Over the past two weeks, the Supreme Court and the United States Postal Service have been working to make it more difficult to vote by mail. And making it more difficult (especially in blue states) seems to be the ultimate goal, despite rhetoric that says it is about “election integrity.” As you might imagine, the political parties are deeply divided on this one.

Twenty-nine states offer “no excuse” mail-in/absentee voting, which means that any voter can request and cast an absentee/mail ballot, no excuse or reason necessary. While 81% of left-leaning Americans support “no excuse” mail-in voting, 66% of right-leaning voters oppose it (only 34% support).

It is odd to me, though, that so many of the religious right would seek to limit or ban mail-in voting.

In every church I’ve attended or pastored, there has been a woman whom we descriptively (if not affectionately called) a “shut in.” She is somewhere north of eighty, and she stopped driving years ago. Unless someone picks her up, she is home-bound. For decades she sat in a pew that now sits empty, and she has probably prayed for you more often than you know, especially if she knew you were sick or in need.

She votes by mail.

She votes by mail, not because she has to, but because standing in line for forty minutes or finding her way to the new polling place which moved miles away from her a few years ago is a real hardship.

On Monday of last week, the Supreme Court made her ability to vote far less certain.

Because precision matters, the Supreme Court did not rule that President Trump’s plan is legal. The Court ruled on timing. In an unsigned order, split as it almost always is now along conservative/progressive lines, the Court allowed the Trump administration to begin implementing parts of a March executive order restricting mail voting. This includes a provision that allows the government to compile state-specific lists of the people it believes are eligible to vote in the Democratic-led states that sued.

So this is targeted to Democratic states. No one really argues that it isn’t.

Republicans long ago dropped the “we should all play under the same rules” charade and openly target Democratic states for punishment and stricter rules. So much for bipartisanship.

The justices also greenlit a piece of the Executive Order that directs the Postal Service to impose new mandates on states that mail ballots. The Court said plainly that nothing in its order means the government’s eventual actions to limit mail-in voting will be lawful. “On that score,” the justices wrote, “time will tell.”

So this is legally unresolved, but it is a big win for those who wish to restrict mail-in voting this November.

Apparently, the Postal Service has been doing it anyway, behind the court's back and out of public view. This week, a USPS whistleblower is alleging that new hidden procedures put in place by the Postal Service are intended to make an already complicated mail situation even more vulnerable to potential mass disenfranchisement of voters.

But more concerning to me, honestly, is that millions of American Christians read headlines about limiting mail-in voting and feel… relief.

And that bothers me a lot, the relief.

The concern is legitimate. The story is not.

Let’s get this out of the way: Wanting secure elections is not wicked. It is a reasonable thing to want.

A person who says “I want to be confident that the votes we count were cast by people legally allowed to vote” is not a bigot.

Wanting election integrity is not a bad thing.

But hear this clearly, because election integrity is not in question, at all:

And most disturbingly, Christians believed the lie anyway, at a higher rate than anyone else.

The Heritage Foundation (one of the most conservative groups in the US) maintains a public database of election fraud cases for the explicit purpose of demonstrating that the threat of election fraud is real, and the Heritage Foundation is staffed by people who are highly motivated to find every single instance of election fraud that they can, no matter how questionable or unserious it is.

Their database contains roughly 1,500 proven cases of election fraud. But that number is drawn from about two decades of American elections, across more than a billion ballots cast. That is less than a percentage of a percent. It doesn’t even register; it’s so few.

The Heritage Foundation's own 1,500 cases over two decades is not quite zero, but it is statistically negligible, and there is no documented instance of fraud at a scale that changed a state or national outcome.

Republican data confirms: Those who aren’t allowed to vote in elections don’t vote in elections.

But this isn’t the only evidence that “voter fraud” itself is a fraud.

Consider President Trump’s own commission. In 2017, Trump convened the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. As is his typical practice, he staffed it with his own allies. The group’s purpose was to document the supposed millions of illegal votes that Trump insisted had been cast against him. The commission found literally nothing. It was disbanded in early 2018 without even issuing a report. One of its own commissioners later sued the government for the Commission’s records, testifying that the panel had found no evidence of widespread fraud.

But wait, that’s not all.

Don’t forget all of the audits. Georgia hand-counted every ballot; the recount turned up the ordinary level of human error you'd expect in any hand count of five million ballots (about 5,000 miscounts, well within normal range) and confirmed Biden's win. In Arizona, a Republican-commissioned review of Maricopa County (the one Fox News and Trump said would finally prove fraud) concluded that Biden had won the county by a slightly wider margin than even the official count! Trump’s votes went DOWN when Republicans forced a recount.

The Trump administration’s own cybersecurity agency called the 2020 election the most secure in American history … and then Trump fired the man who said it, because of course he did.

Mail-in voting isn’t partisan.

Utah has run near-universal mail voting for years under Republican leadership. Florida and Arizona Republicans have used mail ballots heavily and successfully. Trump himself votes by mail.

And if you want to know how rare fraud is, the Brennan Center’s review of the available data found incident rates between 0.0003% and 0.0025%, meaning that an American is more likely to be struck by lightning than to impersonate another voter at the polls.

None of these facts are new.

Sixty percent.

In mid-2022, after all of the recounts, the audits, and some sixty court losses, the non-partisan Pew Research Center found that 60% of white Evangelical Protestants still said Joe Biden was not legitimately elected.

Of all the religious groups measured, white Evangelical Protestants were most likely to believe the lie.

And the implications of that reach far beyond politics.

These are the people that most loudly talk about themselves as the people of the truth. These are the people who talk about absolute truth as the thing that distinguishes them from culture. These are the people who lecture everyone else about objective moral reality. But also … these are the people who have the highest ratio of members who continue to believe a lie.

And the white Evangelical Protestants have continued to believe the lie of election fraud, even after correction… even after correction from their own side.

Why they needed the lie.

The easy explanation is that Fox News and the GOP brainwashed a generation of voters and Evangelicals.

I’ve even often said that myself.

And I do believe that there has been brainwashing.

But the truth is far more complicated than that. For one, it treats grown Christians as hypnotized children, and it lets them off the hook too easily for the untold number of horrors and evil that they are responsible for and have continually supported. Happily supported.

Fox News didn’t manufacture the demand for dishonesty; it simply fed it.

Evangelicals wanted (even needed) the lie, because:

1. It is easier to believe you were robbed than to believe that you lost. If the election was stolen, you never have to consider the far more painful possibility that voters rejected your ideas in the court of public opinion.

2. It changes the narrative from decline to persecution. American Christianity is losing cultural ground. Believing the system is rigged explains the loss without requiring a single moment of self-reflection …or repentance.

3. It turns exclusion into something good. Without the fraud lie, a Christian who is looking at rules that make voting harder for the old, the poor, and the immigrant (rules that disenfranchise groups Jesus said to protect) would recognize what they were looking at. Believing the lie allows Christians to do what God forbade them to do (disenfranchise others).

The voter fraud myth is not so much about getting the truth wrong as it is a way to let people commit injustice while allowing them to pretend like they are righteous.

Don’t miss that list.

The Bible has a list of people that God cares about.

It might even be said that God cares about the people on this list more than others, and if that is offensive to you, perhaps you should reflect on why.

This list appears across the Bible, across centuries, and across genres: Deuteronomy, Zechariah, Jeremiah, Malachi, Isaiah, the Psalms, and even the Book of James.

For instance, Malachi 3:5 says: “I will come to put you on trial…. those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive the foreigners among you of justice, but do not fear me,” says the LORD Almighty.

Each of these books points to four distinct categories of people whose treatment is the test of whether a community is actually in alignment with God. They are:

1. The widow.

2. The orphan.

3. The immigrant.

4. The poor.

The command to care for and protect these four groups of people is arguably the most-repeated ethical demand in the entire Hebrew Bible. It shows up over, and over, and over again.

If mail-in voting is restricted, here is the list of Americans most affected:

1. The elderly — this group makes up the heaviest users of mail ballots. They are the least able to stand in a line. They are the least likely to have a current photo ID, and they are the most likely to live an hour or more from the office where you get one (with no easy way to get there).

2. The young and transient — this group has no fixed address, no utility bill in their name, no property record, and no birth certificate located in a fireproof safe in a basement they don’t own.

3. The naturalized citizen — this group, which has a lawful right to vote, is the exact group a federal agency is now proposing to check against a list it compiles itself.

4. The poor — this group has no car, no passport, no flexible shift to vote, and no four hours to spend proving they are who they say they are.

Put the two lists side by side.

The Elderly … the Widow.
The Young/Transient … the Orphan.
The Naturalized Citizen … the Immigrant.
The Poor … the Poor.

This list becomes uncomfortable in a hurry because Christians could read Malachi’s list of protected people listed above and they could read the Trump administration’s list of scrutinized voters and struggle to tell them apart.

They are the same list.
And that isn’t a coincidence.

And don’t miss the end of Malachi 3:5 (because of the verb). God says he will come as a witness against those who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive the foreigners among you of justice.

Deprive of justice.

Not assault.
Not rob.
Not hate.
Deprive of access.

The sin in view here is the sin of denying access to those who deserve it.

It is the sin of the unnecessary legal form, the sin of the fee meant to dissuade, the sin of an office only open limited hours, the sin of intentionally moving an office too far away, or the sin of a voting list you didn’t know you’d been left off.

Remember the Ninth.

At the same time as all of this disenfranchisement is going on, the State of Texas has mandated that a sanitized Protestant version of the Ten Commandments be hung in every public school classroom. Texas has even asked the Supreme Court to bless the requirement.

Christians across the country have cheered this as a reclamation of moral foundations, but, I wonder if they’ve read the ninth one on the list:

“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

That is the exact text as it must be written in Texas.

Notice it isn’t “do not lie,” which would be more understandable… but also more broadly convicting.

“Bearing false witness against thy neighbor” is courtroom language, so it is easy to miss the point. It describes giving false testimony in a proceeding, with a specific person on the other end of it. It is the sin of working hard to see someone else harmed.

Functionally, this is a decent description of what the last six years of fraud claims have been: false public testimony that your neighbors are criminals.

If you want the commandments in the classroom, I suggest that we don’t skip the ninth.

This isn’t new. The church has long been involved in disenfranchisement.

“Surely the church wouldn’t do this.”

But it has, time and time again. This exact same way.

Literacy tests.
Poll taxes.
Grandfather clauses.

None of the above said that Black Americans couldn’t vote; instead, they simply said: pass this test, pay this fee, produce this document, satisfy this administrator. And that soft barrier was the point. It was enough to curb the vote covertly, rather than overtly. Plausible deniability… but effective.

It let men administer literacy tests on Saturday (intended to deny voting rights) and then worship in church on Sunday without guilt or shame. They had not banned anyone from anything; they had merely enforced a standard.

And that standard amounts to something akin to blasphemy.

How God views these practices.

The central claim of Christianity is not that God had opinions about humanity. Christianity claims that God became a specific human being.

God intentionally took on one type of body, one bloodline, one province, one tax bracket. Christianity claims that God intentionally became a poor kid from an occupied backwater town, was born to an unmarried teenager, and was registered on the census of an empire that counted him for exactly one purpose: to extract money from him.

But God did not become a demographic;
God became a person.

And when he grew up, the people he kept insisting were the measure of everything good were the same four groups that the prophets named: the widow who put in two coins … the orphaned and unaccompanied … the Samaritan and the Syrophoenician and the centurion … and the poor (to whom the whole thing was announced first).

So when American Christians take their elderly neighbor, their immigrant neighbor, and their broke neighbor and reduce them into a fraud statistic, a group to oppress, or a name on a suspected ineligibility list compiled in Washington, they are not just oppressing people Jesus said to protect; they are reversing the incarnation itself.

Christianity’s foundational value is that God became something specific.

That is the incarnation.

The fraud myth’s foundational value was that people are generic categories to be dismissed. God’s foundational value was that these people are not to be dismissed.

A faith that requires a smaller electorate is confessing something about itself.

A faith that requires that we bully the very people that God told us time and again to protect says something about itself.

If your convictions can only survive when fewer of your neighbors are able to vote, you do not have a persuasive faith with a turnout problem; you have a faith that has stopped believing its own message works on free people.

Kevin Young writes weekly at the intersection of progressive faith and modern culture. Please consider supporting this needed work by sharing with others and subscribing.

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Dolly didn’t stumble into her death.
She staged it … for better AND for worse.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Four days before she died, Dolly Parton sat for an interview and mentioned, almost in passing, that she was “dealing with some health issues that I just didn’t pay attention to when I was watching over Carl.” Weeks before that, in a pre-recorded video with butterfly wings fluttering behind her, Dolly apologized for missing an event with a line only she could have written: “My little butterfly wings are getting tired.”

We all read it as Dolly being Dolly.

Charming.
Deflecting.
Fine.

But she was dying of cancer, and she hid it from everyone.

On Tuesday, August 25, her nephew Bryan Seaver, head of Dolly’s security detail for more than twenty years, appeared in a video on her social media accounts and told the world that she was gone.

“This video announcement is something Dolly asked of me years ago before I fully absorbed it as a future reality,” he said at the outset of the video.

And that line has been haunting me since.

The most photographed, most quoted, most relentlessly public woman in American life had already planned the announcement of her own death years in advance, even choosing the messenger to carry the news, and specifying that she wanted to be laid to rest in plush cotton, because after a lifetime in heavy rhinestones she figured she’d earned a bit of comfort.

And because Dolly said she wanted those things, we can be certain that she is getting all of them exactly as she directed. And that matters.

Instead of eulogizing her life—there are many more capable than I to handle those stories—I want to talk specifically about what Dolly taught us about death.

But I need to admit that this week has hit me hard, not just as a pastor who has regularly dealt with death, but as someone who has stared my own in the face and nearly crumbled.

Sitting with one’s own death

Last year, quite by accident, I discovered that I’d suffered two heart attacks that had somehow gone unnoticed in the months before. Along with the blockages that caused them, the heart attacks left my heart weeks (at best) from cardiac arrest and almost certain death. Were it not for my heart being too weak to survive the surgery, I would have gone immediately into an emergency triple coronary artery bypass without the chance to alert my loved ones, prepare a will, or tell my kids goodbye.

The embarrassing part isn’t the missed heart attacks, but: I am a pastor who has spent decades burying people. But when it was my turn to face death, I had nothing planned or written down. I hadn’t given my own demise the least bit of consideration.

I had preached at gravesides. I had sat with families in small rooms with tissue boxes and terrible art as they tried to reconstruct what their loved one might have wanted in death. I had said, out loud, from a pulpit, that death comes for us all.

But the day before that surgery, I found myself frantically doing what I’d had two decades to do at a kitchen table if I had wanted to: figure out what I actually wanted in death, not just in life. I’d had more than enough time to decide who needed to know it and what I would want said and done if I didn’t wake up, but I had never done it.

So, in the dark hours of the night, a couple of hours before my open-heart surgery, instead of eating a grand meal or spending (what could be my last) time with family and friends, I sat down at the computer and started typing out answers to a list of guided questions. The first, “Do you prefer burial or cremation?” The second, “What should be done with ashes (scattering, burial, displayed urn, divided among family)?” They got hard fast. Those kinds of questions before open-heart surgery will wake a person up! But there were also questions that I couldn’t answer, and they broke me. “Have you written letters for specific family members?” I hadn’t. And now, I didn’t have time.

I knew my death might be coming in hours, under anesthesia in the O.R., but now I didn’t have enough time to prepare for it.

And it was my fault alone.

Technically, I didn’t have to prepare. Plenty of people go under anesthesia having completed no advance directives and having thought no thoughts about what if. The surgeon will proceed with the surgery regardless, but I needed to at least do something. I refused to be wheeled down the hallway toward the O.R. as an (completely) unprepared man.

But what I didn’t expect about the process of thinking through my own demise was this: It wasn’t morbid. It was a relief.

Getting it out on paper didn’t summon death; it disarmed it.

The fear I’d been keeping at arm’s length for years turned out to be quite a bit smaller once I looked it directly in the eye.

It’s something I should have done sooner. Far, far sooner.

The art of dying

There’s a book by Rob Moll called The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come. In addition to being a journalist and longtime Christianity Today editor, Rob also once volunteered as a hospice worker, which ignited in him a deep interest in dying well. He began interviewing doctors, chaplains, hospice nurses, and families about what actually happens at the end of a life. He wanted to understand how to end life well, or at least, better.

Like the line from Bryan Seaver in Dolly’s death announcement, this line from Rob’s eventual book has haunted me for years:

“Strangers to death.” That line hit me hard.

Not enemies of death.
Not victims of death.
Strangers… as though we have never been introduced.

I want to argue with that line, but I am not sure that, in good conscience, I can.

For most of history, the thought of being a “stranger to death” would have been a wildly unintelligible thought. For most of history, death was always waiting just at the door, so it had to be dealt with regularly.

The Ars Moriendi writings were small, illustrated handbooks, wildly popular, printed and reprinted across Europe, and their sole purpose was to teach ordinary people how to die. They covered topics like the temptations that arrive at the end (despair, impatience, spiritual pride, clinging to your possessions and your people). They listed the questions one should ask a dying man and the prayers to say over him once he passed. They even proposed the various duties of the friends gathered in the room at the moment of passing.

The Ars Moriendi were guidebooks for the art of dying well.

Today, it is an odd thing to imagine that dying once had a widely distributed and beloved educational curriculum, and you practiced the art by attending other people’s deaths.

Rob Moll’s argument is that we didn’t outgrow that tradition or the need for it; we simply outsourced it… and that disconnection from grief is deeply problematic in ways we might not immediately understand.

Death moved out of the front parlor of our homes and into the ICU. Once death began happening behind hospital doors rather than behind front doors, we simply stopped learning how to die.

Medical advances have made dying a longer and more drawn-out process with more machines, medications, and (this should not surprise us, but it does) loneliness. Worse, the church (which used to be the world’s foremost expert on the subject of death) has largely handed the duties of death off to the doctors.

Though I had read (and loved) The Art of Dying long before my heart attacks, it never motivated me to prepare for my own death. That gap between “knowing you will die” and “behaving as though you will die” is a problem that we all face.

We are never forced to face death, so we never force ourselves to face the reality of our own.

There’s one more thing you should know about Rob Moll, but before I get there…

Our ancestors wanted the opposite thing that we want in death

In the Book of Common Prayer, there is a Great Litany which contains a very old, strange line. Among the calamities Christians once begged God to spare them from (plague, pestilence, famine, and battle) sits this:

From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death, Good Lord, deliver us.

Think about that ending for a moment.

From sudden death … deliver us.

If you were to ask your friends, family, or coworkers how they hope they will go, you will hear the exact same response from all of them, and it will be the exact opposite of the Great Litany. They will say:

I want to go quickly,
in my sleep,
no warning,
no fuss,
don’t let me suffer,
I don’t want to be a burden.

We now pray for precisely the death that our great-grandparents considered a curse.

They weren’t braver than you or I, but they were better at facing death. Far better.

To them, a sudden death was a horrific thought because it robbed them of the exam they’d spent their entire life studying for. They didn’t want to die suddenly, unaccompanied and alone, without their affairs in order, and with everything in disarray. They wanted to know the time was coming, not avoid it.

Unlike our ancestors, we consider it a mercy to be ambushed by death.

And even when it does come, we still try to ignore it as best we can.

The dire state of modern death

I’ve been a pastor long enough to watch the American funeral become a relic of the past. A true non-event, no matter how loved the person was.

If funerals are even held at all these days, attendance is down and usually limited to a markedly older crowd. Many people don’t even know what a “Visitation” is (or “Viewing” depending on what part of the country you are from). There is a push to try livestream alternatives to buck the downward trend, and newer “Celebration of Life” events are replacing the traditional “funeral,” but they are generally no better attended.

A “Celebration of Life” does sound better, until you notice what was edited out: the body, the dirt, and the word dead.

Increasingly there’s no service at all, celebration or otherwise. For many, it is just a cremation, a delay of several months, and endless years of awkwardly trying to figure out what you do with the urn.

I’m not opposed to change. Death rites, customs, and traditions change. That is okay, and necessary. But this isn’t change. This is the absence of rites and customs.

The death-avoidance industry, on the other hand, is booming.

Peptides, cold plunges, longevity clinics, biological-age tests, GLP-1s, hormone panels, supplement stacks, and all manner of health aids abound. We have never spent more money to not die, and yet, the mortality rate remains stubbornly fixed at one hundred percent.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe that any of these death-defying techniques are bad in and of themselves.

It isn’t the treating of death that is problematic in my mind; it is the denying of it. My bypass surgery wasn’t a cure for death. It was a delay. For how long, only God knows. I am a ticking time-bomb.

But aren’t we all?

Avoidance doesn’t bring relief to grief, though.

In Dolly’s case, without a public funeral or planned memorial for people to participate in, the grief moved online instead.

Wednesday, my entire feed was Dolly.
Wall to wall Dolly.
It still is today.

… the Imagination Library and its hundreds of millions of free books … the million dollars she gave Vanderbilt for vaccine research … “Coat of Many Colors” lyrics typed out by strangers … Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Eminem, Paul McCartney, and other celebrities offering personal stories … tens of thousands of ordinary people writing genuine, aching, unembarrassed tributes to a woman that most had never met …

That isn’t an accident.
That is a wake.
That is an international, online wake.

For those who don’t know the very old word and practice of wake, it is an informal social gathering where family and friends come together to mourn, share memories, and celebrate the life of the person who has died.

Our grandparents participated in wakes by sitting up all night in a front parlor, with the casket and a coffee pot. They would gather and watch the body, as a community, until it was memorialized in a funeral and interred in dirt.

Now, people stay up late into the night scrolling social media, posting and commenting about the deceased as a form of lament. A wake.

The impulse to grieve together will never go away.
But also, a social media feed simply cannot accomplish what a funeral does.

It can’t put a hand on your shoulder. It can’t dig a hole. It can’t say I am the resurrection and the life over a box while you try to hide your tears. It can’t help you face and process your grief.

And social media will soon move on to the next topic of the day, but your unprocessed grief won’t.

What Dolly taught us about dying well

If we set the wigs and the rhinestones aside for a moment and look at the way Dolly handled her impending death, there’s a real ars moriendi (art of dying) in there:

1. She gave most of it away while she was alive. Dolly didn’t die having hoarded riches. She gave most of it away while she was alive, and by most accounts she would have been a billionaire if she hadn’t always been giving it away. She funded the Imagination Library for thirty years. She paid tuitions. She wrote checks after the Gatlinburg wildfires. And because of it, there’s no scramble now over what she “would have wanted,” because she already did it. The medieval ars moriendi handbooks were blunt about the deathbed temptation of avaritia (clinging), but Dolly had loosened her grip on riches decades early.

2. She had already written how the ending would go. The video announcement of her passing was planned years in advance. She hand-picked the messenger and left instructions for what to do. Compare that to the average American family who shows up at the funeral without anybody knowing whether Dad wants to be buried or burned. Compare it, frankly, to me at forty-something in a hospital gown, having just written down the decision for myself, and not getting it done because I waited till too late. Dolly, on the other hand, did her paperwork.

3. She kept a place for hope in the hereafter for her entire life. “Dolly has lived in the light and is in the arms of Jesus,” her nephew said. She spent seventy years writing gospel songs (one of the more famous, “He’s Alive,” is still an Easter staple). Unlike many near the end of life, Dolly had somewhere to put her death when it came, which brought her peace. She wasn’t improvising hope in the last four days; she’d spent a lifetime stoking its fires.

4. She left something for the future. In 2015, Dolly secretly recorded a song, sealed it in a wooden chest at Dollywood, and left legal instructions that it not be opened until January 19, 2046 (her hundredth birthday). Whatever else that is, it’s an act of faith that there will be people around twenty years from now, and that those people will still want to hear from her.

5. She died surrounded by people she loved. She chose to let those close to her be with her, rather than completely hide the dire state of her health.

6. She refused to be pitied into the ground. Dolly did her best to hide her decline during televised appearances. She did no farewell tour. She didn’t release any inspirational cancer-journey content. She simply kept working and walking forward until her wings gave out.

Where Dolly teaches us caution

Now the harder half, because Dolly’s death might have some lessons for us in what not to do:

1. Her silence was a gift to us and possibly a cost to her. Withholding the diagnosis spared millions of people months of dread and spared her family a public deathwatch. That is a genuinely generous thing to do for people you love. And I get it. When I was sick, managing other people’s fear about my diagnosis was a full-time job, and there was a real temptation to solve that by simply not telling them. But the old ars moriendi handbooks insist that dying is a communal act. They insist that the dying person needs witnesses, and that the community needs the practice of experiencing death from up close. Every hospice chaplain I know says the same thing: the people who tell the truth early about their terminal illness get months of extraordinary conversation in return, but the people who protect everyone get a lot of unfinished sentences. I don’t know what happened in those rooms in Nashville, and it isn’t mine to know, but I know the pattern: Protecting people from your death is sometimes a way of protecting yourself from their grief. I know because I tried it. But grief is as important as hope, if not more important. People need to feel it, and those facing death need to see it.

2. She never let us see her un-costumed, even at the end. “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap,” is one of my favorite Dolly lines. But the woman who joked about looking good in her casket spent sixty years constructing a body that wasn’t allowed to age in public. She made it charming, and it was a lovely punchline for her. But still, the most beloved woman in America could not be seen with gray roots or wrinkles. That’s not an indictment of Dolly (because that was also what she wanted), but it is an indictment of what we required of her. A culture that cannot bear to watch a woman grow old is not going to be any good at watching her die.

3. We may be mourning our own comfort. I noticed something while doom-scrolling the death tributes. People kept referring to her with some variation of “the most unproblematic celebrity.” Dolly earned universal love, in part, through a lifelong, disciplined refusal to do things that might alienate half her audience. She gave no endorsements. She had no public feuds. She was radically generous but politically Switzerland. And so she became the last thing Americans could all agree on. Christ was also universally beloved for about a week, and then he opened his mouth in the temple. That said, Dolly did gently signal her support of the gay and lesbian community, trans rights, and vaccines, and for that she took (and will continue to take) a lot of heat. But when we say “be more like Dolly,” we should not just mean be generous, be kind, be unpretentious, be likeable, but we should also make sure when we say “be more like Dolly” that we don’t mean be inoffensive when human rights are at stake.

4. The social funeral is crowding out the actual one. We wept for a woman none of us met. Meanwhile, someone in your congregation buried her husband of fifty-one years last month and hasn’t had a single visitor since the casseroles ran out. No one is calling. No one is checking in on her. We’re getting very good at grieving strangers, which costs us nothing, and worse and worse at grieving neighbors, which costs us an afternoon.

The depressing death of the man who wrote the book on dying well

So, I need to finish telling you about Rob Moll (the hospice volunteer, journalist, and man who wrote the modern book on the Christian “art of dying”).

Rob died, suddenly and unexpectedly, on July 19, 2019.

He fell while hiking in the backcountry of Mount Rainier National Park, the place he loved most. Rob was only forty-one, and he left his wife, Clarissa, and four children behind.

Sudden death.
The exact thing the Great Litany prays against.

No diagnosis.
No runway to prepare for it.
No chosen messenger to share the news.
No time to stage anything at all.

Rob, the expert in dying well, got no more warning than the rest of us.

One could read that as a cosmic joke—and I understand the impulse to make a joke of it—but I read more into it than that.

His family did not have to reconstruct his final wishes from fragments. Rob had already told them what he believed about death and what he wanted when it came, as it was his life’s work. He’d written the book, and they had it. His widow went on to write four books of her own on grief and bereavement, building directly on the research he’d done on dying well.

While his preparation didn’t spare him a sudden death, Rob’s intentional preparation made his sudden death survivable for the people he left.

Dolly got eighty years, a diagnosis, and time to script it.

Rob Moll got a trail and a sudden fall.

I got two heart attacks and a warning.

None of us chose how we go. And that is the point of my thoughts here: The art of dying is not a technique for controlling your death; it’s a way to make sure that you aren’t strangers when it arrives.

An art of dying for the rest of us

So how do you die well, on purpose? How do you make death a craft rather than a catastrophe?

Here are a few thoughts from a man (me) who once had to cram for the exam and hopes to help keep you from the same predicament.

1. Say the words out loud. To your spouse, your partner, your kids, your coworkers: I am going to die. Don’t say “if anything ever happens to me,” but get used to saying “I am going to die.” They need to hear you say it, and you need to hear yourself say it. Psalm 90 doesn’t ask God to extend our days; it asks him to teach us to number them.

2. Do the paperwork this month. Write a will. Prepare an advance directive. Determine who will be your healthcare proxy. Write out your passwords. Let someone know where the deed is. Decide whether you want burial or cremation, a psalm or a slideshow. Write your own funeral order of service (this is especially powerful and cathartic, but almost no one does it). Dolly’s preparation took years. Mine took a sleepless night. Yours can take a Saturday, at a table, with coffee, while nothing is wrong.

3. Choose your witnesses. Name three or so people you want in the room with you when you die, and tell them now, while it’s an honor instead of an ambush.

4. Give it away early. Don’t leave everything to be given away in the will. Do it now while you can watch it land and change lives. Fund that thing you love. Pay off that person’s tuition. Hand over the keys to the property. The deathbed is a terrible place to attempt generosity for the first time.

5. Settle your accounts and grievances with others. The old ars moriendi books listed the deathbed temptations: despair, impatience, pride, clinging. Each of these is easier to avoid at death if you have already written the apology letter or told the person how much they have meant to you. Make the call you’ve been avoiding for eleven years. You don’t want to be sending those texts with a pre-op IV in your arm and an anesthesiologist waiting on you to put the phone down. Ask me how I know.

6. Go to funerals. All of them. Yes, even the awkward ones. And go to the ones for people you barely knew. “It is better to go to a house of mourning than to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart” (Ecclesiastes 7:2). This is how the skill of dying well gets transmitted, by standing in the room and watching another family do it. Bring your children. Yes, children should be educated in the art of dying and exposed to death their whole lives. It is NEVER too early. Let them see a body. Let them see you cry and then eat a ham sandwich in a church basement, because that’s the whole gospel in miniature: grief and food and other people.

7. Rehearse your hope until it’s muscle memory. Memorize a psalm that brings comfort. Learn a hymn for times of mourning. Have the words in you before you need them, because at the end you will not be composing new material. I can tell you exactly what surfaced in me on that gurney, and it wasn’t anything I’d thought up that week. It was the old stuff, put there decades ago. Hymns I didn’t know I remembered and KJV verses from AWANAs that I had memorized as a child but hadn’t thought of in decades. Dolly had seventy years of gospel in her bones. What’s in yours?

8. Leave a box behind. Leave a letter for a grandchild’s wedding. Pass on a recipe in your handwriting. Make a recording of your voice telling one story about your mother. Write down everything from your life you can remember in a chapter book. Leave something for someone to open when you’re not there.

9. Then live like it’s Tuesday, the day Dolly died. The point of the ars moriendi handbooks was never morbidity. It was freedom. People who have made peace with dying stop negotiating with it, and they’re almost always the least anxious people in the face of death. Dolly kept writing songs and cracking jokes about gas stations until the last week of her life. That isn’t denial of death as much as it is simply what it looks like when the fear of death has already been dealt with.

Sadness lies with us

Hebrews says it plainly: “People are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment” (9:27).

We’ve built an entire modern society dedicated to that first half being negotiable.

It isn’t.

Death isn’t negotiable for billionaires, not for pastors with new bypasses, and not for the closest thing to a saint that American popular culture ever produced, Dolly Parton.

Dolly got a good death by almost any measure, dying at eighty, surrounded, prepared, in the light, affairs in order, gifts already given, and a small private service for the people who actually knew her.

She left us a butterfly joke, a sealed box, a video filmed some time ago, and a request for a bed of plush cotton.

She crafted her passing before the time came, just in case.

Rob Moll never got to use most of what he learned about dying well, but it served his family anyway.

And I got a second chance to do what I should have done at thirty, which is not a thing most people are handed, and which I am not going to waste twice.

Number your days.
Write it down.
Give it away.
Go to the funeral.

And when it’s your turn to go, God willing, may someone stand up and say of you what her nephew said of her: the sadness lies with us, not with her.

Dr. Kevin Young writes at the intersection of faith and culture from a progressive perspective. Please consider subscribing and sharing this with others.

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Contrary to what recent evangelical rhetoric would have you believe, the world is not becoming less religious; it is becoming increasingly religious every day.

This month, two states pushed forward wildly divergent ideas about God and how the topic of religion should be taught in public schools, because no matter how hard we try, it seems that religion in schools has become all but unavoidable.

Texas, known for its brash cowboy ways, is rolling out a state-mandated reading list of roughly 200 curated biblical passages to be taught from kindergarten through graduation. In short, state-mandated religion in schools.

Connecticut is also putting religion in its schools, just not Christianity. This month, the state quietly passed a provision buried in an education omnibus bill that directed its Department of Education to build instructional resources on Arab and Islamic studies. Unlike Texas, these lessons will be optional, but districts will be encouraged to use them. Topics cover the history, culture, and contributions of Islam.

As you might expect, American Christians have decided, more or less instinctively, that Texas is a victory and Connecticut is a threat.

Go figure.

For me, the opposite is true.
I’m with Connecticut and opposed to Texas.
And I believe Jesus would agree.

And I would argue that the most diehard conservative Christian fundamentalists should also be against Texas’ move, not because of the Bible verses that Texas chose, but because of what Texas cut out.

Texas isn’t teaching biblical literacy. Texas has decided to teach a carefully curated, watered-down (but toxic) civic religion that flatters the people who curated the texts but is ultimately counterproductive to the goals of Christianity.

Connecticut, on the other hand, is doing the exact thing that Jesus told a lawyer to go and do.

The Problem with Texas

According to The Texas Tribune:

Six-year-olds in Texas classrooms will learn about Noah’s ark, David and Goliath, and Daniel in the lion’s den. For Daniel, they will be using a picture book from Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network.

Fourth graders will be taught Luke 14, where Jesus says the proud will be humbled.

Fifth graders will learn about Moses and the burning bush.

Sixth graders will be taught “do not be anxious.”

Seventh graders get the Beatitudes.

High schoolers will work through Genesis 2 (creation), 1 Corinthians 13 (love), Ecclesiastes 3 (there is a time for everything), Psalm 23 (the Shepherd’s Psalm), the Prodigal Son, and more than a dozen chapters from Job… oh my!

For the most part, these are the passages you’d put on a canvas print at Hobby Lobby.

Love is patient.
The Lord is my shepherd.
Consider the birds.
To everything there is a season.

Meh.

Not one selection on the list would make a comfortable person uncomfortable… which, dare I say, is the real point of the Bible.

But what do I know?

Oddly absent from the list, though, is the real heart and core of Christianity. It somewhat surprises me that this list doesn’t bother Christian conservatives.

There are no verses that speak of Jesus as God or mention his divinity.

So they aren’t really teaching Christianity at all… or even religion.

Texas Christians did what Thomas Jefferson did.

They took a pair of scissors and cut out all of the icky parts. They deleted the tough passages.

For all of the whining about “libs” picking and choosing what they want from the Bible, it seems that here the conservatives are doing the same.

What is left are lessons in morality.

What Was Cut

Over the years I have discovered that one can often learn more from what isn’t said than from what is.

Within everything reported to be in the Texas Bible teaching list, I cannot find:

• Genesis 22. Abraham raises a knife to kill his son. The founding trauma of three faiths. Cut.

• Genesis 19. Lot offers his daughters to a mob, then his daughters rape him. Cut.

• Judges 19. A woman is handed to a crowd, assaulted to death, and dismembered into twelve pieces to start a war. Cut.

• Numbers 31, Deuteronomy 20, Joshua 6–11, 1 Samuel 15. Herem (total annihilation) warfare. Every man, woman, child, and animal murdered... commanded by God. Cut, cut, cut, cut.

• 2 Samuel 11–13. David rapes Bathsheba, kills her husband, and later David’s son rapes David’s daughter Tamar. Cut. … But David and Goliath made it into the first grade!

• 1 Samuel 18. Two hundred foreskins as a bride price. Cut… obviously.

• Leviticus 18 and 20. The verses American Christians constantly weaponize against gay kids. (When did they suddenly become shy?) Cut.

• Leviticus 19:33–34. “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself.” Cut… unsurprisingly.

• Luke 1:46–55. Mary sings that God pulls rulers off thrones and sends the rich away empty. Cut.

• Luke 4. Jesus’s first sermon: “Good news to the poor! Freedom for prisoners!” Cut.

• Matthew 25. “I was a foreigner and you did not welcome me.” Cut.

• Amos 5. “You trample on the poor.” Cut.

• James 5. “Wail, you rich, your gold is rotting.” Cut.

• Acts 2 and 4. The first church practiced socialism/communism, holding everything in common, and no one was in need. Cut.

• Ephesians 6, Colossians 3, 1 Timothy 2, Philemon. “Slaves obey your masters.” “Women be silent.” The texts American Christians used for three centuries to hold human beings in bondage and half the church in silence. Cut.

• Revelation 18. A superpower drunk on wealth and trafficking in human bodies. Very cut.

Now look at the two lists side by side and notice something about what was kept and what was cut.

The Texas curriculum did not cut hard passages. Texas cut two specific categories: texts that indict the powerful, and texts that embarrass the pious. All of these deleted passages are wildly inconvenient to a story where America is good, the Bible is nice, and God is on America’s side.

While they did keep Job, they are missing the point by teaching it as “Satan tests a faithful man.” The actual argument of Job—that the friends’ tidy theology of reward and punishment is wrong, and that God (who is the actual villain in the text) says so out loud in chapter 42—cannot survive a curriculum designed by people who need religion to be black and white.

They also kept Exodus, but only as a burning-bush inspirational message. They cut out the topic of slavery and liberation, and every serious historian knows that the parts they cut out of the Exodus story were the parts that armed the American Revolution against a tyrannical government and Black liberation against slavery. It is impossible to teach Exodus honestly in Texas without teaching the Trail of Tears... so they won’t teach that part at all.

A curriculum that has to hide most of its source material isn’t teaching the Bible at all.

If Texas wanted biblical literacy,
I’d be first in line.
Genuinely.

I want kids to know why Melville named a character Ishmael and why Martin Luther King said “let justice roll down.” (That’s in Amos, btw).

True biblical literacy means teaching the whole terrifying library, or nothing.

Biblical literacy means a seventeen-year-old should be reading Judges 19 and asking a teacher, out loud, “why is this in here?” and “what does this have to do with me?”

But the curriculum doesn’t want students actually wrestling with tough texts, or even how the Bible confronts our present age. It is actively preventing those questions by white-washing the Bible.

This isn’t putting the Bible in schools.

Even the Ten Commandments are Edited

While we’re here, the Ten Commandments plaques now hanging in Texas classrooms are also a lie.

Go read Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 in full.

The command about images is a paragraph long, with a jealous God doling out suffering to the third and fourth generation for infractions.

The Sabbath command is a labor regulation that protects servants and immigrant workers.

And the tenth commandment lists a neighbor’s wife between his house and his ox… as property (a fact about the ancient world worth a real conversation with teenagers today).

The Texas Ten Commandments don’t say any of that.

The posters give you a numbered list of American manners, not of ancient Jewish law … or even anything resembling biblical truth.

Texas conservatives aren’t putting God’s Word on the wall; they are putting a dishonest summary of God’s Word on the wall, because the real thing is an indictment against them.

Do We Really Want Religion in Schools?

The argument for the Texas curriculum seems to be this:

• Religion is central to human existence.

• Students can’t understand Western civilization or literature without religion.

• Academic study of religion isn’t indoctrination.

All true.

But that logic should apply to other religions as well, not just Christianity.

A Pepperdine professor put it well in Christianity Today: “Christians can study the Quran or Bhagavad Gita as scholastics without becoming believers of those gods.”

But Christians in Texas don’t seem to be interested in academic study of the Bible by students; they seem to be interested in behavioral change, i.e., making students live according to (American) Christian values.

But at what cost?

Do Christians really want to open the door to the inclusion of religious texts in schools… or just their (gutted) religious text?

Do Christians really want two hundred Quranic selections being taught in K through 12th grade? Do they want instruction in Surah Al-Fatihah in the second grade? Would they support a unit on the Hijra in fifth grade? How would they feel about Ramadan in a state textbook, taught with warmth, by a teacher who calls it beautiful? (and honestly, it is beautiful…)

It’s time that Christians do some serious self-reflection, because what they said they wanted was neutral teaching about the centrality of religion in the West … but what they really meant was that they only wanted teaching about their religion, and their religious texts (and even then, only the good and easy parts).

That is quite different.

We don’t have to guess how this (one religion vs. many religions) plays out in Texas, because we already have a recent example of it.

Four days before the CT article was published, Texas’ governor threatened to pull grant funding from the Dallas and Houston airports over the installation of Islamic washing facilities. Yes, the governor of Texas got into a fight over … sinks. A state that says it wants religion in every public school is refusing simple accommodation of a different religion.

Go figure.

Texas isn’t interested in religious liberty.
Texas just wants to give Christianity a home-team advantage.

But isn’t Connecticut doing the same thing with Islam? Aren’t they giving preferential treatment as well?

Connecticut’s House Republican leader thinks so, saying the state shouldn’t advance any religion and “went too far in including Islamic studies.”

Also, the Connecticut Catholic Conference called it a clear First Amendment violation, comparable to hanging the Ten Commandments on a wall.

Interesting comparison.

What Connecticut Is Doing

Despite how it might seem on the surface, Connecticut and Texas are doing very different things.

Connecticut is not mandating that schools teach religion.

The provision directs the state to make materials available and encourage districts to utilize them. CAIR-Connecticut’s chairman said that nobody expects every school to teach Islam next year, but that if a district wants to, the state will have something ready.

The state education department compared the Islamic resources to materials they already provide to classrooms for Holocaust education, Native American studies, and Asian American and Pacific Islander studies.

For all of these specialized studies, the content is history, culture, and civilization rather than the indoctrination of religious texts.

For Islam in particular, Connecticut hopes that teaching about the history and culture of Islam will help Connecticut’s children know more about their Muslim neighbors (because the alternative is that they learn something false about them… usually from Christians).

So let’s compare the two, honestly:

Which One Is the Christian Move?

A lawyer once asked Jesus who counted as his neighbor. He was looking for loopholes.

Jesus answered with a story in which the religious professionals walk past a bleeding man, leaving him for dead. The hero of the story is a Samaritan, a member of a heretical ethnic group that Jesus’ audience had been taught to despise.

Then Jesus told the lawyer, "Go and do likewise."

I am sure many Christians have many reasons to reject a curriculum whose explicit purpose is to help children see a despised religious minority as fully human.

But the priest and the Levite probably had good reasons to refuse to help the bleeding man on the side of the road.

Jesus’ point was as clear then as I think it would be now:

The Connecticut curriculum is the one that Christians should be defending, and the Texas curriculum is the one Christians should be rejecting.

Here’s why:

1. Texas assumes the Bible needs to be sanitized to be safe for children and adolescents. That is a low view of Scripture. Connecticut, on the other hand, makes no claim on Scripture at all.

2. Texas is selectively choosing moralizing content from the Bible that avoids the Bible’s primary messages, especially in regard to the poor, oppressed, and marginalized.

3. Connecticut is simply asking children to understand their neighbors better. No version of the gospel has that as the villain.

The Desire to Be the Default Religion

Here is what I believe is really going on:

The push for religion in public schools (Texas and elsewhere) is not a hunger for God.

It is a hunger for establishment.

It is a hunger for the reassuring feeling of being the default religion. It is a hunger for the culture around you to bend toward your shape. It is a hunger for your grandchildren to grow up in a country where your faith is the only faith, rather than one option among many. It is a hunger to subvert other religions, lest you be subverted by them first.

In short, that “hunger” isn’t Christianity.
It is Christian Nationalism.

Christian Nationalism is not Christianity.

A state that can decide which two hundred Bible verses your children read is a state that has decided which God your children meet.

Right now, the God that children will meet in Texas public schools does not defend immigrants, does not indict the rich, does not hand a woman (Mary) a revolutionary song, and (perhaps most tellingly) does not claim to be God.

Texas put two hundred Bible verses in front of its children and made sure none of those verses would ask anything of the adults in charge, nor would they question the nation in any way.

Connecticut, on the other hand, offered its children a chance to know a Muslim kid’s grandmother as a human being.

One of those is a true Christian curriculum.

Go and do likewise.

Kevin Young writes at the intersection of faith and culture, from a progressive perspective. If you found this helpful or insightful, please share or become a paid subscriber.

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ICE And The Rule of Law

There are multiple flavors of Christianity these days, but not all of them are healthy or driven by Christ.

One of the most concerning is the one that allows federal ICE agents to profile congregants, interrogate on church property, and make arrests within sanctuaries.

Have we forgotten the meaning of “sanctuary?”

Lutheran synods, an entire UCC convention, and a slew of Baptist churches are in federal court this month fighting the Trump administration over the reversal of the “sensitive locations” policy that used to keep ICE and federal agents out of churches, schools, and hospitals. Now the sanctuary is little more than another parking lot to stake out.

While a federal injunction has already blocked enforcement of the practice once (which tells you how shaky the government’s legal ground is here), the fight is still very much alive.

Shockingly, many Christians are siding with the government and ICE.

Their rationale? The rule of law.

It’s as if they never stopped to think about how that phrase has been used as justification for some of history’s worst atrocities.

Pharaoh had the rule of law.
Segregation and slavery had the rule of law.
1930s Germany had the rule of law.

But somehow that is conveniently avoided.

The rule of law isn’t a trump card that we get to play against Jesus whenever we want to follow a tyrannical regime or a political party rather than his teachings. We don’t get to use the rule of law to bring harm to others.

But, of course, it isn’t that clear at times, is it?

We have to keep asking the question: Whose law, protecting what, at whose expense?

At the center of this tension sits the Bible.
Not cable news.
Not the election.

And more specifically, the Bible verse that is always used to shut down the whole conversation before it even begins: Romans 13, “submit yourselves to the governing authorities.”

One Of The Few Areas Where The Bible Is Clear

Before we get to Paul and Romans, we need to start in Exodus. You don’t just get to leapfrog the Hebrew texts and Jesus just because it fits your preferred political position.

“You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 22:21)

Notice what God does not say.

God doesn’t say “be nice to foreigners because it’s the nice thing to do.” God doesn’t appeal to feelings at all.

God appeals to memory.

You were the undocumented ones, once.
You were the ones without papers,
You were the ones without land,
You were the ones under the rule of law, without a legal leg to stand on,
You were the ones entirely at the mercy of somebody else’s border policy.

Don’t you dare forget it! — God

Later, in Leviticus, he says it again:
“The stranger who dwells among you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself... for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (19:33-34).

And again in Deuteronomy:
God himself “loves the stranger, giving him food and clothing, and therefore…” (not however, not but only if they came through the right channel, but THEREFORE) Israel must do the same (10:18-19).

This is not a suggestion buried in the footnotes of OT Law.

In Hebrew, the word for “stranger” is ger, and it has a specific group of people that it means. The ger (stranger) is the nonnative person living in your land, contributing to your economy, raising their kids in your neighborhood, but who has no legal standing.

The ger is completely dependent on the mercy of people who could turn on them, and turn them in, at any moment.

Jesus does not soften any of this:
“I was a stranger and you welcomed me... as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:35, 40)

Jesus is not being poetic or metaphorical, he is telling us, point blank, that he has attached himself to the “illegal,” the refugee, and the person your people are telling you to hate and send home.

If you refuse the stranger, you are not just bending a policy, you are refusing Christ.

Jesus’ own origin story is essentially one of an undocumented refugee. Herod wanted Jesus dead, so Joseph and Mary became asylum seekers, fleeing through the night into Egypt with a baby who has no papers and no protection except the mercy of a foreign land (Matthew 2:13-15).

The God of the universe entered the story of human history as an undocumented child.

I failed to grasp the importance of these texts until I began to interact with undocumented immigrants while living in South Florida. I was shocked by what I learned. The stories I had been told about them were all lies. These gers were good people. They worked hard. They paid their taxes and gave more to the system than they took. They desperately wanted to become legal, but the process was designed to keep them from it, with many spending untold years trying.

In America, the ger has become too useful as a political football (to rally white conservatives) for anyone in power to want the problem solved. So the “just follow the law” and “just do it the right way” lines are lies.

In America, the ger has become too useful as a political football — a wedge to rally voters — for anyone in power to actually want the problem solved. So the 'just follow the law' line is a lie.

The Romans 13 Problem

So with all that in mind, let’s now face Paul and Romans 13:
“Let every person be subject to the governing authorities... whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed.” (Romans 13:1-2)

This verse is easy to misunderstand if you don’t read everything around it, know the people whom Paul is writing it to, or the situation that his readers find themselves in.

And that is an important point to remember: It was written to them, not to us.

1. WHO IS PAUL TALKING TO, AND WHAT’S THEIR DEAL?

   Paul is writing to a vulnerable, struggling, and quite small group of Jewish-Christians living in Rome, a city that could crush the new Christian community without anyone taking notice. In fact, it had just happened to the Jews in Rome. To make it worse, Rome was in open unrest over unfair taxation, with ongoing riots, which is why Paul’s encouragement to pay your taxes and obey without questions isn’t a once-and-forever decree about every government ever. It’s pastoral triage. Paul is a battered leader telling his fragile, minority community, “Don’t give the government an excuse to notice you and kill you.”
   

2. THE VERSE DOESN’T STAND ALONE

   This verse is a continuation of a sentence that began at the end of chapter 12: “Repay no one evil for evil... never avenge yourselves... leave it to the wrath of God” (12:17-19). Paul’s concern here is Christian vigilantism, i.e. that Christians were looking increasingly as though they might take justice into their own hands. He’s saying: Don’t become the mob. There is a huge difference between that and “whatever the government does to the vulnerable is fine with God.”
   

3. VERBS MATTER.

   Paul uses the word hypotassō for “obey.” It means: to be rightly ordered under, or situated in right relationship to.
   
   He does not use hypakouō, which is the word for direct, unconditional obedience (the same word Luke used in Acts 5:29 when the apostles tell the Sanhedrin, “We must obey God rather than human authority.”) Paul could have used either word, but he used the first, and there is an enormous difference between the two.
   

4. PAUL PUTS IN A CONDITION, BUT EVERYONE IGNORES IT.

   In verses 3-4, the very next lines say: rulers are legitimate only if they are “not a terror to good conduct, but to bad” since they exist to be “God’s servant for your good” and to act against wrongdoing.
   
   So let’s ask the question: When armed ICE agents stake out sanctuaries to terrorize people who are worshiping, feeding their kids, and doing nothing but existing without the correct paperwork, is that a government being “God’s servant for good,” or is that the exact thing that Paul says disqualifies authority from being followed and obeyed?
   

5. WHAT PAUL DOES HIMSELF.

   When city magistrates try to release Paul quietly after an illegal beating, he refuses to slip away, demanding public accountability for the injustice done to him (Acts 16:35-37). Later, Paul appeals directly to Caesar, using the empire’s own legal machinery against corrupt local authorities (Acts 25:11).
   
   The man who allegedly told everyone to just fall in line, didn’t fall in line himself. He spent his entire ministry life in and out of prison for refusing to fall in line. If Romans 13 meant what the rule of law people say it means, then Paul constantly broke his own rule.
   

6. PAUL DIDN’T WRITE IN A VACUUM.
   The Hebrew midwives lie to Pharaoh’s face and let the babies live (Exodus 1). Daniel keeps praying toward Jerusalem, even with the death decree already signed (Daniel 6). Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego stand in front of a furnace and tell the king, we’re not bowing, do what you’re going to do (Daniel 3).
   
   The same New Testament that contains Romans 13 also contains Revelation 13, a vision of empire so given over to blasphemy and bloodshed that the faithful response is resistance, not submission.
   

And history confirms Paul’s argument, and we should be ashamed for continually forgetting.

• The “German Christians” in 1930s Nazi Germany quoted Romans 13, demanding submission to Hitler. But the minority Confessing Church insisted the church’s ultimate allegiance could never be absorbed into the state’s. Dietrich Bonhoeffer went to the gallows because he believed in the very reading of Romans 13 that I just gave you.

• American slaveholders and, a century later, segregationists reached again for Romans 13 against abolitionists and against Martin Luther King Jr., trying to squelch the resistance by hitting hard with an authoritarian reading of Romans 13. King answered from a Birmingham jail cell, borrowing from Augustine: “An unjust law is no law at all.”

Who Has Bought Your Soul?

In Les Misérables, there is a man who is an ex-convict, a parole violator, and a guy that the rule of law had already judged disposable. His name is Jean Valjean, and wherever he walks in town, every single door shuts in his face.

Every door, but one.
The Bishop’s.

Myriel, the Bishop, takes him in, gives him food and a bed, asking no questions about his papers.

Valjean repays the kindness by stealing some silver from the church and running.

When the police catch him and drag him back to the Bishop’s house to confirm the theft, the Bishop lies to the police.

He tells the authorities that he gave Valjean the silver as a gift. Then, in front of the officers, he hands Valjean two silver candlesticks, saying he had “forgotten” them when he left…

“Jean Valjean, my brother, you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul I am buying for you.”

The Bishop broke the law that night. He lied to armed government authorities to protect a man who was a criminal. But no one has ever thought the Bishop was the villain.

There is another character, who is worth noting.

Javert.

Javert is as important to the story as the Bishop. Javert genuinely believes the law is righteous and to follow it is to be a righteous person, full stop, no exceptions. But Valjean’s transformation and the mercy shown by the Bishop break Javert’s world. Unable to reconcile the Bishop’s mercy with his rule of law worldview, Javert commits suicide.

Right now, right here in America, there are Javerts standing at the back of sanctuaries, sitting in pews, and waiting in parking lots. We have to decide which character in the story we are going to be.

The rule of law, today, is trying to say that the stranger at the door doesn’t count. But the Bible has told us that we aren’t supposed to slam it in the face of anyone, even criminals, but instead, throw it open wide.

It is your soul I am buying for you.

That line was never just about a Bishop or a convict.

We only welcome Jesus when we welcome the stranger unconditionally. Not before. Not with conditions. Only then.

Kevin Young writes at the intersection of faith and culture, tackling the tough topics from a progressive-leaning perspective… thoughtfully, pastorally, but boldly.

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It was 2019, and I found myself in one of the most magnificent (and admittedly weirdest) places on earth… its lowest point, the Dead Sea, located in Israel’s Jordan Valley.

I stayed at the most magnificent seaside resort, experiencing luxuries most people only ever dream of. But the true opportunity of a lifetime wasn’t the resort but the seawater and the chance to float in water so dense with salt that I couldn’t make myself sink no matter how hard I tried (which is pretty cool for a guy who doesn’t swim well).

While in the water, I remember a guide reaching down to the bottom of the sea, scooping up a bit of sea floor, and handing me a fistful of thick, gray Dead Sea mud, telling me to cake it on… “good for the skin,” he said, “minerals found nowhere else on earth.”

What a memory, floating effortlessly in the lowest place on the planet, covered in mud, baking in the sun, laughing with strangers.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, beyond how absurd I looked. It wasn’t until later, flipping back through John’s Gospel, that the image caught up with me. When Jesus heals the man born blind, he doesn’t just speak a word, but he makes mud from dirt and his own saliva and puts it on the man’s eyes.

“Go,” he says, “wash.”
And the man came back seeing.

While I don’t want to overwork that image, I haven’t been able to shake it either, because that’s more or less what happened to me.

For many years, I had a tidy, inherited theology about what “God’s covenant nation” (Israel) meant and what it obligated me to. I had mud over my eyes. It wasn’t until I washed off the muddy theology about Israel, so to speak, that I was able to see the place, and the theology, more clearly.

Seven years later, apparently I’m not the only one that needs a mud bath.

The numbers are finally catching up to the questions

For most of my life, white evangelical support for Israel has been treated as settled fact. “Christians are required to support Israel… no matter what,” they say.

But fewer and fewer Christians are buying into that theology anymore, and it is causing a great deal of distress.

Pew Research’s most recent survey, released this summer, found that favorable views of the Israeli people among white evangelicals have dropped ten points since 2024, down to 74 percent. That is an enormous, steep drop.

But the sharper drop is toward Israel’s government: favorability there has fallen from 71 percent to 57 percent in the same window, among white evangelicals. Among Americans under 30 (the future of every church that’s paying attention), only 32 percent hold a positive view of Israel at all!

Having been to Israel, this caught me off guard. It is a lovely country with truly lovely people.

But it gets worse for Israel…

Brookings was blunter than Pew: Israel now relies more heavily than ever on American evangelical support precisely because younger evangelicals are the ones walking away from it.

And it’s not a coincidence. Reports indicate that this bottoming-out of pro-Israel sentiment among young evangelicals is part of the reason why the Israeli government earmarked nearly $750 million for public relations aimed, in no small part, directly at Christian audiences. One of their primary methods? Flying more than a thousand American pastors to Israel at the government’s expense to be trained, in effect, as ambassadors back home.

Pastors like me are being bought as ad space. Walking billboards.

So what gives? Why the change??

I don’t think this shift is mainly about people reading their Bibles more carefully, though I wish it were.

It’s Gaza.

It’s smartphones putting images in front of eighteen-year-olds that their grandparents’ pastors never had to reckon with.

It’s a slow, accumulating disillusionment with the entire political package evangelicalism sold alongside unconditional Zionism… a package which increasingly asks evangelicals to look away from things Scripture never asked them to look away from, like genocide.

Which raises the actual question underneath all of it: What was the theological justification for the unconditional support that Israel has enjoyed from evangelicals for generations?

And when I go looking for that answer, I keep finding one verse, and one verse only, doing all of the work.

One verse. One lousy verse, out of context.

The proof text for all unconditional evangelical Israeli support is Genesis 12:3, and only Genesis 12:3, where God’s word to Abram is: “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse.”

In several corners of American Christianity, this single verse has been stretched into something like a standing threat against any nation, including our own, that doesn’t sufficiently fund or defend the modern State of Israel.

But if we set the verse back into its actual context, the lay of the land becomes obvious fairly quickly.

In this verse, God is addressing one man, ONE MAN, using ancient covenant language about God’s relationship to him, and him alone. This is not a foreign-policy directive to Gentile nations three thousand years later regarding a 20th-century parliamentary democracy in Israel. The Torah itself is relentlessly conditional about blessing and land (Deuteronomy 28–30), and the prophets spend entire books pronouncing curses on Israel itself for covenant unfaithfulness.

IF Genesis 12:3 were an unconditional blank check, as evangelicals treat it, then the prophets wasted a great deal of ink.

And even IF it were true that God intended that blessing/curse promise to extend to a people or nation, then we have to admit that Abraham is the father of more than Israel. He is the father of Islam, Bahá’í, Druze, and Christianity.

So, when was the last time you heard an evangelical say that we must bless an Islamic country as much as Israel or suffer the wrath of God?

The New Testament doesn’t leave this alone either, though.

Paul insists that “those who have faith are children of Abraham” (Galatians 3:7) and that “not all who are descended from Israel are Israel” (Romans 9:6). In short, the New Testament redefines everything around Christ… not bloodlines or borders. And THAT gets conveniently skipped whenever Genesis 12:3 gets quoted with total confidence.

But let me pause here and say: I don’t believe that everyone who holds this view about supporting Israel is being cynical. Most of the people who taught it to me were sincere. They were heirs of a specific, but terrible, 19th- and 20th-century theological tradition called dispensational premillennialism. It was popularized through the Scofield Reference Bible, and later, by people like Hal Lindsey and John Hagee.

Sadly, much of what Christians believe today is inherited from terrible theologians of the recent past rather than the Bible itself.

But the real unsettling problem with the “bless Israel or else God will smite you” theology is how it isn’t really about blessing Israel at all, because it is rarely about extending charity, humility, patience or generosity to Israelis. instead, it shows up the moment someone raises a hard question about things like civilian casualties in Gaza, in convos about settlement expansion, or oversight of a multi-billion-dollar aid package. And it shows up specifically to reclassify what is simply a policy disagreement as a spiritual crime.

“What? You want to stop funding Israeli genocide? … Then you must hate God.”

Insert eyeroll emoji.

A real theological conviction invites conversation.
A trump card ends it.

That’s the sleight of hand: a contested, cherry-picked reading of one patriarchal promise from Genesis, laundered into an unanswerable veto on debate, deployed by people who benefit politically from never letting any debate or dissent happen.

If the last few weeks in Congress proved anything, it’s that the veto is losing its power. The dissent over Israel funding was large and came from directions that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, and I don’t think that’s a sign of eroding faith.

I think it might be a sign of improving faith.

Anti-Israel sentiment can be taken too far

This is more than generational drift, though. As the call for unconditional allegiance to evangelical Zionism has weakened, it hasn’t simply been replaced by something more careful or more just. No, in some very loud corners, it’s been replaced by something much worse.

Case in point. Last fall, Tucker Carlson sat down for a two-hour interview with Nick Fuentes, who is a young white nationalist known for open racism and misogyny. During the interview, Tucker and Nick bonded over mutual contempt for “Christian Zionists” (people who support the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land and the defense of the modern state of Israel), with Carlson naming figures like Ted Cruz, George W. Bush, and Mike Huckabee as people “seized” by what he called a “brain virus.”

The interview has been viewed more than 20 million times, and it sent shockwaves through the conservative movement. In fact, it fractured the movement badly enough that the Heritage Foundation’s president publicly defended Carlson and an antisemitism task force reportedly cut ties with Heritage over it. Many news outlets have covered the story as a rare but genuine schism inside the American right.

And let’s try and be honest AND precise here. Some of what got said in that critique of “Christian Zionism” (that it isn’t the whole of biblical faith, and that Christians can question a foreign government’s policies without heresy, even Israel’s) isn’t wrong on its face, and it echoes some of what I’ve argued above. But when a kernel of truth arrives wrapped in open racism and antisemitic conspiracy, not principled biblical correction, we have no choice but to denounce it.

That’s the trap: the good-faith theological critique of Genesis 12:3 and the bad-faith, hate-driven critique of “Zionists” can sound almost identical for about one sentence before they diverge completely. One ends in “read the whole Bible,” the other ends in “the Jews control everything.” Watching my own tribe struggle visibly to tell those two things apart in real time has been one of the more unsettling parts of this whole season.

This is the actual predicament, and it’s harder than “should we fund Israel?” The theology propping up unconditional support is shaky enough to be genuinely worth dismantling, but the loudest people currently dismantling it in public are not doing it for reasons I’d want anywhere near my faith.

Being against Christian Zionism CANNOT end in antisemitism. Period.

Seeing reality for what it is, rather than what we wish

These days, I think a lot about my trip to the Holy Land, and I especially think about the people.

I think about that Palestinian Christian guide in Bethlehem more than almost anyone else from that trip. He wasn’t bitter, or at least he didn’t perform bitterness for a busload of Americans. He just told the truth about his life, plainly, and let us sit with it. I couldn’t believe how he was treated, but I saw it with my own eyes and heard how Israelis spoke of Palestinians and how miserably they treated them.

But I also think about the guy at the Dead Sea who caked mud on my back and laughed at how badly I sunburned two days later.

I think about how ordinary and human all of it was, underneath every layer of theology stacked on top of it by people—myself included—who’d never actually been to the Holy Land.

None of what I experienced there requires me to pretend that the modern State of Israel is beyond moral critique. I don’t have to pretend that Israel is perfect to have loved being there, and none of it requires me to launder my policy opinions through an ancient biblical curse formula that I’m not sure Genesis 12:3 was ever offering in the first place.

It also doesn’t give me permission to let disillusionment curdle into something that sounds a little too comfortable and ends in platforming actual bigots and antisemites, the way I’ve watched happen to some people I used to trust.

It’s been seven years since I dipped my toes in the Dead Sea, but all these years later, I still order bars of Dead Sea mud soap from an importer—a small, slightly ridiculous ritual that has nothing to do with minerals anymore and has everything to do with reminder.

I use the mud soap, and I think about the mud on a blind man’s eyes, and about scales, and about how the whole point of that story was never the mud itself. It was that he could suddenly see something he’d been told his whole life he never would.

That’s still the goal, for me and I suspect for a lot of us: Not louder certainty in either direction, but washing the mud off and actually looking at the whole text, the whole place, and the whole tangle of people, politics, and power we’ve let stand for far too long.

Kevin Young writes at the intersection of faith, culture, and honest doubt. He visited Israel and the West Bank in 2019 and hasn’t stopped thinking about it since.

Have you watched people in your own church or family shift on this in the last few years? If so, toward what? I’d genuinely like to know in the comments.

CONFESSION: I voted for Donald Trump in 2016. 😬

I know, I know. Trust me, I know.

But it’s important to admit, because there is temptation for somewhat progressive people like me to quietly airbrush that part out of our story. It is all too easy to pretend that we were always eyes-wide-open to the problems and pitfalls of Christianity, but many of us are recovering addicts of the evil effects of Evangelicalism.

… Some of us voted for him.

…... Some of us didn’t vote for him but sat silently in pews every week next to people who did and said absolutely nothing.

……... Some of us never voted for him but forwarded FoxNews talking points over email and called it “just asking questions.”

………… Some of us watched the whole thing happen in slow motion from a safe, educated, comfortable distance and congratulated ourselves on our moral clarity while the fire burned down God’s house and the nation with it.

I’m writing this for all of us.

Because whether you cast the ballot, filled the pew, or just looked the other way: We all own a piece of this sh!t.

This is our collective mess. We all own it.

And it only continues to get worse, as tonight, Donald Trump will address the nation in primetime to assert, once again, with the full theatrical weight of a failed presidency behind him, that the 2020 election was stolen, that voting machines were compromised, that outside forces effected the outcome.

The problem: The intelligence community (his intelligence community, the one he appointed) has always confirmed what he always knew.

He is lying.
Still.

Yet millions of Christians are nodding along in agreement with him, continuing to support his every lie… and it is sin.

But Christians sold their soul long before Trump.

Before Trump Was the Candidate, He Was the Symbol

To understand how we got here, we have to go back far further than 2016. Much further.

We have to revisit the very thing that made Trump possible, not just politically, but spiritually: Evangelicals are to blame, of course, but not just Evangelicals.

The American church has spent half a century building a Book-of-Revelation-worthy monster, starting in the late 1970s with the Moral Majority. It was then that Jerry Falwell Sr. looked at the cultural shifts of that decade—abortion rights, second-wave feminism (focused on workplace discrimination and equal education opportunity), the sexual revolution—and decided that the church could not afford to stay out of the political arena. Falwell and his henchmen began tearing down the walls of separation between the church world and the political one, and much of American Christianity walked straight into the Republican Party and never walked back out.

For more than forty years, the arrangement has held.

Republicans promised the courts.
Winning the courts promised the overturning of Roe.
And the church promised the votes to Republicans, if they could deliver.

Then came Clinton and two democrat appointed Supreme Court justices, then Obama with two more. Four elections lost, to a Democrat… but maybe worse in the eyes of many, two of them to a black man. The demographics were shifting, and with it, the restrictive white supremacy, patriarchy, and fundamentalism of the past. The culture was moving in a direction that felt, to large portions of white evangelical America, like an existential threat to its existence.

Gay marriage was legalized in 2015.
Religious liberty cases were stacking up.
The white, rural, culturally Christian America that had been the backbone of evangelical political power was watching its cultural dominance erode in real time.

They were afraid.

👆 and THAT is an understatement, but I can’t say it any more plainly than that.

White Christianity was afraid.
There was very real, palpable fear.

And into the middle of that fear, in June of 2015, rode a savior on a golden escalator.

2016: The Fusion of Christianity to a Con Man

Here is the thing about Donald Trump that the church should have found immediately disqualifying: He didn’t pretend to be anything other than evil.

Trump didn’t speak in the careful, coded, dog-whistle language of the Romneys and the Bushes who had used evangelical voters without ever fully respecting them. Trump just said the quiet part out loud. He named the fear, embraced the bigotry, embodied the petty grievances, and pointed directly at the people the base had been told to blame, and blamed them… calling them names, using slurs, and treated everyone in his way like scum.

He had zero theological or spiritual credibility. He could not name a favorite Bible verse without mangling it (”Two Corinthians”). He had been married three times, paid off a porn star, and regularly used lewd language to refer to women. His brazen personal, moral profile was so far outside anything the church had ever endorsed as to be almost satirical. Yet the church embraced him, the very same church that condemned Bill Clinton to hell and the political abyss for a single affair. The Christian Right said that they could never support any politician without integrity, morals, or decent character.

But with Trump, none of it mattered.

And it probably should not have surprised us,

Most of the white evangelical/Christian Trump support was never about Trump at all. In the beginning, it wasn’t a vote for Trump but a vote against something else. A study out of the University of New Hampshire found that evangelical Trump support is primarily driven by “negative partisanship,” meaning, his support was about the conviction that the other side is so dangerous, so evil, so threatening to everything you hold sacred, that you will support literally anyone who promises to stop that “evil”… even Satan himself, were Satan to run for office.

When the enemy is demonic, the person carrying the torch doesn’t have to be holy.

That’s the 2016 deal.
That’s the original sin that led to where we are today.

It isn’t that Christians were fooled by a con man, so much as…

But this isn’t just an Evangelical problem, which is where I place the co-equal blame on many of my progressive friends: the ones who didn’t vote for him but said nothing bear responsibility too.

Every pastor who kept politics out of the pulpit out of fear of losing donors and members is guilty of validating Trump. Every minister who remained quiet about their concerns essentially gave their pastoral pulpit mic to FoxNews, which allowed them to disciple their congregation into fascism. Every “Never Trumper” who refused to make the case loudly enough within their own communities because it was socially costly are as equally responsible as those who voted for him.

Silence is not neutrality.
In a burning building, silence is consent.

2017-2019: Trump Becomes the Savior

Trump’s first term was the crucible in which the now-dominant “Trump Is Right No Matter What” GOP Theology was forged. Resistance was futile.

Trump gave evangelicals what they wanted most:
Neil Gorsuch.
Brett Kavanaugh.
Amy Coney Barrett.

He gave the Church-turned-political-regime what they most desired: Three Supreme Court justices who would eventually deliver Dobbs v. Jackson, and with it, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the promised land that the evangelical church had been marching toward for fifty years.

And that was it.
That was the entire transaction.
Justices in exchange for the soul of Christianity.
Winning in courts, prioritized above the winning of souls to the Christian way of life.

That was the moment the church handed over its soul in exchange for a seat at the table of power.

But something even more dangerous was happening at the same time.

The transaction wasn’t just political anymore.

The theological machinery of the charismatic and prophetic stream of evangelicalism was being deployed in service of the unholy alliance between the church and power. High-profile prophets were declaring Trump to be more than a President, but a divine appointment. God-ordained. A Savior, of sorts.

The language of “Cyrus the Great” (the Persian king who God used as an instrument of restoration despite being a pagan) spread like wildfire through evangelical networks, providing theological cover for the moral contradiction and extensive corruption.

“God uses imperfect vessels,” Trump-supporting Christians would loudly proclaim, defending their support of all manner of evil and sin.

Researchers at USC Dornsife documented this framework extensively, pointing out how the “Imperfect Vessel” Theology functions not just as a nuanced theological insight but as a truth-immunity mechanism: i.e., If Trump is Cyrus, then his integrity and personal character is irrelevant. His honesty is irrelevant. His cruelty is irrelevant. God has ordained him, and that ordination renders factual evidence about his behavior theologically null.

Read that again.

The church formed a “truth-proof” theology for Trump that made his character, cruelty, honesty, and integrity irrelevant.

And that isn’t Christianity, at all. It is a cult.

2020: A Kingdom of Lies

Then came 2020.

Biden won. Trump lost.

But how could God’s man lose?! … to the church, it was unthinkable, so it must not be true that he really lost.

He must have won; the election must have been stolen. God’s man cannot lose.

Except, every recount confirmed the loss. Every court, even those stacked with Trump appointees, rejected the challenges and confirmed his loss. Trump’s own Attorney General, William Barr, said there was no widespread fraud and that Trump indeed lost. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency called it “the most secure election in American history.”

Trump lost, bigly.

And yet, dozens of the most prominent voices in American Christianity had publicly, emphatically, on the record, declared that God had told them Trump would win…. God had told them that Trump must win.

This was the moment of reckoning for the church.

This was the moment that should have been a catastrophic, humbling, institution-shaking moment of evangelical accountability. It should have woken the church up to its sin and sent it to repentance.

But the church, as you might know, doesn’t easily repent of its sin… especially the political kind that requires the loss of power.

Instead of repenting, many in the church doubled down on Trump, defending him… protecting him… even elevating him.

The pastors, priests, and prophets who got it wrong didn’t recant, instead, they reframed the loss: Trump had won, they said, but the victory was stolen! God’s plan, they said, was being thwarted by demonic forces.

They cast a political battle as a spiritual one, in order to save themselves from facing their abysmal spiritual condition.

The lie that “Trump is God’s man” didn’t have to be corrected; it just had to be escalated. And the congregation—the same congregation that had invested its identity so completely in the theological project of Trump’s divine mandate—followed them right into the delusion.

The church was now lost, following a false savior like the Pied Piper.

But this really wasn’t a casual or accidental mistake, this is a documented pattern in the psychology of committed belief systems: When a falsifiable prediction fails, true believers don’t abandon the belief, they deepen it. In cults, true believers find a way to make the failure confirm the narrative rather than abandon the false belief. Psychologists call this belief perseverance and motivated reasoning.

The church community has a different name for it: spiritual warfare.

Rather than accept that they had followed a pagan charlatan for reasons of power and bigotry, rather than their crucified Christ, much of the American church simply pivoted and said they were in an epic fight for the heart of a nation.

But reality is a funny thing when truth is not on your side and when you decide to live in an echo chamber of your own lies.

The church has become an embarrassing consumer of lies, conspiracies, and anti-Christ doctrine. A study confirmed what most of us already knew in our guts: 62% of white evangelicals reported watching FoxNews daily, and over 1/3 cite it as their most trusted news source. Among the general U.S. population, only 15% named FoxNews as their most trusted news source. Among white evangelicals? 36%. Nearly double any other religious group in America.

Let that gap settle for a moment.

A news network that was found liable in court for knowingly broadcasting false claims about the 2020 election (whose own hosts sent private texts saying they didn’t believe what they were saying on air, that it was “crazy,” “insane,” and “mind-blowing”) is the most trusted news source for the most reliably church-attending demographic in America.

White evangelicals watch Fox News at nearly 4x the rate of the general population and trust it at more than double the rate of any other religious group.

Much of the church in America is being formed by the liars at FoxNews, not God.

James K.A. Smith, in You Are What You Love, makes the case that human beings are not primarily rational animals. We are liturgical animals. We become what we repeatedly practice. We are shaped by the rhythms of our days and the habits of our communities far more than we are shaped by our stated beliefs or our intellectual conclusions.

If your nightly liturgy is Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity, and Greg Gutfeld followed by a quick devotional, and your Sunday liturgy is a politically homogeneous congregation with a pastor who has made peace with the unholy alliance of Trump and FoxNews talking points, and your social media liturgy is a closed loop of sources that all confirm the same story, then your loves are being formed toward that narrative, regardless of its relationship to reality.

The church has long been being formed by FoxNews.

And it didn’t just believe the lies. The church practiced them. Daily. Repeatedly. Communally.

This was willful.

I am not talking about people who were innocently deceived. I am talking about adults with smartphones and broadband internet access who made deliberate choices about which pastors to listen to (the ones who agreed with them), which news sources to trust (the ones that confirmed their opinions), and which questions to never ask (the ones whose answers might require them to change). I am talking about a church community that chose its echo chamber and then refused to exit it, not out of ignorance, but out of the one thing that the Gospel is supposedly designed to defeat:

Fear.

The fear of having been wrong. The fear of what it would mean for your identity if the story fell apart. The fear of the shame that would come with admitting that you handed your theological credibility to a man who has never once, in his public life, demonstrated even a passing familiarity with the teachings of Jesus or any care (at all) for anything remotely resembling the Christian faith.

Guilt. Shame. The fear of being seen.

These are powerful forces. I know them personally. And I want to have compassion for the people in their grip.

But compassion does not require me to pretend that the grip isn’t self-inflicted.

We Are the Only Ones Left

Because I want to end with something other than despair (because despair is too easy and too passive and too much of what the moment does not need), I want to point out that:

Trump’s approval among white evangelicals has declined notably in 2026. A Christian Post poll from May documented it. The Axios reporting on “quiet quitting” in evangelical churches (which means pastors are consciously stepping back from political sermons and their members are slowly disengaging from the MAGA identity) suggests that the fever may, finally, be breaking.

But it is not nearly enough, not yet.

It does matter though, because:

Christians are, at this point, probably the only people who can move the needle away from Trump and save the Union… and more importantly, save the Church.

The Christian left, unfortunately, is no longer able to help the broader American church. They are not going to reach the white evangelical voter. The progressive and level-headed evangelical voices have been dismissed as apostate, so they are of little help. The Republican establishment has been fully absorbed into the MAGA identity. And the mainstream media is trusted by virtually no one in these communities.

None of these are going to reach those who still see Trump as Messiah and Savior.

BUT, there are pastors who still have credibility in these spaces. There are deacons and Sunday school teachers and small group leaders who still speak into the lives of people who are quietly starting to feel the cognitive dissonance. There are former Trump supporters who have already made the journey (people like me) who carry a credibility that no outside critic can manufacture.

And tonight’s speech is another opening, another hole in the wall.

When a sitting president uses a primetime national address to assert—on the basis of “declassified intelligence” that his own former officials contradict—that voting machines were compromised in an election that has been re-examined exhaustively by courts, state officials, and election security experts from both parties, he is not just making a political claim.

He is asking you to believe something that is not true.

He is lying.

And for Christians—a people who build their entire lives on the claim that Truth with a capital T is not just a concept but a Person—that should be a breaking point.

“You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32)

Not: you will know the narrative that makes you feel safe.
Not: you will know the story that confirms your tribe.
Not: you will know the version of events that FoxNews has settled on.

The truth. The actual, verifiable, evidenced, audited, recounted, court- and expert-reviewed truth.

What You Can Actually Do

This is not an abstract theological debate. It is happening tonight, in real time, on national television. Here is what faithfulness looks like in this moment:

Have the conversation you’ve been avoiding.

You know the person in your life who is still inside the narrative. You have been keeping the peace because the cost of the conversation feels too high. It is time to decide if you love them enough to pay it. Ask them: “What would it take to convince you this was wrong? What evidence would you need to see? And if no evidence could ever change your mind, is that still called faith… or is it called something else?”

Challenge the information diet, not the person.

Don’t tell someone their news source is lying. Ask them to cross-reference one story. Just one story. One. “Can you find three sources outside FoxNews that confirm this?” The goal is not a debate; the goal is to crack open the sealed room.

Preach the Ninth Commandment.

“You shall not bear false witness.” Most people in the pew have never heard this applied to political speech. They have heard it applied to gossip and personal slander. Apply it here. Apply it to the President. Apply it to the media ecosystem that profits from manufactured outrage and lies. The commandment does not have a partisan exception.

Demand accountability from your pastor.

If your church has been largely silent about the most sustained campaign of public disinformation in modern American history, your pastor owes you and the congregation a sermon on truth-telling. Not a political sermon, a biblical one. There are ninety-three verses in the Bible about false witness and lying. Pick one. Any.

Name the shame loop, and offer a way through it.

The biggest barrier to people leaving the lie is not intellectual: it is emotional. There is a dread in admitting to ourselves, our family, our community, our pastor, that we were wrong, and that what we were wrong about carried real consequences. Name that. Say: “I know it is hard to look at this. I know what it costs. I have paid it. It is worth it. You will not lose yourself. You will find yourself.”

Vote and organize like the stakes are what they are.

The midterms are not a spectator sport, not this year. The 2026 elections will be shaped, in large part, by whether a meaningful portion of the Christian community decides that its loyalty is to Truth rather than to the man who has made himself its living symbol. That decision doesn’t happen in the voting booth, it happens in living rooms, small groups, and Sunday school classes between now and November.

The biblical prophets were never popular.

Jeremiah was thrown in a cistern for telling the truth about Babylon. Amos was told to go back where he came from. Micah asked a thriving, self-satisfied religious community to take a hard look at who was being crushed under the weight of its comfort.

The word is the same today.

We were captured by an identity, but it wasn’t a Christian one. And it was fueled by false fear… fear of a changing culture, fear of losing power, fear of the shame of having been wrong about all of it.

But there is an older, deeper story, one about a God who is not impressed by empires, who does not share an altar with golden calves wrapped in flags, and who has a long, documented track record of showing up on the side of truth when the powerful have decided that truth is negotiable.

That story is still available to us.

The question is whether we want it badly enough to let go of the other one.

I think some of us do.
I think that number is growing.

And I think that is the only genuinely good news in this whole rotten mess.

Kevin Young writes at the intersection of culture and faith from a progressive perspective. Would you help support this kind of content by subscribe to【Culture ✚ Faith】or by considering becoming a paid subscriber?

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Like clockwork, every June my social media feeds fill up with the same boring (but predictable) outrage from “good” Christians.

Evangelical pastors clutching their pearls over rainbow flags. Theobros posting memes about how “Pride is a sin.” Church people flooding comment sections with Leviticus verses they’ve never actually studied, let alone understood in context. And it is all fired like weapons at LGBTQ+ people who simply want to exist in the open.

For all of June, the word “pride” becomes a slur, and to Evangelicals, evidence of civilization’s complete collapse.

Then July 1st hits.

And those same people? They’re at the church decking out the communion table in red, white, and blue bunting, giving Old Glory a premium spot next to the pulpit. The Sunday morning setlist includes “God Bless America,” and the pastor wraps up his sermon with a patriotic flourish as the congregation belts out Lee Greenwood at full volume: “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free.”

Pride.

Loud, unapologetic, flag-waving,
God-endorsed pride.

It’s July.
Welcome to Straight Pride Month.

I don’t understand why we aren’t pushing back on the sin of straight-pride hiding behind patriotism.

Why is it only the gays?

So What Does the Bible Actually Say About Pride?

If you’ve spent any time in conservative Christian spaces, you’ve heard Proverbs 16:18 more times than you can count: “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.” That little gem gets deployed like artillery aimed at innocent rainbow flags every June.

Here’s the problem. They haven’t read the verse. Not really. (It’s a common problem among Evangelical Christians.)

The Hebrew word behind “pride” in Proverbs 16:18 is gaavah—arrogance, haughtiness, the posture of someone who has made themselves the center of the universe. In this verse, pride is the pride of domination. It is the pride of kings who forget they are mortal. It is the pride of empires that confuse military victory with divine favor. If you open your concordance and trace that word (gaavah) through the Hebrew Bible and see whose pride the prophets are actually railing against, you are going to see that it is NOT the pride of a gay man in a sequined jacket or jockstrap in a parade.

And don’t get me started about jock straps, because I will remind you that King David danced naked in public. I will remind you that a guy who was said to be a “man after God’s own heart” was a Sun’s Out, Buns Out kind of guy in public.

So the pride of Proverbs isn’t the “pride” of Pride Month. The pride of Proverbs is the pride of Babylon. It is the pride of Egypt. It is the pride of Assyria. The pride of Proverbs is the pride of nations that run the world on the backs of the vulnerable and tell themselves God is cheering. It is the pride of nations that harm the weak and vulnerable, saying that they are just following the law and doing their national security duty.

Jeremiah 9:23-24 could not be more explicit: “Let not the wise boast of their wisdom or the strong boast of their strength or the rich boast of their riches, but let the one who boasts boast about this: that they have the understanding to know me.” The prophetic tradition has one consistent target for its condemnation of pride: Power. Human achievement. Military might. National exceptionalism.

American exceptionalism is pride.
America First is pride.
’I’m proud to be an American,’ is pride.

“I’m proud to be an American” is not a confession of faith, it is a boast in exactly the kind of strength and national greatness that Jeremiah says God is not impressed by.

But nobody is putting that verse on a meme in July, are they?

THAT kind of pride isn’t just overlooked by the American Church, it is condoned, honored, and promoted with fervor.

The Golden Calf Is Wearing a Flag Pin.

We don’t tell the story of the “Golden Calf” enough, to be honest.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, the Gospels are great… but Exodus 32 may have more to say in this moment than Matthew or Mark.

If you don’t know the story: Moses is up on the mountain. The people get restless. They go to Aaron (the top religious leader) and say, essentially, give us something we can see, something we can rally around.

Aaron collects their gold, melts it down, shapes it into a calf, and then (don’t miss this because most people miss this) Aaron says “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.” And the next day? They held a festival to the LORD.

They did not stop worshipping Yahweh. They just... decorated their worship with something made by human hands. Something that represented national power and identity. It communicated national strength and virility. It was a tangible, visible symbol to gather around and feel proud of, to feel like they had something to rally around since God had seemingly let them down.

It was focusing on the strength of their nation in place of the strength of their God.

Now walk into almost any evangelical church this Sunday and tell me what you see at the front of the sanctuary. In most, you will find an American flag, given a place of honor alongside or above the Christian flag. The communion table (the table that is supposed to hold the broken body and shed blood of a Palestinian Jew executed by the Roman Empire) will be dressed in red, white, and blue. You will find a congregation singing about national greatness with more gusto than they do about God.

Aaron would immediately recognize the problem.

The First Commandment is not subtle: “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). No other gods. None. Not even the ones that look like eagles and carry rifles and promise to make the nation great again. God does not share an altar. The communion table is not a display case for the paraphernalia of empire.

This is the Bible’s biggest law—first in position, first in weight—and the God-and-Country crowd breaks it every Fourth of July weekend without a moment of theological reflection.

And truth be told, having a 🇺🇸 anywhere in the sanctuary, anytime, ever, is a violation of our allegiance to God.

Jesus Was Not a Patriot.

The evangelical imagination has turned Jesus into a blue-eyed American who owns a pickup truck and loves the Second Amendment. The actual Jesus was a brown-skinned, Middle Eastern, Aramaic-speaking, homeless rabbi from an occupied territory who was executed by the most powerful empire on earth for being a political and religious threat.

And when that empire tried to get him on record about national allegiance, he pulled off one of the most subversive moves in the New Testament.

“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21).

People read this as a tidy separation of church and state. It is not. It is a declaration of complete incompatibility. The coin has Caesar’s image on it, so give it back to him. But you were made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). You bear the imago Dei, which means you belong entirely, completely, and without remainder to God and not to any earthly empire, no matter how many stars and stripes it flies.

The earliest Christian confession was three words: Iesous Kyrios … Jesus is Lord.

In the Roman Empire, that was not a personal religious statement, it was an act of political defiance because the empire’s confession was Caesar is Lord. The first Christians were not saying their Lord was better than Rome’s Lord, they were saying Rome does not have a Lord.

There is only one Lord, and he was not born in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.

Paul understood this. His letter to the Philippians was written from a Roman prison, addressed to Christians living in a Roman colony who were proud of their Roman citizenship. It contains this extraordinary line: “But our citizenship is in heaven”(Philippians 3:20). Not in Rome. Not in America. We live in the coming Kingdom that tears down every empire, without exception.

Revelation 13 (which envisions a great evil beast waging war against God’s people) is not a coded message about a future global dictator in “end times.” Revelation is a first-century document describing the Roman Empire as a beast that demands worship and kills those who refuse. The author, John, was not being metaphorical about the danger of empire, he was being a journalist intent on reminding future readers about what happens when you serve nations and empires.

And yet the American church has somehow made peace with the beast and is draping it in red, white, and blue bunting.

The Real Sinners in the Camp.

There is something deeply hypocritical about the church’s June-to-July pride pivot. The church’s hermeneutic about pride has nothing to do with faithful Bible reading and everything to do with power.

The God-and-Country crowd is not anti-pride in the least.

They aren’t interested in reading their Bibles carefully and arriving at a consistent theology that condemns human arrogance in all its forms. No, they are selectively deploying scripture to police the bodies and identities of people who threaten the social order they’ve built, while completely exempting their own nationalism from any theological scrutiny.

That is the definition of using the Bible as a weapon rather than a mirror.

Meanwhile, Psalm 139:13-14 just sits there, quietly devastating their argument: “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”

God knits people, not flags.

And God does not make mistakes in the knitting. Every person who walks through the doors of a Pride celebration was knit together by the same God who knit together the people putting flags on the communion table. The audacity required to look at a human being and tell them that the way God made them is an abomination—while simultaneously pledging allegiance to a flag—is a theological feat that requires considerable commitment to not reading your Bible.

Joshua asked Israel to choose.
So did Elijah on Mount Carmel.
So did Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount:
“No one can serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24).

The God-and-Country church has tried to serve both for so long it can no longer see the contradiction.

The church has traded the cross for a flag and pledged allegiance to the wrong god.

What Does a Faithful Response Look Like?

This is not an abstract theological debate. This is happening in real churches, with real people, and it requires a real response.

Here is where to start:

If you are navigating a church that has bought into God-and-Country Christianity:

• Name what you see, specifically. Don’t argue in abstractions. Point to the flag on the altar and ask the simple question: “Whose image is on that?” or “What does the First Commandment say about objects placed in positions of worship?” Specificity cuts through the fog faster than broad arguments.

• Use their Bible, not yours. Do not open with progressive theology. Open with Exodus 20:3-5, Jeremiah 9:23-24, and Matthew 22:21. Let the text do the confrontation. You are not challenging their faith, you are inviting them into a deeper reading of the Bible they claim to believe.

• Ask questions more than you make statements. “When Jeremiah says not to boast in national strength, who do you think he was talking to?” Questions create more internal movement than declarations. You are not trying to win an argument; you are trying to open a crack in the wall.

• Refuse to perform the nationalism. You do not have to make a scene, but: Simply do not stand for the national anthem in church. Do not sing the patriotic songs in a worship service. Your quiet non-participation is itself a prophetic act, and when someone asks why, you have an opening.

• Connect the June hypocrisy to the July idolatry explicitly. Most people in these churches have never had anyone draw this line for them. When they condemn gay pride in June and then celebrate national pride in July without any theological self-examination, that is the functional definition of a double standard that protects power. Say that.

If you are trying to help someone see the problem who has fully bought in:

• Start with shared love for scripture. The most effective entry point for a committed Bible believer is not progressive theology, it is a better, more rigorous reading of the texts they already love. Ask them to walk you through what the Bible says about pride. All of it. Including Jeremiah 9.

• Ask them to imagine the same scene with a different flag. “If the pastor put a Mexican flag on the communion table, would that feel different to you? Why? What about a Nazi flag, the way German churches displayed them … or a Confederate flag, as churches across the South still do?” The discomfort that question creates is exactly the discomfort that needs to be created.

• Tell them the Early Church story. Many believers have never heard that “Jesus is Lord” was a political confession against Roman imperial power. Many are unaware that the church was born as an anti-imperial movement. That changes the whole picture, and it is historically undeniable.

• Give them time and stay in relationship. You are not going to dismantle decades of theological formation in one conversation. Plant seeds. Lend them Brian Zahnd’s Postcards from Babylon. Come back to it. The deprogram from Christian nationalism is a process, not an event. Be patient with the people, even when you are impatient with the theology.

The prophets were not popular.

Jeremiah was thrown in a cistern. Amos was told to go back where he came from. Micah asked a church that was thriving by every external measure to take a hard look at who was being crushed in the process of that prosperity.

The word is the same today.

The flag does not belong on the altar, the nation is not the Kingdom, and the God who knit every human being together in their mother’s womb is not interested in being co-opted by an empire.

The Bible has far more to say against the pride of nations than it does against the pride of people who simply want to be seen as fearfully and wonderfully made.

If there is a sinful kind of pride and a month that is set aside to celebrate it, then it is the one with red, white, and blue, not rainbows, that is offensive to God.

Kevin Young writes about theology, identity, and the intersection of faith and culture from a progressive perspective. You can find more of his work at kevinyoung.substack.com.

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This is one of a rare handful of pieces I have released for Paid Subscribers only, not because it’s more valuable than what I share freely, but because it’s more personal. For my beloved free subscribers, I’ve given an extended preview below…

There is a letter that I have started to my children more times than I can count, trying and failing for more than a year since my therapist first suggested it.

I’ve told myself I wasn’t ready, that the timing was wrong, that I needed more distance, more clarity, more courage. I’ve told myself that I have amazing kids, and I don’t want to risk making an already-rough situation even worse. And all of that was probably true, but also, I didn’t know how to write something so important without making it about the wrong things.

Without, making it about me.

And if I am being completely forthright, I also didn’t think I had the strength to be vulnerable enough about my failures.

And I still am not certain that I do.

But I need to try.

What I Hoped For

When I became a father, I had a version of the future in my head, the way I think that most parents do… not something specific, but more like a feeling.

I imagined teaching my kids how to lose gracefully and love extravagantly. I imagined long car rides with bad music arguments, ones where my music would always win out. I imagined being the kind of dad they’d call first when something went wrong, not because I’d always have the answer (I wanted them to know that I often didn’t have the answer), but because they knew I was safe.

The only way to create safety, in my mind, was for them to be certain of my love at all times. I knew I couldn’t be a perfect dad, but I knew I could love them for who they were, and I wanted to believe that kind of love could cover a multitude of dad-imperfections.

I imagined all four of them knowing that they were loved without conditions attached. I imagined them knowing that my “I love you” wasn’t just something I just said (like many religious people say without meaning it) but something they knew I meant, because I lived it with them, especially in the hard moments.

That was the dream.

I never wanted a particular version of them to exist; I just wanted them to exist… as them. Just them, fully themselves, never needing to be anything else, knowing they were fully loved.

I wanted that for them, I think, because I never felt that for myself.

I’m not sure I’ve gotten there yet with them.
And that’s on me, not them.

What Being a Dad Actually Taught Me About Myself

There is something fatherhood does to you that nothing else quite replicates. It holds a mirror up to every unresolved thing you’ve been carrying and says: Figure this out, quickly, because small people are watching.

For many dads, fatherhood is their undoing.

I wasn’t ready for that mirror when my kids were young. Are any of us, though? As a young dad, I was just holding on for dear life, carrying strollers, diaper bags, and multiple kids in each arm.

But also, I was carrying more than most dads carry.

I was performing a version of myself that was real… but was incomplete.

And to my great shame and guilt, I couldn’t yet afford to look directly at the very demons I needed to stop avoiding. I was too scared of what would happen if I were honest with myself and those around me. I had never been safe enough to be honest.

I had too much to lose.

I had built a life I loved more than anything else in the world, but it was built on a lie that haunted me and which I feared would take it all from me in a moment if I faced it.

On one hand, my kids grew up watching a father who loved them fiercely and showed up for them genuinely. They would each tell you that Dad (the before Dad of the old days, before everything fell apart) was incredible beyond explanation. The best.

But on the other hand, they also grew up watching a father who was quietly at war with himself in ways he never showed anyone, including them. That war had a cost. It leaked into rooms and relationships, even when I thought I had it contained.

Kids are perceptive in ways that bypass their own conscious awareness, and while they don’t always know what they’re sensing, they sense things. I believe my kids sensed something, even before they had any framework for what it was.

And I wish I had been more honest, sooner.

Not about my sexuality, specifically (I’m not sure earlier would have been better for anyone). But I wish that I had been more honest in general. I wish that I had been more willing to show them that their father was a person with doubts and fears and unresolved things, rather than a guy mostly pretending that he knew what he was doing and wasn’t living in absolute terror that he was going to screw it up.

And screw it up, he did.
He destroyed it.

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I still remember the exact moment the wall came down for me.

It wasn’t gradual. It wasn’t the result of a long theological deconstruction or a carefully reasoned political shift. It happened in 8 minutes and 46 seconds, on a street in Minneapolis, while a man named George Floyd called out for his mother, and a white police officer’s knee stayed planted on his neck until there was nothing left to call out for.

I watched it happen in real time, and something inside me that had been mortared into place over 43 years of conservative Evangelical formation cracked open like a fault line that had been building pressure for decades.

The wall came down, and I saw the horrors of systemic and institutionalized racism.

And for a moment, I thought it came down for all of us.

I thought we all saw.

The Summer We Almost Got It Right

We should be careful not to romanticize the summer of 2020, because romanticizing it is part of how we ended up here.

But something real happened in those weeks after George Floyd’s death, something I had never seen in my lifetime. People who looked like me—white, middle-aged, church-raised, politically comfortable—were in the streets… and not just in the streets of cities like Atlanta, New York, or Los Angeles, but in mid-sized cities like the one I lived in at the time and small towns like the rural one I grew up in.

Protests erupted in communities that had never once given a thought to racial justice, let alone involved themselves in it.

Confederate monuments came down.
Cities repainted their streets.
Corporate America pledged billions.
Congress held hearings with members taking a knee in Kente cloth.
Evangelical churches (real ones, the kind I had pastored over the years) were hosting conversations about race and justice that would have been unthinkable at earlier points in their history.

And Juneteenth became a federal holiday, finally.

President Biden signed it into law in June of 2021, and for the first time in the history of the United States, the country officially said: the freedom of Black Americans is worth remembering. It is worth marking and worth celebrating on a national scale.

It felt, briefly, like the Beloved Community that Dr. King had spent his life preaching toward was not some distant dream but something we could actually taste.

It felt like Pentecost. Like the Spirit moving across every tribe and tongue, crashing through every wall we had built to keep each other out. It crashed through my wall, that is for certain.

I was a changed man standing in the middle of it.

I had gone back and pulled conversation after conversation out of Black friends and colleagues I had known for years—people I thought I knew—only to discover I had never truly heard them. Their stories poured out, and for the first time I listened.

The fear.
The exhaustion.
The grief they had been quietly carrying in rooms I was also in, because I had never made it safe for them to speak.

I was gutted.

I was also hopeful in a way I hadn’t been in years.

Maybe the country was being gutted too. Maybe all of us were finally seeing what had always been there, just on the other side of our own walls.

Six Years Later

George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020, and the first Juneteenth was celebrated nationally in 2021.

This week, we celebrate the sixth Juneteenth.

But it is time that we be honest with ourselves about what has happened in the five years between those two dates, because pretending otherwise would be a betrayal of everyone who took to those streets, everyone who told me their stories, and everyone who believed, even briefly, that this time was different.

The wall went back up.

Not quietly, and not apologetically. It went back up brick by brick, with legislative intent and judicial precision and the enthusiastic participation of a significant portion of the American church.

And now, on this Juneteenth, it looks like the wall of separation and segregation might be climbing higher than it has ever been in my lifetime.

The Bricks Being Laid

On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, and in doing so, effectively gutted Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Act that was signed into law because of Bloody Sunday, the day in 1965 when police in Selma, Alabama violently attacked peaceful protestors. The Voting Rights Acts that the Supreme Court vacated was purchased with the blood and broken bones of marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, most of them connected to the prophetic Black church tradition. The Voting Rights Act made possible the very representative democracy we claim to cherish, for all Americans.

The Court’s conservative supermajority dismantled it.

Justice Kagan’s dissent described the ruling’s effect plainly: Section 2 is now “all but a dead letter,” she said. The new standard requires proof of intentional discrimination in order to mount a legal challenge, a bar so high as to be nearly unreachable, because racism in 2026 has learned that to win, it must wear a suit and carry a briefcase and file legal briefs to kangaroo courts.

CNN reports we are now on the brink of the largest reduction in Black Congressional representation since the Voting Rights Act was first passed sixty years ago. Six Black House members could be gone after the midterms. Six voices. Six seats at the table that were fought for, bled for, and won through decades of political organizing and equality work.

The NAACP’s Derrick Johnson put it plainly: “What the Supreme Court has done is sanction discrimination against African Americans in the political process.”

That ruling came down fewer than two months before Juneteenth.

Think about that.

The same nation that six years ago painted “Black Lives Matter” on the street in front of the White House just told Black Americans, through its highest court, that their votes can be diluted without legal consequence. We just need to prove someone meant to do it. And good luck with that.

That is one brick.

Here is another: The National Park Service quietly removed Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Jr. Day from its list of fee-free entry days for 2026. Two federal holidays. The only two federal holidays on the calendar that specifically honor Black history and Black freedom. Removed.

Not all federal holidays. Just those two.

And they were the only days removed, while ten others (including Donald Trump’s birthday) were added.

You cannot tell me that is coincidental. You can call it administrative. You can call it a budget decision. What you cannot call it is anything other than a clear message.

Corporate America, which six years ago was falling over itself to pledge solidarity, has followed suit. Sponsors are pulling back from Juneteenth events across the country. The money that flowed so publicly and so loudly in the summer of 2020 has quietly dried up, and Black communities are left to keep the flame alive on their own , which, to their extraordinary credit and resilience, they are doing.

And then there is the classroom.

The dismantling of federal DEI programs has cascaded into public schools in ways that are still unfolding. The teaching of Black history—not a political agenda, but actual factual history—is under assault. The USC Equity Research Institute describes the anti-DEI movement as a deliberate attempt to erase the historical gains made through the Civil Rights Movement.

Erase.

Think about that word for a moment. Erase.

The Theological Problem Everyone is Avoiding

What is happening in America right now is not just a political problem, it is a theological catastrophe.

The Hebrew scriptures are obsessed—I mean absolutely OBSESSED—with memory. The command to remember appears over 200 times in the Old Testament alone. “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt,” says Deuteronomy 5:15. God did not issue that command as a footnote but as the foundation of Israel’s entire ethical framework.

You were oppressed.
You know what oppression feels like.
Therefore, you do not oppress.

Remember!

To forget is not simply to be careless. In the theology of the Hebrew Bible, to forget is to sin.

When white people dismantle the legal protections of Black voters, erase Black history from classrooms, defund the celebrations of Black freedom, and quietly remove the holidays that honor Black lives from our national calendar, we are not just making administrative, fiscal, or even political decisions. No.

We are committing an act of spiritual forgetting. We are sinning against memory, and we are willfully sinning against the image-bearers we have chosen to forget.

Every single human being (including the ones of color that our courts are busy disenfranchising) bears the Imago Dei, the image of God. You cannot simultaneously claim to honor the God who made them and work to silence their voice in the political process. The theology does not hold up any more than the logic.

And yet here we are, six years after the nation wept together in the streets, watching a church that once called itself the moral conscience of America stand largely silent while the gains of the Civil Rights Movement are systematically dismantled.

The Black church has always known who Jesus is.

The Black church met him in the fields and on the auction block and in the middle of the night on the banks of the Ohio River. The Black church built the prophetic tradition in America. Amos 5:24’s “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream,” wasn’t just a sermon text to Martin Luther King Jr., it was the theological DNA of a community that had no other advocate but God at the time, and who found in God an advocate who always, always sides with the oppressed.

White American Christianity, in too many of its expressions, has chosen a different God.

American Christianity (Evangelicalism, especially) has chosen a God who is comfortable with power. A God who blesses the nation-state over the Kingdom of God. A God who somehow looked at the footage of George Floyd dying in the street and found a way to move on without changing.

And most galling, chose to change for the worse.

I know that God.
I used to worship him.

He is not the God of the Gospels.

The Jesus of the Gospels is always on the other side of the wall. He is with the hurting, the marginalized, the silenced, and the ones the powerful grind under their knee. Matthew 25:40 is not a metaphor: “Whatever you did for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

The question for the American church in Juneteenth 2026 is uncomfortably simple: Which side of the wall are you on?

Juneteenth Does Not Need Permission

Juneteenth has never needed white permission.

It was celebrated in Black communities for over 150 years before the federal government got around to recognizing it.

Juneteenth survived slavery.
It survived Reconstruction’s collapse.
It survived Jim Crow.
It survived being ignored and underfunded and condescended to and co-opted.
And it will survive this too.

The Black communities across America who are keeping Juneteenth alive this week, even as sponsors disappear and the government removes it from the fee-free list, are living out a theology that the comfortable White American church desperately needs to learn.

These Black communities are proclaiming, with their cookouts and their red soda water and their music and their presence together, that freedom is not a grant from the powerful. Freedom is a gift from God, and no court ruling, no executive order, and no budget line item can take it away.

That is a resurrection story.
That is the Gospel in action.

And it is happening right now, this week, all around us, if we have the eyes to see it.

The Changed Man, Six Years On

I am not the same person who once voted for Donald Trump. Thank God.

I will never be that person again.

George Floyd didn’t just shift my politics. He wrecked my theology, rebuilt my anthropology, and permanently rewired the way I read the Gospels. I cannot unsee what I saw, and I cannot un-hear the stories my Black friends finally felt safe enough to tell me.

I cannot go back behind the wall of not-knowing. I cannot un-remember.

But I have to be honest: there are days when the weight of what has happened in these six years feels crushing. The hope of that summer, that fragile, extraordinary, unprecedented hope has not just been disappointed, but actively dismantled.

More than a political problem, I carry a moral and spiritual wound.

I think about George Floyd’s daughter, Gianna, who told the world that her daddy changed it. She was six years old.

I think about what we are handing her.

I think about the Juneteenth celebrations happening this week in communities where Black parents still have to have “the talk” with their children… the same talk they were having in 2020, and in 2010, and in 1980 because the systems we hoped would change have instead calcified, and in some cases, gotten worse.

… and if you don’t know what “the talk” is, then you may be part of the problem.

And I think about what it means to be a person of faith in this moment.

I think it means we do not look away.

Walls Were Made to Come Down

If you are reading this and you feel, as I do, the grief and the urgency of this moment, then let me leave you with something to do. Because faith without works is cosplay.

The wall went back up in the nation. That is true. But walls were made to come down, and here is how people of conscience, people of faith, people who believe in the God who always stands with the oppressed, can put their hands to the work:

• Show up for Juneteenth this week. Attend a community celebration, particularly in a predominantly Black community that is not your own. Presence is not nothing, it is solidarity made physical.

• Contact your Congressional representatives about the Voting Rights Act. The gutting of Section 2 is not the end of the story unless we let it be. Demand federal legislation to restore and strengthen voting rights protections. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act deserves a vote.

• Financially support Black-led organizations keeping Juneteenth and Black history alive. As corporate sponsors disappear, individuals can fill the gap. The Equal Justice Initiative, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and local Juneteenth organizations in your city all need resources right now.

• Defend Black history in your local schools. Attend a school board meeting. Speak up when curriculum is being sanitized. Your voice in a local meeting has more immediate power than your frustration on social media.

• Have the conversation your Black friends have been waiting for you to start. Six years ago, I asked my Black friends to talk to me, and what I heard gutted me. They had been waiting for years for me to be ready to listen. Be ready. Ask. And then close your mouth and open your ears.

• Audit your church. Does your congregation preach, teach, and practice the justice of Amos 5:24? Does it understand that the Gospel has always been political, because the prophets and Jesus himself were political? Does it look like Revelation 7:9, where every nation, tribe, people and language are united, or does it look like a comfortable cultural country club?

• Remember. Actively, intentionally, consistently remember. Deuteronomy 5:15. You were slaves in Egypt. You know what oppression feels like. Or if you don’t, you have Black neighbors who do. Remember with them.

George Floyd’s death cracked open a man who had spent 43 years walling himself in from the truth around him.

Six years later, I am standing on the other side of the rubble that used to be my wall, watching a nation rebuild its own evil wall, brick by legislative brick, ruling by ruling, erasure by erasure.

I can’t breathe.

And neither can too many of my Black brothers and sisters, not in the literal sense but in every other sense that matters.

Juneteenth says: Freedom is coming.
The prophetic tradition says: Justice is non-negotiable.
The Gospel says: The wall does not get the last word.

I believe that.
I have to.

Because I’ve seen what happens when a wall falls.

And it is the most beautiful thing in the world.

Kevin Young writes at the intersection of culture and faith from a progressive perspective. Subscribe to Reconstructing Faith at kevinyoung.substack.com.

I have been some form of Baptist for most of my life. Independent Baptist (eek), GARBC, Southern Baptist, Cooperative Baptist, Alliance of Baptists, and probably others if I thought long enough about it.

I know Baptist life well, what it should and shouldn’t be when it is healthy.

I want to say something plainly, without qualification or equivocation:

If you are a woman in a Southern Baptist church, the institution you are sitting in has just told you—boldly, in writing, with a landslide vote—that you are less than the men around you. And the research overwhelmingly says that’s not just a theological problem, it’s a warning sign.

History tells us that victims often remain in increasingly toxic and abusive relationships rather than run. Don’t make that same mistake.

This week in Orlando, the Southern Baptist Convention passed the “Truth and Unity Amendment” (gaslighting language proposed by Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) to formally enshrine in the SBC’s governing constitution that no cooperating church may “affirm, appoint, or endorse a woman serving in the office or function of a pastor/elder/overseer, specifically preaching to the assembled congregation.” In the same breath, Mohler framed this as the natural continuation of the SBC’s earlier constitutional exclusion of LGBTQ-affirming churches.

Women in pulpits.
Gay people in pews.
Same constitutional remedy.
Same category of threat.

And on that same convention floor, Southern Baptists elected as their new president Willy Rice, a Florida pastor who has publicly suggested the SBC’s documented, independently-investigated, two-decade sexual abuse crisis is more hoax than history. His primary opponent used the phrase “snipe hunt” to describe it. Both men, apparently, are more troubled by a woman preaching than by the documented reality that, for almost twenty years, the SBC Executive Committee systematically stonewalled, dismissed, and denigrated survivors of sexual abuse while protecting the institutions and the men who ran them.

As such, the topic of female pastors isn’t a theological conversation, not at its core.

If it were, the SBC would be equally as concerned about removing the men in their ranks who abuse and harm the office of pastor.

But an organization run by men doesn’t see men as a problem (and they believe God agrees with them). Go figure.

Ironic, Yes. But Also a Pattern.

The first thing outsiders notice about the SBC’s current posture is the irony. You can’t miss it. The same institution that spent twenty years dismissing, belittling, and burying the testimonies of women who were sexually abused in Southern Baptist churches just voted to constitutionally limit what women can do and say in those same churches. Ironic, yes.

But let’s be honest: calling it irony lets them off the hook.

Irony implies accident. It implies that if the SBC leadership could just see the contradiction, they’d correct it.

But would they?

What if this isn’t a contradiction at all? What if the suppression of women’s authority and the suppression of women’s abuse testimony are not two separate, ironic policies running on parallel tracks but, instead, the same policy, expressing itself in two different ways?

Because that’s exactly what the research says is happening as the SBC devolves.

Dr. Kristin Kobes Du Mez—professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University and author of Jesus and John Wayne—has made this case with scholarly precision. The white evangelical complementarian worldview (the idea that women have God-ordained roles/submission in marriage, church, and the world), she argues, does not merely correlate with sexual abuse cover-ups… it enables them.

The same ideological machinery that says a woman cannot preach to a congregation also says that a woman’s testimony about a man in authority is inherently suspect, even and especially when she is calling out abuse.

It gets worse: A peer-reviewed study found that purity culture beliefs predicted domestic violence myth acceptance above and beyond hostile sexism, benevolent sexism, and traditional sex-role beliefs as independent variables. That means people formed in SBC-style evangelical culture (i.e., people who are taught that women are responsible for male sexual behavior, that female bodies are the source of male temptation, and that a woman’s value is bound to her purity and her submission) are measurably, empirically more likely to rationalize, minimize, and dismiss sexual violence against women.

In short, the doctrine of gender hierarchy itself is the sin that leads to the evil of violence and abuse against women.

The SBC is, therefore, an unavoidable theological breeding ground for abusers.

The Inverse Is Damning

Across 44 countries, the data is consistent: the more gender equality, the less violence against women. The less gender equality, the more violence against women.

This is not a correlation found in one study. It is an inverse relationship that replicates across regional, cultural, and religious contexts. The Lancet published it. The World Health Organization documented it across 161 countries. ResearchGate’s academic review concurred: “the more gender equality, the less domestic violence against women.” The National Academies of Sciences found that organizations with large power differentials (places where men hold more power than women) are more likely to be associated with high rates of sexual harassment than organizations without them.

Every time.
Everywhere.

So when the SBC constitutionally codifies the subordination of women, they are not just making a theological statement; they are building the precise conditions that the research most consistently identifies as predictors of abuse. Not to mention, when they write into their governing document that women cannot lead, cannot preach, cannot hold authority over men in any pastoral capacity, that in and of itself is a form of abuse.

Abusive theology leads to abusers perpetrating abuse.

This shouldn’t be a radical idea.

The SBC is not protecting women from bad theology, it is creating the environment in which the abuse of women becomes, as I’ve come to think of it, largely inevitable.

Not every man in every SBC church will abuse a woman. Not every complementarian pastor is a predator. Academic honesty requires that caveat. But the research supports something more troubling than individual bad actors: the systemic, institutionally-protected, repeatedly-enabled abuse of women at scale cannot exist without gender subjugation as its structural foundation.

The subjugation is what makes the abuse scalable, deniable, and sustainable across decades.

Which is exactly what the Guidepost Solutions report documented in 288 pages: twenty years of survivors coming forward, twenty years of institutional dismissal, a private list of accused ministers that was never shared with law enforcement, and organized, active resistance to reform.

Not one or two bad decisions. A system. An abusive one. Functioning exactly as it was designed.

The Harm Is Not Just Sexual

While the conversation about abuse in the SBC tends to center on sexual abuse, and for good reason, we need to push further.

The documented cases are devastating, but if we only talk about sexual abuse, we miss the broader architecture of harm that complementarianism builds into a woman’s daily life.

Telling a woman she cannot lead is not a neutral theological position. It is a psychological event… one that happens every week, in every SBC church, in every sermon, every deacon meeting, every moment a gifted woman with something to say is quietly pointed back to the children’s ministry.

Research from Christians for Biblical Equality found that attendance at sexist religious congregations correlates with measurably worse health outcomes for women—psychologically, emotionally, spiritually. This is not speculative. This is measured.

When you tell a woman, repeatedly, with the weight of divine mandate behind you, that she is structurally “less than,” you are doing harm. When you tell her that her voice carries less authority, that her calling is conditional on male approval, and that her body is a liability and her testimony is suspect then you are abusing her, long before anyone touches her or before any abuse report gets buried.

The true harm is the hierarchy itself.
Abuse is what grows in the hierarchy’s soil.

Purity culture (especially the SBC’s specific brand of it) does something even more insidious than restrict women’s leadership. It constructs women as morally responsible for male sexual behavior, making them psychologically pre-loaded to doubt themselves when abuse occurs, and institutionally pre-loaded to be doubted by others. As The Conversation’s academic analysis put it: patriarchy and purity culture don’t just silence women after abuse happens, they build the silence in advance. Patriarchy and purity culture manufacture the conditions in which a woman questions whether what happened to her was real, whether she bears responsibility for it, and whether anyone in her church community will believe her if she speaks.

The SBC didn’t just fail to protect women from abuses, the SBC has spent decades building, doctrine by doctrine, a structure in which women were primed to absorb abuse because it was called ‘biblical.’

And Then There’s Jesus

I cannot leave the biblical argument entirely on the table, because the SBC insists this is about Scripture. Albert Mohler says this is about what Christ has the authority to determine.

Fine. Let’s talk about what the historical Jesus actually did.

The historical Jesus—the one documented across all four gospels, the one whose revolutionary social behavior is among the most academically consistent findings in New Testament scholarship—operated in a first-century Palestinian context where women were legally classified closer to property than to persons. And into that context, Jesus did something that his contemporaries found scandalous enough to write about, argue about, and, in some cases, try to silence: he treated women as full, equal human beings with full spiritual authority in all matters.

He appeared first to women after the resurrection—not to Peter, not to the twelve, but to Mary Magdalene. The early church Fathers called her Apostola Apostolorum: “The Apostle to the Apostles.” She was the first preacher of the resurrection, the first witness, and the first one commissioned to carry the most important message in Christian history to the men (who had run away).

Figures.

Biblical scholars Joan Taylor and Helen Bond, both professors of Christian origins, have documented extensively that Jesus had women disciples (not just supporters, not just donors, but active participants in the movement, entrusted with teaching and witness). Junia, named in Romans 16:7, is—by a consensus of New Testament scholars including N.T. Wright—identified as an apostle. Not a helper. An apostle.

Women were Apostles.
Period.

The SBC’s “Truth and Unity Amendment” is not a reflection of the historical Jesus. It is a reflection of the Roman household codes that the early church was in the process of dismantling before later interpreters froze them back into doctrine. Full stop.

The Jesus of the Gospels didn’t come to reinforce the patriarchy of Greco-Roman culture. He detonated it, quietly and consistently, in every conversation he had with a woman who wasn’t supposed to be there.

Complementarianism is not Christology. It is cultural conservatism wearing the Bible as a costume.

If You’re a Woman in the SBC: Here’s Your Framework

I know some of you reading this are still sitting in those pews. Some of you were there in Orlando this week. Some of you are wrestling with what this means for your faith, your community, your family, your sense of call.

I am not here to tell you what to do. But I am here to offer you a framework, because sometimes the hardest thing about leaving a harmful system is finding language for what you already know in your body is true.

Here are five things you are permitted to say.

Five things the research (not just theology, but peer-reviewed science) fully supports:

1. “The way this institution treats women is not just theologically questionable—it is extraordinarily harmful.”Complementarianism does not merely limit your role. It places your well-being structurally below the institutional interests of men in authority. It shouldn’t be called a church, because it is a known abusive power structure hiding under a steeple.

2. “When my voice is silenced in leadership, I am placed in measurably greater danger.” This is not rhetoric. This is the World Health Organization and the National Academies of Sciences. The inverse relationship between gender equality and violence against women is one of the most consistent findings in global public health research. A church that bars your voice is a church that dramatically increases your risk of harm.

3. “I am not responsible for what men do with their desire. That doctrine was designed to protect them, not me.” Purity culture is not holiness. Purity culture is a liability-shifting mechanism that transfers male behavior onto female bodies. Any theology that makes you responsible for male lust is a theology that has already decided whose safety matters more.

4. “My call does not require male permission to be legitimate.” The historical Jesus commissioned women before he commissioned the assembled disciples. Mary Magdalene did not check with Peter before she went to tell the story of the resurrection. Your gifting precedes their approval. Always has.

5. “Leaving is not a loss of faith. It may be the first fully faithful thing you do.” The SBC has been in a two-decade membership decline—losing over 259,000 members in 2024 alone, down to its lowest membership in 50 years. You are not abandoning the church, you are joining a growing, quiet exodus of people who decided that their integrity and their safety were worth more than the institutional brand.

The Last Word

The Southern Baptist Convention has just declared, before God and everybody in Orlando, that women in their pulpits are a greater threat to denominational integrity than two decades of documented, independently-verified, survivor-testified sexual abuse.

They’ve elected a president who called that crisis a hoax. They’ve written women’s subordination into their governing document. And they’ve placed this squarely in the tradition of a Jesus who—I promise you—looked nothing like Albert Mohler.

The research is clear.
The history is documented.
The direction is unmistakable.

Women: you deserve a faith community where your voice is not a constitutional problem. Where your body is not a theological liability. Where the person most likely to protect you from harm is not also the person most likely to bury a report.

That community exists. It’s being built right now, by people who have already done what you’re considering.

It’s okay to run.

Run.

Kevin Young is a pastor, public theologian, published author, and advocate writing at kevinyoung.substack.com. He is a member of the LGBTQIA+ community and an unapologetic voice for progressive faith, human dignity, and the deconstruction of systems that harm people in God’s name.

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Works Cited

Bond, Helen K., and Joan E. Taylor. Women Remembered: Jesus’ Female Disciples. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2022.

Christians for Biblical Equality International. “When Religion Hurts: How Complementarian Churches Harm Women.” CBE International, 2022. https://www.cbeinternational.org/resource/when-religion-hurts-how-complementarian-churches-hurt.

Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.New York: Liveright Publishing, 2020.

Guidepost Solutions LLC. Report of the Independent Investigation: The Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee’s Response to Sexual Abuse Allegations and an Audit of the Procedures and Actions of the Credentials Committee. May 15, 2022. https://guidepostsolutions.com/insights/media-mentions/guidepost-solutions-report-of-the-independent-investigation-of-the-southern-baptist-convention.

Lifeway Research. 2025 Annual Church Profile. Nashville: Southern Baptist Convention, 2026. https://research.lifeway.com/2026/05/05/southern-baptists-see-attendance-and-baptism-gains-amid-membership-declines.

Mohler, R. Albert, Jr. “Truth and Unity Amendment.” AlbertMohler.com, May 18, 2026. https://albertmohler.com/2026/05/18/truth-and-unity-amendment.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2018. https://www.nationalacademies.org/publications/26631.

“Purity Culture: Measurement and Relationship to Domestic Violence Myth Acceptance.” Journal of Psychology and Theology, 2023. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/371890421_Purity_Culture_Measurement_and_Relationship_to_Domestic_Violence_Myth_Acceptance.

Religion News Service. “Willy Rice, Florida Pastor and Abuse Crisis Skeptic, Elected SBC President.” Religion News Service, June 9, 2026. https://religionnews.com/2026/06/09/willy-rice-florida-pastor-and-abuse-crisis-skeptic-wins-sbc-presidential-election.

ResearchGate. “The More Gender Equality, the Less Violence (Domestic, Against Women).” ResearchGate, 2021. https://www.researchgate.net/post/The-more-gender-equality-the-less-violence-domestic-against-women.

Sardinha, Lynnmarie, et al. “Achieving Gender Equality to Reduce Intimate Partner Violence Against Women.” The Lancet Global Health 3, no. 6 (2015). https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(15)00006-6/fulltext.

The Conversation. “Patriarchy and Purity Culture Combine to Silence Women in the Southern Baptist Convention — and Are Blocking Efforts to Address the Sexual Abuse Scandal.” The Conversation, 2022. https://theconversation.com/patriarchy-and-purity-culture-combine-to-silence-women-in-the-southern-baptist-convention-and-are-blocking-efforts-to-address-the-sexual-abuse-scandal-183799.

World Health Organization. “Violence Against Women.” WHO Fact Sheet, March 2024. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-against-women.

Confession:

For years … years … I tried to have the Bible argument with bigots. I believed that if I could just get the exegesis right, unpack the Greco-Roman context of arsenokoitai, demonstrate that Sodom’s sin was inhospitality and not homosexuality, I could change minds. I thought the problem was an information deficit. I thought that if I could better educate people about the Bible, then I could change them.

I was wrong.

Not about the exegesis (the scholarship is overwhelmingly on the side of LGBTQ+ inclusion, and I’ll fight that battle any day of the week). No. I was wrong about where the hostility actually comes from. Behavioral science, psychology, sociology, and political science have been quietly, rigorously telling us for decades what drives bigotry:

The Bible isn’t the engine for hate; neither is morality.
It isn’t even really about faith.

The engine that drives hate is something far more primal, far more irrational, and far more interesting than a hermeneutics dispute. And if we’re going to stop being traumatized every June and start building something that actually changes the terrain, we need to understand what we’re actually dealing with.

Religion is a convenient cover for the true root issue.

Part One: It’s Not What They Think It Is

The Gut Reaction That Became a Theology

According to a large and robust body of peer-reviewed research, disgust is the single most powerful psychological predictor of negative attitudes toward gay and lesbian people. More than religious attendance, political affiliation, or any demographic factor, disgust predicts the level of gay-hate present in a person.

Not the Bible.
Not morality.
Not God.
Disgust.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory identified six innate psychological systems that function like moral “taste buds.” Liberals weight their moral lives primarily around Care and Fairness, even above loyalty, liberty, or authority. Liberals will sacrifice (even break the rules) to care or be fair. Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to weight their moral lives around Sanctity. The sanctity foundation is the moral taste bud most directly wired to disgust. It produces the intuitive sense that something is unclean, disordered, profane … i.e., a violation of some sacred order.

Which means that when a deeply conservative person sees two men kiss at a Pride parade, what they experience is not primarily a theological objection they’ve consciously reasoned to. They are having a visceral, embodied moral-emotional response that their entire psychological architecture has primed them to experience as the voice of moral truth.

Their disgust BECOMES their morality, rather than their morality shaping their disgust.

Disgust shapes moral judgment. Moral judgment amplifies disgust. The feedback loop is remarkably resistant to rational argument.

Evangelical purity culture didn’t get their LGBTQ-disgust from God. They took a pre-existing internal psychological disgust response and handed it a Bible verse and a theology.

Evangelicals told a generation of people: your gut reaction to gays is not an irrational instinct—it is the voice of God.

But it wasn’t God’s voice, it was their own disgust, wrapped up in Bible drag.

They gave psychological disgust divine authorization, transforming normal (and yes, manageable) personal discomfort into a sacred, communal, non-negotiable moral obligation.

It wasn’t the Holy Spirit their hate was hearing from, it was their amygdala wearing a fake clerical collar.

The Personality Under the Pew

Disgust doesn’t operate alone, though. It has a partner.

Decades of cross-cultural research have identified two personality constructs that, together, predict homophobic prejudice with striking consistency. Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA), which is a deep psychological need for social order, deference to authority, and aggressive rejection of perceived deviants. And Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), which is a fundamental preference for hierarchy and resistance to movements that challenge who sits at the top of it.

Together, RWA and SDO account for a substantial portion of anti-gay prejudice even after controlling for religion, politics, and demographics.

Meaning: for a significant population, opposition to LGBTQ+ dignity is not primarily a moral position, it is an expression of one’s personality flaws.

I.e., you don’t need fewer gays in your life, you just need therapy.

The gay couple next door isn’t so much of a theological problem for a high Right Wing Authoritarian person as they are a destabilizing symbol of a world not behaving the way that your personality needs it to behave.

And then there’s this, the finding I keep coming back to:

A well-documented body of research shows that some of the most intense public hostility toward gay people comes from people privately navigating unresolved same-sex attraction! The more likely you are to be publicly hostile toward the LGBTQ+, the more likely you are to be a closeted member of that community.

When the message you’ve absorbed your entire life is “what you feel inside is an abomination,” that pressure doesn’t disappear. It externalizes. For a notable subset of the loudest anti-gay voices, what you’re watching is wounded people hurting others with the wound they cannot name.

In my personal and public conversations with vocal anti-LGBTQ+ individuals, I have begun pointing out they are simply in the closet and dealing with internalized homophobia. And surprisingly, they rarely ever push back against my assertion, choosing instead to pivot away rather than lie about their same-sex attraction or correct me.

Zero-Sum Thinking and the Public Performance of Hate

Now layer on the sociology, because this is where Pride Month specifically comes into focus.

There is a research theory that brings all of this into focus. Social Identity Theory tells us that human beings derive a significant portion of their self-concept from group membership. When the perceived status of an outgroup rises (an “outgroup” is a group made up of outsiders), members of the dominant ingroup (insiders) experience it as a relative diminishment of their own worth. So in effect, the more that people accept the existence of the LGBTQ+ community, the more that white, Christian heterosexuals will feel their existence is threatened.

When a conservative, evangelical American sees rainbow flags on government buildings and corporations changing their logos every June, their social psychology isn’t asking “is this logically a threat to my hetero marriage?” It is saying: “Your group is losing ground. Their group is winning. This is zero-sum and you are on the losing side.”

This is exactly why the MAGA and Evangelical responses are both performative and public. Burning a pride flag… saying things like the “Stars and Stripes is my Pride Flag”… state resolutions designating June as “Nuclear Family Month”…. These are not rational arguments directed at LGBTQ+ people. They are solidarity signals directed at the ingroup—saying to their own community: we are still here, our values still matter, we will not be erased.

In effect, let’s erase THEM before they erase US.

Research calls this a symbolic threat—the sense that LGBTQ+ visibility undermines the moral fabric and threatens the cultural architecture that gives a community its identity.

You cannot argue someone out of a symbolic threat. You cannot defeat it with better exegesis. Because it was never about the argument. It was always about the identity.

When Ingroup Panic Meets an Algorithm

ACLED documented that anti-LGBTQ+ incidents in the United States more than tripled from 64 events in 2021 to 193 in 2022. For three consecutive years, more than 20% of all hate crimes reported to the FBI have been motivated by anti-LGBTQ+ bias. This is not accidental.

Research using millions of tweets found that positive social feedback for expressions of moral outrage conditions people to produce more outrage—identical to slot machine conditioning. A Pride flag burning that goes viral becomes a template. A governor who signs a Nuclear Family Month resolution gets national coverage and donor checks. The escalation is manufactured, rewarded, and quite profitable.

When Tennessee’s Bill Lee signed a resolution declaring June “Nuclear Family Month”—explicitly describing the heterosexual nuclear family as “God’s design”—he wasn’t doing theology. He was deploying a precise political instrument to affirm his ingroup, delegitimize LGBTQ+ symbolic claims on public space, and perform cultural survival for a base that rewards bigotry.

Part Two: Okay. So What Do We Do?

Everything above could, in certain lights, feel deeply discouraging. But here’s what years of serious training in the gym have taught me:

The most seemingly immovable things are often the most responsive to consistent, intelligent pressure.

The research on what actually changes attitudes is more compelling to me than the research on what creates them. Because change is not only possible, it is happening, it has happened, and we know with increasing precision what produces it.

What Doesn’t Work

Public shaming feels good, but it is strategically counterproductive. Public shaming of bigotry only hardens opposition and energizes the ingroup you’re trying to reach past. Winning the Bible argument matters for the church, but doesn’t move the dial for people whose opposition is emotional and identity-based rather than intellectual. And framing every Pride action as a battle in a zero-sum war deepens the very polarization that feeds the backlash.

We have to stop fighting on terrain our opponents designed.

Contact. Story. Presence.

A meta-analysis of 515 studies involving more than 250,000 participants across 38 nations confirmed that intergroup contact (i.e., actually knowing someone from the outgroup) consistently reduces prejudice. The mechanism is empathy through perspective-taking. People who personally know a gay, lesbian, or bisexual person are dramatically less likely to hold hostile attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people as a whole.

The practical implication is staggering in its simplicity: you, being you, in proximity to people, IS the strategy. Every out LGBTQ+ person living openly and in genuine relationship with their community is doing something no legislative campaign or social media strategy can replicate.

EVERY “out” person moves the needle, because it gives their community and connections a living, breathing face and story from someone they know and love… which makes it far more difficult to hate.

Companion research from UC Berkeley and Stanford found that a ten-minute, empathy-focused conversation (not argument, not data, but genuine human presence) produces lasting reductions in anti-trans prejudice that persist for months. Not arguing at people, but inviting them to connect the issue to their own experience of exclusion or invisibility and building bridges on similar topics. For those of us in ministry: this is not a political strategy. This is incarnational theology with empirical validation. This is what Jesus did at every well, every table, every threshold.

And the research on persuasion is unambiguous: personal narrative shifts moral attitudes more durably than statistics or argument. Less time winning debates; more time telling human stories with radical honesty.

Less time proving our right to exist.
More time existing so fully and humanly that the question dissolves.

Name the Zero-Sum Lie

Because symbolic threat drives so much of this hostility, our communication needs to address it directly. Messaging that affirms diverse families without requiring the abandonment of traditional ones consistently outperforms messaging that frames equality as cultural replacement.

The frame that works is not “your values are wrong.” It is: “My family being celebrated does not uncelebrate yours. My dignity does not diminish yours. This is not a competition.”

Rather than being capitulation, that is strategic empathy deployed in service of justice. There is a difference.

The Structural Work Cannot Be Optional

Individual attitude change is necessary but not sufficient. The legislative assault on LGBTQ+ lives is driven by electoral incentives because political entrepreneurs have discovered that anti-LGBTQ+ performance generates donors and drives base turnout.

Nuclear Family Month didn’t come from the pews. It came from the playbook.

Removing the electoral profitability of anti-LGBTQ+ signaling is as urgent as changing individual hearts. Pursuing ballot outcomes, corporate accountability, and cross-partisan coalition building with libertarian conservatives who oppose government intrusion into private life are structural interventions that complement, but cannot be replaced by, personal and relational work.

We need both.

The long arc and the immediate leverage point. We need both the deep relational conversations and the voting booth.

The Longer Game

From where I stand, I see people who were handed a psychological disgust response and told it was divine revelation. I see people whose sense of identity feels genuinely threatened by a world changing faster than their nervous systems can process. I see wounded people, some of whom are fighting hardest against the very thing they secretly are.

And I see, on the other side, a community—our community—that has survived everything. That has outlasted every empire that tried to erase us. That has produced, out of the crucible of marginalization, extraordinary beauty, resilience, love, and spiritual depth.

The path forward is NOT louder outrage.

The path forward is deeper humanity. Showing up … in relationship, in story, in unflinching presence … so fully and irrevocably human that the narrative of threat has nowhere left to stand.

The research says contact changes minds.
The Gospel says love changes hearts.

I’ve decided to trust both.

Kevin M. Young is a pastor, author, public theologian, and proud member of the LGBTQ+ community. His writing explores the intersection of ancient spiritual disciplines, progressive faith, and embodied liberation. Subscribe to kevinyoung.substack.com for weekly essays at the edge of faith and culture.

If this landed for you, share it. The algorithm rewards engagement. For once, let’s make it work for us.

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SOURCES:

1. Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon.

2. Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(5), 751–783.

3. Stephan, W. G., & Renfro, C. L. (2002). The role of threat in intergroup relations. In D. M. Mackie & E. R. Smith (Eds.), From prejudice to intergroup emotions.Psychology Press.

4. Mancini et al. (2025). Bidirectional interplay of disgust and morality: Meta-analytic review. Personality and Individual Differences.

5. Broockman, D., & Kalla, J. (2016). Durably reducing transphobia: A field experiment on door-to-door canvassing. Science, 352(6282), 220–224. (The deep canvassing study)

6. ACLED (2022). Fact Sheet: Anti-LGBT+ Mobilization on the Rise in the United States.

7. ISD Global (2025). Five-year overview of the online and offline anti-LGBTQ+ landscape.

Let’s be honest, there is little modern Christians love more than to value-signal their disdain for the LGBTQ+ around Pride Month… especially its flag.

And if you haven’t seen the headline by now, you soon will, as we have arrived at this year’s ubiquitous anti-gay outrage:

Jeffrey Little, a Christian lifeguard captain in Los Angeles County, is suing because he was suspended after refusing to raise a Pride flag. Jeffrey’s supervisors allegedly told him his “religious beliefs do not matter” because he was a county employee. The county initially approved his religious exemption, then reversed course days later. Now it’s headed to federal court.

First, let’s be clear: The county handled this badly. VERY badly. Approving an exemption and then reversing it days later is sloppy governance, and we shouldn’t give bad HR practices a pass. Due process matters. Consistency matters. And yes, workplace religious accommodations are a real legal and ethical issue worth serious conversation.

But.

But!

Let’s not let administrative incompetence distract from the much larger, much thornier question sitting right in the middle of this story:

Is This Really About Religious Freedom, or Is It Just Bigotry With Better Paperwork?

Here’s my honest, pastoral, and thoroughly unmagnanomous take: I don’t see this as a religious freedom issue. Not really.

Religious freedom protects your right to practice your faith––to pray, to worship, to observe your sabbath, to hold your theological convictions without government interference––it does not, and should not, function as a legal shield that allows you to opt out of civil equality whenever your personal beliefs find certain people inconvenient.

There’s a difference between the government compelling you to profess a belief and the government asking you to do your job––a job that, in a pluralistic society, occasionally involves acknowledging the existence and dignity of people you might personally dislike, disagree with, or even disdain. It’s your job to serve all people.

Raising a flag is not a confession of faith. It’s a function of employment.

And this is the question that I think exposes the root of the issue:

Would this same energy exist if he’d refused to raise a flag commemorating Black History Month? Or a flag honoring women’s suffrage? Or a disability awareness flag?

Because if the answer is “no”––if there’s no lawsuit, no viral outrage, no coalition of Christian legal organizations rallying to his cause––then what we’re witnessing isn’t a principled stand for religious liberty but the selective application of conscience, and that selection just happens to land squarely on queer people.

Every. Single. Time.

Caesar’s Paycheck and God’s Kingdom Don’t Always Mix

If you want to live exclusively under the jurisdiction of God’s Kingdom, then don’t become an employee of Caesar’s.

The moment you accept a government paycheck, you are operating inside a pluralistic, constitutional framework that was never designed to privilege one religion’s sensibilities over the civil rights of other citizens.

That’s not persecution.

And if those job responsibilities are incompatible with your convictions, there is an entirely honorable solution: find work where your conscience and your job description actually align. Nobody is forcing anyone to work for L.A. County Baywatch.

I’ve said something similar to people on the other side of the aisle, by the way. If you want Caesar’s infrastructure, Caesar’s salary, and Caesar’s pension, then you work within Caesar’s parameters. That goes for everyone.

One’s faith should never function as a cudgel against civil rights, against the celebration of those rights, or against the communities for whom those rights were hard-won and are still being fought for.

But Can We Talk About That Other Flag for a Moment?

If we want a real theological conversation about flags, how about this one:

If your Christianity is so intricately bound up in the flags you raise and the symbols you associate yourself with––if that’s the line in the sand––then I need to pivot away from Pride and ask you…

What are you doing with the American flag?

What are you doing pledging allegiance––and that word, allegiance, is doing some very heavy lifting here––to a nation-state, to an empire, to a flag, when the One you claim as Lord was executed by an empire, refused the crowns empires offered, and spent his entire ministry subverting the logic of imperial power?

The early Christians died rather than burn a pinch of incense to Caesar.

They refused the loyalty oaths and would never place the empire above the Kingdom.

They refused giving their allegiance to the empire, and it cost them everything.

And now we’ve got Christians who will stand in worship on Sunday morning, hand over heart, pledging allegiance to a republic and its flag without a whisper of irony or theological discomfort.

But raise a Pride flag?
That’s the hill we die on?

Let me say this slowly, clearly, and with my whole pastoral chest:

The flag of the United States of America represents a history of colonization, slavery, indigenous genocide, and ongoing systems of oppression that have yet to be fully reckoned with. If flags carry spiritual weight, if symbols carry moral meaning, if your faith demands you evaluate what you lift up and what you align yourself with, then that evaluation cannot begin and end with the Pride flag… it must extend to all flags you touch.

Either symbols matter, or they don’t.

Either allegiance is a theological category, or it isn’t.

You don’t get to apply one standard to the rainbow and another standard to the stars and stripes and call yourself consistent. That is far from “religious conviction,” it’s bigotry dressed up in Bible drag.

So What Do We Do With All of This?

I’m not interested in a culture war. Evangelicalism has far too many of those. What I am interested in is truth-telling … the kind that doesn’t spare anyone, including those of us who sit in more progressive pews.

1. Workplace religious accommodations are real and worth protecting. The government should not be sloppy or arbitrary in how it handles them. That applies here, and it should extend equally to ALL religious faiths, not just Christianity.
   

2. Religious freedom is not a blanket exemption from participating in a pluralistic society. It never was, and making it one would unravel civil rights protections in ways that would hurt far more people than it would help.
   

3. Selective conscience is not conscience at all––its preference. If you wouldn’t make this stand for any other marginalized community’s flag, then your stand is not about religious principle, it’s about who you think doesn’t deserve dignity.
   

4. If symbols matter to your faith, apply that standard consistently. The flag of empire deserves at least as much theological scrutiny as the flag of liberation.
   

5. The Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world are not the same thing. Allegiance is not a neutral act, and it never has been. The first Christians knew that. We’ve somehow forgotten and aligned ourselves with anti-Christ nationalism fervor rather than true faith.

I love the Church too much to let her keep doing this unchallenged.

I love LGBTQIA+ people––my people––too much to stay quiet when their dignity is litigated as if it’s debatable.

And I love Jesus too much to watch his name get co-signed on to something he would have had serious, table-flipping objections to.

Raise or lower whatever flag you want in your own home. Fly it from your truck. Tattoo it on your forearm. That’s your right.

But if you’re on Caesar’s clock, doing Caesar’s job, cashing Caesar’s check, then do the job, or find another one. And while you’re figuring that out, spend a little time asking yourself why you’re more threatened by a rainbow than by an empire.

That question might be the most spiritual work you do all year.

Rev. Dr. Kevin M. Young is a Pastor, Biblical Scholar, Public Theologian, and LGBTQIA+ advocate. He writes at kevinyoung.substack.com.

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“If I am not there to receive these ideas, God will give them to Prince.”
— Michael Jackson

I’ve rarely heard a theatre laugh as hard as they did when Jaafar Jackson landed this line in the new biopic about his uncle Michael.

But the punchline hid the real point of the moment: Michael’s intense devotion to his religious faith.

“God gave me the gift of song,” he once said publicly. “And the world gave me the opportunity to be heard.”

Michael Jackson was a deeply religious man, but many missed it, and it nearly derailed his career and the trajectory of his life … as religion often does.

And ground zero for the battle was Thriller.

“Jehovah says let your light shine to the world.”

But before we get there, we need to understand a bit about the peculiarities of his particular faith.

In the movie, the word “Jehovah” is dropped in a single line so nonchalantly by Katherine Jackson, his mother, that most people likely missed it, let alone understood the lifetime of religious fundamentalism and intense trauma it represented.

Katherine Jackson was a devout Jehovah’s Witness.

She raised Michael in the faith from the time he was roughly five years old. Many people miss that Michael’s entire childhood was ordered around TWO controlling forces: Joseph Jackson, his overbearing father, AND his faith community. Both Joseph and JW doctrine shaped how Michael saw himself, how he understood his gifts, and most critically, what he was allowed to do with them.

For a kid with that much creative electricity and father-trauma running through him, the Jehovah’s Witnesses offered structure and a seemingly safe community, at first. And for a long time, longer than most people realize, Michael held both worlds together.

Pop superstardom and Kingdom Hall.
Sequined gloves and Watchtower pamphlets.

It is difficult to imagine, but Michael was reportedly still going door-to-door to witness, two-by-two, in disguise, hat pulled low, fake mustache on, hoping not to be recognized.

At the height of his global superstardom, the biggest pop star on earth was knocking on strangers’ doors offering them “Good News.”

But it wasn’t enough to satisfy his religion’s leadership.

December 1983 and the (oc)cult hit, Thriller

Unless you were alive in the waning days of 1982, it is impossible to explain the phenomenon that was “Thriller.” Nothing like that album had ever been released, and the energy only grew with each passing month of 1983 (and it is still, 42 years later, the best-selling album … ever).

When the insanely risky 14-minute music video for Thriller premiered a year after the release of the album on December 2nd, 1983, it wasn’t just a cultural event, it single-handedly revolutionized music videos. Album sales doubled, it became the first music video inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, and it is widely considered to be the greatest music video ever made.

But for Michael Jackson, it was a crisis.
One of epic proportions.

For the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Thriller music video was the last straw.

The JW elders came for him.

The zombie imagery, the werewolf transformation, Vincent Price’s voice dragging listeners down into “the funk of forty thousand years,” all of it was, in the eyes of Jehovah’s Witness leadership, a direct violation of their prohibition on occult and spiritist content.

And Michael, who had just made what would become the best-selling music video in the history of the medium, reportedly wanted to destroy it.

He came within a hair’s breadth of choosing his religious community over his God-given talent.

To try and assuage the JW leadership, Michael published a statement in Awake! magazine, the official JW magazine, publicly denouncing his own masterpiece. "I realize now it was not a good idea. I'll never do a video like that again."

He went so far as to add this disclaimer to the front of Thriller:

It’s still there today.

It is difficult to understand the weight of that moment.

Michael is twenty-five years old. He is the most famous human being alive. He has just made something genuinely transcendent, fourteen minutes of art that critics and scholars will still be picking apart long after his death. And the community of faith his mother gave him, the community he is still actively serving by going door-to-door in a fake mustache, is telling him it is evil… telling him that he is “worldly.”

And he almost believed them.

The cost of living inside a cage

What we must understand about the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and frankly, about any religious community that operates by control rather than grace, is this:

When belonging is conditional,
we experience captivity rather than true community.

When the price of staying is the suppression of who you are, and what you carry, that isn’t Christianity, at least not the Jesus-type … it’s a cage.

Michael was caught in that trap, and he spent years trying to make it livable rather than simply walking away from it.

The disclaimer before Thriller was his attempt at negotiation.

I’ll call it evil if you’ll let me keep making it.

He was trying to be a good son to Katherine, a faithful Witness, and the most extraordinary musical talent of his generation, all at once. He was trying to honor the Creator’s gift and the religion’s rules at the same time.

The contortions required to do that were almost unbearable to watch.

And this isn’t just about Michael Jackson; it’s about every person reading this who has ever tried to shrink themselves to fit a faith that wasn’t built to hold them.

You cannot cage what God has released.
You cannot ignore what God has embedded.
You cannot unbecome what God has always intended.

You can add disclaimers to it.
You can publicly denounce it.
You can go door-to-door with your fake mustache and your Watchtower and try to prove your loyalty to an institution that has never once asked whether the institution is loyal to you.

But the gift will keep coming.
It doesn’t belong to the institution.
It belongs to the One who gave it.

1987: The year he chose the gift

Three years after the Thriller crisis, Michael Jackson formally disassociated himself from the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The Brooklyn headquarters of JW sent a searing letter in response.

Michael was out.

Under JW doctrine, disassociation (removing yourself from the religion) is treated as more severe than being disfellowshipped (being removed by the religion), which meant his closest JW family and friends were now theologically required to shun him.

His own mother.
His still-believing siblings.
The community that had been his spiritual home since he was five years old.

Everyone he had ever loved and who had loved him was supposed to completely cut ties and communication with him… forever.

Dead man walking.

He chose the gift anyway, and walked away.

That same year, 1987, Michael Jackson released Bad.

Darker. Bolder. Sexually charged in ways the old version of himself would have disclaimed. The armor was off. The man who had publicly renounced his own masterpiece, Thriller, was finally letting himself be free.

That isn’t to say Michael was whole, or even healthy. He was nowhere close to whole. The damage from Joe Jackson’s physical and emotional cruelty and the faith-based shame of the Kingdom Hall had carved out enormous holes in his interior life that he would spend the rest of his days trying to fill.

And here is the part we must face directly:

Repression has to go somewhere.

The energy of a suppressed soul doesn’t disappear. It finds an exit.

Sometimes that exit is art.
Sometimes it’s something darker,
something harder to explain or excuse.

The allegations against Michael Jackson, the ones brought by Wade Robson and James Safechuck and documented in Leaving Neverland, cannot be fully separated from the story of a man who never got to be a child and who built an entire estate as a monument to the childhood that was taken from him.

I’m not suggesting the allegations explain themselves, and I’m certainly not dismissing them. What I’m saying is that when human beings are broken the way Michael was broken—by violence, by exploitation, by fame before the brain was done forming, and especially by a faith that controlled rather than freed—the brokenness tends to have consequences that reach far beyond the person themselves. It compounds, and rather than an excuse, it is a warning:

Faith communities still in the business of that kind of breaking would do well to reckon with where it leads.

What the Creator gave, no religion gets to take back

Katherine Jackson told her son that Jehovah wanted his light to shine to the world. She wasn’t wrong about that part.

She was wrong about who got to decide what the light was for.

The Kingdom Hall tried to own it. Religion tried to regulate it, approve it, disclaim it, and ultimately, when Michael refused to keep shrinking, shun it.

What religion couldn’t imagine was that the light didn’t come from the institution. The institution was just the place where a little boy from Gary, Indiana first learned that something extraordinary was living inside him.

Call the source of that whatever you want. God. The universe. Evolution. Sacred DNA. Whatever force makes a child spin in circles for no reason and feel the floor drop away. Michael Jackson himself used the word God with consistency and conviction to describe that light within himself.

As such, this is the thing I’d want tattooed on the wall of every church sanctuary, every elder board meeting room, and every doctrinal review panel that has ever turned away a person because their art or their identity or their love didn’t fit the approved format:

The Man in the Mirror

For us, the epic battle between Thriller and the Kingdom Hall is not so much a music history lesson as much as it is a mirror.

Maybe you were raised in a tradition that told you which parts of yourself were acceptable to God and which parts needed to be hidden, disclaimed, or simply never spoken of. Maybe your art was too dark, too strange, or too honest for your religious family and friends. Maybe your body was too queer, too fluid, too much for the doctrine. Maybe your questions were sharper than the simplistic Sunday school answer could handle. Maybe, like Michael Jackson going door-to-door in a fake mustache, you have spent years trying to be present in a community that only ever wanted the costumed version of you.

What has your faith asked you to disclaim?
Not just about God.
About yourself?
About your gifts?
About the way you were made?

History has never once vindicated the move of burying the talent. Not the biblical version, not Michael’s version, not yours. Every time a human being has chosen the institution over the gift, the disclaimer over the art, history has eventually sided with the gift.

So here’s what I’m asking you to do this week. Write down what you’ve disclaimed. Specifically. What parts of yourself have you added a “due to my strong personal convictions, I wish to stress…” to in order to stay in a room that may not deserve your presence? Then ask yourself whether Michael’s exit in 1987 was really a rejection of God, or whether it was a rejection of the institution’s claim of ownership over his relationship with God. Because those are not the same thing. They have never been the same thing.

And then, when you’ve sat with that question long enough, let the thing run. Whatever it is. The voice. The body. The love. The question. The fire. It was given to you because the world needs it.

A disclaimed gift helps no one.
A released one changes everything.

The Kingdom Hall tried to mute the moonwalk.
We all know how that turned out.

Kevin M. Young is a pastor, author, speaker, and doctor of early church faith formation. His Substack【Culture ✚ Faith】lands every Wednesday at the intersection of the week’s cultural conversations and theological implications. It is written for people who still believe in God but have stopped pretending the institution is the same thing. His book, Reconstruct Your Faith: Ancient Ways to Make Your Relationship With God Whole Again, is available now. He is a father, a lifter, a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and a post-evangelical who has never once been accused of playing it safe.

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Megan Basham and Allie Beth Stuckey would like you to believe that the most dangerous person the modern church faces is the liberal enemy trying to infiltrate the church, but it’s not. The most dangerous person is the stranger inside the walls who has convinced everyone they belong there, when they don’t.

Megan Basham and Allie Beth Stuckey have been called two of “the most influential Baptists in America.” A recent Juicy Ecumenism piece used a front-page Washington Post story on Trump’s blasphemous Jesus imagery as a launching pad to elevate both women as the new public face of the Baptist movement within evangelicalism.

Influential? Sure. I’ll grant them that. But Baptist?

No… not even close.

So, before another congregation invites one of their books into a small group, before another pastor defers to any Basham/Stuckey take on Baptist denominational life, or before another well-meaning Baptist shares their content and says “see, she gets it,” we need to have an honest, unflinching conversation about what it really means to be “Baptist.”

Buckle up, this is a wild ride … whether or not you are Baptist!

The Real Problem Isn’t Them. It’s Us.

We need to start here, because it is the linchpin of Baptist identity:

Baptists have never yielded their authority (or their theology) to media celebrities whose only authority comes from subscriber counts, book deals, podcast downloads, and political media empires.

The moment a denomination lets its identity be defined from the outside, it has begun the long, slow process of losing its own soul. More directly, the moment Baptists allow unaccountable voices who profit from controversy and whose first loyalty is to a political movement rather than a gathered church to become the voice of the movement, it ceases to be “baptist” at all.

This isn’t a new problem, though.

Billy Sunday — a former baseball player who was ordained basically on the strength of his celebrity, and with zero formal theological training, spent decades whipping up revival crowds with a gospel that was more “Americanism” than it was Christianity. His “mixture of manhood, morals, Americanism, and willfully managed Christianity,” as Founders Ministries has documented, “pushed the envelope toward seeing Christianity as the most sure route to national greatness.” He was more interested in building himself up than he was Christianity.

Jim Bakker — built a televangelist PTL empire on evangelical distrust of institutions, leveraging his platform into a multi-million-dollar fraud operation, and went to prison. He was charismatic, but he had no congregational accountability. Enormous influence; catastrophic results.

Jerry Falwell, Sr. — was at least an ordained Baptist pastor, but he built the Moral Majority as a para-ecclesial political machine that told Baptist congregations coast to coast what they were supposed to believe, overriding congregational autonomy and collapsing church-state separation in service of the Republican Party platform rather than God. We are still living inside the wreckage of that mess.

Same anatomy, every single time:

Basham and Stuckey are that formula for the TikTok-and-Substack generation. And the Baptist church is walking right into a hijacking with arms wide open.

Who Are These Women … Really?

Let’s be specific, because vague concern is easy to dismiss. Specificity isn’t.

MEGAN BASHAM is a culture reporter for The Daily Wire—a for-profit, right-wing political media operation—and the author of Shepherds for Sale, a book that accuses evangelical leaders of selling out to a “leftist agenda.” She has a degree in English and a background in film criticism. She is a 2022 Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute. For background on the company she keeps, the Claremont Institute is the dangerous think tank whose senior fellow, John Eastman, authored a memo advising Pence not to certify the 2020 election, and which even National Review’s Mona Charen described as having “beclowned itself with this embrace of the smarmy underside of American politics.”

Basham holds no ordination.
She pastors no congregation.
She has no formal theological training.

She is a political journalist who covers Baptist institutions as her beat, and that beat is also her brand and her income.

ALLIE BETH STUCKEY hosts Relatable on Blaze TV—another for-profit right-wing media operation—and has authored Toxic Empathy and You’re Not Enough (& That’s Okay). She attended Furman University and majored in communication studies. Not theology. Not biblical studies. Not ministry. Communication studies. Her origin story, per her own website, is that she led a Bible study for freshman girls that “helped her realize the need young, Christian women have in approaching politics and culture from a Christian perspective” … and from that, she launched a podcast.

She also holds no ordination.
She pastors no congregation.
She has no formal theological training.

Stuckey identifies as Reformed Baptist, and we need to park here for a second, because this label is doing a lot of heavy lifting for her Baptist credibility, and it shouldn’t be allowed to.

“Reformed Baptist” Is NOT “Historic Baptist.” Full Stop.

We need to hear this clearly, because Stuckey’s entire claim to Baptist identity (as with most of the really “bad actors” in current Baptist life) rests on this semantic sleight of hand.

HISTORIC BAPTIST Theology is rooted in John Smyth and Thomas Helwys at the turn of the 17th century, flowing through the General Baptist tradition and the overwhelming majority of Baptists in American history — has been broadly Arminian. It affirms genuine human freedom to respond to the Gospel. It insists that grace is universally available. It builds its entire architecture of religious liberty on the conviction that every soul is genuinely, freely competent to respond to God. You cannot coerce faith. You cannot legislate righteousness. That is “soul competency,” and it is the theological engine behind the Baptist commitment to church-state separation.

REFORMED BAPTIST Theology is a different tradition entirely. It derives from the 17th-century Particular Baptists, runs through the legalistic and largely anti-Baptist 1689 London Baptist Confession, and draws directly on Calvinist soteriology (unconditional election, limited atonement, the whole package). It is a legitimate Protestant tradition, but it is not the Baptist mainstream, and grading Stuckey’s Baptist credentials against Reformed Baptist standards instead of historic Baptist standards is like grading a sprinter’s performance against swimming records and calling it even.

When you hold Stuckey up to the light of historic Baptist identity—Williams, Helwys, Leland, Truett—the differences are not subtle; they are major.

Four Baptist Distinctives. Two Epic Failures.

Since the beginning, Baptists across all traditions have shared four core values: congregational autonomy, the priesthood of the believer, the separation of church and state, and the freedom to minister cooperatively. These are not suggestions for what it means to be Baptist; these are the bones of what it means to be Baptist at its core.

1. Congregational Autonomy. Basham’s entire career is built on violating this principle. Shepherds for Sale is a book-length exercise in an outside voice—accountable to no congregation, no deacon board, no denomination—declaring which Baptist pastors are orthodox and which are compromised. J.D. Greear responded to her publicly by invoking the autonomy of The Summit Church directly, noting the pastor she describes “is not the pastor [his church] has known for more than 20 years.” Even her sharpest critics noted the book “describes not so much facts that Basham has discovered, but a standard against which she evaluates Christians outside of her own political tribe.” Stuckey does the same from her podcast throne, broadcasting to a trans-congregational audience what Baptist and evangelical communities should believe, but none of it accountable to any local Baptist congregation.

2. Priesthood of the Believer. Both women have constructed, through their platforms, something functionally indistinguishable from a counter-magisterium, an outside authority issuing rulings on who is theologically sound and who has sold out. A key Baptist concept, the “Priesthood of the Believer,” affirms that every individual believer can read and interpret scripture on their own. But Basham/Stuckey have a non-Baptist habit of deciding who is in and who is out. They regularly impose their own political orthodoxy dressed in biblical language upon others, denying the priesthood of the believer.

3. Separation of Church and State. This is where Basham/Stuckey don’t just miss the mark, but they become the danger. In 1920, standing on the steps of the United States Capitol before 15,000 people, the great Baptist pastor George W. Truett declared: “There must be no union between church and state, because their nature and functions are utterly different.” He called religious liberty “the supreme contribution of the new world to the old” and called it, explicitly, “pre-eminently a Baptist achievement.” He was not speaking as a liberal. He was speaking as a Baptist who knew his history, a Baptist who knew that Roger Williams fled Puritan Massachusetts for it, that John Leland fought his whole life for it, and that Baptists had been jailed, whipped, and exiled over it.
   

   Stuckey publicly dismissed the separation of church and state as a “phony” concept and called Christian nationalism “a moniker used as a manipulation tactic to get Christian conservatives and only Christian conservatives to shut up.” On her own podcast, she has argued that “our worldview and policy were never meant to be separate,” casually dismantling in one sentence what Baptists bled for over four centuries.
   
   Basham’s institutional home is The Daily Wire, whose political identity is inseparable from Trumpist conservatism. Her formal fellowship is with the Claremont Institute, ground-zero for MAGA politics. And her most celebrated public alliance? Doug Wilson, the Moscow, Idaho theocrat whose Christ Church community explicitly envisions a Christian nationalist state where “political power is held only by people who identify as Christian,” and who has said in plain language that he wants “a society that acknowledges Jesus’ authority over politics.” Basham has publicly stated, without ambiguity: “I like Doug Wilson’s work.”

Let me be very clear about what that means.

You cannot claim Baptist identity while cheerleading for the leading advocate of American theocracy (the unification of church and state). Those two things are not in tension. They are in direct contradiction.

The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty (representing fifteen Baptist organizations and founded almost a century ago) has named Christian nationalism for exactly what it is: a direct assault on religious liberty. The BJC has documented that people who embrace Christian nationalism are statistically more likely to approve of authoritarian tactics, distrust religious minorities, and condone police violence. That is not a political opinion, that is a documented threat to the free society that Baptists have helped build for centuries.

Basham and Stuckey are not just non-Baptist on this point. They are actively and aggressively anti-Baptist.

Let’s Talk About the Money

Because we should.

Basham and Stuckey are not unpaid volunteers. They are not lay people speaking from conscience out of concern for their congregations. They are paid media personalities whose income depends directly on the controversy they generate within Baptist and evangelical communities. The Daily Wire is a business. Blaze TV is a business. Book advances, speaking fees, podcast revenue, all of it flows from the friction and outrage their content produces within Baptist life.

When Basham attacks Russell Moore, Ed Stetzer, and J.D. Greear as having sold out to a “leftist agenda,” she is not just a concerned Baptist woman speaking her conscience. She is producing a product for a secular company that profits from that attack. She profits from attacking true Baptists and their thoroughly Baptist beliefs. When Stuckey frames pastoral compassion as “toxic empathy,” she is monetizing the division she sows.

The Revelation 12 term “accusers of the brethren” was not written for demons alone. It describes anyone whose business model requires perpetual accusation against God’s people. Without the attack, there is no content. Without the content, there is no subscriber. Without the subscriber, there is no income. The accusation is the product.

Baptists—of all people—should be able to recognize that dynamic and name it clearly.

The Verdict

I am not going to hedge here.

Megan Basham is not Baptist. Basham is a right-wing political journalist who covers Baptist institutions as a beat. She exercises no congregational accountability. She has no theological credentials beyond an English degree and a Claremont fellowship. She has publicly aligned herself with Doug Wilson’s theocracy (the most un-Baptist ecclesio-political project in contemporary American life). She profits from attacking Baptist pastors while operating entirely outside any Baptist accountability structure. Her primary institutional identity is The Daily Wire. That is not a church.

Allie Beth Stuckey is not Baptist. The “Reformed Baptist” label gives her credobaptism and not much else when measured against historic Baptist identity. Her dismissal of church-state separation as “phony,” her rehabilitation of Christian nationalism as mere Christianity, her alignment with MAGA political priorities, her communications degree, and her operation as a para-denominational media authority all place her outside—not on the edges of, but outside—the Baptist tradition she claims.

Both women are influential among Baptists.
Neither is influential as a Baptist.

And the difference is not a technicality.

Their Christian nationalism, their dismissal of church-state separation, their subordination of congregational autonomy to political loyalty tests, and their desire to use state power to impose their (non-Baptistic) theology on a free citizenry are not a different flavor of Baptist Christianity but its antithesis.

They champion things Baptists spent four centuries resisting.

Okay. But What Do You Actually Say?

I know some of you are reading this and thinking: “Kevin, I agree, but have you met a Basham fan or tangled with Basham herself? They are not easy to talk to.”

You’re right. They’re not. And there’s a reason for that.

Both Basham and Stuckey are masters of what psychologists call bad-faith argumentation: debate tactics designed not to discover truth but to win at all costs and avoid accountability.

Here is your survival guide:

🔴 Tactic #1: DARVO — “Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender”

What it looks like: You raise a legitimate concern about Basham or Stuckey’s lack of theological credentials or their alignment with Christian nationalism. Suddenly you’re the one attacking the church. You’re the one with a “leftist agenda.” You’re the one who hates women. You’re the problem.

What’s happening: DARVO is a clinical manipulation tactic used to deflect accountability. The person accused becomes the accuser; the critic becomes the villain. It’s psychologically disorienting by design.

What to say:

“I notice we’ve shifted from the substance of what I raised to whether I’m a good person for raising it. I’m happy to talk about my motives, but only after we’ve addressed the actual question. Can we go back to that?”

Stay on the issue. Do not take the bait on the character assassination. The moment you defend yourself instead of advancing your argument, they’ve won the redirect.

🔴 Tactic #2: The Motte and Bailey

What it looks like: Stuckey says something sweeping like “Christian nationalism is just basic Christianity” or “our worldview and policy were never meant to be separate.” You push back. She retreats to something defensible, “I just think Christians should be involved in public life” or “I’m not saying we should have a state church.” You agree with the retreat, and she advances the original claim again later.

What’s happening: The “motte” is the easily defended position (Christians can participate in politics, which is obviously true). The “bailey” is the aggressive position she actually wants to hold (the separation of church and state is phony; Christian values should be legislated). She cycles between them to avoid being pinned down.

What to say:

“I want to make sure we’re talking about the same thing. Are you saying Christians should participate in public life—which, yes, of course—or are you saying the separation of church and state is an illegitimate concept? Because those are very different claims. Which one are we actually discussing?”

Name the shift. Force specificity. Refuse to let the conversation slide back to the castle every time the battlefield gets uncomfortable.

🔴 Tactic #3: The Credentialism Reversal

What it looks like: You note that neither Basham nor Stuckey have theological credentials, pastoral experience, or congregational accountability. They respond: “So only ordained pastors can speak? That sounds pretty elitist. The Reformation was about the priesthood of all believers!” Or: “Are you saying women can’t have a voice?”

What’s happening: They are weaponizing Baptist values (the very ones they violate) to deflect a legitimate critique. It’s theologically sophisticated and practically dishonest.

What to say:

“The priesthood of all believers means every Christian has direct access to God and should engage their faith seriously, including in public. That’s beautiful and I affirm it completely. It does not mean that someone with a communications degree and a Blaze TV contract has the same standing to evaluate Baptist pastors and denominational life as a trained theologian or ordained minister. There’s a difference between having a voice and having authority. We need to be honest about which one we’re talking about.”

Affirm the principle. Distinguish between participation and authority. Don’t let the Baptist doctrine of soul competency be hijacked to justify para-denominational media power.

🔴 Tactic #4: The Persecution Frame

What it looks like: Any critique of Basham or Stuckey is met with: “See, this is exactly what they warned us about, the Left attacking faithful Christians for standing up.” Or: “This is why we need voices like Megan’s, look how they come after her.”

What’s happening: This is gaslighting at the community level, a manipulation tactic that reframes critique as attack, disagreement as persecution, and accountability as evidence of a conspiracy. In a religious context, it is especially toxic because it activates tribal instincts and shuts down critical thinking.

What to say:

“Being criticized is not the same as being persecuted. Asking someone to demonstrate theological credentials before exercising denominational authority is not an attack; it’s a reasonable standard that we apply to everyone, including people we agree with. If the only defense available is ‘they’re coming after us,’ that’s actually a signal that the substance of the critique hasn’t been answered.”

Name the frame. Don’t argue inside it.

🔴 Tactic #5: The Appeal to Fruit (“But Look How Many People She’s Reached!”)

What it looks like: “Allie Beth has helped so many women grow in their faith.” “Megan exposed real problems in the SBC.” “You can’t argue with results.”

What to say:

“Influence and faithfulness are not the same thing. Billy Sunday drew massive crowds. Jim Bakker reached millions. Reach has never been the Baptist measure of truth. For Baptists, the gathered community, accountable to Scripture and to one another, is the measure of truth. And by that measure, neither of these women is accountable to any Baptist community at all.”

The Last Word — Which Was Also the First

We end where we began, because some truths are worth saying twice.

The moment a denomination lets its identity be defined from the outside—by unaccountable voices who profit from controversy and whose primary loyalty is to a political movement rather than a gathered church—it has begun the process of surrendering its soul.

Basham and Stuckey are strangers to the Baptist soul. Influential strangers, yes. Well-funded strangers, absolutely. Strategically positioned strangers with massive platforms and a vested financial interest in keeping Baptist communities destabilized and dependent on their commentary? Unquestionably.

But strangers, nonetheless.

And the Baptist tradition—with 400 years of hard-won clarity about what happens when outside power claims authority over the gathered church—deserves better than to keep letting them in.

Rev. Dr. Kevin M. Young is the author of Reconstructing Faith and writes weekly at kevinyoung.substack.com at the intersection of theology, culture, and the ancient spiritual disciplines. He is a pastor, author, biblical scholar, public theologian, certified personal trainer, competitive bodybuilder, and LGBTQIA+ advocate.

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This week, the President of the United States posted an AI-generated image to Truth Social of himself dressed as Jesus Christ, hands outstretched to heal, robed in white, and bathed in holy light.

Let that sit in your body for a moment.

The leader of the free world—in the middle of a public feud with no less than the Pope himself—looked at a digitally fabricated image of himself cosplaying as the Son of God and thought, Yeah. Post it.

When the backlash came (and it came fast) Trump told CBS News he thought the image showed him as “a doctor in fixing… you had the Red Cross right there.” He took the image down, denying it was because of the Evangelical outrage. “Normally I don’t like doing that,” he said, “but I didn’t want to have anybody be confused.”

Nobody was confused.
Literally, nobody.

Conservative commentator Cam Higby, a man who by his own admission spends “8 hours a day” defending Trump, drew his line: “I will not defend blasphemy.” Washington Bishop Mariann Budde called it “alarming.” Franklin Graham said he was “thankful” the post was removed … which, if you think about it, is an extraordinary thing for the most prominent evangelical in America to have to say about the president he helped enthrone.

But here’s what kept me up that night.

It wasn’t the image itself. If you’ve been paying attention, Trump casting himself as a Savior/messianic figure is another Monday. He’s called himself “the Chosen One,” out loud, on camera, looking up at the sky. Evangelical TV preachers have called his criminal indictments a “battle between good and evil.” A viral campaign video in 2024 literally depicted him as a Messiah-like figure, narrated with the cadence of scripture.

No. What kept me up was the SILENCE.

The vast machinery of institutional Evangelicalism—the megachurch pastors, the Christian media empires, the faith advisors who have prayed hands-on over this man in the Oval Office—was, with a few notable exceptions, deafeningly quiet. And the ones who did speak up didn’t say, “This is who he has always been.” No, they said, “He must not have known…” As if the man they’ve spent a decade calling “God’s anointed instrument” couldn’t possibly recognize what a picture of Jesus looks like.

Evangelicalism created this. They fed the beast a steady diet of messianic language, prophetic anointing, and “God raised him up for such a time as this,” and then they acted shocked, SHOCKED, when the beast looked in the mirror and saw Christ staring back.

And that, friends, is exactly where this story gets a bit old-school, batshit crazy.

Meet the original Trump: Herod the Great

If you grew up in church, you probably know Herod as the villain from the Christmas story. You know, the paranoid king who ordered the slaughter of every male infant in Bethlehem because he’d heard a rival “King of the Jews” had been born. That story alone should tell you everything you need to know about the man’s relationship with power. But Herod was more than a nativity-scene antagonist. Herod was one of the most fascinating, complex, and instructive political figures in ancient history, and the parallels to our current MAGA moment are so precise they feel less like coincidence and more like prophecy.

Herod ruled Judea from 37 to 4 BCE. He was not Jewish by lineage; his family was forcibly converted to Judaism not long before Herod’s birth. He held his throne not by popular mandate or ancestral right, but because the Roman Senate appointed him. He was, in every sense, an outsider. Herod was a man whose claim to power was conferred by an empire, not earned by belonging.

Sound like anyone?

To compensate for this legitimacy deficit, Herod did two things simultaneously. First, he built. Relentlessly. Obsessively. He constructed the harbor city of Caesarea from scratch. He erected palace-fortresses across the desert. He raised an artificial mountain (Herodium) and built a palace on top of it to serve as his own monument. And in the ultimate power move, he rebuilt the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem on a scale so staggering that the rabbis later said, “He who has not seen Herod’s Temple has never seen a beautiful building.”

Herod put his name on everything. Caesarea. Herodium. Towers named after his brother, his friend, his wife.

If Herod had access to gold leaf lettering, you’d better believe it would have been on the front of every building.

Second, and this is the part that should make every American Christian sit up straight, Herod weaponized religion. Not because he believed in it, but because he understood that in Judea, religious legitimacy was political legitimacy. You couldn’t rule the Jewish people without the blessing of the religious establishment. And so Herod set out to acquire that blessing … by any means necessary.

The (ir)Religious Deal: Power for Legitimacy

In Herod’s Judea, the most powerful religious group was the Sadducees. You may have heard of them, the priestly aristocracy who controlled the Temple, the High Priesthood, and the Sanhedrin.

They were theologically conservative, politically pragmatic, and institutionally powerful. Think of them as the megachurch establishment of the first century BCE.

Herod offered the Sadducees a deal. It was never written on parchment, but it didn’t need to be. The terms were simple:

You give me religious legitimacy.
I give you institutional power.

Herod appointed and dismissed High Priests at will, which turned the holiest office in Judaism into a political appointment. He offered the High Priesthood to the highest bidder among the chief priestly families. The Mishnah—the ancient Jewish legal text—is absolutely brutal in its description of the corruption this produced during the time of Jesus.

The public, by and large, understood the priesthood had become a sham. But the Sadducees accepted the arrangement because it kept them at the top of the religious hierarchy. They got proximity to power, protection for their institutions, and a seat at the table.

In exchange, they blessed King Herod. They legitimized his rule. They performed religious endorsement for a man whose personal life, family violence, and pagan temple-building in non-Jewish territories made a mockery of everything they claimed to believe.

Does any of this sound familiar yet? … because it should sound like Sunday morning in American Christianity.

The Evangelical Bargain

The parallels between the Sadducees’ arrangement with Herod and American Evangelicalism’s arrangement with Donald Trump are not clever metaphors I’m forcing onto the text. They are structural. The architecture is the same.

Consider:

Herod needed the Sadducees to make him look like a legitimate Jewish king. Trump needed Evangelicals to make him look like a legitimate Christian leader. Herod was an outsider to Judaism (Idumean, recently converted, culturally Hellenistic). Trump was an outsider to Christianity (a thrice-married non-practicing casino mogul who fumbled “Two Corinthians” and couldn’t name a favorite Bible verse or say whether he liked the Old or New Testament better). Both men understood that their claim to power required a religious costume, and both found religious leaders willing to provide the wardrobe.

In exchange, Herod rebuilt the Temple and gave the Sadducees institutional prominence. Trump appointed Supreme Court justices, delivered anti-abortion policy, signed executive orders on religious liberty, and gave evangelical leaders unprecedented access to the White House. Through the currency was different, the transaction was identical.

And here’s the part that should haunt us: in both cases, the religious establishment didn’t just tolerate the arrangement. They needed it. The Sadducees had become so dependent on proximity to power that their entire institutional identity was wrapped up in it. Without Herod, they were just a priestly family with no political leverage. Without Trump, the evangelical establishment was watching its cultural influence evaporate in real time; they were losing the courts, losing the culture wars, and losing young people at a rate of roughly a million a year.

Who Made Trump Think He Was the Messiah?

Now here’s where the AI Jesus image becomes something more than a social media scandal.

Trump didn’t wake up one morning and decide he was Christ. He was told he was, over and over, in language that grew more explicit with each passing year.

Evangelical TV preacher Hank Kunneman framed Trump’s criminal indictments as “a battle between good and evil.” The “chosen one” language became standard evangelical vocabulary. Robert Jeffress prayed over him in the White House as though he were God’s anointed. Campaign videos depicted him as a messianic figure. Rally crowds chanted his name with the fervor of worship.

And then, when he posted an AI-generated image of himself as Christ, the same leaders who had spent a decade feeding him messianic language said they were shocked. They said he must not have known what the image depicted. Franklin Graham was “thankful” he took it down.

Thankful… as if the man they told was God’s anointed instrument for the salvation of America simply made an innocent mistake.

This is exactly what happened in Herod’s court.

Herod didn’t independently arrive at the belief that he could control the Temple, appoint the High Priest, and use Judaism as a personal branding tool. The Sadducees gave him that power. They blessed his building projects. They accepted his appointments. They performed legitimacy for him so consistently that he genuinely believed the religious establishment existed to serve his purposes. When Herod built pagan temples in Gentile cities—literally honoring Roman gods while claiming to be the protector of Judaism—the Sadducees said nothing. When he executed members of his own family, the Sadducees said nothing.

Their silence was permission.
Their proximity was endorsement.

Evangelicals’ silence was permission.
Their proximity was (and is) endorsement.

The Sadducees created a Herod who believed he was the faith. Just as Evangelicals created a Trump who believes he is their Christianity.

The Herodians Among Us

There’s a second group from Herod’s world worth knowing about, because they are the ones who most precisely mirror what we now call Christian Nationalism.

The Herodians were not a separate religious denomination. They were a political faction—largely drawn from within the Sadducees—whose religious identity had been entirely consumed by their loyalty to the Herodian dynasty. For the Herodians, political allegiance to Herod was their religion. The lines between faith and faction had been erased completely.

In the Gospels, the Herodians show up exactly twice, and both times they are trying to destroy Jesus. In Mark 3:6, the Herodians plot to kill him. In Matthew 22:16, they try to trap him with a trick question about paying taxes to Rome. As one scholar notes, the Herodians “were focused on political goals rather than the eternal goals that Jesus proclaimed.”

Read that again, slowly.

A religious group so captured by political loyalty that when the actual incarnation of God showed up and threatened their patron’s power, they tried to have him killed.

I am not certain how anyone can read that sentence and not see a mirror of this moment… a moment where Christians wearing MAGA hats will threaten, harass, and attempt to silence anyone who challenges their political lord.

The Herodians didn’t just support Herod. They had become Herod. Their faith was no longer in God. It was in the project of power.

That is Christian Nationalism. Full stop.

The Bell That History Is Ringing

And now we come to the part of this story that should keep every American Christian awake at night. Not because it’s speculative, but because it already happened. We know how this ends. History already rang this bell.

When Herod died in 4 BCE, in extraordinary physical agony, despised by his own people, and mourned by no one, his kingdom fractured immediately. His sons turned on each other. Within a generation, Rome dissolved the Herodian dynasty entirely and installed direct rule.

But that’s not the devastating part. This is:

The Sadducees—the most powerful religious group in Judea, the ones who had controlled the Temple, held the High Priesthood, and sat at the center of Jewish religious life for generations—CEASED TO EXIST.

When the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 CE, the Sadducees didn’t adapt. They didn’t regroup. They didn’t find a new theological identity. They simply vanished from history. The group became extinct.

Gone. Erased.

And why? Because they had tied their entire identity (spiritual, institutional, theological) to a power structure. When the power structure collapsed, they had nothing left. No grassroots community. No independent theological tradition. No spiritual resilience. They had spent so long performing loyalty to political power that they had forgotten how to be a religion.

The Pharisees, by contrast (imperfect, frustrating, often hypocritical, but spiritually independent) survived. The Pharisees adapted. They became the rabbinical tradition that has sustained Judaism for two thousand years. The group that maintained its independence from political power, however messily, is the group that endured.

The group that sold its soul for a seat at the king’s table disappeared.

Pew Research reported in February 2026 that there has been an 8-percentage-point drop since early 2025 in the share of white evangelicals who support all or most of Trump’s plans and policies. Studies consistently show that roughly 70% of young adults who attended Protestant churches in high school drop out for at least a year between ages 18 and 22. A million young people leave the church every year.

I need you to hear me: this is not a slow decline. This is the Temple falling. And Evangelicalism, like the Sadducees before it, has staked everything from its identity, to its credibility, and even its public witness on a political alliance with a man who just posted a picture of himself as Jesus and then pretended he thought it was a Red Cross ad.

The Question History Always Asks

There is really only one question this story poses, and it’s the same question whether you’re asking it in 30 BCE or April 2026:

Did you win the political battle, or did you keep your soul?

The Sadducees won. For decades, they won. They had the Temple. They had the High Priesthood. They had access to the king. They had institutional power, political influence, and a seat at every table that mattered.

And then the table collapsed, and they were nothing.

The question history asks of every religious community that hitches itself to earthly power is not whether the alliance was effective. Of course it was effective. Herod built them a Temple. Trump built them a Supreme Court majority.

The question is what it cost.

What did it cost the Sadducees to bless a king who built pagan temples? What did it cost Evangelicalism to bless a man who held up a Bible he’d never read in front of a church he’d never attended, tear-gassed peaceful protesters for the photo op, and then posted a picture of himself as Christ?

It cost them the next generation. It cost them their moral authority. It cost them the ability to say the word “Jesus” in public and have anyone under 40 take them seriously.

And if history is any guide (and history is always a guide) it may eventually cost Evangelicalism them everything.

A Few Things Worth Saying Out Loud

I want to end with something practical, because I know many of you are living inside this tension… at family dinners, in church lobbies, and in group chats that have become minefields. Here are some things worth carrying with you:

When someone says, “He didn’t know it was a Jesus image”:

You can say: “Maybe. But the question isn’t whether he knew what the image was. The question is why he’s been told for a decade that messianic language applies to him. Who taught him that?”

When someone says, “God uses imperfect people”:

You can say: “Absolutely. But ‘God uses imperfect people’ is not the same as ‘imperfect people get to use God.’ There’s a difference between a flawed vessel and someone wearing God’s face as a campaign ad.”

When someone says, “But look at the judges. Look at the policies”:

You can say: “The Sadducees got a Temple. The most beautiful building in the ancient world. And within a generation of Herod’s death, they no longer existed. Winning a political battle and losing your identity as a faith community is not a trade anyone should make.”

When someone says, “You’re just being political”:

You can say: “No. I’m being historical. And the history is clear: every religious community that has fully merged its identity with political power has eventually been consumed by it. Every single one.”

When someone asks, “So what do we do?”:

You can say: “We do what the Pharisees did, imperfectly, but stubbornly. We maintain our spiritual independence. We refuse to let any political figure become the organizing center of our faith. We keep our roots in something deeper than any election cycle. We remember that Jesus was executed by a coalition of religious and political power, and we ask ourselves which side of that coalition we want to be standing on.”

The early church didn’t grow because it had political power. It grew because it didn’t. It grew because it offered something the Roman Empire, with all its monuments and military might could never manufacture: a community that answered to a Kingdom no emperor could build and no army could destroy.

Herod’s Temple was a marvel. Everybody said so. It was the most beautiful building anyone had ever seen.

It burned to the ground.

The faith that survived was the one that never needed the building … or the builder … in the first place.

Kevin Young writes at the intersection of progressive faith, modern culture, and the uncomfortable questions most people would rather not ask out loud. He is a pastor, author, coach, and is equally at home in a seminary library or a weight room … and he is deeply suspicious of anyone who is too comfortable in either.

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Like many who came of age in the 70s and 80s, many of my earliest and best memories involve space.

LEGO sets with little yellow astronauts and white shuttle bays. Star Trek reruns where Picard made baldness seem sexy and Spock somehow made logic feel spiritual. Bedroom walls that, had my father allowed it, would have been covered floor to ceiling in NASA mission posters. I even begged my parents into letting me join the Young Astronaut Program, a Whitehouse-backed school program in the 80’s that distributed lots of space propoganda and was designed to encourage young minds to aim for the stars …literally.

I was that kid. The nerd with his head above the clouds. The one who looked up more than he looked around, convinced that whatever was out there mattered as much, or more, than whatever was down here. Perhaps it was just an escape from reality.

Then January 28, 1986 happened, and reality came crashing down.

I was in elementary school when the Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after liftoff, and I watched it live with my classmates. I remember the silence. I remember the smoke trails forking against that Florida blue sky like a question mark written by God. And I remember crying, not just because seven people died, but because space suddenly felt dangerous, but also, somehow still holy at the same time. That evening, Reagan borrowed from poet John Gillespie Magee, honoring the crew who had “slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.” I didn’t understand the theology. I just knew it was true.

Challenger didn’t kill my love of space. If anything, it baptized it.

What did try to kill it, though? Two things.

First, the slow monetization of space exploration, watching the shuttle program end and a billionaire space race begin, rockets with corporate logos where mission patches used to be. (More on that in a minute, because C.S. Lewis called this before any of us were born.)

But second, and more personally damaging, was my own theological tradition. The evangelical world I grew up in handed me a very clear doctrine: There is no life on other planets, and believing otherwise is, at best, a distraction from the Gospel and, at worst, an open door to heresy.

Hogwash.

A Long Week for the Sky-Watchers

This week, something remarkable happened. On April 6, 2026, NASA’s Artemis II crew, Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, and Mission Specialists Christina Koch and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen, completed a historic lunar flyby, swinging within 4,067 miles of the moon’s surface and traveling farther from Earth than any human beings in history, a staggering 252,760 miles. They witnessed an Earthset, our whole blue planet sinking behind the lunar horizon. They watched a total solar eclipse from the window of their Orion spacecraft, the moon swallowing the sun from a vantage point no human had ever occupied.

For a stretch of that journey, they passed behind the moon entirely, and for roughly 40 minutes, no signal could reach them. No call from Mission Control. No tweet. No news. Just four humans, alone in the silence of the cosmos, the most isolated people who have ever lived.

I don’t know how you don’t feel something theological about that.

The Question Christians Always Ask (and Why It’s the Wrong One)

Every time some amazing space advance, exploration, or discovery like this happens, a predictable panic rises in certain Christian circles:

“What if we find life out there?
What does that do to the Bible?
What does it do to Jesus?
What does it do to us?”

It’s an understandable reflex, honestly. We’ve built a lot of theological furniture around the assumption that Earth is the singular stage of God’s epic redemptive drama. But here’s the thing: that assumption is ours, not Scripture’s. The Bible is remarkably quiet about the question of extraterrestrial life, and silence is not prohibition.

The good folks at BioLogos, the organization founded by geneticist and former NIH Director Francis Collins to explore the harmony of faith and science, have thought carefully about this. Their position, put plainly, is that a robust theology of God as Creator of all things can absolutely accommodate the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe, without crisis, without contradiction, and without abandoning the Gospel. They outline several theological possibilities:

1. Perhaps extraterrestrial life exists and is unfallen, needing no redemption.

2. Perhaps it exists, is fallen, and has been met by God’s grace in ways we cannot yet imagine.

3. Perhaps it exists and needs Christ in ways that stretch our Christology in uncomfortable but generative directions.

None of these scenarios require us to conclude that God is smaller than we thought. If anything, they suggest God is far, far larger.

The universe is 93 billion light-years across. You really think the Creator of all of it signed an exclusive contract with one species on one planet in one mid-sized galaxy?

Come on.

Oh, and for those in the back who are convinced that extraterrestrial life is really just demons in drag... that's a theological position built more on fear and sci-fi horror movies than on any serious engagement with Scripture. The Bible neither confirms nor requires that kind of reading. There is nothing in the texts that imply aliens cannot exist, and if they do exist, they must be demons. And frankly, it says far more about the demons we already know, the ones wearing human faces and running institutions, than anything that might exist on a planet we haven't visited yet.

Let Me Introduce You to C.S. Lewis (Because He Already Thought About This)

THIS is where things get crazy, because C.S. Lewis, Oxford don, Christian apologist, author of The Chronicles of Narnia and Mere Christianity, did something astonishing that almost nobody talks about.

He didn’t fear alien life. He feared us.

Long before Independence Day or Arrival or Interstellar, Lewis wrote a science fiction trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), and That Hideous Strength (1945), that told the story of space not as humanity’s triumphant frontier, but as a place where humanity was the dangerous variable. In his fictional cosmology, Earth is called “the Silent Planet,” quarantined from the rest of the solar system’s intelligent life, cut off by spiritual forces, not to protect us from what’s out there, but to protect what’s out there from us.

Read that again slowly.

The villain in Out of the Silent Planet isn’t a monster from Mars. The villains are the two humans who make it there: Weston, a physicist consumed by the ideology of human expansion at any cost, and Devine, a greedy opportunist looking for profit. Sound familiar? Lewis was writing in 1938, but he might as well have been describing the pitch deck of any number of current private space ventures.

Then in 1958, he made the argument explicitly in an essay called “Religion and Rocketry.” And he did not pull a single punch.

“We know what our race does to strangers. Man destroys or enslaves every species he can. Civilized man murders, enslaves, cheats, and corrupts savage man. Even inanimate nature he turns into dust bowls and slag-heaps. There are individuals who don’t. But they are not the sort who are likely to be our pioneers in space. Our ambassador to new worlds will be the needy and greedy adventurer or the ruthless technical expert.”

Read that as many times as you need to.

Lewis isn’t anxious about what aliens might do to us. He is terrified of what we would do to them. The monster in his story is not the creature from another world. The monster are the creatures from this one.

We are the aliens to be feared.

Should We Be In Space At All

Lewis’s fear isn’t a literary device. It is a direct application of the Christian doctrine of sin. We are, as he puts it plainly in the essay, fallen. And our fallenness has a track record. It shows up in every colonial expansion in human history. It shows up in every encounter between a technologically “advanced” civilization and one deemed less so. It shows up in the Middle Passage and the Trail of Tears and the systematic destruction of indigenous cultures across every continent. Every time humanity has met a “stranger,” the stranger has paid the price.

The question Lewis is forcing us to ask isn’t theological in the narrow sense. It is theological in the fullest sense. What does the Gospel say about who we are? Not just who we can become by grace, but who we are by nature, what we do when we have power and the other party doesn’t?

And then he forces the next question: Should a race like ours be in space at all?

Now, I’m not saying no. I’m a Trekkie, for heaven’s sake. I wept at Challenger. I stayed up this week to watch the Artemis II live feed with the same joy I had as a kid staring at LEGO spaceships. I believe in exploration. But Lewis is asking us to interrogate the motivations underneath the exploration, and whether the species doing the exploring has done the internal work to be trusted with what it might find.

The BioLogos framework gives us the theological breathing room to say “life beyond Earth doesn’t undo our faith.”

Lewis gives us the prophetic challenge that says, “Good. Now ask yourself what your faith would do to that life if you encountered it.”

Both are necessary.
Neither is sufficient without the other.

Exploration Starts Within

So here is where I want to land (pun intended), and I want to land practically, because none of this is just interesting theology-from-a-distance. This week’s Artemis II flyby is a cultural moment. It’s also a mirror. And before we go any further into the cosmos, Lewis’s words deserve to send us inward.

A few things worth exploring in yourself:

1. Explore your theology of “the stranger.” Lewis’s lament is directly connected to what the Hebrew Bible calls the ger, the foreigner, the alien in your midst. Leviticus 19:34 is not ambiguous: “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born.” Our theology of space exploration directly connects to our theology of immigration, refugees, and racial justice, and the connection is not subtle.

2. Explore what motivates your excitement about space. Is it wonder, the genuinely sacred pull of curiosity that I believe is God-wired into us? Or is it expansion, the always-hungry assumption that more territory, more resources, more dominion is the goal? Those two motivations lead to very different futures.

3. Explore who you’d send. Lewis said the pioneers won’t be the best of us, they’ll be the neediest and greediest of us. Who actually gets to go? Who profits? Who decides? The privatization of space travel is not a neutral development. It is a power structure, and power structures have theology whether we name it or not.

4. Explore whether your God is big enough. Not as a test of orthodoxy, but as an act of worship. Do you believe in a God who created 200 billion galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars, who limited redemptive love to one pale blue dot? That’s not the God of Job who asks, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” That’s a smaller god. And you deserve a bigger one.

5. Explore what kind of ambassador you are right now, here, today. Because if we can’t love the stranger on our own street, in our own city, across our own borders, Lewis is right: we have no business being anybody’s first contact in the cosmos.

This week, four humans swung around the moon and looked back at us. What they saw was a small, fragile, impossibly beautiful blue marble, suspended in nothing, carrying everything we’ve ever known or loved or broken.

Maybe the most honest theological response to Artemis II isn’t awe at how far we’ve gone.

Maybe it’s conviction about how far we still have to go.

Rev. Dr. Kevin M. Young is a Pastor, Public Theologian, and author based in the American South. He writes at kevinyoung.substack.com on faith, deconstruction, embodiment, and the sacred interruptions of ordinary life.

This is the Holy Week nobody in MAGA wanted.

Two stories broke within forty-eight hours of each other, and together they cracked something open that all the legislation in the world isn’t going to reseal.

1. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled 8–1 to gut state bans on conversion therapy for minors, handing the religious right a permission slip to psychologically torment LGBTQ+ kids in the name of Jesus.

2. The husband of one of MAGA’s most prominent anti-trans crusaders was exposed for allegedly spending over $25,000 messaging fetish models, cross-dressing, and writing to one of them: “You turn me into a girl... should I put on leggings?”

If you think those two stories are unrelated, stay with me.

First, I want to clearly say that I am not here to mock Bryon Noem. He should have and feel the freedom to pursue his sexual interests, without fear or shame, as long as there is mutual consent and lack of harm. What I’m about to say is not about cruelty but clarity.

This moment is a mirror. And when the mirror gets held up this close, at this volume, during Holy Week of all weeks, a pastor who’s paying attention doesn’t get to look away.

So. Let’s talk about the glass tomb that Bryon, and sooo many others, are trying to hide within.

The Supreme Court Just Gave the Church a Hammer to Hit Kids With

This week, on March 31, 2026 (which is Holy Tuesday, for those keeping liturgical score) the Supreme Court ruled in Chiles v. Salazar to effectively gut Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for minors. The majority found that because conversion therapy involves talk—words, pressure, prayer, manipulation—it is protected speech under the First Amendment. The state cannot regulate it as healthcare. The lone dissent came from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who argued that states absolutely should be able to protect children from harmful practices. Eight justices disagreed.

Eight.

Every major medical and mental health organization—the APA, the AMA, the AAP—has already concluded that conversion therapy is both ineffective and harmful. The ruling means that in more than twenty states where similar bans exist, those protections are now dangling by a thread.

And here is what the research says about what we just greenlit:

LGBTQ+ young people who are subjected to conversion therapy are three times more likely to attempt suicide.

The Trevor Project’s 2024 National Survey found that 39% of LGBTQ+ young people seriously considered suicide in the past year, including 46% of transgender and nonbinary youth. A 2024 Stanford Medicine study confirmed conversion practices are directly linked to depression, PTSD, and suicidality.

We didn’t protect free speech this week.

We endangered children … during Holy Week.

The Glass Tomb

The same week, this week, the Daily Mail published a bombshell: Bryon Noem, husband of former DHS Secretary and MAGA stalwart Kristi Noem, had allegedly been living a secret double life, cross-dressing and messaging sex workers who specialize in the “bimbofication” fetish. He reportedly sent hundreds of messages, spent over $25,000, and in one exchange told a performer: “You turn me into a girl.”

When reached for comment, he did not deny it.

His wife—the same woman who spent years making political hay out of attacking transgender people, drag queens, and gender nonconformity—said the family was “blindsided.”

If I’m being perfectly honest, I don’t believe that she was.

But if I’m being pastoral, I have sympathy (whether she was blindsided this week, or some other week long ago), because that is exactly how the glass tomb works.

The glass tomb is not like an ordinary closet in which many LGBTQ hide.

The glass tomb is not sealed or opaque.

The people closest to it can often see something—they just don’t say anything, or they explain it away, or they throw themselves deeper into the culture war as a kind of penance-by-proxy. The person inside can see out, too. They can see every queer kid they’re targeting. They know. On some level, they always know.

And that knowing … that unbearable, unprocessed knowing … is exactly what converts into cruelty.

This is what happens when MAGA, Conservatives, and Evangelicals force their LGBTQ+ members into hiding. That deep repression eventually leads to the oppression of others, an act of avoidance and self-hatred.

From their glass tomb, they harm others … and themselves.

The Pattern Is Not a Coincidence

Let’s be honest about what this week’s news is part of.

It’s no anomaly. It’s a pattern.

• Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, one of MAGA’s most virulently anti-LGBTQ+ power brokers, was sued for allegedly groping a male campaign staffer.

• Larry Craig, the Idaho senator who co-sponsored the Defense of Marriage Act, was arrested for soliciting sex in an airport men’s restroom.

• Bridget Ziegler, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, was involved in a same-sex encounter while her husband called for banning LGBTQ+ education.

• The Advocate has documented at least 18 anti-gay political and religious leaders who were later exposed as gay or bisexual themselves.

The list is not short.
The list is not new.
The list is not getting shorter.

And I want to tell you something about that list that doesn’t get said enough:

It is not evidence of gay people being bad. It is evidence of suppression being catastrophic.

Here’s what the statistics nobody in the evangelical pew wants to read actually say: according to Gallup’s 2024 data, 14.2% of Millennials and over 22% of Gen Z identify as LGBTQ+. These people are in your churches. They are in your political parties. They are in your families.

Not former Christians. Christians. Active, church-going, Bible-reading people.

According to PRRI data, only 6% of LGBT Americans identify as white evangelical Protestant, not because queer people don’t grow up evangelical, but because the church has made it agonizing to stay in the church when one is queer.

So you either leave your faith, or you go into hiding.

You don’t create glass tombs by accident.

You build them, board by board, sermon by sermon, vote by vote.

The Theology of Self-Hatred

I spent years inside a version of faith that told me, told us, that certain parts of ourselves were broken. That desire itself was the disease. That the cure was suppression, prayer, accountability groups, and if all else failed, a counselor who would “speak truth” to your “unwanted attractions.”

That is what conversion therapy actually is.

It is not a healing. It is a hopeless road of ineffective self-humiliation that changes nothing.

Conversation therapy doesn’t change who you are. You cannot change your sexuality.

The research has been conclusive for decades.

What trying to change your God-given sexual wiring does do is teach you to hate who you are more efficiently. And when you get very good at hating yourself, when you have built an entire theological architecture around the shame of your own desire, then you need somewhere for all that energy to go:

• You become an anti-gay crusader.

• You write political platforms filled with hate.

• You vote for bans on people created just like you.

• You give homophobic sermons.

• You cry at the altar about other people’s sin, because at least that’s not your sin, right out in the open where anyone can see it.

The glass tomb doesn’t make you straight. It makes you dangerous … to yourself, and to everyone you project your self-hatred onto.

The cruelest and most diabolical thing the church has done is hand people a theological hammer and tell them the nail is someone else created in the Imago Dei.

Holy Week Was Made for This Moment

Here’s where I need you to stay with me, because this is where it gets sacred.

It is Holy Week.

This is the week when Christians confess that something had to die before something else could live. This is the week of tomb-sealing and stone-rolling, of the worst Friday in history and the most impossible Sunday morning. This is the week that the tradition I love—despite its many, many betrayals of people like me—insists that death is not the final word. That burial is not the destination. That what gets sealed in the dark will not …cannot… stay there.

Coming out—truly coming out, not just publicly but internally, to yourself, to God—is resurrection language. Let me say it plainly:

Coming out is resurrection.

You cannot experience the Easter of who you fully are until you allow the Good Friday of who you have been pretending to be. The false self has to die. The performance has to be buried. The shame-construction that you have been calling “faith” and “values” and “family” has to go into the ground first.

And yes.
It will feel like death.

That’s the point. That is the whole point.

The queer theologians have been saying this for years: Holy Week is, in a profound sense, queer week. That the body of Jesus, beaten, mocked, stripped, and hung out for public spectacle by a coalition of religious and political power, looks a great deal like the bodies of LGBTQ+ people who have been tried and condemned in the court of religious opinion.

Resurrection is not the erasure of the wounds.

The risen Christ kept his scars. He showed them. He let people touch them.

Your queerness is not a wound to be healed away. It may be the very thing that gets glorified.

A Pastoral Word to Everyone Still Sealed Inside the Glass Tomb

I am talking to you now. Not about you… to you.

I don’t know your full story. None of us do. But I know the weight of a secret that feels like it would kill you if it got out. One that is slowly killing you because it’s staying in.

I know what it costs to stand next to someone’s political crusade against people like you, performing loyalty to an identity that was never quite yours. I know the spiritual and psychological mathematics of suppression: how much energy it takes, how it leaks out sideways, how it eventually …always… finds the light.

You are not broken.
You were never broken.

You were told, very early and very loudly and by people who held spiritual authority over you, that a part of you was a mistake. And you believed them. Most of us do …for a while.

But here is what I’ve learned—in the gym, in the pulpit, in the therapy room, and on my own knees: you cannot build real strength on a foundation of self-hatred. It looks like strength. It performs like conviction. But it’s compensatory. It’s brittle. It’s the kind of structure that fails under real pressure, usually publicly, usually at the worst possible moment… like Bryon’s did.

Don’t get me wrong: The work of coming out—really out, into wholeness, into honesty, into your full self—is the hardest and most holy work you will ever do. Trust me, I know.

It will cost you something. It may cost you a great deal. But on the other side of that loss is a life you don’t have to hide. A faith you don’t have to weaponize. A self you don’t have to convert.

The stone has already been rolled away. You don’t have to stay in the tomb because the people outside are afraid of what walks out.

We can already see you.
God can already see you.
The tomb you are hiding in is glass.

What the Church, and the Country, Needs to Do

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Chiles v. Salazar will be remembered as one of the cruelest institutional acts against LGBTQ+ young people in a generation. It must be resisted. Advocates, clinicians, parents, and people of faith who actually believe in do no harm need to mobilize at the state level to protect these bans where they still stand. The Trevor Project and Lambda Legal are already in the fight. Get behind them — financially, vocally, and politically.

And to the churches: stop building glass tombs.

Stop sealing people inside shame-constructions and calling it discipleship. The research is in, the bodies have been counted, and the verdict on conversion theology—whether it happens in a counselor’s office or a Sunday sermon—is the same:

It does not work.
It causes harm.
And it has to stop.

This is not a political position. This is a pastoral one.

This is Easter.

New life is waiting on the other side of honesty.

Rev. Dr. Kevin M. Young is a Pastor, Biblical Scholar, Public Theologian, Certified Personal Trainer, Competitive Bodybuilder, and unapologetic member and advocate of the LGBTQIA+ community. He writes, preaches, and lifts heavy things in pursuit of integrated wholeness — body, soul, and spirit.

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Ryland Grace, the middle school science teacher at the center of the box office hit Project Hail Mary, doesn’t go to church.

He doesn’t pray … at least not in any way the Southern Baptist Convention would recognize. He doesn’t post a Bible verse before doing something brave. He doesn’t do performative goodness for online influence among Evangelicals.

But at the end of Project Hail Mary, he gives up everything—his future, his home, his chance to return to the only world he’s ever known—to help a six-legged rock creature rebuild a dying civilization.

Somebody remind me. Where have I heard that story before?

(Spoilers ahead. You’ve been warned. Go see the movie first. It’s worth every minute.)

This movie should make every church-going, Bible-believing, cross-wearing Christian sweat.

The story isn’t Christian, but somehow, Ryland Grace still is.

And he is a better one than you.

Project Hail Mary isn’t a religiously-based or faith-motivated story. Far from it, in fact. Author Andy Weir has said as much. In interview after interview, Weir traces the book’s origins to spacecraft fuel speculation and astrophage biology, not theology and not spiritual allegory. He is, by his own framing, a humanist and an optimist, not a preacher, pastor, or prophet.

And that is precisely what makes his story so interesting.

When a self-described irreligious author accidentally writes the most compelling portrait of Christ-like sacrifice I’ve encountered in years, that is worth sitting up and paying attention to. And somehow, he did it without trying to, without knowing it, and (shockingly) without a theological agenda anywhere in the process.

Evangelical agendas are literally everywhere, but here, apparently. And that should make performative Christians deeply uncomfortable.

It tells us the Spirit moves where it will.

In 1966, a Jesuit theologian named Karl Rahner introduced a concept that got him in enormous trouble with the Vatican.

He called it anonymous Christianity.

The idea, stripped of its academic scaffolding, is this:

The grace of God is not confined to the walls of the Church or the boundaries of explicit Christian confession.

It suggested that people who have never heard the name of Jesus—or who’ve heard it and walked away from the wreckage of what some institutions have done with it—can nonetheless be living the thing Christianity claims to be about.

That they can still be, Christian … without being a, well, Christian.

Sacrificial love.
Radical solidarity with the other.
The willingness to lay down your life for a world that may never know your name.

You know, Christianity. At least, the real kind of it … just without the label.

Rahner got pushback from two directions: traditionalists who said he was universalizing salvation too broadly, and progressives who said the framework was still too Christocentric, too colonizing. Both critiques have merit, and I’m not asking you to adopt the label wholesale. What I’m asking you to do is sit with the observation at the center of it: Ryland Grace is a Christian, without Christianity.

Because Ryland Grace lives it. Fully. Without apology. Without a label.

Ignore labels, and watch how Ryland actually lives.

He wakes up alone, in space, with no memory of who he is. He has every reason—scientifically, rationally, emotionally—to point his ship back toward Earth and spend whatever time he has left going home. Instead, he stays. He works the problem.

He forms a friendship across an incomprehensible biological and cultural divide. And when the moment comes to choose between his own survival and the completion of a mission that will save billions of people he’ll never meet, he chooses the mission.

John 15:13. “No greater love has anyone than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

He didn’t read that verse. He just did the thing.

And that may well be the only version of Christianity that matters right now.

The world doesn’t need more outspoken idiots pointing to highlighted Bibles, it needs more people who just radically live it.

The more “Christians” I come in contact with these days, the more I am convinced that the only true form of Christianity is anonymous Christianity.

I spend a lot of time in spaces where people have read that verse but never actually do it.

John 15:33 has been highlighted in so many study Bible. It has been quoted at funerals, used in endless social media posts, and put on enormous motivational banners, but to what end? Those same people who have it highlighted in their Bibles have used those very same Bibles to justify exclusion, to police bodies, to maintain comfort at the expense of the marginalized, and to try and make the gospel small enough to fit inside their particular cultural and political package.

I’m not throwing stones at others, though. I’ve been in those spaces. I’ve sometimes been of those spaces. The deconstruction process is rarely clean, and it’s never finished.

But here’s what I now know:
the label of “Christianity” was never the point.
The life was always the point.

Jesus didn’t say, “By this everyone will know you are my disciples: By your correct systematic theology.”

He said: They will know you by the depths of your love.
Full stop. No asterisk. No denominational footnote.

Ryland Grace loved.
Completely.
At profound personal cost.
With zero audience and zero reward.

And THAT is true Christianity, not what we see from “Christians.”

I want to be careful here, because I know the objection coming.

Someone is already typing: “But Kevin, doesn’t this just make Christianity irrelevant? If anyone can live it without the label, why bother with the tradition at all?”

Fair question. Here’s my honest answer:

The tradition—the practices, the community, the ancient rhythms of Scripture and prayer and collective discernment—can be a formation engine. And that is important.

At its best, the Church is the place you go to practice being Ryland Grace before the moment demands it. The spiritual disciplines, the liturgy, the uncomfortable confrontations with texts that challenge your ego, these aren’t the destination. They’re the training. They’re the gym.

The problem is when the training becomes the destination. When we mistake the discipline for the deed. When we think that going to church or wearing the Christian label actually makes us a Christian, we get it wrong.

When showing up, performing the right theological positions, and maintaining the right social affiliations substitutes for actually laying anything down, substitutes for actually living and looking like Christ, that isn’t formation as much as it’s cosplay.

Anonymous Christianity > Cosplay Christianity

Ryland Grace isn’t cosplaying anything.

Neither is Rocky, for that matter (but that’s a whole other article).

What they are, together, is a picture of something the mystics have always known and the institutional church keeps forgetting: that love, when it is real, does not stop at the boundary of the familiar. It crosses species lines. Language lines. It persists in the dark, far from any audience, sustained by nothing except the conviction that the other person matters. That the genuinely, irreducibly other person matters.

Anonymous Christianity, maybe.
Or maybe just Christianity… the way it was always supposed to be.

But what about pushback?

My thoughts always tend to generate some heat, so here are some ways to engage the conversations that might follow:

If someone says: “You’re just using a movie to attack the Church.”

Try: “I’m actually using a movie to describe what I love about the Church at its best, and I mourn what it sometimes settles for. The critique comes from inside the tradition, not outside of it.”

If someone says: “Rahner’s anonymous Christianity is heresy / universalism / a slippery slope.”

Try: “I hear that. Rahner’s full framework is definitely debatable, but the underlying observation (that grace operates beyond the borders of our institutions, like the church) is pretty hard to argue with if you believe God is actually sovereign. If God can only work through people who show up to the right church, that’s a pretty small God.”

If someone says: “This is just secular humanism dressed up in religious language.”

Try: “Maybe the line between ‘secular humanism at its best’ and ‘Christianity at its best’ is thinner than we’ve been taught. When the fruit looks identical, like sacrificial love, genuine solidarity, care for the other, I’m not sure the label on the tree is the most important thing. Jesus seemed more interested in the fruit.”

If someone says: “So you’re saying we don’t need Jesus?”

Try: “I’m saying Jesus seems less concerned with whether you know his name and more concerned with whether you’re doing the thing he modeled. That’s not my idea, it’s the whole point of Matthew 25 where people ask ‘Lord, when did we see you?’ The people being welcomed in that passage didn’t know they were serving God, either.”

I watched Heated Rivalry, like a lot of you probably did… quietly, maybe a little guiltily at times, definitely not posting about it for fear of being judged.

But let’s be honest, there was NOTHING any steamier in Heated Rivalry than there was in those Harlequin Romance paperbacks your mom and aunties used to pass around in brown paper bags at family gatherings.

Yes, Heated Rivalry was a bit uncomfortable in places. Even as a gay man, there were moments that had me blushing.

But somewhere around episode three, I had to put my phone down and just... sit with it.

What I was watching wasn’t just good television. I realized I was being moved to tears over and over again, by good theology.

The Numbers Don’t Lie (And Neither Does the Hunger)

Heated Rivalry is sitting at an 8.8 on IMDb.

Nearly 100,000 ratings.

It became the most-watched original on Crave. Critics called it “revolutionary.” “The most significant queer show of the year.” One of the best television series of 2025, full stop. And tons of those ratings and positive reviews were from straight Christians.

But here’s the question nobody in any church or Bible study is asking:

Why?

Because it wasn’t the hockey. I promise you. Nobody is losing sleep over power plays and penalty shots. People are losing sleep binge-watching Shane and Ilya because somewhere in those six episodes, in the middle of the most hyper-masculine, most performatively straight institution in North American sports culture, two people chose authenticity over approval … and the whole world held its breath watching.

It was more than just a pop culture moment.
It was a spiritual crisis wearing a hockey jersey.

The Church Has Been Failing This Exam for Decades

Here’s what Heated Rivalry did that the Church has consistently, stubbornly, and sometimes cruelly refused to do:

It let gay men be fully human.

Think about that. The story isn’t a cautionary tale about gay culture. Nor is it a veiled LGBTQ+ advocacy statement posing as a TV series. It isn’t a lifestyle to be preached about from behind a pulpit or debated in a small group curriculum. The story is just… human beings, in love, making choices, failing, trying again, playing their sport, calling their mamas, grieving their fathers, and learning how to say the true thing out loud.

It was just life. Real life.

Shane Hollander didn’t become a symbol. He became a person. And that, right there, is the thing that compelled 98,000 people to go online and rate this show. That is the thing that made straight women ugly-cry at 2:00am. That is the thing that made closeted gay men (men who will go to their graves swearing they never watched it) feel, maybe for the first time, like their love story was worth telling.

The Church has had two thousand years to do what Heated Rivalry did in six episodes.

But the Church keeps choosing approval over authenticity.

This Is What a Healthy Love Story Looks Like

This matters.

Heated Rivalry wasn’t overt advocacy.

There were no waving rainbow flags or performative allyship.
There was no gay manifesto wrapped in shoulder pads.

There was just, simply and profoundly, a good love story—in the same genre as David and Jonathan’s soul-knitting covenant and in the same key as Ruth clinging to Naomi and saying where you go, I will go. It was simply two people, against every pressure imaginable, institutional and otherwise, choosing each other.

It wasn’t a gay story; it was a human story that just happened to center gay men.

And the reason it landed so hard, on so many people, across so many demographics, is because the shape of that kind of love story is ancient.

We are wired for covenant.
We are built to recognize love that costs something.
We know, somewhere in our bones, what it looks like when someone chooses authenticity over the approval of every system that surrounds them.

We know it because we see it in the most epic stories ever told, and perhaps most importantly for Christians, we see it in Jesus.

The Church is Missing What Is Actually at Stake Right Now

We are living in a cultural moment where LGBTQ+ people (real ones, not fictional hockey stars) are facing true evil.

Legislative erasure.
Denominational rejection.
Social media pile-ons.
Ongoing hate speech.

The pushback against visibility and dignity isn’t slowing down. It is accelerating.

And in the middle of that maelstrom of religiously driven hate, a streaming series about two gay hockey players woke us up… or at least, it should have.

People in Russia, where LGBTQ+ existence has been legally suppressed, are finding workarounds to stream it. They are pirating hope. They are risking something to see themselves loved on screen.

And some of you—good, compassionate, closet progressive, secretly-watched-and-enjoyed-the-show people—are still not saying anything. You are still silent in your church. On your social media. At your family dinner table.

Your silence isn’t neutral.

In this moment, silence is a vote. And the people who need you to speak know exactly how you’re voting.

How to Come Out As an Ally, Starting Now

You don’t have to write a doctoral thesis. You don’t have to win a theological debate. You don’t have to have every answer before you open your mouth.

The cool thing about courage is: it doesn’t wait until you’re ready. It just goes.

Here’s some practical language to start speaking up in hostile churches, on social media feeds, and in the groups you’ve been far too silent in. It’s time to be like Jesus and start speaking up for the most vulnerable, targeted, and oppressed among us. It’s time to stop being “Christian” cowards.

Jesus wasn’t one, and neither should we be.

🏒 Use the Show as Your Door

Stop hiding the fact that you watched Heated Rivalry. That show is one of the most accessible, least-threatening entry points into a conversation about LGBTQ+ dignity that exists in popular culture right now. It’s not political. It’s not preachy. It’s just two people in love.

Try this:

“Have you watched Heated Rivalry? I wasn’t expecting to be so moved by it. There’s something about watching people choose authenticity over everyone else’s approval that just hits different. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.”

That’s it. That’s the door. You don’t have to blow the hinges off it on day one. Just open it.

⛪ In Hostile Church Spaces: Lead with Story, Not Argument

Theology debates in church small groups almost never change minds, but stories do. When someone says something dismissive about LGBTQ+ people or “that gay agenda on TV,” resist the urge to debate. Instead:

“You know, I’ve been watching this show, Heated Rivalry, and I keep thinking about how the story reminded me of David and Jonathan. Two people, profound love, impossible circumstances. I wonder sometimes if we’ve been so trained to debate the theology that we’ve stopped being able to recognize the humanity.”

You’re not attacking anyone’s doctrine.

You’re reframing the conversation toward the human being.

THAT is a spiritual discipline.
That is how Jesus did it.
Stories, not arguments.

📱 On Social Media: Post the Thing You’ve Been Afraid to Post

Social media algorithms reward engagement, but more importantly, the person who needed to see your post is waiting for it. The closeted teenager in your church follows you. The gay man who grew up in your denomination and left quietly is still watching your feed, waiting to see if you’re safe.

What if you were brave and posted something like:

“Just finished Heated Rivalry and I don’t think I’m okay. This show reminded me that love (real, costly, chosen love) doesn’t need our permission to be holy. Highly recommend, no matter where you are on the theological spectrum.”

Or go further:

“I want to be the kind of person who says clearly: if you are LGBTQ+ and you’ve been told your love is less-than, I don’t believe that. Not theologically. Not humanly. Not on any level. You deserve a love story. You deserve to be seen. And I’m going to keep saying that, even when it’s uncomfortable… even when some of my fellow Christians don’t want to hear it.”

🗣️ When Someone Pushes Back: You Don’t Have to Win

This is the part nobody tells allies. You don’t have to win the argument. You just have to stay in the room. When someone challenges you, try:

“I hear you, and I respect that we read the Bible differently. I’ve just gotten to a place where I can’t prioritize your theological opinions over the actual human beings in front of me. That’s where I am. If Jesus wants to reject me for loving others too much, so be it.”

And then stay. Don’t storm out. Don’t deactivate your account. Stay in the room. Because your continued, non-anxious presence in that space is itself an act of advocacy. You are changing the temperature just by not leaving.

💪 Know Why This Moment Is Different

Here is what I need you to understand about the urgency right now:

We are in a moment of cultural and political backlash against LGBTQ+ dignity that is unprecedented in recent memory. Legislative attacks are accelerating. Denominational exclusions are doubling down. And in the middle of that, Heated Rivalry happened. The culture spoke. 98,000 ratings. Global streaming. People in hostile countries finding workarounds just to feel seen.

The window when your voice costs you relatively little to speak is not permanently open. Speak now, while speaking is still the hard-but-doable thing, rather than waiting until it becomes the heroic-but-too-late thing.

There are people in your orbit, in your church, in your family, in your DMs, who are watching to see if you are safe. They’re not waiting for your theological position paper. They’re waiting to see if you’ll say something.

So say something.

The Altar Call Nobody Expected

Here’s what I know about Heated Rivalry, about David and Jonathan, about Ruth and Naomi, about every love story that refused to be diminished by the institutions surrounding it:

LOVE, when it’s real, doesn’t need our permission.

LOVE, when it’s costly, doesn’t need our permission.

LOVE, when it chooses authenticity over the comfort of approval, doesn’t need our permission.

That kind of love just … is.

And history is clear: that that kind of love has a way of outlasting every system that tried to suppress it.

The Church didn’t invent love. It was just supposed to be its best witness.

It’s not too late to start.

So the next time someone asks if you watched Heated Rivalry: Don’t hedge. Don’t change the subject. Don’t give a careful non-answer designed to keep everyone comfortable.

Tell the truth.

Tell them it moved you.

Tell them why.

That is how change happens. Not in denominations. Not in doctrinal statements.

In conversations. In courage. In the audacity to say: This love story mattered to me, and so do you.

Rev. Dr. Kevin M. Young is a pastor, biblical scholar, published author, certified personal trainer, and LGBTQIA+ advocate. He writes at kevinyoung.substack.com.

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If Jesus said “Blessed are the peacemakers,” why are so many of his most vocal followers among the loudest voices beating the war drum?

That question matters,
and we have to stop ignoring it!

Here we go again, another moment in which the American church (or at least the loudest, most 🇺🇸-draped wing of it) is salivating over the prospect of shock-and-awe in Iran.

People with crosses in their social media profiles and Bibles on their desks are using a lot of words like justice, protection, and even divine mandate to cheer on bombs that will fall on human beings made in the image of God. And almost nobody in the pew is pushing back.

Not me.

I want to push back.
As a pastor and theologian, I must push back.

This bloviating, Bible-based bloodlust has gone entirely too far.

I’m not naive about evil.
I don’t think the Iranian regime is benevolent.
I don’t think the threats aren’t real.

I have to push back because I’ve read the same Bible these bomb-loving Christians claim to believe, and I cannot find a single framework, a single command, or a single endorsement from Jesus, his apostles, or the Early Church for what is being proposed. Not one. Not in the Gospels. Not in the Epistles. Not in the witness of the early church. Nowhere.

What I find instead is something far more demanding, far more subversive, and far more dangerous to empire than any missile: the wearisome way of the Cross.

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Jesus and the Early Church: A Stunning Silence

Let’s be honest about what the New Testament does and doesn’t say.

Jesus, who had the authority to call down legions of angels, chose instead to be arrested, beaten, and crucified. When Peter drew his sword in the garden, which is arguably the most defensible act of violence in history, protecting the literal Son of God from an unjust arrest, Jesus told him to put it away. He then healed the man Peter wounded.

That moment alone should give every trigger-happy Christian pause.

Throughout His ministry, Jesus was unrelenting:

“Love your enemies.” “Blessed are the peacemakers.” “Do not resist and evil person.” “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting.”

These are not soft suggestions buried in footnotes. They are the Sermon on the Mount. They are the core ethic of the Kingdom of God.

Paul echoed it without apology: “Repay no one evil for evil... if possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all... Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” He reminded the church that “we do not wage war like humans do” and that our real enemy is never a nation or a people group but “the unseen world.”

And the Early Church?

For the first 300 years of Christianity—before Constantine, before empire, before the church traded the Cross for a crown—the consensus was clear and consistent:

Christians do not kill.

Tertullian declared, “Christ, in disarming Peter, disarmed every soldier.” Origen argued that Christians served the empire best through prayer, not bloodshed.

Justin Martyr… Lactantius… Clement of Alexandria… all of them held the same line.

The Early Church wasn’t pacifist because it was weak. It was pacifist because it had actually read Jesus.

It wasn’t until Constantine militarized the faith in the 4th century that Christianity and the war machine of empire were formally married. That union was not a biblical development, it was a political one.

We have been paying for it ever since.

Enter the Christless “Just War” Lie

When the Roman Empire Christianized around 400-years after Jesus, the church faced a new problem: how do you justify the wars of a now “Christian empire” (an oxymoron if there ever were one) using the ethics of a crucified rabbi?

The answer came from Augustine of Hippo, who borrowed (stole) heavily from the Roman philosopher Cicero (not from Moses or Jesus) and constructed what we now call “Just War Theory.”

Now, for centuries, Christians have used the idea (false) idea of “Just War” as moral cover for virtually every war the Western world has waged.

Here are its classic criteria (and also, why each one collapses under honest scrutiny).

1. The cause must be just.

Sounds reasonable in theory, but it is completely useless in practice. Every nation that has ever gone to war has believed its cause was just (including both sides of the same conflict). The Crusaders believed it… the Confederacy believed it… the Third Reich believed it. The self-designation of “just” has never once stopped an unjust war, because the people launching the war are always the ones grading their own exam.

2. It must be declared by legitimate authority.

The idea that “legitimate authority” provides “moral guardrails” is almost laughable. “Legitimate authority” has rubber-stamped nearly every bad decision and military catastrophe of the modern era.

3. It must be a last resort.

Has any nation that wanted to go to war ever actually exhausted every peaceful option first? Or, does every simply pretend that it is a “last resort” because the more honest “we’ve just decided we want to use these cool weapons we built and kill some bad guys” is a harder sell?

4. The intent must be peace, not conquest.

This one almost doesn’t deserve a response. “Peace” is always the stated intent… but it never actually is. Every invasion in history has been framed as a peacekeeping mission. We went into Iraq “to bring democracy.” We went into Afghanistan “to bring stability.” We went into Libya “to protect civilians.” But none of that was really the honest reason. The gap between stated intent and actual outcome is the graveyard of Just War Theory.

5. The harm must be proportional.

When armies met on open fields, this might have been a coherent concept, but it is a moral fiction in the age of airstrikes, drone warfare, and “collateral damage” euphemisms. When a missile strike kills a military target and forty civilians at a wedding, which checklist do we consult? What over a hundred innocent children are murdered in a girl’s school, what is a proportional concession. There is no proportional calculus that makes a dead child acceptable. Period. Ever.

6. Non-combatants must be protected.

See above. Modern warfare does not protect non-combatants, it statistically guarantees their deaths and then argues about the acceptable percentage. The people who die in the wars we cheer from our living rooms are overwhelmingly ordinary human beings: innocent mothers, students, shopkeepers, children. They bear the image of God. Just War Theory has no honest answer for them.

Here is the bottom line on Just War Theory:

It was never a biblical framework. It was always a way to creatively avoid the commands of Christ. Augustine needed to justify the wars of a newly Christianized empire, Rome, so he borrowed from a pagan philosopher and dressed it up in theological language. The New Testament provided him literally zero raw material for building it, because Jesus refused to give any. Just War Theory is, at its core, the church’s attempt to make peace with the evil politics of men like Caesar … and like Trump.

And “Just War” has been doing Caesar’s bidding ever since.

Tools for the Cutting Through the Christian Nationalist Nonsense War Machine

If you’re a follower of Jesus sitting across the table, or the Easter dinner, or the church lobby from someone using Christian language to advocate for war, here are a few penetrating questions to ask, not to win an argument but to awaken healthy reflection…

On Biblical Faithfulness:

• “Can you show me where Jesus gave His followers criteria for when it’s acceptable to go to war? Chapter and verse.”

• “If ‘love your enemies’ applies to you as an individual, what theological principle makes it inapplicable to a nation led by Christians?”

• “The early church refused military participation for 300 years. Was the Early Church (made up of the Apostles and those closest to Christ) wrong? And if so, what Scripture corrects them?”

On Just War:

• “Every nation in every war has believed their cause was just. What makes our self-assessment more reliable than theirs?”

• “Has every peaceful option truly been exhausted? Can you name them (all of them) and tell me why each one failed?”

• “Just War Theory came from Cicero, not Christ. Why are we treating a Roman political philosophy as Christian doctrine?”

On This Moment, in Iran:

• “If Iran launched an unprovoked military strike on American soil, we would call it terrorism. What do we call it when we do it first?”

• “Who actually dies in these strikes? Are we bombing a regime, or are we bombing the image of God in ordinary Iranian people?”

• “Every major military intervention in the Middle East over the last 40 years has produced more chaos, not less. What evidence do we have that this will be different?”

• “If your child were in the radius of the bomb you’re supporting, would your moral calculus change? If so, why does geography change the math?”

On Human Dignity:

• “Every person killed in this conflict bears the image of God. At what point does that factor into our strategic calculations?”

• “Can you genuinely pray for the people of Iran… for their flourishing, their protection, their freedom, while simultaneously supporting bombing them?”

You don’t have to raise your voice.
You don’t have to win.
You just have to ask, and then be quiet, and let the question do its work.

The Way of the Cross Is Not the Way of the Cruise Missile

Here is where I land, and I want to be as clear as I know how to be:

Pacifism is not cowardice.
Pacifism is the most demanding command in the Sermon on the Mount.

Anyone can drop a bomb. Machines do it now without a human hand on the trigger. It takes no courage, no virtue, no faith to rain destruction down on people you’ve been taught to fear and dehumanize. What takes courage. What takes the genuine, supernatural grace of God, is to actually love the enemy. To pursue peace when every political instinct screams for retaliation. To build a bridge when the crowd is handing out pitchforks.

The Cross is God’s final and definitive statement on how he responds to evil.

He did not bomb it.
He did not invade it.
He entered into it, absorbed it, and defeated it from the inside through resurrection.

That is the pattern of the Kingdom.
That is the way of Jesus.

And ANYTHING that calls itself Christian while abandoning that pattern owes the rest of us a very careful theological accounting.

Peacemaking is not passive. It is aggressive, creative, costly, and relentless. It means funding diplomacy instead of defense contractors. It means telling the truth about who dies in wars. It means refusing to wave a flag when we should be holding a cross. It means being willing to be called naive, weak, and unpatriotic by people who have confused the Kingdom of God with the interests of a brutally self-centered, antagonistic, and anti-Christian American empire.

Jesus said the peacemakers would be called sons of God.

He did not say they would be called popular.
He did not say they would be called safe.
But He said they would be called His.

That is enough.
That has always been enough.

And in a moment when the drums of war are beating louder than the voices of the prophets, the church desperately needs people who are willing to speak out, whatever the cost.

Beat your swords into plowshares.
The Kingdom is not coming by force.
It never was.