily bread is gift. The people who know that anxiety is a poor architect of public life. The people who know that enoughness is possible because God, not Caesar, is the giver of life.

That does not mean Christians become naive about trade, oil, or geopolitical leverage. It means we refuse to let those realities become our moral horizon. It means we ask harder questions about what kind of world an economy of endless extraction is forming. It means we practice forms of life that interrupt the lie of scarcity: generosity, limits, hospitality, truth-telling, and a refusal to make enemies out of those whom the system needs to mark as expendable.

The first step out of empire is not sophisticated. It is spiritual.

You do not have to believe that someone else has to lose for you to live.

You do not have to turn stones into bread.

You do not have to solve vulnerability by making another people disposable.

Jesus has already shown another way.

He is right to press there.

And more than that, he helped me see where my original argument could be misunderstood and how I need to tighten it.

Todd’s questions did more than expose an ambiguity in my argument. They turned the argument back on me.

In that first piece, I was trying to name the way partisan, tribal, and political identity gets built through the cheap unity of blame. I was trying to expose the sacrificial logic by which a fractured people become coherent through shared hatred. But Todd helpfully showed that if I am not careful, the claim can sound broader than it should. It can sound as though naming oppressors is itself suspect. It can sound as though the vulnerable are being asked to deny the reality of enemies in order to remain morally pure.

That is not what I mean, although Todd was right, I was not specific enough. Hence, this article.

Scapegoating is not one victim, or one class of victims, naming the people who harm them. Scapegoating is not an undocumented family describing the violence of deportation. Scapegoating is not a woman telling the truth about a husband who has made himself dangerous.

Scapegoating is not a survivor naming the institution that protected abuse.

Todd put it starkly: “An ICE agent who has embraced the task of tearing their family apart is most certainly their enemy.” He also wrote, with equal moral clarity, “This past week, news broke about a website that coaches men on how to r_pe their wives. Those women are married to men who have made themselves into enemies.”

Christians do not serve the vulnerable by becoming vague at exactly that point.

We do not help the wounded by calling danger a misunderstanding. We do not help the exploited by refusing the language of opposition. We do not help the violated by treating moral clarity as a form of bad manners.

There are enemies in the world because there are people and powers that really do set themselves against the good of their neighbors. Scripture is not confused about this. The Psalms are not confused about this. Jesus is not confused about this. The church should not be confused either.

So what, then, is scapegoating?

Scapegoating is All Against One

Scapegoating happens when people who have been caught in rivalrous relations discover a sudden social peace by converging against a common foe. It is the all against one movement. It is the crowd becoming one by locating disorder in a target. It is previous antagonists discovering fellowship in accusation. It is not simply opposition. It is opposition becoming a mechanism of belonging and innocence.

That is why scapegoating is not only a public event. It is a mode. It is a way of seeing and handling another person. It is the habit of reducing a neighbor to what they cost, disturb, threaten, or symbolize, and then using that reduction to feel clearer, cleaner, and more justified ourselves. If we scapegoat the person nearest to us, we will do it more broadly. The social habit grows out of the personal mode.

And all of it stays invisible, unless we break the cycle like Daryl Davis did.

I think of an old woman who lived in my neighborhood. She was easy to resent. She did not keep up her yard. She was sharp with people. She was mean to kids. She cursed. She complained. She seemed to confirm every bad thing people said about her.

And because of that, the mechanism began to hum around her.

She was blamed for neighborhood tension. She became the easy explanation for what was wrong on that corner. Once a person fills that role, everyone gets to feel a little more innocent in comparison.

Then one evening I stopped long enough to stay with her. She must have been in her mid-seventies, gnarled by life, lashing out with a long list of profane complaints: SOB this, why the hell that.

Her anger was impressive in its range and intensity. But underneath it, breaking through every so often like a cracked note in a song, came the deeper truth: I am so lonely. I am hurting.

I listened. I nodded. I did not run.

And as I stayed, another life began to appear. She told me about living on Madison Avenue in New York City, about marriage, and about the last twenty years of poverty and pain that had bent her mind and body into a constant defense.

She had become the kind of person who hurts first so she will not be hurt again.

That did not make her behavior harmless. It did not make the neighborhood’s frustration imaginary. But it did expose the difference between truthful moral naming and reduction. When I stayed, I could see not only the woman who had become difficult, but the delightful little girl still buried somewhere inside the wreckage. And something in her shifted too.

She smiled. She touched my arm. She grabbed my hand. She thanked me for kindness.

I hugged her, and she said, “You’ve kept me from hurting someone, or myself.” I invited her for coffee the next morning. Even then her woundedness flared, and the coffee did not happen. The barista kicked her out even before I arrived.

She was a pain.

But she gave them a note to give to me: apologizing for touching me so much and saying it was the most meaningful human contact she had had in years.

Selah.

Scapegoats almost always look like they deserve condemnation. That is one reason the mechanism is so powerful.

This is why I want to press the distinction. The wounded telling the truth about what has been done to them is not the same thing as the crowd manufacturing innocence through expulsion. One of the great deceptions of abusive systems is to call truth-telling “divisive” precisely because the system wants to preserve its own false peace. But there is another danger too: the habit of reduction itself. Once we learn to behold a neighbor as a carrier of our grievance, it becomes easier to do the same thing in politics, in churches, in movements, and in whole public imaginations.

The Bible itself sides with victims often enough to make this obvious. The prophets do not scold the poor for naming their oppressors. Genesis tells the truth about Abel, Hagar, Tamar, Joseph.

From the beginning, it is clear that victims exist.

But Jesus interrupts the scapegoating mode at its root. He refuses reduction. He sees the person beneath the accusation (John 8:1-11), the wound beneath the rage (Matthew 8:28), the image of God beneath the social role (Matthew 9:9). The cross is not only God’s exposure of the crowd’s violence. It is God’s refusal to join our way of making one life carry the burden of everybody else’s innocence. That means Christian faith does not mute the cry of the harmed. It does mean that Christians must resist scapegoating first in the way we behold and hold the nearest difficult person.

But now we arrive at the harder turn.

If scapegoating is not the same as victims naming oppressors, it is still possible for movements of the wounded to be tempted by a scapegoating logic of their own. Not because their pain is false. Every injury carries a temptation: to gather the whole weight of evil into one body, one class, one face, one hated figure, and then imagine that our future will be secured once that person or group has been cast out.

This is where the issue becomes intensely Christian. We must begin with the end in mind.

The end, for Christians, cannot be merely a more emotionally satisfying version of the same sacrificial pattern. Followers of Christ are called to live now in light of the future Christ has already opened.

That is why Christian nonviolence is so demanding. It asks whether liberation will merely reverse the direction of exclusion, or whether it will refuse exclusion as the final grammar of communal life.

That is one reason figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela still matter. They were not naive about power. They did not deny oppression. They did not tell the wounded to call evil good. They led movements of resistance while trying, however imperfectly and under immense pressure, to prevent liberation from hardening into mirrored hatred.

King is especially instructive here because he refused to choose between truth and grace. In Birmingham he insisted that “justice too long delayed is justice denied,” and he defended direct action as the exposure of hidden injustice to “the light of human conscience.” Yet when his own house was bombed with his wife and daughter inside, he still told the gathered crowd, “We must not return violence under any condition... this is the way of Christ; it is the way of the cross.”

King could name the evil plainly and still refuse to become its mirror.

Gandhi matters because he treated nonviolence not as passivity but as disciplined truth-force. He opposed British domination without surrendering to the fantasy that humiliation, revenge, or hatred could heal India. He wanted even the British to leave as something more than defeated enemies.

Nelson Mandela matters because he emerged from prison without pretending apartheid was small or forgetting its brutality, yet still tried to build a country that was not organized around permanent racial retaliation. He understood that justice without reconciliation can still leave a nation captive to the old script.

That is not sentimentalism. It is strategy shaped by a deeper anthropology.

It is the recognition that if a people become one only by hating together, then even their victory may remain captive to the old mechanism. They may throw off one oppressor and still inherit the spiritual habits of oppression. They may win the contest and lose their soul.

The gospel also does not let any of us make a permanent identity out of enemyhood.

Why?

Because the deepest truth in the room is not finally that one side has found the right object of hatred. The deepest truth is that Christ has revealed both the reality of evil and the possibility of a humanity not held together by sacrifice. Jesus opens a future the crowd did not know how to imagine.

That is the horizon I was reaching for, and Todd helped me see that I needed to state it more carefully. Yes, there are enemies. The vulnerable must be defended. Systems of domination must be opposed.

But no, scapegoating is not the same thing as that opposition.

Scapegoating is what happens when our unity begins to depend on keeping someone outside the camp as the bearer of our moral coherence.

Todd asked me who I was speaking to and whether I had examples in mind.

Me. That is where I will start. Over the last year+ of my life, I have been wounded like never before.

I myself was scapegoated. Publicly. Hundreds of relationships irrevocably harmed. The damage is real and continues.

I’m drawn to reducing those who hurt me, to identify victims and raise awareness! It’s not all negative, but I sense an accusatory urge within me. Can I balance holding others accountable with humanizing those who’ve wronged me? Will I focus on gathering a group of accusers or treat the perpetrators as...human?

We must refuse to let tomorrow be founded on one more scapegoat. That refusal will not look like niceness. It will look like cruciform courage.

That is the kind of healing I want to seek.

No false unity. No avoidance-driven-peace. No vague sentimentality.

Christians have often accepted such things. And, ironically, become an enemy of the true gospel.

Let’s love those enemies and refuse to be like them.

It’s like we are on a first date with the mountain. She giggles. We flirt. All easy, right? No, struggle looms. You may not be ready for the terrain ahead.

The view atop a mountain is almost always worth the climb. I am not a wildly experienced mountaineer, but I have tackled a few summits. Enough to know this: the summit invariably feels closer than it is. That is part of the magic of mountains. They seem, at once, graspable and enormous.

They wink at a distance.

When my son and I, along with some friends, summited the South Sister in Oregon in 2020, we emerged from the timberline and stared up her ash-rock-strewn face. I had little idea that this would be the slowest and worst segment of the trip. I suppose, if I would have thought about it, I might have guessed.

But I was not thinking. I was just climbing.

Steep sections. Rocky sections. All labor.

Then came the one-step-up, two-steps-back part of the loose ash rock. Thighs burning. Oxygen thin. Heart rate up. Every hopeful step seemed to slide beneath me.

That is a bit like life, isn’t it?

We are climbing. Then we hit a stretch tougher than anything before it. We long for the time when oxygen was easier to get, when our feet could find footing, even if we were still working hard. What used to feel difficult begins to seem almost easy compared with this.

And then, somehow, you summit.

You made it.

Dag Hammarskjold, the Swedish diplomat and second Secretary-General of the United Nations, kept a private spiritual journal that was later published as Markings. He writes:

Never measure the height of a mountain until you have reached the top.
Then you’ll see how low it was.

The line has stayed with me.

The acute stress of our lives is survivable. Our heart rate eventually lowers. Oxygen comes again. Not every segment of life is the acute, painful, tedious struggle of the ash rock.

But when you are in that section, it feels like the mountain has become nothing but ash.

Currently, I feel like I am trying to get to the top of Everest. I feel like I am on a perpetual face of the mountain. Steps forward seem hopeful, but then I slide through the ash rock of exclusion. When all relationships are suddenly unsure, I have a hard time even getting enough footing to stand still, let alone to keep climbing toward the summit.

But maybe, once I am at the top, I will see that it was lower than I thought.

Psalm 11 opens with a refusal:

In the LORD I take refuge; how can you say to me,
“Flee like a bird to the mountains;”
Psalm 11:1, NRSV

There are times when people tell you to flee, and there are times when flight would be faithlessness. Not always. There are dangers from which we should run. There are places no one should be asked to endure. But not every wilderness is a place of abandonment. Sometimes we are led there by the Spirit to fight the the devil.

Some say, get away. Some say, be done. Some say, fly. We quote the scriptures, remain and trust.

But the arrows follow. The wound is not healed by changing scenery. The mountain is not escaped by pretending the climb is over.

There is no being done apart from true healing.

So while we climb, we can only experience the truth of the moment, the struggle of each step. God is with us.

Better said: we hope God is with us.

We believe it, yes. But we also find that our faith wavers. The oxygen thins. The footing gives way. The heart pounds. The summit looks close and impossible all at once.

Still, we climb.

Not because the mountain is small. Not because the ash rock is imaginary. Not because the pain is unfelt.

We climb because the present stretch is not the whole mountain. We climb because the view from the top will tell the truth more fully than the burning in our thighs can tell it now. We climb because God meets people in wilderness places, even when they are too tired to call it faith.

The mountain is high.

But we do not yet know how high. Or low.

Before Luke tells us what John the Baptist preached, he tells us who was in charge. That might unsettle us. The gospel does not begin in a vague spiritual atmosphere—or a vacuum. It begins under named rulers, named bureaucrats, named religious authorities, named men with enough power to cast shadows over everyone else.

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.

Luke 3:1-2, NRSV

These are the men atop the proverbial ladder.

Some were born into their station. Some worked for it. Some schemed, killed, and maneuvered. In any case, they occupied significant places of leadership and privilege. They were not background characters to the lives beneath them. Their decisions mattered. Their ambitions mattered. Their cowardice also mattered.

(Cowardice. Let us NEVER be that!)

For John the Baptist, Herod will soon take his head. For Jesus, Pilate will wash his hands and send him to die. Caiaphas will say it is better for one man to die for the people, foreshadowing and overseeing the scapegoating of Jesus.

At this point in Luke’s story, the outcomes are not yet set. But the dynamics are already moving. Inertias that create outcomes.

Pride. Folly. The desire for power.

Rome is regularly crushing rebellion. The Jewish people, with their strange devotion to Yahweh, are stubborn under occupation. They draw on deep spiritual convictions that give them identity even when the empire wants to make them small.

And then, in the middle of all those names, the word of God comes to John in the wilderness. Not to Tiberius. Not to Pilate. Not to Herod. Not to Annas or Caiaphas.

To John.

In the wilderness.

This matters because our lives are also happening under someone’s rule. Presidents, governors, judges, denominational leaders, executives, boards, HOAs, landlords, algorithms, creditors, editors, publishers, platforms, and more. Some are visible. Some are almost impossible to name. Some have earned responsibility. Some have inherited it. Some have maneuvered their way into it and now cast long shadows over the rest of us.

And when you live beneath those shadows long enough, it can begin to feel like God is far off.

Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?
Psalm 10:1, NRSV

I feel that question in my own bones right now. I am in a season where it has seemed, at times, that God is absent while evil, lies, and wickedness do their work. The story is still in motion, but some days motion feels like tripping over someone else’s shoes. My heart is in my throat. My knees ache—from painful prayers, yes. But mostly from being knocked down by ongoing punches of exclusion.

And yet the Scriptures will not let me collapse into despair as a form of wisdom.

A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich.
Proverbs 10:4, NRSV

I do not read that as a cheap prosperity formula. I read it as a summons back to agency. Our lives are shaped by powers we did not choose, but we are not only victims of the powers. Our agency is part of the story.

I doubt Tiberius, Pilate, Herod, Annas, or Caiaphas knew they would become archetypes of power, bureaucratic rule, religious scheming, and cowardice. Most people do not wake up and decide to become warnings. They make the next choice. Then the next. Then the next. Eventually their lives harden into a pattern.

That is true for rulers. It is also true for me.

If I am going to write publicly, if I am going to try to publish, influence, and help, I will have to deal honestly with the audience (YOU!). I will need diligence. I will need courage. I may be hated in some circles and adored in others. Worse, just ignored. Neither hatred nor adoration or ignoration (made up, ha!) can be allowed to name me.

The word of God still comes in the wilderness. Into the isolation that is louder than ever.

Not always where power gathers. Not always where ambition points. Not always where the important names are listed.

Sometimes it comes to the obscure place, the unfinished person, the one who is still trying to refuse discouragement and take the next faithful step.

My story is in progress.

So is yours.

And, I’d take him.

Charles, well done. Not in totality. Certainly not as a political program. But in general, he showed the current administration up.

Listening to the king was a major relief from the erratic bombast we are becoming accustomed to. His speech, similar to Canadian Prime Minster Mark Carney‘s a few months back, reminded me that the spoken word is helpful when it is done with eloquence, intelligence, and a few sprinkles of self-conscious humor. It should not feel rare to hear a public figure form complete thoughts in public.

But here we are.

Charles (HRH? Your Majesty?) walked into the chamber with all the old royal contradictions trailing behind him: ceremony, wealth, inherited status, polished shoes, gilded memory. And yet the contrast was embarrassing. A king spoke of democracy with more restraint than many who campaign as its defenders.

He described the promise of American government as “Not by the will of one”, but by deliberation. He spoke of Christian faith not as a weapon for sorting the pure from the heretics, but as an anchor for compassion, interfaith respect, and peace. He said his hope, even his prayer, was that our nations might “stem the beating of plowshares” into swords.

That line should resound across a world that continues to arm itself for destruction. It was powerful.

Not because Charles has somehow deconstructed empire by quoting the prophets. He has not. But because public speech still forms us. It tells us what kind of world is thinkable, imaginable. It gives a people humane grammar, or it takes humane grammar away.

I recently completed a thesis that focused on the power of the spoken word. (I will be writing much more about it soon) Unfortunately, across the board, it seems that our speech is being used to divide. To scapegoat. To blame.

We are caught in a pattern of developing belonging by exclusion.

That is one of the oldest tricks in the human book. Find the enemy. Gather the crowd. Make peace by agreeing who should be cast out. It gives us the relief of togetherness without requiring the labor of reconciliation.

King Charles refused that logic yesterday, at least in part, by refusing to mirror the demonic rhetoric of one-siding everything. He affirmed his Christian beliefs, but touted the gift of cooperation and pluralism. He reminded America that “words carry weight”, and that actions matter even more.

Donald Trump is the natural outcome of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. We have an entertainer at the helm (And, I am not amused).

Postman, the NYU scholar who foresaw politics and discourse reduced to image management, saw the shape of this long before we had a president posting AI images of himself in war cosplay. His argument was not simply that television was full of entertainment. It was that entertainment had become the expected form for almost everything. As he put it, “all subject matter is presented as entertaining”.

That sentence keeps aging well, which is to say, badly.

Postman warned that our public discourse was being reshaped by its mediums. Television trained us to receive politics as performance, tragedy as a 15 second segment, leaders as images, and truth as whatever could survive under the lights. Social media made the absurdity faster, stranger, more close up and more addictive. Now the image is generated before the conscience has time to object. All that moral grammar is lost in some data-farm.

Postman’s old phrase for one part of the problem was the “information-action ratio”: we receive more and more information about which we can do less and less. The result is not wisdom. It is a frenetic scrolling to know everything, only to become full of under-formed opinions and nearly empty of action.

This is why absurd public discourse is not merely annoying. It is formative. The joke becomes the pedagogy. Insults are the genesis for policy. An image reduces assertions to pixels. We do not just accept the meme as truth, we can’t even read the actual argument. (If you’ve read this far, you’re exceptional, just 500 words to go!)

And then, when someone speaks with a little restraint and a longer view than today’s X feed, it feels like miracle.

Charles coyly critiqued the president’s reckless words. That was good. It was also incomplete. Because while he spoke against the current plowshare-to-sword trajectory, he also talked of building up militaries. Golly. The logic of empire is not deconstructed by a noble-sounding speech.

Next year, the United States will spend staggering sums ($1,500,000,000,000) on defense, ahem, sorry Pete, war. And the United Kingdom is going to add to that? Yeesh.

If you keep manufacturing hammers, everything is a nail.

That is the tension the speech could not resolve. It resisted scapegoating, but it still blessed security through superior force. It named compassion, but it also praised the machinery that turns fear into budgets, weapons, and the imagination of peace.

Christianly, we have to be able to say both things at once. The speech was better than what we usually hear. But, better is not the same as faithful. Eloquence can expose bombast, but eloquence can also polish the sword.

And, so it goes. Less than a day later, Trump made King Charles look all the better, posting this picture.

According to ITV, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself holding a weapon, with explosions behind him, under the line “No more Mr Nice Guy!”

Neil, close your eyes, roll back over and enjoy some peace.

It is almost too perfect. A king gives a speech about words and actions, pluralism and restraint, Easter and peace. Then the president responds with a fake war image, produced by the same cultural machine that turns politics into pro wrestling and violence into merch.

Postman would not be surprised. He might be exhausted.

I am.

Trump has suggested Canada become the 51st state. Perhaps we would be better off rejoining the Commonwealth.

But then we could no longer chant No Kings.

So here is the strange little mercy of yesterday: an actual king reminded us that public speech can still have dignity. Here is the warning: dignity is not discipleship. A beautiful sentence can still serve a violent order. A king can sound more sane than a president and still not sound like Jesus.

The church should care about this. Not because we need better royal speeches. Not because we should baptize monarchy when democracy embarrasses itself. But because we are people of the Word. We believe speech can bless or curse, gather or scatter, heal or accuse, tell the truth or manufacture enemies.

Christian speech is not called to be entertaining—just truthful enough to resist the logic of the crowd.

No kings, please.

But maybe, every now and then, one kingly speech can remind us how low the bar has fallen—and how badly we need leaders who use words to lift us out of the cauldron of snipes and tropes.

Something more magisterial?

The video below is almost offensively simple.

Two men in different ties. Two signs. Two bodies moving closer. A punch. A grin. A better weapon. A louder retaliation. A march. A war room. Then the implication of a final weapon so severe it can make the whole world stop.

That is the point.

Written and animated by me in 2022. Special thanks to Laney Bliss for the voiceover

The animation works because it strips away our favorite excuses. It does not let us hide inside geopolitics, tribal history, diplomatic language, or patriotic myth. It shows the naked pattern. Rivalry hardens into againstness. Againstness becomes invasion. Invasion becomes injury. Injury becomes justification. Justification becomes organization. Organization becomes total war.

Tit for tat.

A Political Scientist and a Theologian

Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political scientist who studies international security and political violence, is helpful here because he is trying to name escalation before it disappears into propaganda. On his Substack page for Escalation Trap, he says most analysis merely explains events after the fact, while his project tries to identify what phase a conflict is entering, what pressures are driving the next move, and what choices remain before commitment hardens. That is a useful phrase: before commitment hardens.

In “What the Escalation Trap Actually Means,” Pape defines the trap as the way efforts to control a conflict can make it harder to control. In “Trump’s Words Don’t Predict War. His Deployments Do,” he applies that lens to the difference between political rhetoric and actual military posture: words can move perception, but deployments move reality.

Because that is how violence works. It hardens.

One blow creates a new atmosphere. One retaliation narrows the future. One successful strike creates both vindication and vulnerability. The victor feels righteous. The loser feels humiliated. Each side now possesses a fresh moral story explaining why the next move is necessary. And by the time people say, “We have no choice,” they are usually standing inside a structure built by many smaller choices that once felt obvious.

That is what the little video understands.

It also understands something Dom Helder Camara, a Brazilian with an important voice in liberation theology, named with more theological precision. In Spiral of Violence, Camara argues that injustice is itself a form of violence, “the basic violence,” what he elsewhere calls “violence number one.” Poverty, degradation, exclusion, and domination are not the peaceful backdrop behind later conflict. They are already violence. They wound bodies, warp imagination, and provoke revolt. Then revolt invites repression. And so the spiral turns: oppression, revolt, repression.

This matters because Christians are often tempted to notice violence only once blood is visible.

By then, the trap, the spiral, is already well underway. A sobering realization.

Camara’s line is severe and clarifying: “poverty kills just as surely as the most bloody war.” That means the church cannot truthfully preach peace while blessing the arrangements that generate desperation, humiliation, and disposable classes of people. Camara does not romanticize revolt. He explains why it appears. He is trying to stop Christians from pretending the spiral began in the middle.

That is one reason (I think) the “Tit for Tat” video is stronger than it first appears. It is not merely saying, “Both sides are bad.” That would be shallow. It is showing how quickly opposition takes liturgical form. First there are signs. Then there is posturing. Then there is proximity. Then a strike. Then triumph. Then the wounded imagination of revenge. Then a technological leap. Then propaganda. Then mass participation by people who may barely remember the first grievance, only that blood now feels required.

This is how a people gets catechized into escalation.

Once a community is living inside that atmosphere, each new measure appears prudent. More security. More weapons. More preemption. More public certainty. More willingness to call annihilation peace.

Christian, you should be suspicious whenever violence starts sounding inevitable. Not because evil is unreal. Not because nations have no enemies. Not because all conflicts are morally symmetrical.

But because retaliation has a way of disguising itself as wisdom precisely when it is making everyone stupider.

The “Tit for Tat” video ends in a war room because that is where rivalry loves to arrive: in an air of seriousness, maps, plans, strategy, and calm expert voices explaining why the next unbearable thing must now be done. But the Christian does not have the right to be impressed by a cleaner PowerPoint presentation of Cain.

Yes, I am talking to you Pete.

Jesus’ True Way

Jesus is much less naive than our warmongers.

He understands escalation better than any empire does. “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’” He names the old logic plainly. Then he interrupts it, not because he does not understand the desire for proportionate vengeance, but because he understands where it leads. He knows tit for tat never stays tit for tat. It grows. It recruits. It rationalizes. It becomes a whole social world.

That is why Christian nonviolence is not passivity. It is strategic refusal at the point where imitation is asking for your body.

It is the refusal to let the enemy dictate the next move.

It is the refusal to let injury become liturgy.

It is the refusal to let fear become our god.

This does not mean injustice should be minimized. Quite the opposite. If Camara is right, then Christians must become much more serious about violence number one: the quiet brutalities that prepare the stage for louder brutalities later. We should oppose the structures that grind people down. We should tell the truth about humiliation, deprivation, occupation, exclusion, and domination. We should not wait until the bomb goes off to ask how we got here.

But neither should we baptize “violence number two” just because it emerged from real pain. The oppressed can become mirror images of the oppressor. The wounded can become worshipers of force. A righteous grievance can still become a murderous liturgy.

That is why the church has to hold both truths at once.

And Christ refuses to let any of them have the last word.

The little “Tit for Tat” film shows that escalation is not an accident. It is a pattern. It is a habit of the human heart. It is what happens when nobody has the courage to absorb injury without mirroring it, and nobody has the honesty to address injustice before it ripens into revolt.

We like to imagine that war begins with a single shocking act.

Usually it begins much earlier. It begins in the signs we carry. It begins in the stories we tell about the other side.

A Brief Moment of Unity

That is why Saturday night’s shooting at the Washington Hilton was so clarifying.

For a few hours, the room seemed to remember a shared human vulnerability. Trump later described it as “totally unified,” and there was something genuinely sobering about journalists, officials, spouses, and political rivals suddenly reduced to the same fragile condition: bodies under threat.

But by the Sunday’s 60 Minutes interview with CBS News correspondent Norah O’Donnell, the moment had already been pulled back into the familiar pattern. Asked whether the near-miss would change his relationship with the press, Trump linked the press and Democrats as “almost one and the same,” then later blamed Democratic “hate speech” as especially dangerous. As Axios reporter Zachary Basu observed, the truce did not last long. The point is not that fear was unreal. The point is that even a near-tragic interruption can be absorbed into tit for tat when it becomes another weapon in the rivalry.

(Side note: Trump also called would-be assassin as anti-Christian, but this article paints a different picture. Thanks to David Fitch for the link)

Violence begins in the conviction that our violence will finally be the one that restores order.

No. It will not.

Christian, do not let the war room disciple you. Do not call escalation inevitable when Christ has already shown it to be reversible.

And do not mistake the spiral for fate. God holds the future.

And, Jesus Christ has already stepped into humanity’s oldest cycle of retaliation and broken it open from the inside. The church does not serve the world by offering a holier version of tit for tat. It serves the world by becoming a people who can tell the truth about violence without becoming its next evangelists.

(But, also, let’s party sometime too!)

Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.
Romans 12:15 (NET)

There is something quietly devastating about having no one to celebrate with and no one to mourn with.

Many of us know that feeling better than we would like to admit. We have learned how to keep going by ourselves. We have learned how to post good news without expecting anyone to really enter it. We have learned how to absorb sorrow in private and then show up in public as though nothing happened.

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Paul imagines something better for the church.

He does not say, “Admire people from a distance when good things happen to them.” He says, rejoice with those who rejoice.

He does not say, “Offer a quick explanation when someone is hurting.” He says, weep with those who weep.

That is a thicker vision of community than most of us are used to. It means joy is not meant to stay sealed inside one household, and grief is not meant to be carried as a solitary burden. Celebration and mourning are both too heavy to carry alone.

Curt Thompson makes a similar point in Anatomy of the Soul when he argues that people change as they tell their stories to an empathic listener, and that we become more whole as we are “engaged, known, and understood by one another.” The point is not merely neurological. It is profoundly human and deeply Christian. We need each other in order to become more truthful about what is happening in us.

That includes joy.

Rejoice with those who rejoice

The church should recover the art of celebration.

Not performative celebration. Not curated happiness. Real delight.

We should throw more parties. We should go to more weddings, more birthdays, more baby showers, more anniversary dinners, more small gatherings where somebody else’s joy is allowed to become partly ours. A healthy church does not only show up for crisis. It also shows up for joy.

That matters because celebration is one of the ways love becomes visible. To rejoice with someone is to say, “Your good is not a threat to me. I do not need to compete with your gladness. I can thank God with you.”

In a lonely and status-conscious culture, that is not automatic. Envy comes easily. Comparison comes easily. Detached politeness comes easily. Shared joy often does not.

So perhaps one small act of discipleship is simply this: widen the guest list. Let more people into the good parts of life. Let the community become more than the place where we exchange updates on Sunday. Let it become a people who know how to celebrate without suspicion.

Weep with those who weep

But Paul is just as serious about sorrow.

Some of our anger may be grief with nowhere to go. Some of our numbness may be unwept sadness. Some of our impatience may be pain that has never been given honest room to breathe.

That does not mean every frustration is secretly grief, and it does not mean tears solve everything. But it does mean mourning is not optional if we hope to remain human.

In a Harvard Health article on crying, Leo Newhouse describes tears as an “important safety valve” and notes that crying can encourage “closeness, empathy, and support from friends and family.” That feels truer than many of us want to admit. Tears are not a failure of faith. They are often one of the body’s ways of telling the truth before the mind is ready to speak.

Jesus seems to honor that truth directly:

Matthew 5:4 (NRSV)
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

That is not a romantic sentence. It is a promise that God does not meet us only on the far side of polished strength. He meets us in grief itself.

Walter Brueggemann has long argued in The Prophetic Imagination that genuine mourning is part of how God breaks denial and makes room for newness. That feels especially important in a culture trained to distract itself. We are very skilled at keeping ourselves entertained, medicated, scheduled, and scrolling. We are much less skilled at letting sorrow have its say.

But if we never grieve honestly, we do not become strong. We become defended.

And defended people are rarely free. They are often brittle, reactive, and unable to receive comfort because they have never fully admitted the wound.

To weep with those who weep is one of the ways we resist becoming numb.

It is also one of the ways the church tells the truth. We do not need to rush people past loss. We do not need to explain away every pain. We do not need to be impressive by how resilient we are.

Sometimes faithfulness looks like sitting beside someone long enough that they no longer have to carry their sorrow alone.

That kind of presence is holy.

Learning both together

The deeper wisdom of Romans 12:15 is that celebration and mourning belong together.

If a community only knows how to celebrate, it becomes shallow.
If a community only knows how to grieve, it becomes exhausted.
But if a community learns both, it begins to look like the body of Christ.

There are always births and burials.
There are always anniversaries and diagnoses.
There are always answered prayers and unanswered questions.

The church is meant to be a people large enough in love to hold all of it.

That is the invitation.

Come close enough to another person’s life that their joy interrupts your self-absorption and their sorrow interrupts your avoidance.

Show up when there is laughter.
Show up when there are tears.
Show up before you have the perfect words.

Praise God, there are still reasons for both rejoicing and weeping.

And praise God, we do not have to do either one alone.

Maybe we just need a big cry party. Once there we could each sing,

🎼 “And, I’ll cry if I want to, cry if…”

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