I also need a bit more time to prepare for some hyper-local ministry opportunities this fall. I’m looking forward to helping some folks better connect at church and in the community. Spiritual direction and hospice chaplaincy continue to be mutually energizing, too.

Photo by Sage Friedman on Unsplash

That means I’ll be taking a sabbatical from Substack in August. I’m confident that all the things I want to write about will still be completely applicable when I resume in September. Meanwhile, I’ll be taking notes. Trust me, none of this goes unnoticed.

The month of August also means I’ll be wrapping up weeks of physical therapy and taking my annual pilgrimage to New Mexico, now that I’m driving again. My repaired foot feels stronger every day (many thanks for your kind thoughts and words and prayers), though it will take some time for the post-surgical swelling to completely fade. Compression socks are a necessary part of my wardrobe these days!

I hope and pray that you will find time this month to nourish your souls and rest your minds and bodies, too. There’s wisdom in pacing ourselves for the journey ahead as we anticipate the steady work of repairing the norms of our country and its people. That starts with the midterms. Has any of us ever fully appreciated checks and balances til now?

We can (and will) do more than we think we can.

Peace and all hope, friends.

Mitchell McConnell’s “missing in action” stunt points out another needed reform: Age and term limits for Congress, and while we’re at it, the Supreme Court.

Health care advancements have increased our lifespans and enabled the foolhardy assumption that it’s OK to allow members of Congress to keep running for office as octogenarians and even die in office. Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley is the oldest member of Congress at 92. Now McConnell, 84, has been off camera since EMTs ferried him off in an ambulance in mid-June.

We’ve long known that McConnell has had health issues. He’s been caught on camera appearing to physically and mentally freeze while talking to the media. Is he even still alive?

Aides help Sen. Mitch McConnell make his way through the Capitol in early June 2026.

And yes, I’m well aware that we also have a few octogenarian Democratic members of Congress. So far, however, none of them are failing to provide proof of life.

Lifetime appointments for aging Supreme Court justices is also problematic. Our oldest justice, Clarence Thomas, is 78 and has served for 35 years. Samuel Alito is not far behind at 76. We shouldn’t have to scramble to replace a justice who dies while on the court. And we might question whether their mental acuity and decision-making abilities are the same as their peers who are decades younger.

I know whereof I speak. Since entering the last quarter of my life, I’m aware of the cognitive and physical health declines that aging brings. Aging can impact clarity, stamina and ability to handle high-stress demands.

I am still a highly functional person. And I have good genes. My mother, who died at age 90, said she felt pretty good until her 85^th year. But I also recognize I don’t have nearly the stamina I had at 40, 50 or even 60. My husband will tell you that I sometimes stutter to get the right word on the tip of my tongue. We joke that if one of us ever got dementia, would the other even know it? (Remind me if I’ve said that before!)

There are always exceptions to the rule. But I question whether most folks my age could hold down the demands of a full-time job, day after day. Despite their limits, too many aging Baby Boomers are reluctant to release positions of power to younger cohorts. Millennials and Gen X employees have long complained about the “boomer blockade” that slows down their promotion process.

And in Congress, it’s not just Baby Boomers aged 62-80 who are holding them up. We still have members of the Silent Generation aged 81-98 serving in Senate and the House of Representatives.

I get that Boomers in the U.S. must depend on company-provided health coverage until their Medicare benefits kick in. That’s not an issue, however, for octogenarian members of Congress who have enjoyed Medicare coverage for decades.

This Congress is the third-oldest in U.S. history, with an average age of 58.9 years. The median age of senators is now 64; house of reps is 57. A full two dozen elected officials in Congress are 80 or over; 13 of them plan to run again, counting on name recognition. Meanwhile, the median age in the U.S. is 39.1.

“The average age of a Congress member is when most people are thinking about retiring. And we’ve seen so many examples of people who just wear out their welcome and stay in past their sell-by date,” said Nick Tomboulides, who heads a nonpartisan group that backs a constitutional amendment to limit congressional terms.

“We don’t think senility is really the problem. We think incumbency is the problem, and senility is the symptom,” he added. “Because when these incumbents can run effectively unopposed or under-opposed for so long, they really have no incentive to leave.”

And of course Donald Trump is the oldest president in U.S. history. We’ve all seen this 80-year-old nod off during Cabinet meetings. We’ve witnessed his increased confusion on the global stage, his out-of-touch fixation on the pop culture and glitz of the 1980s, and the ever-growing number of his medical specialists.

PHOTO CREDIT: Andrew Harnik/Getty

President Trump falls asleep in yet another Cabinet meeting.

Why do so many in government resist passing the torch to let younger politicians rise through the ranks? We can only assume they don’t want to give up institutional power and influence. But it also might be, as the late Lindsey Graham once said, the desire to still be relevant.

Retirement can feel like the loss of an identity, especially if you really enjoyed your career. But the second half of life can be richly rewarding, says contemplative author Richard Rohr. It will take an internal shift into a season of investing well in others, in mentoring and being an “elder” to encourage and support members of the next generation who are stepping into leadership roles.

This only happens, Rohr says, if we accept the realities of healthy aging. That means we move beyond striving to build our identity and instead discover our true self. It means letting go of superficial titles, attachments, and the need to defend our image—all that ego-building stuff. By growing into our true self we experience a greater freedom to love, knowing we are all somehow deeply connected.

I’ve heard it described as being comfortable in your own skin at last.

Yet many older adults still cling to their ego and fight letting go of external supports, whether it’s the structure of a job, the sense of power and control, or even our certainties that have outlived a changing world.

“The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling, or changing, or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo – even when it’s not working,” Rohr writes in Falling Upward.

Younger leaders are needed because they bring a lived experience about newer challenges that we older folks find difficult to grasp. Millennials tell me they are now “working harder for less.” Many of them are weighed down by student loan debt, skyrocketing housing costs, and wage stagnation that we older generations just didn’t experience in our working life.

Unfortunately, the Constitution doesn’t set a maximum age limit to serve in Congress. It only requires that a senator be at least 30, and a member of the House of Representatives be at least 25. So Millennials (ages 30-45) and Generation X (ages 46-61) qualify by age to serve.

And by speaking to the real-world concerns of their peers members of these generations have proven to be among the most energizing and hopeful candidates for president in 2028. Consider Georgia Sen. John Ossoff, 39, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, 47, former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, 44, or California Gov. Gavin Newson, 58.

Here in Texas, Millennial James Talarico, 37, is successfully challenging Boomer Ken Paxton, 62 for a senate seat. And the vibrant new mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, 34, has connected effectively with the everyday concerns of his constituents.

Photo Credit: Luiz Rampelotto/EuropaNewswire

US Rep.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attends the National Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City with then-New York State Assembly member Zohran Mamdani in June 2025.

It’s not just aging politicians who are holding on to power and prestige. We also see that habit reflected in pastors and parachurch leaders, particularly those in the MAGA evangelical base. Many of these megachurch pastors have no succession plans for their churches, so in Dallas we still see Jack Graham, 76, leading Prestonwood Baptist, and Robert Jeffress, 70, at the helm of of First Baptist. And white-haired evangelist and Trump backer Franklin Graham, 74, looks more and more like his late father.

The United Methodist Church has a mandatory retirement age of 72 for its clergy (though they can serve on a part-time basis afterward). I think there’s wisdom in that. I’ve been happily disproved of the false notion that Millennial pastors might lack the wisdom and grace their older counterparts possess.

At the same time, I also appreciate that we don’t want to lose any institutional knowledge older Boomers have acquired. There are practical ways to tap into that while still making room for new leadership. Retirement does not have to mean being discarded.

Robert Reich suggests a helpful alternative to letting Supreme Court justices accumulate power over decades: Limit them to 18 year terms on the high court and then transition them to lower federal courts to serve out their appointments. It would certainly take partisan pressure off presidential campaigns that focus on appointing a justice to a lifetime term.

Likewise, members of Congress who age out could serve as mentors and be paired with younger legislators to transfer critical institutional knowledge. How wonderful it would it be to see seasoned legislators mentoring the freshman class of the next Congress! I loved seeing Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, 84, and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 36, touring across the country this year.

And older church members can wisely invest in mentoring and guiding younger counterparts to step into leadership roles so that religious institutions stay vibrant, energized, and meaningful. Some of the best second half of life models I’ve seen are my older fellow Sunday school members who are still actively serving the church yet cheer on younger folks as they step into leadership roles.

Age and term limits are hardly the only reforms we need to root out corruption and power-mongering in our federal government. Mitch McConnell’s “is-he-or-isn’t-he?” chicanery and Lindsey Graham’s sudden demise are just shining the spotlight on it.

We can honor our elders by respecting their continued contributions even after they relinquish power.

We can intentionally mentor and support younger generations as they step into influential roles that impact all of us.

We can advocate for healthy age and term limits for government service so that the ever-changing real-life needs of all Americans are addressed.

We can do more than we think we can.

I opted not to pretend like that this year. Instead, we found quiet ways to honor our nation’s 250 years while carefully avoiding any event designed to promote the current occupant of the White House.

We tuned in live to some of the official America 250 music performances at the nation’s Capitol and saw reportage of the empty state fair hosted by Trump’s self-aggrandizing Freedom 250.

We enjoyed rewatching “Hidden Figures,” a movie about unsung heroes of America’s space race era, and shook our heads hearing about the false narrative Trump presented at Mount Rushmore, where he compared Democrats to Communists. (SIDE NOTE: Some pointed out that Trump seems to be living in the past by channeling his old mentor Roy Cohn, who had coached Sen. Joseph McCarthy during his vicious 1950s-era crusade against Communism).

But despite our best efforts, we couldn’t miss the fact that dozens of masked white supremacists calling themselves the Patriot Front felt comfortable enough to march in front of the Capitol while carrying the Confederate flag.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Needless to say, this year’s Fourth of July was a bittersweet day. Voicing my grief doesn’t mean I’m giving up on our country. It’s just a reminder that it will take a more thorough effort for America to move forward instead of backward.

Freedom has been the United States’ aspirational goal since our Founders first set pen to paper. Simply proclaiming freedom doesn’t make it happen. Everyone from abolitionists to women’s suffragettes to civil rights activists has known that living into the freedom we were promised is an ongoing task.

Those of us who continue to seek liberty and justice for all don’t “hate” our country. It’s patriotic to want your country to live up to its stated ideals; it’s nationalistic to demand loyalty to a country that’s headed in the wrong direction.

Patriotism also understands that freedom does not mean winning at all costs. That’s a formula for losing your soul. It’s been the downfall of evangelical Christians who latched onto a savior they saw as powerful but who embodies the opposite of everything they claim to hold dear.

Patriotism is doing the right thing, even when it costs you, knowing that defending liberty and justice for all is worth the sacrifice.

Former Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis suffered a fractured skull when he crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge to challenge racial injustice. But he returned the next day and every year for the rest of his life.

“Freedom is not a state; it is an act,” Lewis wrote in Across that Bridge. “It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society.”

Even JD Vance knew better before he sold out for a seat at the table of power. In an op-ed on July 4, 2016 (that recirculated in 2026), Vance compared Trump to “cultural heroin” that was addictive for his followers. “He makes some feel better for a bit,” Vance accurately discerned. “But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.”

Of course, Trump will never admit he’s failed at delivering his promises. (SIDE NOTE: Some pundits think the perfect metaphor for this administration is the nasty algae floating in the Reflecting Pool; I think a more fitting image is Trump’s interfering to overturn a World Cup rule that suspended a U.S. player, destroying the spirit of international goodwill among fans in the process. As usual, he believes the rules don’t apply to him and that being held accountable for wrongdoing is for losers.)

Like Trump and Vance, far too many MAGA followers seem willing to do what it takes to win at all costs. Their selective amnesia about the tenets of their nation and their faith allows them to cling to an unbiblical and untrue narrative.

They forget that “God does not show favoritism but accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right.” Instead they insist that God loves America more than any other country in the world.

Photo via Facebook

A patriotic service on Sunday, July 15 at Houston’s First Baptist Church melded nationalistic fervor and Christian messaging.

They forget that people who align themselves with God’s desires are meant to bless the entire world, not hoard those blessings for themselves.

They forget God’s command to care for the immigrant, the refugee and the marginalized—the very people who make up the American story.

They forget that the Jesus they worship was neither white nor American, and cling to the myth of white Western Christian superiority, ignoring the contributions of African, Asian, and indigenous American civilizations.

They forget that our nation’s founders fled harsh religious persecution and determined they would not legislate the establishment of any particular religion, knowing how religion becomes corrupted when it melds with state power.

They forget that our land was well-loved and tended before “white” Europeans ever came to take possession of it, and ignore the fact that our nation’s cruel and painful “Black history” is actually American history.

Throughout Scripture God continually calls people to remember. Dr. Jemar Tisby, author and racial justice activist, warns that when we forget what God tells us to remember, we are in danger of falling into idolatry.

“Memory is a guardrail. Memory will keep us from idolatry. Right remembering will keep us from injustice,” Tisby says.

He points out that the idolatrous slogan of “Make America Great Again” claims that our glory days are behind us, a time when they nostalgically believe most Americans followed their narrow fundamentalist version of Christianity. That’s why they push to have the Ten Commandments posted in classrooms and add the Bible to public school curriculums.

History told from the perspective of the powerful diminishes the religious, ethnic, racial and gendered diversity that makes up America. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission showed us that healing as a nation only begins when we tell the truth about our history and ourselves.

“History is about identity. The power to tell that history is the power to shape identity,” Tisby points out.

MAGA tries to shape our identity by narrowing the definition of a real American to being white and Christian—and only a certain flavor of Christian. Here’s an example: At a recent Republican Party of Texas Convention, which has been co-opted by the far right, speakers warned that Muslims aren’t welcome here, and that immigrants who don’t believe in Judeo-Christian values create problems for America. They forget that Muslims also deeply revere Jesus and share the same spiritual roots as Jews and Christians. Not to mention that Muslims have been in America since they were brought here from West Africa as slaves.

This fear and exclusivity makes me wonder if America even know what it means to be a Christian anymore. MAGA followers often baffle onlookers because so many of them have abandoned traditional Christian virtues of mercy, humility, truth, hospitality and sacrificial love to focus instead on battling abortion, immigration and all things “transgender.” To the casual observer, Christians have become known more for their culture wars than by how well they treat others.

There will be a painful reckoning ahead as we sort out the truth about ourselves, our country, and our faith, even after Trump and Vance are long gone. But telling the truth will be worth the discomfort because it will allow our nation to heal and move forward together.

We can’t shrink from the pain that comes with healing. One thing I’ve learned during my lengthy post-surgical recovery is that healing doesn’t mean the absence of pain. I will contend with pain and swelling for months to come even as I regain mobility and flexibility in my toes. I still feel occasional phantom pings from where the pins once held my bones in place. The pain didn’t end when I stowed away my knee scooter and boot.

Author and artist Suleika Jaouad has endured a journey with acute myeloid leukemia since she was 22. I resonated with her reflections on living with pain while reading her memoir Between Two Kingdoms.

Suleika Jaouad/Photo by Nadia Albano

“I used to think healing meant ridding the body and the heart of anything that hurt. It meant putting your pain behind you, leaving it in the past. But I’m learning that’s not how it works,” she writes. “Healing is figuring out how to coexist with the pain that will always live inside of you, without pretending it isn’t there or allowing it to hijack your day.”

That means telling the truth about where we’re at and yet not losing heart. It means we carry both hopeful determination and grief at the same time as we press on to maturity as a people and as a nation.

We can take time to lament that we’re not where we should be as a nation that claims to promote liberty and justice for all.

We can bear the cost of telling the truth until we all live into the freedom we were promised.

We can model as people of faith how to honor the God-given dignity of every American in a nation as diverse as ours.

We can do more than we think we can.

A year and a half into Trump’s chaotic and incompetent second term, Aaron Sorkin’s award-winning TV drama feels idealized: A White House that actually cares about its constituents, acts on principles, fixes real-life problems, and takes responsibility for its actions.

More often than not, the show’s script leaves us teary-eyed. Perhaps it’s because we not only realize how badly we need this kind of leadership, we can recall the times we’ve experienced it. This administration is not one of them.

Watching the dedication of former President Barack Obama’s presidential center, I was reminded of the stark contrast between what we’d like and what we’ve got. The dignity and grace (and complete sentences) we witnessed reminded us how presidents should behave and how far we’ve fallen.

AP Photo/Jon Cherry

Former President Barack Obama speaks on June 18 during the dedication ceremony for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.

What especially surprised me was not just the soaring oratory of Michelle and Barack Obama. If you didn’t already know they are stellar speakers, you’d have been merely awed. It was how strongly they stirred our emotions that we thought had fallen dormant during this mind-numbing era known as Trump 2.0. People in attendance (and at home watching the livestream) were noticeably wiping their eyes after hearing a former president behave in such a presidential manner.

The contrast felt startling. We experienced a grief of sorts, realizing yet again how much our daily lives have been disrupted by this administration. We nodded in agreement when Obama reminded us that “as unsettled as we are, people aren’t looking for perpetual anger and division. They are looking for fairness and common sense and mutual respect.”

It felt familiar to me on a more personal scale as well. After surviving an abusive first marriage, I now have a greater appreciation for the sweetness of being married to someone who actually seeks my well-being, not just his own, and whose word is matched by kind and generous actions. It’s the difference between getting a good night’s sleep and walking on eggshells to protect a fragile and explosive male ego. I can relax at last, and trust that the things that make our lives function and thrive are taken care of.

Most of us want to be able to similarly trust that our nation’s leaders will tend to our needs by simply doing the hard (and often boring) work of governing. Instead, we find ourselves living on edge, wondering what national or global chaos we will wake up to each morning.

That’s why it was so startling to hear Obama speak like a steady and sane president. Substack writer Jennifer Rubin points out, “he disparaged no group of Americans, rewrote no history, recited no election results, and ridiculed no predecessors (instead, he praised the three on stage with him).”

Without ever mentioning Trump by name, Obama cautioned us against “a steady stream of distraction and outrage, as only the loudest, most extreme voices get attention, fanning our prejudices, appealing to our basest, most tribal instincts.” And he reminded us of the things our democracy depends on:

“A belief that our military and law enforcement owe allegiance not to any president or political party, but to the people and our Constitution.

“A belief in the peaceful transfer of power after the people have spoken in fair and free elections, recognizing that in a large, complicated society like ours, no group or faction gets its way 100% of the time.

“And a belief that qualities of character, honesty, integrity, kindness, compassion, a sense of duty and honor, those things matter in our public dealings, just as they do in our private lives.”

In an emotional tribute, Michelle Obama reminded us of her husband’s “unshakeable moral fiber” and “ferocious work ethic” while doing the people’s work as our nation’s first Black president.

We can cling to the qualities she described even as we endure a current president who lacks emotional regulation needed for the job and whose mental acuity is increasingly diminished. Most Americans cringe at hearing the ego-driven and impulsive occupant of the White House embarrass us in front of the entire world, like a carnival barker constantly trying to sell us on something, “the likes of which nobody has never seen.”

Pundits now hold up his latest fixation, the $16 million “repair” of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, as symbolic of Trump’s presidency. He doubled down on lies about imaginary “vandals” damaging the pool after his workers used hydrogen peroxide to treat the algae that was turning it green. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz summed it up: “Found an imaginary problem, said only they could fix it, didn’t listen to experts, hired buddies who grifted millions, failed miserably, bragged how great it went. The entire Trump presidency in a nutshell.”

PHOTO: Fox 5 DC

Crews worked to clean the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on Friday after green blooms appeared the water earlier this week.

I would add that when Trump’s projects go south, he always blames someone else, like the Democrats, Biden, Obama, or even former FBI director James Comey.

It makes me sad that a whole generation of Americans hasn’t yet heard what serious presidential leadership looks and sounds like. Trump’s erratic and vulgar example has been in their heads for over a decade.

Even so, a new American Research Group survey found that 66 percent of Americans now disapprove of Trump’s job performance, while just 30 percent approve. His die-hard supporters would be hard-pressed to name something he’s done that has made our lives easier or better. He has made the economy worse, launched us in illegal wars, refused to release the Epstein files, and violated human rights with his harassment of immigrants—all while wasting tax dollars to remodel monuments rather than deliver on campaign promises.

It’s beyond me how anyone believes what he says anymore. Either they are working hard to ignore what their eyes and ears are telling them or they are just not paying attention. This week Trump continued to insist he is “winning” despite his wavering tactics to resolve the war with Iran and its effects on the economy (a Reuters poll shows only 23 percent of Americans think the war has made the U.S. stronger).

Trump once portrayed a decisive executive on TV, but his actual decision-making and negotiation skills have failed in real time. “His own statements contradict each other from hour to hour. He cannot hold a position from morning to afternoon,” says Substack writer Heather Delaney Reese. “The war is now being driven by his impulses rather than any coherent objective, and there is no one left around him willing to stop it.”

True leadership recognizes that none of us is good enough, kind enough or smart enough to have unlimited power. Seeing all living former presidents onstage together at the Obama presidential center dedication reminded us how much we need nonpartisan cooperation and respect for the Constitution. (You may recall that the perpetually envious Trump was not invited after posting AI memes of the Obama center surrounded by a homeless camp and the Obamas as apes.)

AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, Pool

From left, former President Joe Biden and former first lady Jill Biden, former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama, former President George W. Bush and former first lady Laura Bush, and former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, pose for a photo ahead of the dedication ceremony at the Obama Presidential Center.

The event not only stirred feelings of grief; it also provided needed hope that things can and should be better again. More than a few Americans are now saying they plan to view the Obama Presidential Center’s dedication as the real 250^th anniversary celebration of our nation’s founding rather than any self-promoting rally Trump plans to stage in July. I can’t imagine a better example to emulate.

Joni Mitchell was right. Sometimes you just don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone. Our former presidents are reminding us that it’s possible to do better.

We can choose to pay attention to facts and recognize when people tasked to represent our best interests are verifiably lying about the chaos they create.

We can (and should) always reject any leadership marked by self-serving impulsiveness and vulgar cruelty instead of basic human decency and proven competence.

We can commit to showing up in November to begin making better choices for ourselves and our country.

We can do more than we think we can.

Just thinking about stepping on a brake pedal with my newly healed right foot stirs up an irrational fear in me. I recently told a colleague that after enduring a long recovery of healing bones, I’m now a tad paranoid about being mangled in a car crash. I “know” the odds of that happening are extremely low, but I still have to tell that to my traumatized body.

Photo by M.T ElGassier on Unsplash

We’re not meant to live in irrational fear like that. There’s plenty of actual things to fear these days; stewing on irrational fears can be unnecessarily crippling and unhealthy. Yet we see it all the time in our unbelievably polarized world.

Narcissists, of course, are actually insecure and deeply afraid they’ll be found out as mere humans, not the super-creatures they imagine themselves to be. That’s why they verbally assault anyone who questions their version of reality or leave in a huff when asked to provide evidence to support what they’re saying.

Trump emotionally lashing out on “Meet the Press,” when asked for evidence to support his claims of rigged elections. Shortly after, he ended the interview and stormed out of the room.

People who idolize these immature and narcissistic leaders often end up modeling some of that same behavior. When their arguments don’t hold up to the facts, they will demonize their perceived opponents and even couch their words in religious terms, saying they will “pray for” the one they fear will wreak theological havoc. They see their particular take on theology as the only acceptable version of Christianity—whether it’s excluding women from the pastorate, demonizing the LGBTQ community, or justifying their support of cruel and corrupt leaders who mouth opposition to abortion. I often find myself “unfriended” on social media by these folks who metaphorically leave the room.

I thought about that while pondering a June 3 Facebook post by podcaster Mark Casto that’s gone viral. He cited an article in RELEVANT Magazine about the neuroscience of encountering God that “called out a fear-based religion for what it actually produces.”

The article describes the work of neuroscientist Andrew Newberg, who spent 20 years scanning the brains of people while they pray. He studied everyone from Franciscan nuns to Buddhist monks to Pentecostal worshippers. Newberg found that beliefs don’t just shape how people think — they alter the way the brain processes reality itself. “The brain,” he discovered, “was literally perceiving the world differently based on what the person believed about God.”

“A person who has a fear-based perspective is likely to see fear in everything resulting in strong anxiety and distress in the brain,” Newberg said. “A person who has a more compassion or love-based perspective is more likely to see connections between things and be open to other people and ideas.”

Apparently, encountering God activates emotion, memory, empathy and focus in our brain that gets more defined the more we engage it. Casto says Newberg’s research proves that “the image of God you carry doesn’t just shape your theology. It physically rewires your brain.”

Those who hold a fear-based image of a God looking to mete punishment for our failures and sins are locked in a survival mode. It results in “anxiety, emotional rigidity, hypervigilance, and a diminished capacity for the very things the Gospel promises: peace, joy, and love.”

By contrast, a love-based theology centered on compassion, goodness and connection enables adherents to show a “greater resilience, deeper empathy, and reduced anxiety and depression” along with a capacity to trust God and others.

Far too many evangelical Christians, who make up the largest base of MAGA supporters, fall into the first category. They view humanity as “sinners in the hands of an angry God” rather than see God as the Good Shepherd who restores our souls and whose perfect love casts out fear. They skip over the part where God called created beings good and focus instead on the human capacity to sin. So their political choices center around their fear of what others might do.

Right-wing media well know that fear and anger can be addictive. MAGA Christians seem more ignited by extra-biblical culture wars than motivated by Scriptural mandates to treat others well. They worry more about who might use a girls’ bathroom than about frightened children held in detention centers or whether seniors will lose their Social Security and Medicare benefits to compensate for billionaires’ tax cuts. Their irrational fear of losing influence, power, or perceived righteousness--i.e., being “tainted” by empathic feelings that might cause them to overlook “sin”--often results in unbelievably hurtful actions.

Casto says the ultimate remedy (besides turning off the spigot of right-wing “news”) is to experience a “consistent, love-centered communion with God, rooted in His goodness rather than His wrath” so that we are rewired toward healing, wholeness, and transformation.

It takes intentional effort. In his more than 50 years as a priest, contemplative theologian Richard Rohr says he’s found that “more Christians seem to be afraid of God than in love with God.”

“Sadly, Christians aren’t more loving than anyone else; sometimes, we’re even less loving than other people!” Rohr writes.

“It’s group narcissism to believe that only our group has the Spirit or the truth. At less mature levels, every group will try to put God in their own pocket and say God only loves their group, but such a belief has nothing to do with the love of God. It isn’t a search for Truth or Holy Mystery, but a search for control. It’s the search of the small self, the search to make myself feel superior and to stand alone.”

Rohr contrasts that with the example of Jesus, who came not as a guarded, sin-wary adult but as a vulnerable baby, dependent on relationship with others:

“Naked vulnerability means that we allow otherness to influence and change us. When we think that otherness can’t change us or teach us anything, we don’t give other people any power over our lives. When we block them by thinking we can stand alone, we are spiritually dead. … We are intrinsically like the Trinity, living in an absolute relatedness. We call this love.”

Certainty can be self-protective and feel comforting, and it’s not hard to isolate a chapter and verse that will support anything from justifying slavery to keeping women in abusive situations. But theological certainty doesn’t cover the overarching narrative of Scripture nor does it translate well to real flesh-and-blood people. We are all flawed and we are all beloved. And we desperately need room for God’s Spirit to breathe and move and transform us.

Researcher Newberg says communion with God is best experienced through meditation and being immersed in God’s loving presence. The awareness of being divinely loved seems to kick in around 20 or 30 minutes of focused centering prayer or meditation. That’s when the brain begins building the kind of emotional regulation and resilience that helps us be less reactive and more capable of empathy.

Or as Castro puts it: “It’s positioning yourself before a God who is good — and staying there long enough for your brain, your soul, and your identity to be rebuilt around that reality.”

Focusing on God’s unconditional lovingkindness can relax our need to judge who’s in and who’s out of favor with the divine. It enables us to release into God’s care how God will lead and guide each individual to spiritual growth. And it loosens up our narrow and binary views about day and night, black and white, and male and female. (I’ve been amused by the knee-jerk reaction of those who mocked Texas Rep. James Talerico for suggesting that sexual identity might be more nuanced than we imagine. Chromosomes are a curious thing.)

David Gates wrote insightfully about the vast diversity in nature and in people in his 2024 poem “They/Them,” dedicated to Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old non-binary high school student who died from suicide after an altercation in the girls’ restroom of their Oklahoma high school:

Letting go of a fear-based theology enables us to welcome the mystery of a God who is creative and dynamic, and to the possibility of an understanding greater than our own. Religious certainty can find such humility unsettling, but a teachable posture can be quite freeing. As John Wesley discovered, Scripture is most effectively understood through the light of tradition, reason and experience.

Allen Levi, author of the best-selling novel Theo of Golden, was recently asked on his 70^th birthday what he might be afraid of in his later years. He wasn’t afraid of health issues or other external concerns.

“I fear that one year or ten years from now, I will be the same person I am now, that I will have suffered a diminished sense of wonder, that I will become too tired or too complacent or too disenchanted with human foible to engage energetically with the world around me any longer,” Levi said.

“I hope and trust that I will be spared that fate and that, by slow degrees, I might instead become more loving, more generous, more wise, kind, teachable, forgiving, and hopeful as the years roll on. I pray I’ll be more cheerful, more joyful, more good humored. In short, more alive. … The goal, of course, always, is to be a carrier of Christ’s truth and goodness in the world. There is always room for change and improvement in that noble pursuit. But isn’t the payoff worth it?”

It is, indeed.

We can be let God gently widen the truths we hold that shape our actions, knowing that God is the source of all that is true.

We can trust the Spirit to nudge each of us into deeper awareness and understanding, knowing that truth will outlast the ones who storm off.

We can continue to speak truth and seek the well-being of others, knowing that we ourselves are loved.

We can do more than we think we can.

I know that some of them continue to support a person whose behavior and agenda reflect none of the Christian virtues commonly known as the fruit of the Spirit. These include love, joy, peace, wisdom, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Photo by Andrey K on Unsplash

These virtues take years of discipleship and Christian formation to develop, far beyond just a one-time decision “to invite Jesus into your heart.” I guess they tell themselves Trump is that periennial “baby Christian,” and they overlook his flaws because they think they benefit from having him in power. And some don’t even care whether he reflects values they hold dear, as long as he claims to champion their interests.

At its core, however, to be a Christian is to follow the way of Jesus. Christians are told to discern the authenticity of someone who claims to follow Jesus not by what they promise to do for anyone or the access to power they offer, but by their spiritual fruit. And moral character, in the end, is what truly matters.

I get the confusion, to a degree. As a brand-new, born-again Christian I once fell for mere words, not actions. I married someone who spoke the language but whose behavior turned out to be self-centered, demanding, and ultimately violent. When I realized he was too broken to be motivated or transformed by Christian values, I had to separate myself from the damage he inflicted. It no longer mattered what he said.

I wish the same for my MAGA Christian friends. The cruelty, corruption, and chaos of this president and his administration don’t reflect their core values and don’t deserve their support. While we can’t change who Trump is, we can choose to live our own lives by a higher standard, which is a form of resistance in itself.

I’ve been reflecting on this while reading Theo of Golden, a best-selling novel that has tapped into the longing many of us have for a much kinder world.

The popular novel centers on Theo, an elderly Portuguese man who is devoted to small, deliberate acts of kindness for strangers. Theo arrives in a small Southern town and notices portraits in a coffee shop. He decides to buy them one by one and personally return them to their subjects. As he does, Theo speaks words of life into recipients, telling them what he sees in the rendering of their faces. It reminds us to slow down, pay attention to others, and make people feel seen in a disconnected world.

Author Allen Levi says he wants to use his creative gifts “to provoke godward thought.” He doesn’t wear his faith on his sleeve but scatters Scriptural allusions throughout the book. He acknowledges that his own favorite author, Wendell Berry, has influenced him with “a sense of stewardship and community and cherishing small things.”

I’ve found that Levi’s book has stuck with me and even rubbed off on me. You have to know that I’m not naturally a fan of small talk. As an Enneagram One I can be more task-minded than person-centered. At parties, I have to channel my extroverted husband and try to fake it til I make it.

It’s not that I’m shy. I’m actually a gregarious introvert. But it’s sometimes challenging for me to think of something to say while conversing with a complete stranger.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve been drawn to fields like journalism and hospice chaplaincy, where I have professional permission to quickly dive into deeper topics within the limited time I have with a news source or a terminal patient. I know the ground we need to cover, and I’m on it, fearlessly.

That said, in this second half of my life, some of the best times I’ve had with total strangers is during a hospice visit or a spiritual direction session. Those are timeless, eternal, and liminal spaces with no time constraints or goals in mind other than providing solace and spiritual companionship. I cherish these unrushed oases of kairos time.

But now I find I’m channeling Theo in ordinary everyday encounters, too, and from what I read, I’m not the only one. This fictional character is inspiring many readers to really notice the people around us and be generous in showing them kindness. Just because.

It helps to be waylaid with a long post-surgical recovery, when I’ve been fairly immobile, slowed down, and dependent on those around me. During a recent hospital stay, it still surprised me that I was initiating conversations beyond social niceties with everyone who entered my room.

I chatted with the cleaning lady, who lit up when I told her I’d had recent toe alignment surgery. She freely shared stories about her own post-bunion recovery. When the floor nurse on duty found out I was a former newspaper writer, she told me how proud she’d been of a relative who had worked as a Houston Chronicle reporter. By the time we’d finished talking, she said she wanted to look up my Substack. And when the last nurse during my 24-hour stay didn’t flinch at seeing the pins in my toes, I learned she was a former orthopedic floor charge nurse. What a perfect fit for my needs!

I made a point of thanking each one for their specific good care of me: the emergency room physician (“Just call me Dr. R—it’s easier”) who relieved my fears by assuring me he’d take care of my infection and pain; every single hospital staffer who patiently took my vitals for the umpteenth time; and even the young desk clerk at the urgent care clinic who demonstrated great people skills.

We’re all a bit hungry right now to have our concerns noticed and to be treated with basic human kindness.

It’s why we’ll miss Stephen Colbert for his compassion, kindness, joy, and humanity as much as for his incisive wit. He helped more than a few guests process their grief, thanks to his own healing from childhood loss, and he raised millions for charities like World Central Kitchen by selling off memorabilia. His mantra was simple: “Be kind to people, not because they’re nice, but because you are.”

It’s the opposite of what we hear from the thin-skinned, vengeful one who demanded that Colbert’s show be canceled. Unfortunately, leadership often models behavior for a nation. After a decade of seeing Trump’s casual crudeness and violence glorified, we are often reminded how his demeaning rhetoric from the Oval Office has altered our social climate. I never used to see signs like this in a public space like a hospital emergency room:

Photo by Robin Russell

A sign in a Dallas-area emergency room reflects the need to address the lowered standards of our public discourse today.

Facebook writer Heather Delaney Reese captures the disheartening mood we find ourselves in today, when a president thinks it’s a good idea to stage an ultimate fight cage event on the White House grounds for his 80^th birthday.

“I’ve had to accept that this is the country he is building. One where violence is the background hum of life,” she writes. “There have been more threats and acts of violence swirling around this presidency than around any in living memory, including real attempts on his own life.

“This is what happens when the man at the very top treats violence as entertainment and posts a bomb as a joke. It gives everyone permission. The cruelty flows downhill, into inboxes, onto streets, and outside ordinary people’s windows at midnight.”

Author Levin and late-night host Colbert are not the only secular ambassadors of kindness in 2026. CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman has long shared uplifting stories on his “On the Road” segments about inspiring people he meets each week. Hartman’s video reports are now being used in a Kindness 101 curriculum for elementary school kids. Here’s one example of these little vignettes:

Most Americans admire and aspire to this kind of inclusive kindness, even though we’ve been conditioned to stay inside our tribes these days. But when elementary school kids learn about kindness and character, the results can be life-changing.

These models of kindness are resonating so powerfully because they are a form of “moral elevation,” says therapist Amanda White. Researchers have found that a single person can have a powerful effect on a roomful of people when we speak up about something that’s negative or harmful to others. Or when we simply resist behaving like what we see from the White House these days.

“Selah” acrylic and oil by Matt Moberg

This artist explains why he was inspired to create his painting: “I have grown tired of people speaking of God. … Maybe God is less interested in being defended than in being encountered.”

Therapist White cites the famous obedience experiment where ordinary people were asked to deliver what they believed were painful shocks to a stranger in the next room. Most of them did it. But when two participants who refused to deliver the shocks joined the room, only 10% of the original participants kept going, down from 65%. It showed that people are more willing to refuse evil when they know they aren’t the only one.

“It changes the room,” White says. “It signals something to the person being talked about, to the person doing the talking, and to everyone else in the room who was watching to see whether this was allowed.

“When someone witnesses a small moral act, something shifts in them,” she adds. “People who watch someone do the right thing are measurably more likely to do the right thing themselves later, even in situations that have nothing to do with the original moment.”

That explains the ripple effect taking place with Levi’s novel, the people in Hartman’s videos, and yes, even the example of late-night comedians. Many of us who are weary of the nation’s polarization find we are duplicating these loving actions without even thinking about it. Like Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, we are taking up the call to do small things with great love. And that’s life-changing in a country hungry for ordinary kindness as we await the leadership we yearn for.

We can be kind to each person around us, knowing our small and deliberate acts will help elevate the moral climate in our country and have a lasting impact on our recipients.

We can be intentional about challenging vulgar and demeaning language we witness in public, knowing it “changes the room.”

We can choose to be kind, not because others are nice, but because we remember that we are.

We can do more than we think we can.

I found mine this week while reading an elegant piece in a literary magazine. I was needing some respite from the (boringly) chaotic political era and my tedious recovery from foot surgery, so I perused something random, just for fun. It reminded me how much good literature nourishes my soul.

Photo by Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu on Unsplash

As might be expected, much of my reading this past year while writing a Substack has been consumed by an onslaught of news and commentaries (old journalists never die). Things have been fast and furious in Trump 2.0. It’s meant to overwhelm us. Even as I find it clarifying to mull over and order my thoughts about the madness each week, I’ll admit it leaves me a bit drained at times.

I recently shared this with my spiritual director. She wisely discerned that it wasn’t the actual writing that burdened me; it was having to be so heavily immersed in the “toxicity” of this political season. She encouraged me to honor my calling as a writer by creating more space for rest and peace and perspective so that I can stay recharged for the long haul.

That’s especially helpful to consider while I’m recuperating from surgery. It takes longer and it’s more physically tiring to get to hospice chaplain visits and spiritual direction sessions while maneuvering on a knee scooter. Not to mention the multiple follow-up appointments with my podiatrist. Thank goodness for a husband who is willing to be my patient driver!

So I have decided to accept my spiritual director’s invitation to write just twice a month instead of weekly, at least until my body heals. That will help me stay engaged while allowing me to rest physically and nourish my soul. It will also help me better digest (or even ignore for a few days) what’s happening from the White House. (As my pastor once shared with me about his own writing discipline, he pays attention to the news and always acknowledges how it impacts lives, but he doesn’t let Trump dictate his weekly sermon.)

Setting your own pace has to be intentional, because the crazy around us never pauses. For example, here’s what I’m definitely not writing about this week:

* Trump’s odd fixation on redecorating without regard to taxpayers’ wishes. His latest unneeded plan to repaint the Washington Mall’s reflecting pool has jumped by 88%, to $13.1 million.

* Corruption of insider trading as key insiders know ahead of time how the market will respond to each scrap of economic news from the Middle East.

* Trump’s wee-hours habit of posting unhinged AI images on his Truth Social account, causing him to fall asleep during Cabinet meetings while “conducting” the business of being president.

* The horrific glee of Southern legislators rushing to redraw their congressional maps and silence Black voters after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act.

OK, just a word or two on that last point. Voting rights should concern us all because they are the foundation of a democracy. The right to vote is a sacred trust and the most powerful tool available to Americans, especially for those whose voting rights were hard-earned. You just don’t mess with it.

I’ve been greatly encouraged by the refusal of Black leaders to surrender to cynicism. It’s been energizing to see a roaring lion wakened as Black leaders re-organize to defend voting rights. I’m reminded that none of us does the work of resistance alone.

As historian Jemar Tisby noted: “Sometimes people don’t realize the historical moment they’re living through. This is not one of those moments. We are living through the Civil Rights movement of our day.”

The Rev. William Barber told a Moral Monday crowd gathered outside the White House that our government derives its powers from the consent of the governed, and that in this moment, “We do not consent.” Barber recited from memory a long list of Civil Rights-era heroes and then sent a powerful reminder to those in power now scrambling to redistrict Black votes: “They must not know who we are. They shouldn’t have poked us like this.”

Barber vowed to mobilize Black voters “until what’s written is true: One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Ever the preacher, he added the words of the Apostle Paul: “We are not of those who shrink back unto destruction. We are those who persevere until the salvation of the soul.”

Some faith leaders are calling for a new Freedom Rider movement this summer, reminding a new generation of the way Black and white civil rights activists rode buses together across the South in 1961 to challenge local laws and customs that enforced segregation. We clearly need massive voter registration and mobilization (90 million Americans didn’t bother to vote in 2024!). Organizers say that will result in midterms voter turnout that will overwhelm even redistricted maps.

There is indeed something powerful stirring. And I am grateful this is not going away.

Which brings me back to the writing prompt I mentioned earlier. It landed in a randomly beautiful and surprisingly pertinent way.

I’d come across a lovely book review in The New Yorker that was oddly titled “The Violence in Vermeer.” Having been awed by some stunning Vermeer paintings in Amsterdam and London, I was intrigued by Anthony Lane’s review of Andrew Graham-Dixon’s new book, Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found.

You’d never know from looking at Vermeer’s paintings, Lane wrote, that the 17^th century Delft artist lived in a perilous time of war, mass starvation, and massacres. After the Thirty Years War had spread across Europe, some 8 million people had died.

“How, why, and by what right does a person produce tranquil art in the midst, or the wake, of tumultuous times?” Lane wrote. “What does all this have to do, pray, with a woman pouring milk from a jug, or reading a letter, or patiently making lace—the kind of activity, that is, pursued in Vermeer’s art? One answer would be that the more savage the storm, the more urgent the need for safe havens.”

via Wikimedia Commons

The Milkmaid (c. 1658) by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam regards it as “unquestionably one of the museum’s finest attractions.”

We do indeed live in a savage time, my friends. And how urgently we need safe havens: the space to catch our breath, become centered, connect with like-minded people, and then regroup for action. Reading those words, it almost felt I’d been given permission to slow down and stay better grounded in this season.

But there’s more. Lane noted that in Vermeer’s works, it seems “the people who inhabit the paintings are breathing a specific spiritual atmosphere.” He adds that the kind of peace, tranquility and grace—“the remarkable order which [Vermeer] extracts from the world”--might resonate today with those of us in the U.S., “where you can’t hear yourself think for the jangle.”

Make no mistake: The tension from the outside world is not altogether absent from Vermeer’s work. “Something in these quiet rooms is getting ready to happen...the stillness might not hold,” Lane observes. But the observer also gets a sense that something larger is happening.

The light falling from a half-open window in Vermeer’s paintings, Lane suggests, “testifies not so much to an overcast Dutch day as to a suffusion of grace.” He gives author Graham-Dixon the last word on Vermeer: “He painted for the same reason that people pray: to make things come true.”

Sometimes we don’t even know we need an infusion of awe and wonder and perspective. A reminder that we are being held, even in the chaos. You might be surprised, as I was, where you’ll find that oasis my spiritual director recommended. I’m so glad I wandered into a well-written book review, of all things.

So yes, stay engaged with the outside world. But take time to also read a good book (I’m currently reading and highly recommend Allen Levi’s gorgeously written and gently inspiring novel Theo of Golden). Study a painting. Play a piece of great music. Memorize a poem. Sit under the stars. And listen to what it all tells you.

And I will see you in two weeks.

We can find, even in unexpected places, a safe haven of peace, tranquility, and grace that lets us breathe a different spiritual atmosphere.

We can purposefully “waste” time by noticing beauty and following where it leads us, knowing that we don’t carry the weight of resistance on our own.

We can give ourselves “permission” to intentionally create time and space for physical and spiritual restoration that lets us sense the divine embrace.

We can do more than we think we can.

In its Louisiana vs. Callais ruling, the Trump-packed U.S. Supreme Court has gutted what remained of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Apparently the high court is OK if minority voters are silenced under the guise of partisan redistricting. It’s just an unfortunate outcome, right? (Fun fact: Plaintiff Bert Callais is an election denier who attended the Stop the Steal rally on Jan. 6.)

The 6-3 ruling struck down Louisiana’s congressional map and raised the bar for proving discrimination, requiring proof not just of harm, but of intent. Never mind that intent is much harder to prove than outcome. What’s more, outcomes can be unfair, no matter the intent.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote a blistering 47-page dissent, saying the Voting Rights Act “was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers. It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality. And it has been repeatedly and overwhelmingly reauthorized by the people’s representatives in Congress. Only they have the right to say it is no longer needed--not the Members of this Court.”

Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash

Protesters hold signs demanding the right to vote during the 1963 March on Washington. As historian Jemar Tisby points out, “Racism never goes away, it just adapts.”

Let’s be clear. There is no way that disenfranchising Black voters is acceptable, particularly in a multiracial democracy like ours. Not in 2026. And certainly not on our watch.

Technically speaking, the court’s ruling didn’t kill the Voting Rights Act; it just moved the goalposts. It bysteps the label of racial discrimination by calling it partisan redistricting. And it shifts the burden of proof on those who challenge this redistricting by forcing them to “prove” a racist intent. It’s more than a bit disingenuous, as the justices know that minority voters, especially in the South, tend to align with a political party that actually represents their interests.

Civil rights advocate Kimberlé Crenshaw calls the SCOTUS decision a “green light” for states to suppress Black representation.

“The Voting Rights Act was the crown jewel of the Civil Rights movement. It protected outcome which was representation,” she said in a podcast. “We look at Black legislators today and forget how much had to happen that made that possible. The court has ruled that parties can now use partisan gerrymandering and black voters have no recourse. That’s what’s so insidious. … It’s not surprising that MAGA is trying to rewrite history and privilege power for some.”

Indeed, Southern governors and legislators are already off to the races, using partisan redistricting to neutralize minority voters and secure more red seats before the midterms. Florida passed a bill the same day. Alabama and Tennessee are taking steps to pass their own bills. Louisiana went even further, canceling active congressional primary elections.

The New York Times estimates that new gerrymanders across the deep South could net Republicans as many as 12 House seats and lead to the largest drop in Black congressional representation since Reconstruction.

Black voters, who make up a majority of residents in communities created by redlining and segregation policies, will no longer be able to choose their own representatives because their communities will be gerrymandered into oddly shaped districts that effectively silence their voice. Memphis, with a 61 percent Black population, has already been split into three districts to neutralize its majority Black voters.

Here’s a quick refresher on how partisan gerrymandering works. It uses several techniques to guarantee an electoral outcome: “Cracking” splits groups of voters among multiple districts to dilute their strength; “packing” crams members of a group into as few districts as possible, so their numbers are overwhelmed.

The result is that politicians can now choose their voters instead of voters choosing their politicians. In cases like Memphis, the party drawing the maps might win a majority of seats even when it wins only a minority of the vote.

That’s horrifically unfair. And it’s just not right. It denies Black voters free and fair elections, the very thing the Voting Rights Act was written to ensure.

Gerrymandering affects all Americans, but its most significant costs are borne by communities of color. The South holds the highest concentration of Black Americans in the U.S., with 58 percent of the nation’s Black population residing there.

Substack writer Lucian Truscott points out why representation matters:

“There are still neighborhoods in small towns in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Arkansas that do not have paved roads, sidewalks, street lights, or even public sewers because the people who live there are Black, and their votes have been successfully diluted to the extent that they have not been able to elect representatives to the governmental bodies that appropriate the money to pay for these public services in their neighborhoods,” he writes.

Supreme Court justices who sided with this ruling are relying on the false notion that the effects of racism in the U.S. were rectified 70 years ago, and that we should now see beyond color. Peter Johnson, a civil rights leader and columnist for The Dallas Morning News, says this reasoning is convoluted, because in order to combat racial discrimination against Blacks, courts still have to consider race.

“The Civil Rights Movement did not begin by asking courts to determine what was in the hearts of lawmakers. It began by exposing what was happening in the lives of ordinary people,” Johnson writes. “This decision risks turning our attention away from what people experience and toward what cannot easily be proven.”

Courts are called to judge actions, systems, and outcomes, Johnson says. “You can intend fairness and still produce inequality. You can claim neutrality and still silence voices.”

Historian Jemar Tisby agrees that the SCOTUS decision is based on the faulty premise that “the best way to address racial inequality is not to consider race at all.” Only white Americans, who don’t have to think about race unless they choose to, would agree with that.

“We must push back against the idea of colorblindness as a virtue. It is not. If race caused the inequality, then race must be named in order to create equity,” Tisby writes. “The [Voting Rights Act] did not emerge from a colorblind agenda. It came from those who spoke clearly about race and power.”

The implicit bias runs across theological lines as well. White Christians like me—especially the 80 percent of white evangelicals who backed Trump—like to think of ourselves as colorblind. We were taught that we shouldn’t see color. We consider it rude at best and even “divisive” to talk about race today. But we are also well aware of the racial split along partisan lines. Good white evangelicals in particular are always expected to vote Republican.

It’s theologically driven. White evangelicals tend to espouse an individualistic heaven-focused faith that doesn’t make room for social justice concerns. They often believe it’s futile to try to reform unfair systems and policies that disproportionately affect Blacks because racism is seen as a “heart” issue. As if getting enough Jesus in your heart means everything else will just sort itself out.

That’s why many white evangelicals view police killings of unarmed Black people as isolated incidents rather than connect the dots to see systemic patterns. When George Floyd’s 2020 murder by a white police officer prompted national protests, evangelicals pushed back with “All lives matter.” Sociologists argue that this kind of thinking only helps maintain the status quo and prevents us from addressing racial inequality.

During a recent workshop on race, several of my fellow church members and I discussed these white Christian filters with members of two black churches. We talked about white privilege, microaggressions, and color blindness, and how economic and sociological systems contribute to unequal outcomes.

We were asked to consider why racial disparities—like lack of generational wealth and differences in health outcomes, policing and hiring practices—still remain long after laws changed in this country. We agreed that talking about race is not divisive but clarifying. Naming race as an issue doesn’t make white people the “bad guys;” it’s about the unfair systems we all live in.

“Colorblindness” might be thought of as neutral and unbiased, but it assumes equal conditions. Equality is treating everyone the same; fairness is making sure the outcome isn’t distorted by factors that shouldn’t matter.

U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts infamously once wrote, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” which ignores the fact that the damage already done to disadvantaged people still hasn’t been fixed.

Which brings us back to the Supreme Court ruling. It’s happening at the same time that DEI initiatives are seen as suspect and Black military generals are being fired.

The Rev. Cameron Trimble offers some insight: “When governments lose the public’s confidence, they have a choice: they can change direction, or they can try to keep power by making it harder for people to take part.”

And when Christians identify with those in power instead of supporting the vulnerable, she adds, they risk losing their powerful and prophetic voice. Recall how the prophets Amos and Isaiah condemned laws that deprived people of justice, even when they’re couched in moral language.

“The biblical concern was never only private morality. It was public life,” Trimble writes. “Who has power. Who is protected. Who is excluded. Whose suffering is considered acceptable collateral damage.

“These rulings reveal the kind of society we are becoming: a society where rights depend on conditions. A society where, in theory, everyone can participate in democracy, but in reality, it becomes less equal. A society where courts claim neutrality but actually support those already in power.”

The Callais ruling reflects the kind of voter suppression attempts we saw during the Jim Crow era, says attorney Robert Hubbell. After all, poll taxes and literacy tests never mentioned race either. Hubbell says critical reforms will be needed when political power shifts, including passing legislation that requires nonpartisan state redistricting commissions, passing the Freedom to Vote Act and expanding the Supreme Court to loosen the grip of the far-right majority.

And just as during the Civil Rights movement, the church also has a key role in making sure our “endowed rights” are protected for all, says the Rev. William Barber.

“We have to call the church to its public mission, which is always the public exorcism of the impure spirits that make the American house sick,” Barber says. They include the societal “demons” of systemic racism, ecological devastation, denial of healthcare, and white Christian nationalism.

Barber shares an unforgettable warning from one of his seminary professors, Dr. William Turner: “Call your spiritual experience whatever you want, but if it doesn’t produce a quarrel with the world’s injustices, then your claim of spirituality is suspect.”

We can indeed do more, knowing that we are all in this together.

We can speak openly and candidly about racism as an affront to the divinely ordained dignity of each human being.

We can help defend our multiracial democracy and the right to free and fair elections. (To support a legal organization that will challenge every discriminatory map drawn after this ruling, I hope you’ll join me in donating to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund).

We can participate in voter education, engagement, and registration efforts to mobilize the largest multiracial turnout in our history for the November midterms.

We can do more than we think we can.

When I faced surgery on my foot a week ago, my peers and I began joking that it’s just “patch, patch, patch” from here on out. We find ourselves now in that famed season of life where our conversations begin with our latest ailments and upcoming medical procedures.

Photo by Nicole Moore on Unsplash

To be clear, I’m on the path to full mobility and my surgery was nowhere near life-threatening. Nevertheless I will still use a knee scooter for a few more weeks. I haven’t left the house in over a week but have become fairly expert at maneuvering tight spaces in our kitchen and bathrooms: turning, backing up, and even lifting the scooter while balancing to protect my non-weight bearing foot.

My experience is small potatoes compared to people who face their own impending mortality. I thought of that when a gunman forced attendees to evacuate the recent White House Correspondents Dinner. The thought of a potential assassin getting that close to the president and everyone else in the line of power was unsettling, to say the least. Attendees fled or ducked for cover as dignitaries were quickly whisked out.

Most people in that kind of fight-or-flight situation would be focused on saving themselves and thinking of their loved ones. Not our president.

Within an hour of his life supposedly being threatened, Trump was using the foiled assassination attempt to promote the “need” for his bullet-proof ballroom. This claim makes no sense because the Correspondents Dinner is a private affair and not a White House event. But no matter. GOP loyalists promptly joined in, even calling for taxpayers to fund this extravagant ballroom, although Trump said earlier that private donors had already paid for it.

How unlike their passive “thoughts and prayers” response to multiple school shootings that have taken the lives of hundreds of children in this country!

Their response was also tone-deaf as Americans are experiencing higher gas prices and soaring costs of groceries, thanks to this administration’s policies. I can’t imagine anyone saying, “Well, we might not be able to pay for that prescription but at least we’ll have a ballroom!”

No other president in US history has needed an expensive ballroom to feel safe. President Obama’s life was threatened 11 times yet we never even heard about most of the attempts. Maybe having a network of seasoned nonpartisan experts at the Secret Service and the FBI is not a bad thing.

Trump’s quick pivot to a sales pitch only fed skepticism over whether the whole thing was staged. I don’t fault anyone for thinking that. After all, we’ve seen photos of Trump’s inner circle smirking and laughing minutes afterward. Not exactly the reaction of people who were afraid they were going to be taken down by a gunman’s random shots.

Their lack of seriousness was a sharp contrast to an interview I heard this week with someone else facing a life-threatening situation. Former Nebraska senator Ben Sasse was recently diagnosed with aggressive pancreatic cancer and has undergone experimental therapy, but his prognosis is grim.

Sasse was remarkably vulnerable as he grieved the fact that he won’t be there to walk his daughters down the aisle or watch his 14-year-old son’s shoulders grow taller. But he also recognizes that his diagnosis is prompting him to speak truth more boldly about himself, the country he loves, and the way politics has been trivialized in the last decade.

“We’re always on the clock. Some of us have the benefit of knowing our time is finite and defined, and it becomes an opportunity to talk about bigger stuff,” Sasse told 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley.

Photo credit: CBS News

Sasse bemoaned the fact that Americans have become “pretty impoverished spiritually and communally” and lack a sense of common cause.

“I love America. I think there’s a lot of big and meaty things we should have been talking about and we still can talk about,” Sasse said, before referencing how politicians play more to the camera than tend to business. “The Senate needs to be less like Instagram. The Senate should be more deliberative, and that means less smack-down nonsense. The Senate should be plodding and steady and boring and trustworthy.”

Sasse’s right-sized priorities and focus jives with what I’ve seen as a hospice chaplain. My terminal patients are most concerned about the well-being of their loved ones, not themselves. When asked how they want to be remembered, they’ll cite their character qualities or the positive and lasting impact they’ve had on others. They don’t want to be forgotten, but they view their legacy as a reflection of their personal values and the quality of their relationships rather than material possessions or wealth.

You would think Trump’s obvious health concerns would prompt deeper reflection. Instead he thinks name-branded buildings will remind people that he once lived. That’s because his insulated and indulged billionaire lifestyle has kept him from investing in mentoring others, nurturing his family, or sharing personal life lessons. He hasn’t volunteered his time or shared his wealth through philanthropy or created anything that benefits those outside the Trump family.

By contrast, former president Jimmy Carter continued his humanitarian work for the underprivileged, and kept up his writing and public appearance schedule well into his 90s after receiving a cancer diagnosis. His post-presidency legacy will be the highlight of his record of service. Carter finally entered hospice care in 2023, saying he was “at ease with death.”

Actor Michael J. Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1991 at age 29. He’s written about his long, progressive battle and about finding acceptance and humor, and focusing not on his disease but on the gratitude he feels for his life and family.

Sen. John McCain remained highly productive after his July 2017 glioblastoma diagnosis. He cast the deciding vote against the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and managed the annual defense bill, which passed with bipartisan support. Cain said he felt “more energetic” and driven to serve while he could.

Trump is satisfied with surrounding himself with the trappings of wealth like marble tiles, chandeliers and gold trim. He compares the size and height of things. He’s swayed by gifts of medals and fake trophies. He’ll accept anything from luxury jets to knickknacks.

Instead of using his power and influence to make life better for others, he’s obsessed with building monuments to his own name. He forgets that like the historic East Wing, they can be easily bulldozed over time. No wonder he wonders if he’ll “go to heaven.”

Jesus called his followers to a different path in life: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven.” What matters most from the divine perspective are the things that last forever--not hoarded billions or bricks and mortar, but God’s love, truth, and people.

Before my anesthesia from surgery wore off, I was reminded of how easily I can become numb to the reality of my human brokenness. But each “ping” and “zing” of healing in my bones, nerves and joints lets me know what I need to take care of and what’s most important.

And what’s most important is Ben Sasse’s clarity, not Donald Trump’s delusions.

“Death is wicked. Death is evil. Death is not how it’s supposed to be, but it’s a touch of grace because it forces me to tell the truth,” Sasse reflected. “And the lie I want to tell myself is that I’m the center of everything and I’m going to be around forever. … I hate cancer, but I’m also grateful for it. I tell a lot more truth to myself than I used to do when I thought I was super omni-competent and interesting.”

Trump, though decades older than Sasse, hasn’t reached that point of self-awareness and truth-telling yet, but we can.

We can remember that our ability to control our lives and our possessions is just an illusion.

We can invest in the essential things that faith traditions teach us to honor and hold dear.

We can view unsettling news and health setbacks as a call to better notice and care for ourselves and those around us.

We can do more than we think we can.

The anesthesiologist had warned me on Monday that I was about to get the “party pack” of toe surgery. Repairing an arthritic big toe and multiple hammer toes required the insertion of pins and rods, and a bone graft from my heel. My osteopenia (softer than normal bones) caused one of my toe bones to splinter during surgery. I began to feel all this when the nerve block wore off the second night after the procedures. It seemed that I could feel all the new bionic parts and screaming nerve ends until the potent meds kicked in. Let me just say it’s important to stay on top of your pain meds schedule.

I’ve been learning ever since how to navigate with a non-weight bearing foot encased in a post-surgical boot. It’s harder than it sounds. I’m supposed to keep the bandanged foot off the floor, not even using it for balance. A few days into recovery, I can now get onto the knee scooter from the couch and use the bathroom by myself, which feels like a huge accomplishment. My husband and I have a much-deepened appreciation for caregivers!

My sister asked me how I was coping with the initial breakthrough pain. I said it helped to visualize it as something helpful rather than something evil to endure through gritted teeth. I imagined embracing the pain as a reminder that my nerves and bones were regenerating and reconnecting to overcome the damage of a needed surgical wounding. Our bodies do wondrous and hard work, and that deserves to be honored.

When I looked at it that way, I began to breathe more deeply rather than hold my breath until the pain meds kicked in. And I learned to balance the timing of my meds to better cooperate with the healing process!

I’m in that season of life where several of my peers have gone through something similar. What a blessing! Folks from my Sunday school class and longtime friends have surrounded me with expert counsel. I didn’t know how much a knee scooter, crutches, cast cover for showering, and a raised toilet seat would help me better navigate my daily routines.

It’s a reminder how much we need each other during any painful season, and that we each have something to offer. It shows us that others have also gone through hard times. And it offers the hope that we, too, will survive what feels excruciatingly hard.

We can indeed do more than we think we can.

And I’m deeply grateful for all the prayers and good thoughts sent my way!

Pastor and author Nadia Bolz-Weber recently reflected on these questions while steaming out the creases in an American flag for her military-veteran father’s funeral.

As she worked to honor that defining symbol of our nation, Bolz-Weber grieved that a loud minority in our country often brandishes the flag but is not really committed to liberty and justice for all.

“I want to take back my country’s flag,” she writes. “And the term patriot, while we’re at it.”

She makes a good point. She’s not the only clear-minded citizen who is reluctant to fly the flag on national holidays lest they be seen as a MAGA supporter who wants to “take back America.” After all, the president has embraced and kissed our flag at rallies. His supporters sport glittered flag-themed clothing, then go home to fly Trump flags alongside Old Glory on their front porches.

How did that partisan right-wing movement take captive our national symbols and redefine patriotism as the agenda of the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus?

Words and symbols matter.

Patriotism is not the same as “uncritical loyalty,” Bolz-Weber points out. “Sometimes it looks more like grief. Sometimes more like argument. Sometimes more like refusing to let a beautiful thing be used to bless our worst instincts.”

I feel the same about how MAGA has twisted the Christian faith beyond Scriptural recognition into a narrow and flat “biblical worldview.” It’s become the religion of MAGA, not Jesus. The president evens sells Trump Bibles. It’s infiltrated the church so much that in the past decade I’ve sometimes been hesitant to let people know I’m a Christian. I don’t want anyone to mistake this white Baby Boomer churchgoer for a Fox News junkie. My faith has nothing to do with the idolatrous support of Donald Trump.

None other than Christianity Today editor Russell Moore says many white church members in the US can no longer tell the difference between Trump and Jesus. “That’s why many people’s test of loyalty right now is not whether you hold to the gospel or to the mission or to the creeds or to the transformed life but whether you are sufficiently ‘in line’ on politics,” Moore writes.

We’ve seen cross necklaces worn on the throats of White House spokespersons and Cabinet members even as they lie to the public about this administration’s actions and intentions. We’ve heard a bloodthirsty defense secretary cite imprecatory Old Testament psalms (!) to justify violence in an unprovoked war. We’ve watched evangelical and Pentecostal pastors fawn over their “chosen one” because he furthers their white Christian nationalism agenda. We’ve heard politicians arrogantly try to correct the pope’s theology. And we’ve seen a president post a blasphemous image of himself as Jesus, the healer of the nation.

Bible teacher Beth Moore nailed this distortion of the faith when she warned evangelicals way back in 2020:

Let’s be clear: MAGA does not represent America, and MAGA idolatry of Donald Trump does not reflect Christianity. So let’s reclaim a few terms.

Christians know from their Scriptures that, especially in a nation of immigrants, we were all foreigners at one time. That means we hold space to honor differences rather than demand uniformity. We don’t all pray the same way but most Christians don’t force their beliefs on anyone; we model and invite a shared understanding and respect. We don’t consider empathy a sin; rather we seek to be guided by compassion and love. We heed the teachings of Jesus, not the interpretation of a pastor seeking to curry favor with those in power.

Patriots appreciate the freedom and abundance our country offers and are grateful our forebears worked to make sure everyone had access. They set aside national parks so we can all enjoy rather than exploit its beauty. They funded public schools, libraries and museums so everyone can be educated. They added amendments to ensure fairness, no matter your gender or skin color. They know that our Constitution is aspirational, and that we are called to interpret it in ways that benefit all of us.

I’m weary of a political movement that is not truly patriotic but only blindly loyal to its own. It’s a movement that doesn’t really like democracy or the Constitution or the government; it disregards the rule of law and constitutional freedoms; it’s not interested in protecting our land, water and air; and it seems to despise half the people who are here.

I’m tired of seeing white nationalists use Christianity to further their agenda: to justify their desire for global dominance; to seek preferential treatment in a diverse country; to restrict the rights of women and people of color; to reverse immigration trends and restrict asylum seekers; to mock those struggling with gender issues; and to label it all as a “biblical worldview.”

It’s time to recover both our flag and our faith, and what they truly represent. I’m glad to see more people at No Kings protests proudly waving the US flag (many of which were hung upside down to highlight the current state of the nation) to show they love this country and want to see it restored. I’m also encouraged to see many faith leaders and clergy—even the Pope—fulfilling their call to speak truth to power and distinguish the gospel message from a partisan agenda.

A man walks through Boston Common with multiple upside-down U.S. flags attached to his back. (Avary Amaral/ Beacon Staff)

And I was especially pleased to see Hungarians show us how to overthrow a longtime authoritarian regime, especially after our MAGA vice president campaigned for him. Victor Orbán was one of Trump’s role models as he dismantled democratic institutions, controlled news outlets, replaced judges with loyalists, faced corruption scandals, and enriched a handful over an entire country’s well-being.

There’s a growing momentum to rid ourselves of a regime that aspires to do the same. It turns out more Americans love what this country stands for than support a failing administration’s grasp for power. Trump’s approval polls are tanking, MAGA politicians and pundits are defecting, legislative seats are flipping blue, more people are turning out to protest, neighbors are still defending immigrants, and independent media not beholden to corporations bowing to Trump are booming.

To be sure, we now face a generational task of restoring trust with our global alliances, with whom we used to be a “band of brothers,” fighting side-by-side whenever democracy was actually under threat. Trump’s short-sightedness and hubris have left us standing isolated, vulnerable, and alone.

Writer Lucian Truscott recently summed up how the world now sees us:

“The world cringed in embarrassment when [Trump] rattled his saber about taking over Greenland, when he kidnapped the leader of a neighboring nation and used blackmail to enrich himself from its oil resources, when he attempted to blackmail the country of Norway into awarding him a Nobel Prize that they had no power to disburse, and when he slapped gold leaf all over the White House and then tore down a third of it so he could build a monument to himself on land that for more than two centuries had been sacrosanct and protected from mania such as his.”

Even now, Trump’s refusal to extricate us from his illegal war on Iran has disrupted international trade and imperiled the world’s economy. We were better off before the Israeli government and real estate investors talked him into waging war. Recall that the Straight of Hormuz was already open and Iran was honoring a nuclear agreement negotiated by President Obama. But like all things having to do with Obama, Trump childishly tore up that agreement in his first term.

Joni Mitchell was right: Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.

That’s why we need a redefinition of terms. Perhaps patriotism is not baptizing a politician who offers transactional favors but a reminder to live into the principles our nation was founded upon. Perhaps Christianity is a faith journey that leads us not to justify harm and power but to follow a path of humility, compassion and truth.

Nadia Bolz-Weber describes patriotism as believing so deeply in what the US claims to be about that we refuse to settle for less. And Christian theology, she adds, is too potentially transformational to be left in the hands of those who use it to justify their dominance over others.

“Maybe that, too, is a form of patriotism AND Christian faith,” she observes, “to hold something gently, grieve what has been done in its name, and still refuse to give up on what it could yet mean.”

We can resist efforts to dismantle our unique American experiment and to restrict divine blessings meant for all.

We can recognize where true patriotism and genuine faith are breaking through, even in a time when partisan politics tries to narrow the definition of both.

We can follow a different path and embody what it means to truly love our country, our God, and one another.

We can do more than we think we can.

I’ve been searching hard this spring for signs of new life as buds begin to appear on our trees. It’s taken an agonizingly long time, how slowly they sprout after a winter of stark bareness. The change is barely perceptible, and then one day, nearly everything has bloomed, everywhere and all at once!

Resurrection Sunday is a reminder of how things can seem so empty and barren, until it’s not. New life can show up in an instant.

We are clinging to that hope and looking hard for that kind of change to erupt in us and our country, even as we grieve the loss of everything we’ve valued, from military and scientific expertise to appreciating diversity to global alliances that have kept us safe for 80 years. Oh, and democracy. We like that, too.

This week felt like the last straw: I don’t know about you, but I’m angry at how a would-be autocrat’s ego and utter recklessness has jangled our well-being and shaken the world. Whether he has dementia or is just mentally diminished, there is no longer any doubt that Trump lacks the capacity and character to serve as our leader.

We are tired and we are fed up. This administration has served none of our interests. Worst of all, its destructive agenda has been rolled out in the name of God. Even as Trump issued this week a horrific statement threatening to wipe out an entire civilization, evangelical leaders like Franklin Graham continue to support him, someone who represents the very opposite of Jesus, just to hold onto access to power.

Trump is indeed declining, and especially now, so many of us are awaiting word of this one final death. By all observations, it will happen sooner than later. History tells us how this will end.

I called my Substack “Pulling Back the Curtain” because I saw how Trump’s bullying and intimidating behavior compared to that of my abusive ex-husband. It’s fitting that my ex also claimed to be a Christian.

An abuser/madman will often lose his mind under the weight of the accumulated crazy he carries. Some authoritarian madmen end their own lives in despair when they feel cornered or discover they can’t get their way all the time. Others succumb to the natural physical consequences of their own abusive behavior.

My abusive ex-husband’s indulgent and self-centered lifestyle led to heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and depression. (Trump’s enablers also are not transparent about his physical decline, which we can see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears). My ex died in memory care in an assisted living facility, his mind blurred by a lifetime of deluded thinking. Much of that could have been avoided had he sought the help he needed, but people with a narcissistic personality disorder often resist external counsel.

We are experiencing that on a national level with Trump. Scripture is instructive about what happens when a nation’s unhealthy leader goes awry. King Saul was so paranoid and power-hungry that he tried to kill his beloved David and ended up falling on his own sword. The proud King Nebuchadnezzar saw the writing on the wall but ended up eating grass like an ox before he came to his senses.

There’s no doubt now that Trump is out of his mind, and has been for some time. Whatever his diagnosis, he clearly lacks the emotional control and virtue of character needed to be entrusted with our future.

He’s fed us through an emotional wringer this week, starting with his social media post on Easter, a high holy day for Christians. As we commemorated the resurrection of Christ, Trump displayed the depths of his vulgarity and a complete lack of self-regulation by threatening to blast an entire civilization into the “stone age.”

He followed that up on Tuesday by threatening to destroy Iran forever unless it corrected the consequences of his own invasion: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

Beyond startling the world and torturing Americans’ psyches, he put everyone in the US military chain of command at risk. Calling for genocide is a war crime for which there is no statute of limitations. I hardly expected to agree with former MAGA firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene’s response:

“Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness. … On Easter, of all days, we as Christians should be reminded that the son of God died and rose from the grave so that we can be forgiven once and for all of our sins. Jesus commanded us to love one another and forgive one another. Even our enemies. … Our President is not a Christian and his words and actions should not be supported by Christians. … This is not making America great again, this is evil.”

On some level, Trump must know the future doesn’t look good for him, and he appears ready to take down the whole world with him. He surely reveled in having all eyes on his every word as we watched and waited, with nerves wrangled and stomachs turning, to see what he might do. The mental anguish he so needlessly inflicts on us will be among the hardest things to forgive.

It’s been maddening to see the passive complicity around Trump. Somehow his enablers have been OK with his breaking things in rapid succession. It’s happened so fast that it’s worth recalling some of what’s happened. Since January 2025, he’s:

• Misused the presidential pardon to free insurrectionists—some of whom have gone on to commit other crimes—and fraudsters who have left thousands of victims without recompense;

• Insulted and bullied our longtime allies, believing the myth that America can go it alone;

• Threatened and disrupted countries in our own hemisphere;

• Let his ICE thugs illegally deport non-criminal immigrants and kill US citizens;

• Showed indebtedness to Putin by abandoning Ukraine and lifting sanctions against Russia;

• Surrounded himself with incompetent sycophants rubber-stamped by Congress and then fired only females in his inner circle;

• Allowed DOGE to ransack and extract private citizen data and fire thousands of needed federal workers in a quest for nonexistent fraud and miniscule waste;

• Urged Congress to pass a huge ugly bill that cuts programs for needy Americans while giving tax cuts to those who don’t need it;

• Pushed for Congress to pass the voter-restrictive SAVE Act and to “do it for Jesus.”

• Launched an illegal war in Iran after ignoring military experts and listening to real estate developers invested in the Gulf States and Israel.

Sadly, his insanity is contagious, based on what his supporters believe:

* Trump’s ear magically grew back after the “assassination attempt” in Butler, Pennsylvania, and real Secret Service agents would have allowed him to stand up unprotected and pose defiantly while his life was under threat. (We recall how agents really react when President Reagan was slammed into a car after he was shot);

* A convicted felon and reality-show businessman who inspired an insurrection was nevertheless still qualified to serve again;

* Fox News is not biased, even though its entire prime-time lineup is hosted by supporters of Trump;

* Eight million attendees at No Kings rallies are just “paid actors”;

* The Epstein files are of no consequence, even though other countries arrest leaders and launch probes based on what’s been released;

* Paula White was right to compare Trump to Jesus because he’d also been “falsely accused” and persecuted, but will be triumphant nevertheless;

Even as most Americans suffer under the weight of these nonstop lies and gross injustice, MAGA Christians chirp up on social media to say we should “Fear God, and nothing else.” As if to say: “Just buck up. It’ll all be fine as long as you’re on God’s side. Nothing in this life really matters. It’s the after-life that counts.” That kind of posturing is utterly dismissive of human suffering and a weak attempt to distract us from the fact we’re witnessing a horrific aberration in our nation’s history.

“We are watching people in positions of power invoke the name of Jesus while pursuing domination,” says Rev. Benjamin Cremer. “While this is always unsettling and deeply disturbing and should never be normalized, this is not new. It is what authoritarianism has always tried to do: attach itself to God in order to justify itself.”

I seem to recall Scripture that tells us God is not mocked, and God’s justice cannot be fooled by those who claim to act in God’s name.

We don’t have to settle for this. We can do so much better if we can just imagine what it’s like to live in a stable country again with leadership that seeks our best interests.

Suleika Jaouad, a leukemia survivor who has learned how to cope with suffering, was recently inspired by the work of resistance scholars to creatively imagine how serious change could happen in this country.

“Just 3.5 percent of people, dreaming up a different existence and acting on it. That’s all it takes to reshape the world,” Jaouad writes. “Before any change happens in the real world, it has to happen in our minds. We have to dream about what could be before we can create it.”

I can imagine a different and better kind of leadership, one that actually benefits Americans, can’t you? I’ve seen it in politicians like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Texas State Rep. James Talerico. I’ve seen it in faith leaders who stand with the oppressed and the marginalized. And I see it in ordinary Americans who continue to love and protect their neighbors, no matter where they came from.

We may not see it fully quite yet, but like the new buds on our trees, I’m confident something better is being birthed among us. Fear and anger can mobilize rather than cower us. It’s why Trump’s hand-picked candidates are being defeated in off-year elections, why new and younger candidates are running for office, and why the GOP is so panicked over the midterms they’re resigning in historic numbers.

Photo by Robin Russell

Easter and springtime remind us that rebirth is happening all around us.

The gravity of where we’re at now begs for unyielding determination. Sometimes it feels like no one’s doing anything, because ordinary life goes on. Resistance is still taking place, awaiting its time. The very people who hid Jews during the Holocaust also just made dinner and went to church.

History informs us that an empire’s fear-and-control tactics are never as secure as they seem. Authoritarians are fragile humans, not supermen. Stories of resurrection tell us that empires rise and fall, but love has the final word. And love never fails.

“What the resurrection reveals more than anything else is that love is stronger than death,” observes mystic Richard Rohr. “It doesn’t fit any logical explanation. Yet this is the mystery: that nothing dies forever, and that all that has died will be reborn in love. So, to be a Christian is to be inevitably and forever a person of hope.”

We can name the truth about the leaders who have failed us and call for stability and sanity instead in those who want to represent us.

We can view each assault on our national psyche as a deepening of the call to envision the change we need in ourselves and in our leaders.

We can remind ourselves of ancient patterns in nature and history, that death is always followed by rebirth.

We can do more than we think we can.

We now know that more than eight million Americans participated at 3,300 sites across the country. Protests were held in every congressional district in the country. These protests penetrated into deeply red states, in rural and Republican areas. They showed that resistance is embedded everywhere.

One in every 43 Americans showed up. Based on the reactions I witnessed, many others agree that this administration hugely unpopular. Trump’s approval rating has dropped to a meager 37 percent. It’s no wonder: In just the last few weeks we’ve seen our “wannabe king” try to bypass Congress and wage illegal wars, undermine the Constitution by attacking voting rights and birthright citizenship, and accept bribes, gifts, and awards to salve his ego and enrich his own family.

Photo credit: Robert Hubble on Substack

A protester uses humor to demonstrate her resistance in Great Barrington, Mass.

The resistance is growing. No Kings protests were larger than previous events in all 50 states. Participants were younger and more diverse, no doubt motivated by the senseless war in Iran. Protests have grown from 5 million in June, to 7 million in October, to 8 million on Saturday. More than a dozen countries joined in solidarity, including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Australia.

And the resistance is being noticed. Counter-protesters also showed up this time. Here in Dallas, leaders from the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers came to agitate and disrupt the crowd, leading to one man’s arrest for assault.

At the first No Kings event in a mostly red suburb, some drivers were visibly annoyed to see an anti-MAGA protest in their area. More middle fingers were aimed our way than at previous locations, even as I held a sign with a Bible verse: “Act justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly with your God.” Other drivers revved their engines to intimidate us. One woman leaned out her passenger window to shout “You’re idiots!”

We held steady and returned their scorn with a smile and a wave, glad to be on the front lines as we broke new ground in a red stronghold.

But even there, people showed more appreciation than disdain for our efforts. Many people clapped and waved as they drove by, giving a thumbs-up and raising their fists in solidarity. Others honked their horns in support. One driver even left his car during a long red light to perform an improvised dance. He ended by bending down and nearly touching the ground, then sweeping his arms high above his head before blowing kisses toward us over and over, as if to say “From your lips to God’s ears.”

To be clear, a couple of our sidewalk protesters at this new location were also negatively outspoken, an unpleasant anomaly among the events I’ve attended. One man waved a hugely unhelpful F*** Trump flag. Another approached a driver to challenge him on whether his support of MAGA meant that he also supported pedophiles. We positioned ourselves further away from both of them.

They clearly didn’t heed the guidelines local organizers provide: Remain peaceful, don’t engage with people who are negative; express hopeful sentiments; and stay well away from the flow of traffic. That ensures these events are typically joy-filled and uplifting, with flag-waving participants who offer a better message for our country than we get from the White House.

Photo credit: Robin Russell

Meeting another red hat resister at a No Kings protest outside of Dallas.

Protests are a positive reminder of why we don’t have to go through this era alone. Participants find solidarity at these in-person events and often sign on for more civic involvement afterward. At No Kings 3, we were invited to monthly gatherings of veteran rights and Democratic groups to meet political candidates and learn how to canvass neighborhoods or write postcards to encourage voting.

Social movement scholar Dr. Liz Corrigan says mass protests are critical to building a resistance movement because participants “share some similarity of grievance against state actions,” notes Substack writer Jennifer Rubin.

“At protests, folks are registering voters, organizing volunteers, building databases for further actions, debating various courses of action, and creating relationships,” Corrigan observes. “It is literally how people build skills for solidarity actions as they are forced into more immediate confrontation with the state.”

Nonviolence scholar Steven Levitsky adds that “the three domains in which democracy is defended or lost are the ballot box, the courts, and the streets,” writes journalist Rebecca Solnit. “His point was that no single one is sufficient — and that the streets, far from being the weakest, are the foundation the other two rest on.”

That’s because protests do what other restraints on power cannot. They relieve our sense of isolation when authoritarians try to control us through division. They shift public discourse. And they build relationships between people who might never have connected otherwise.

Joining with so many others who feel as we do brings the kind of joy and hope we need to sustain our resistance. Last Saturday, we all joked about how much better our protest signs would be if we got paid. We laughed at funny signs and inflatable costumes with people we’d just met. We felt encouraged by young families who showed up with children in strollers.

Photo by Robin Russell

More young people showed up for positive change, for the sake of their children.

“Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism,” Solnit writes. “And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.”

The momentum is growing. Groups like Indivisible are already calling for a national “May Day” boycott on May 1, when we send a message to those ruled by profit. Its slogan is: No School. No Work. No Shopping.

These highly visible events expose what we’re being asked to accept. They prove that Americans have not surrendered despite the gaslighting and cruelty inflicted by this administration. They show how many of us believe something else might be possible.

We can show together that we still have a say in how this turns out.

We can consider it a small thing when others belittle us for our efforts, and show them love anyway.

We can demonstrate that love is always stronger than hate, and it never, ever gives up.

We can do more than we think we can.

International watchdog organizations reported this week that the level of democracy in America at the end of 2025 dropped back to the 1965 level. This is a historic disruption for people used to living in a democracy. It is not normal to see our country so backslidden. It’s a wakeup call: We must refuse to accept what we know is not right.

The Project 2025 authoritarian playbook unleashed by this administration has attacked far too many of our democratic norms: a free press, independent courts, separation of powers, accountability and transparency in government, voting rights, the peaceful transfer of power, and the idea that the law applies to everyone.

Many of us mourn what this recklessness will leave for the next generation if it’s unchecked: the loss of decency and respect in our discourse, the disruption of international alliances, the rise of propaganda and lies, the damage to our climate, and the increasing costs of health care, gas, and groceries.

Polls show that most Americans are heartsick about what’s been happening, yet many of us feel isolated in our grief. As a hospice chaplain, I know that what might feel like a solitary grief affects others around us as well. Grief is an expression of love that is felt by everyone surrounding a loss.

Americans could use a national “grief share” group to process what’s been happening under Trump 2.0. People who love and care about their country need to know they’re not alone. Christians who see white Christian nationalists trying to hijack their faith need to know that many people of faith likewise feel horrified.

Together we must say “Enough.” Public protest is a powerful way to do that.

Don O’Neill, an evangelical Christian, attends a “No Kings” protest, June 14, 2025, in Philadelphia. (RNS photo/Jack Jenkins)

I participated in several in 2025 that consistently grew larger as Trump 2.0 continued its destructive path. The No Kings protests this Saturday at more than 3,000 locations across the country will likely be the largest nonviolent protest in US history.

Yet people often ask: “What good does it do to protest? It doesn’t change anything.” That’s not really true. Scholar Timothy Snyder says that while they may not initially change a leader’s heart or mind, non-violent protests can help stop authoritarian takeovers.

“For authoritarians to win, they need their supporters to be active, the majority to be silent, and their actions to seem normal,” Snyder writes. “Protest shows that their supporters are in the minority, that the majority will not be silent, and that it is the people who set the standards.”

Such public sentiment seems to have helped in Florida this week, where Trump suffered a major defeat in his own backyard. Democrat Emily Gregory flipped a state legislative seat in a district that includes Mar-a-Lago and that Trump had won in 2024 by 19 points. Gregory defeating the GOP candidate by 2 points, which means there’s been a total swing of 21 points in two years. Robert Hubbell says a large swing like that is not possible without flipping some of Trump’s 2024 base, unless GOP voters just sat out the election.

A poll released Tuesday confirms a shift in the base with respondents citing the economy as the reason. Support for Trump among men has dropped 20 points since 2024; among men under 45, it was a 25-point drop.

The economy is just one of the many things that concern Americans each day. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Monday shows Trump’s approval rating has fallen to a record low of 36% because of surging fuel prices and the hugely unpopular war in Iran. No Kings protests will help keep the momentum going by providing a visual of what’s weighing on our minds.

It’s interesting that the Saturday protests will fall on the eve of Palm Sunday. I hope many people of faith will lead the way, as they did during the Civil Rights movement, to show that our allegiance is to a power higher than an earthly authority. Members of the Interfaith Alliance, for example, have committed to do just that.

The Rev. William Barber II, founder of Repairers of the Breach, addresses a “No Kings” protest on June 14, 2025 in Philadelphia. (RNS photo/Jack Jenkins)

Christians who reject the dominance-and-control narrative of white Christian nationalism are certain to have a presence. Nearly every mainline denomination has stood up against mass deportations and cutting social services for the poor. Volunteers and clergy from these congregations serve immigrant neighbors, preach about peace and justice, protest at ICE centers, and are trained to protect voting rights. Organizers at my United Methodist church are expecting triple the number of people from our congregation who usually protest show up this Saturday.

By standing together, people of all beliefs (and those with none) will create a safe space where we can speak the truth about authoritarian leaders who try hard to stifle dissent and refuse to be questioned. Gathering in huge numbers will amplify our outrage at the damage being done to our country and our faith.

Protests give us the chance to connect with fellow patriots who love their country more than political power, and people of faith who know the difference between worship and idolatry.

These protests have a ripple effect, reminding observers that we are still free to exercise our rights to assemble and speak our mind even as we criticize government actions. Protests also help shift public opinion as people see how unpopular this administration is and how many of us refuse to call any of its actions normal.

People across the country and around the world will see that millions of Americans know how far off track we’ve gotten. They’ll also hear what we want instead:

• a president who speaks in complete sentences and shows basic human kindness and decency (a huge ask, I know).

• leaders who value expertise in science, economics, and the military more than their own gut feelings.

• people of integrity we can trust to faithfully govern instead of rage-tweet while we sleep.

• leaders who solve actual problems rather than create international crises to distract from personal and governance failures.

• presidents who work to help all of us thrive rather than just build their own family’s wealth.

• an administration that tells the truth instead of gaslighting and deflecting the people they serve.

• presidents who take responsibility for the state of the country under their watch rather than blame predecessors long out of office.

In the final run, protests benefit participants most of all. Those who show up find renewed hope by being with people who are united, not divided. We draw courage and strength from people who share the weight of our grief. And we are greatly encouraged seeing the reactions of passersby who honk and wave in support.

Facebook photo from a weekly protest outside an ICE office in Framingham, Mass.

Author Shannan Martin calls such positive communal experiences one of the “counterweights” that balance the emotional and spiritual load we carry individually.

“My community is among my steadiest counterweights, centering me on the bedrock belief that God’s weighty hand always and only tips the scales toward goodness,” Martin writes in her new book, Counterweights: An Essential Practice for Holding Hope in a Heavy World. “If it is not good, it is not God.”

A community of like-minded strangers can help us rediscover our faith in humanity. We find our bearings again, and we leave better able to hold the tension of the good and the awful, knowing others stand with us.

I invite you to come join us. Full disclosure: You will not be paid for your time, no matter what MAGA claims. But you will find a warm welcome and meet new friends. Here’s where to find a location near you.

We can rediscover our agency by speaking out against corruption, injustice, and recklessness that endanger us all.

We can help stem the ambitions of authoritarian wannabes trying to subvert our country’s democracy and misrepresent our faith.

We can find hope, courage, and renewed strength from like-minded people who share our griefs and concerns.

We can do more than we think we can.

We’ve been living with chaos at home for more than a year and now our impulsive leader has led us into another dangerous international conflict, this time with no clear objective or consensus of support. It’s maddening and frightening to see the president waste more than $1 billion a day as he recklessly bombs an already volatile region, killing innocent lives, disrupting diplomatic alliances, and seeding even more antagonism against the US.

Trump now finds himself cornered and alone in a crisis of his own making. After insulting and bullying other countries for years, he is reaping what he has sown. No one is coming to his aid.

His short-sighted decisions are also affecting our lives back home as we grow increasingly concerned over rising fuel prices and risking more US troops. Ordinary Americans are carrying daily trauma over what he’s inflicting. We find ourselves asking, “With everything so out of control, why isn’t anyone doing anything to stop this?”

Photo by Klemen Vrankar on Unsplash

But instead of initiating impeachment, the GOP-led Congress is distracted by proposed legislation driven by the debunked idea of election fraud. Lawmakers are set to debate a new poll tax on voters, aka the SAVE Act, even as the world burns and pedophiles go unpunished.

So the question remains: When our leaders completely lose their way or perhaps have no moral compass to guide them at all, how do we go on living normal lives under the chaos they create?

We are learning for ourselves in real time how to live in dark and uncertain times. Americans as a whole aren’t used to this. Sometimes it feels like we’re living split lives: doom-scrolling and fretting over the latest catastrophe while still shopping for groceries, sorting laundry, and cooking dinner.

It must be blissful to live inside the MAGA bubble of certainty where the president is always “winning,” but those of us who live in reality often need help finding stability amid the chaos of this administration.

I found the capacity to breathe a little more deeply during a sermon last Sunday. My pastor, Jonathan Perry, beautifully reminded us that while darkness can feel frightening, it is never truly empty or meaningless.

He described what it was like to camp under Montana’s big sky and see the Milky Way for the first time: “I don’t really have words for it. It wasn’t just more stars. It was depth, like the sky had dimensions I never knew existed before. This river of light across the whole dome of the sky. And I lay there with my mouth and my mind wide open for the whole night.”

He later learned that humans are actually wired to find our way in the dark. The rods in our retina naturally become more sensitive in the dark. With fully adapted eyes, we can even see by starlight. People did it for ages before we surrounded ourselves with artificial light. If we have to, we really can learn to see and walk in the dark.

“Sometimes in the darkest night, when the fire fades and our eyes adjust, that’s when we can see what’s been holding us all along,” Perry said in his sermon. (Bonus points for those who watch the whole thing and see me deliver the closing prayer.)

We naturally prefer being in the light, where we don’t have to work as hard to maintain our bearings. We see darkness as a negative thing. It’s disorienting when we can’t see what might be approaching.

Yet the darkness is never really empty; it also holds Presence. It’s often the place where something new happens, where growth begins, like a baby in the womb or a seed planted in the soil. It’s a place where God is doing things we cannot yet see.

Most days we’re not able to sit still long enough; the constant noise and chaos of this administration remind us of what we can’t control. But when we take a deep breath and our eyes begin to adjust, we find that we are still being held after all. Clarity always lessens fear.

Dark times also give us the opportunity to see beautiful things that wouldn’t otherwise happen. In his essay, “Why Minnesota Matters More Than Iran for America’s Future,” Thomas Friedman writes about people in his home state who became beacons of light and showed us how to turn “neighboring” into a verb.

Heroic folks whose names we’ll never know stepped up to quietly care for their neighbors. New moms donated breast milk for infants whose mothers had been detained. Residents drove other people’s kids to school because some parents feared ICE had targeted their license plates. Minnesotans, who had experienced division after the 2020 death of George Floyd, now enjoyed better relationships with their local police who were more diverse and better trained than newly recruited federal agents.

ICE thugs were ultimately “sent packing by a bunch of moms and dads armed only with cellphone cameras and whistles, ready to walk out on a freezing morning in bathrobes and bunny slippers, to defend their neighbors, some of whom they barely knew,” Friedman writes.

Photo credit: Ellen Schmidt/MinnPost/CatchLight Local/Report for America

MInneapolist bystanders embrace after a confrontation with ICE agents in January.

Instead of stoking division in Minneapolis, Trump unintentionally forged a strong bond of unity among residents. Don Samuels, a Black former city councilman, noted with pride: “Something was born in that crisis that could never have been born on a good day.”

Minnesota showed us that we can choose what kind of person we will be, even when our leaders fail us. What can seem commonplace or unremarkable in normal times—everyday acts of love and kindness, and treating people with human dignity and respect—shine all the brighter when chaos and cruelty attempt to reign.

I was unexpectedly encouraged this week by two people I’d just met. At a multi-church workshop about interracial conversations, a Black participant honestly commiserated with me about how painful this season has been. And a white military veteran in my neighborhood didn’t hesitate when I asked what he thought about the war in Iran: “[Trump] doesn’t know what he’s doing. He left our people unprotected there. He needs to go.”

Diana Butler Bass says holding onto truth and goodness together is a way we can highlight “normalcy as resistance.” Not only do acts of kindness help keep humanity alive, they make us feel more connected and courageous in this troubled era.

“I don’t feel nearly as split as I used to when I think about the graciousness of the everyday as a pathway towards what things should be like, for all people in all places at all times. Nobody should live in fear. That just makes me feel a bit more connected and courageous, I think,” she said in a recent online discussion.

Black Americans have often carried this weight of living split lives while enduring slavery, Jim Crow lynchings, and driving while Black. Butler Bass, who lives near Mount Vernon, cites the example of people who were enslaved there and lived their whole lives under oppression, yet they found truth and beauty in the ordinary. Some even got married on the plantation, knowing they could be split up one day or have their children taken away.

“And yet they made this commitment. They celebrated with joy. They gave themselves fully to loving this person as husband and wife. There’s something about that kind of commitment and that kind of hope that really does serve as a source of resistance,” she said.

Butler Bass goes on to say “everyday life, lived with intention and attention, informed by but not afraid of the news, grounded in gratitude, faith, and love, is our strongest force for goodness against authoritarianism. Indeed, the beauty of normal may be our superpower in the face of evil.”

Consider how the prophets of old encouraged us to tend the space and people around us during hard times. The prophet Jeremiah told exiled Jews living under an oppressor: “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce… seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you.”

“Good religion has always known this truth,” the Rev. Cameron Trimble reminds us. “We cannot control the great movements of history. None of us can stop the machinery of war alone. But we are not powerless. We can decide who we will be while history unfolds around us. … We don’t know what tomorrow will bring. But we know who we are called to be today.”

More and more of us now know what it’s like to live under systems that diminish human flourishing. Yet we also live inside a story of hope, even during awful times that we can’t fix or control.

We can remember that fear and cruelty do not define the future, and that even unsettling times will pass.

We can trust that our senses will adjust so that we can stay faithful to goodness even though we’re uncertain about when or how the chaos will end.

And when all the bluster and ego and “power” threaten to overwhelm us, we can listen instead for that small, still voice that lets us know we are being held.

We can do more than we think we can.

I’ll pick up here again next week. Perhaps this Middle East “conflict” will have gone away by then. Highly unlikely, I know. And even if it does, there will be something else!

Taking a break can be a beautiful thing. Find peace in the moment and pace yourself for the long run. The crazy will wait.

That’s a question Texas State Rep. James Talarico heard repeatedly throughout his successful campaign to win the Texas Senate Democratic nomination.

It’s not too surprising a question at a time when evangelical pastors in the state say they look to their strongman Trump, not Jesus, for their model of leadership. As MAGA loyalist Pastor Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Dallas famously said in 2016: “I don’t want some meek and mild leader or somebody who’s going to turn the other cheek. I’ve said I want the meanest, toughest SOB I can find to protect this nation.”

Talarico, a 36-year-old millennial, is calling for a different kind of politics than we’ve seen the last decade. The former school teacher and seminarian hopes to be a pastor one day, and says he will “extend an open hand” as he builds a coalition to help him flip a Texas Senate seat blue this November.

Photo by Billy Pasco on Unsplash

I heard Talarico speak in Dallas recently. I was surprised that his message brought me to tears. But after a decade of MAGA-dominated political rhetoric, I’ll confess we are all starved for leadership that is both kind and loving.

“If your heart is breaking, as you watch what’s happening to our beloved country, it means you still have heart,” he said at a gathering hosted by the University of Texas at Dallas Democrats student organization.

Talarico is calling for unity based on love that’s more than a warm feeling; he’s calling for love as action that intentionally seeks the well-being of others. And that’s not weak at all.

It’s motivated by a love for God and love for neighbor. It’s why self-sacrificing Minnesotans have been admired as heroes. It’s why America before the Trump era selflessly cooperated with our allies to ensure the safety of the world. It’s why we have historically provided for the most vulnerable in our country, including hungry children and immigrant families on the path to citizenship. And it’s why we have made progress (until now) to live up to the American dream for all of us.

“My faith teaches me that love is the strongest force in the universe. Love is not passive. Love is not neutral. Love is not weak,” Talarico said, citing a few examples:

* Sometimes love requires that we stand between the bullies and the bullied.

* Love sometimes requires that we look evil in the eye and not blink.

* Love sometimes requires that we flip over the tables of injustice.

“That kind of love has always been a threat to the powers that be,” he said.

That contrasts sharply with the response of self-focused white Christian nationalists who are cheering the president’s impulsive decision this week to bomb Iran and put our troops at risk for no imminent reason. Their end-times theology believes that a war in the Middle East will hasten the final battle of Armageddon and usher in the return of Christ. War is seen as prophetic fulfillment not human tragedy. In their framework, an alpha-male Jesus will arrive on a white horse to defeat nonbelievers and reward the faithful, taking them to heaven while the rest of the world burns.

This theology, known as dispensationalism, was largely invented in the 19^th century by a man named John Nelson Darby. It made its way into the Scofield Bible in the early 20^th century and became the foundation for theological fiction like Hal Lindsey’s “Late Great Planet Earth” and Tim LaHaye’s “Left Behind” novels and movies. It requires unwavering support for the modern nation of Israel.

But when people latch onto a theology that believes there’s no future for this world, it’s easy to stop caring for one another and the earth we live on. All that matters is escaping this miserable existence for a spiritual realm. What does it matter, then, if an impulsive and reckless president lights the fuse that could set off World War III? Yay, Jesus?

We see this same theological rhetoric of dominance, control, and victory in ICE recruitment ads, among January 6 insurrectionists who invoked the name of Jesus as they overtook the Capitol, and in flags flown outside offices of MAGA congressional loyalists.

Trump doesn’t have a theological bone in his body, and has never been altruistic or unconditionally loving. He is always transactional and doesn’t hesitate to throw people under the bus when they are no longer useful. He has violated most tenets of the faith and ignores the laws of our land.

Under his “leadership,” this political era has been led by bullies who believe might makes right. Control and crush. Dominate and intimidate. Contempt becomes normalized. Love becomes weakness. And the Christian faith is betrayed.

“A Christianity that needs a strongman has forgotten its Savior,” writes Bradley Parish, author of the popular “A Country Pastor” Facebook page. “The gospel of the alpha male says win at any cost. The Gospel of Jesus says love at any cost (John 13:34–35).”

The MAGA theology of white Christian nationalism keeps people spiritually infantilized instead of inviting them to maturity. Adherents feel reassured they are “saved” while continuing to live exactly the same lives. Author and theologian Richard Rohr reminds us that belief is easy, but spiritual transformation is intentional:

“Christianity is a lifestyle—a way of being in the world that is simple, nonviolent, shared, and loving. However, we made it into an established religion (and all that goes with that) and avoided the lifestyle change itself. We could be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain throughout most of Christian history and still believe that Jesus is our personal Lord and Savior or continue, in good standing, to receive the sacraments. The world has no time for such silliness anymore. The suffering on earth is too great.”

The hard work of love goes beyond our natural inclinations. It takes courage, vulnerability, strength, and discipline. It’s so easy to break things; it’s much harder to build, heal, and restore. A strong, lasting love comes from a source beyond ourselves.

This MAGA era has confused voters about what constitutes real strength, says pollster G. Elliott Morris. Voters tend to see the current Republican party as tough, and Democrats as weak or ineffective. But they also find Republicans extreme and cruel, while Democrats are viewed as empathetic and principled.

Trump’s two terms have gutted the Republican Party’s values of free markets, small government, states’ rights, cooperative international engagement and adherence to the Constitution. Some Republicans have had enough. “Old guard GOPs aren’t going to vote for Democrats but they might stay home,” Morris said.

Meanwhile, the issues that play to Democrats’ strengths are actually the ones voters care about, like the economy and healthcare. And interestingly, voters do not find Democrats to be “too liberal.” Democratic leaders clearly have work to do to highlight their strengths, but their party’s enthusiasm for the midterms is off the charts, so their chances are good.

“Perceptions are earned through sustained, visible action. Democrats will have to earn a reputation as a tough party of strong, principled fighters through repeated impressions with voters,” pollster Morris writes.

Hence the question: Is love too weak for the moment we’re in today?

Talarico is betting the house it’s not. It’s how he flipped a Trump district in a red county. It’s how he passed bills in a Republican-dominated body. And he believes it’s how he’ll flip the Senate seat in November. (At his rallies, some people even whisper to him, “I’m here and I’m not a Democrat.”)

Photo from James Talarico’s Facebook page.

“When you extend an open hand instead of a closed fist, you’ll be surprised by who takes that hand,” Talarico said in a preaching cadence.

“If you hate politics and you’ve never voted before, you have a place in this campaign.

“If you’re tired of democratic politicians always folding, you have a place in this campaign.

“If you voted for Donald Trump but you are fed up with the extremism and corruption in our government, you also have a place in this campaign.

“A new kind of politics is possible. It’s waiting to be born through all of us. A movement that radiates that kind of love is unstoppable. And it will win.”

May it be so.

We can be confident that love is indeed the strongest force in the universe, knowing that its source is divine.

We can reject theological frameworks that demand allegiance to nations over the kingdom of God.

We can extend an open hand to people seeking a better way, knowing that a coalition of Americans is stronger than any given political party.

We can do more than we think we can.

Let’s see: Witch hunt. Affordability. Greatest economy in history. Hottest country in the world. Biden. No one’s seen anything like it before. Big beautiful bill. Fake news. Stolen election. Check, check, and check.

Multiple Bingo cards available online couldn’t capture all the lies for SOTU viewers.

He tried to sell us on a grandiose narrative of a “golden age,” saying Americans are tired of all the “winning.” Not so much, really.

It used to be maddening; now it’s just eye-rollingly BOR-ing. Presidential addresses have typically been inspirational and unifying. This one was merely repetitive in its recitation of lies. Trump presents a tired act that doesn’t realize its appeal is fading.

Most of us are beyond weary of the president’s refusal to apologize or change course when proven wrong, his petulant demands for loyalty, the well-rehearsed scowl he thinks projects strength, and his always-grasping-for-attention narcissism that makes him think everything is about him.

Photo from Twitter

Reps. Hank Johnson (D-GA) and Tom Suozzi (D-NY) dozed off during the nearly two-hour SOTU address.

Those who felt compelled to watch were held captive by the theater of an egomaniac posing behind a presidential seal. Loyalists in Congress knew to jump up on cue, cheering and clapping for their dear leader.

Those who refused to watch knew in advance they’d hear Donald J. Trump’s playbook of grievance. He did not disappoint with his usual lies, scapegoating, and distractions.

Attorney Joyce Vance commented on Substack afterward, “If you had to take a drink every time he told the truth, you would have stayed sober.”

It begs the question: Does he actually believe the lies he spews or is he now delusional beyond recovery?

Polls show that most Americans say the country is worse off with him back in power. The real state of the union is that he’s lost the coalition of voters—Latino Americans, young voters and independents--who flipped for him in 2024 because of his campaign promises. Groceries costs are still high. The Epstein saga drags on without full disclosure or accountability. The economy (except for billionaires’ stock portfolios) is failing as the wealth gap widens. Healthcare is a frustrating maze. ICE has killed US citizens on our streets. Our global reputation is in tatters as we bully other nations and betray our allies.

Yet this MAGA administration is just spinning its wheels rather than solving real problems, mistaking action for progress. Trump creates a crisis where none existed, upends the law to claim a “victory,” then adds it to his repertoire of false achievements. Lather, rinse and repeat. It’s all smoke-and-mirrors, spectacle over substance. We are in a mess and the world shakes its collective head as to why we let this happen.

But here’s the thing. He’s become so predictable that those outside his base are starting to find him irrelevant rather than intimidating. A person’s lies catch up to him. That’s a narcissist’s worst fear: is to be exposed as ordinary and flawed rather than grandiose. By definition narcissists are liars. They seek constant attention and admiration to bolster their fragile ego and cover their own insecurity. Can you imagine him ever being content without a presidential press corps hanging on his every word? As more and more Americans tune him out, he will have to work harder to avoid looking powerless and humiliated. That means things may get worse before they get better.

World leaders already laugh at him. Those of us still at his mercy can’t afford to look away yet. Even though he’s an unreliable and buffoonish character, he has access to the world’s most powerful resources and is surrounded by loyalist minions who fail to protect him from himself.

A growing majority of people in this country are ready to turn the page on this shipwreck of a presidency. He’s well underwater in all polls. Just 32 percent of Americans believe he has had the right priorities, while 68 percent say he hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems. That “beautiful bill” that gave tax cuts to billionaires also closed rural hospitals, stripped health coverage, and cut food programs for children.

In her SOTU rebuttal this week, Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger reminded us of what normal looks like. “Tonight we did not hear the truth from our president,” she said. Then she addressed our real-life concerns with three questions: “Is the president working to make life more affordable for you and your family? Is the president working to keep Americans safe both at home and abroad? Is the president working for you?”

Clearly, the answer is no. Representatives of other branches of government are finally stepping up to challenge him. Congressional leaders and even Supreme Court justices no longer willing to do his bidding. Anyone in his inner circle who displeases him will soon be on the outs. It’s just a matter of time.

I know from experience with an abusive first husband that narcissists eventually exhaust those around them with their demanding and one-sided relational behavior. You can never do enough for them. And when they feel ignored, they tend to experience depression, intense rage, and deep insecurity. We’ve seen this in our president already. I believe it ultimately drives them mad.

Some of us are already envisioning the national purge when he is no longer in office. All the banners bearing his scowling face will be torn down from our government buildings and his name removed from every institution he’s hijacked. It’s just a matter of time before he’s consigned to an embarrassing chapter of our history.

Like any true narcissist, Trump displays images of himself alongside actual heroes on government buildings in Washington, D.C.

Americans are waking up to the fact that government is not a reality show. We shouldn’t have to check our news feeds for what happened overnight. Legislating is tedious and requires compromise and checks and balances on power, not acquiescing to toddler-like demands of a weak president. We are exhausted by the nonstop drama of the past year, the chaos and blame, the threats and pivots. We have had enough.

We don’t want endless conflict and division. We want grownups in charge who will treat all Americans fairly rather than punish those who voted a different way. We want to honor our alliances not betray them. We want to be known as trustworthy, not unstable. We want presidential rhetoric to lift us up rather than demonize half the country. We want our leaders to be guided by a moral compass and responsive to the people, not stuck on a longtime grudge or irked by the latest perceived slight.

We want leaders who uphold the law. We want faith leaders to speak truth to power, not baptize cruelty. We want media to tell the truth, not manufacture propaganda. We want leaders that unify the nation, not mete out vengeance for a grudge-filled old man.

White evangelicals who supported Trump would be wise to remember the scriptural counsel to not be swayed by human cunning. Gov. Spanberger echoed this when she cited George Washington’s warning in his final address that “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” might rise to power.

Scripture instead urges us to grow up, speak the truth in love, and bear spiritual fruit by caring for the suffering and marginalized. Those discipled into a mature faith will be able to discern which leaders will actually improve the lives of the people they serve rather than further their own interests.

Republicans have relied on Trump to deliver votes, but as the midterms approach the American people are increasingly tired of his campaign rally schtick. I don’t know when or how this will end, but I believe enough voters have gained clarity. Americans can see for themselves that his “leadership” does not benefit the country.

We are not powerless in the meanwhile.

We can choose to listen to voices that are trustworthy rather than provide proven liars with an audience every time they open their mouth.

We can reject and expose the propaganda from this administration and its right-wing media outlets that runs counter to what we see with our own eyes.

We can commit to doing what actually helps our neighbors and our communities rather than support the never-satisfied whims of a narcissist looking out only for his own interests.

We can do more than we think we can.

Maybe it was the sneer. Or her mocking laughter. It certainly was revealed in her cold-hearted refusal to look at women in the courtroom who had experienced sexual abuse at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein.

Attorney General Pam Bondi ignores the pleas of Epstein survivors during a House Judiciary Committee meeting on Feb. 11.

I’ve never understood how MAGA women can see and hear this administration’s cruel misogyny and still support what hurts their own interests and that of other women. How they are able to turn a blind eye to the suffering around them to remain in good graces of the oppressors.

Women who still back Trump are not concerned that the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act will undermine their ability to vote unless they have ID that matches their birth certificate. They ignore Project 2025 policies designed to discriminate and control women. They dismiss Trump’s derogatory rhetoric aimed at female reporters and government leaders. And they willingly overlook Trump’s rape conviction and his longtime friendship with sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.

White evangelical women who claim they voted for Trump because they want to protect innocent unborn lives are somehow indifferent to the plight of already-born children who have died after DOGE dismantled USAID or are still suffering in inhuman immigrant detention camps. Many of them are young girls.

The psychological mechanism of “internalized misogyny” explains the thinking of these MAGA women, says Dr. Jo-Ann Finkelstein. It allows women “to vote for a man that so clearly has no respect for women and for policies that will ultimately erode their ability for independence.”

Women raised in the kind of patriarchal culture found in many evangelical churches often grow into women who believe females are less valuable, capable, and trustworthy than men. They would never vote for a female candidate because they have come to believe that “women don’t truly know what’s good for them and need men’s protection,” Finkelstein says. They see Trump’s confrontational language and name-calling as strong and assertive rather than aggressive.

Psychologists say “internalized misogyny” enabled many white women to vote for Trump.

“For some women, this manifests as a belief that traditional, patriarchal structures offer stability and legitimacy,” Finkelstein writes. “Voting for someone like Trump whose rhetoric and policies reinforce traditional gender roles can seem protective and stabilizing rather than restrictive. It’s why women who’ve internalized misogyny and the need for traditional gender roles weren’t outraged—and, in fact, cheered—when Trump said he would protect women ‘whether the women like it or not.’”

Attorney General Pam Bondi’s contentious response to Epstein survivors and lawmakers showed this kind of blind loyalty. She was called before the committee on Feb. 11 to explain why the Department of Justice has refused to release all the Epstein files to the public as Congress required when it passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Many MAGA supporters didn’t see her disrespectful behavior because Fox News only ran 10 minutes of Bondi’s five-hour testimony.

She brought a “burn book” of insults and frequently flipped through a tabbed binder to hurl nasty comments at committee members instead of answering their questions. She called Rep. Jamie Raskin, the panel’s top Democrat, a “washed-up, loser lawyer — not even a lawyer.” She refused to even look Epstein survivors in the eye and apologize for the Justice Department’s failure to meet with them. She insisted Trump was “the greatest president in American history.”

Her loyalty to power trumped any empathy for victims or respect for elected officials.

Bondi was smug, self-righteous and combative. It’s clear she was playing for an audience of one rather than show any concern for the well-being of the country. She even said the committee should be talking about the booming stock market instead of the Epstein files. She might as well have said, “How dare you complain about raping children when the stock market is so great?”

Her performance was widely criticized outside the MAGA bubble. An Economist/YouGov poll showed that 85% of U.S. adults agree that powerful elites helped Epstein target and abuse young girls and need to be investigated, and 50 percent think Trump was involved in crimes allegedly committed by Epstein.

Trump surrounds himself with such female enablers. It confuses people who think he can’t be misogynistic because he puts women in such influential roles. Just like how a single social media post of his praising the late Jesse Jackson proves he’s not a racist!

Women have always attached themselves to Trump’s wealth and power, no matter how corrupt, dishonest, and cruel he can be. Remember how Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway willingly stepped up to defend him? Not to mention his three wives.

His latest crop of enablers have been transformed by an aesthetic known as the “Mar-a-Lago face.” It’s an excessive plastic surgery trend among conservative Republic women who want to appeal to Trump’s vision for how a woman should look. These women undergo lip augmentation, Botox, and jaw contouring, and then top it off with spray tans, fake eyelashes, and heavy eye makeup.

It’s meant to signal wealth, privilege, and a strong identification with Trumpism. Think of Melania Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Kristi Noem, Lara Trump, and Erika Kirk, whose glare beneath her hyperfeminine style sends chills. Their exterior packaging is often matched by a contemptuous demeanor that revels in their unaccountable privilege.

Kristi Noem, before and after her Mar-a-Lago makeover.

As long as these women remain uniformly beautiful and loyal, they remain in good standing with Trump. Such identification with an aggressor is often a strategy for feeling less powerless, psychologists have noted. It helps explain why people are tolerant of their abusers. Women who align with powerful figures can feel they’re part of the dominant group where they won’t be targeted or judged. It almost feels safe and empowering.

It’s only true as long as the abuser feels you’re loyal enough to be useful.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, 27, exhibits that kind of confidence far beyond her years. Her augmented lips and nose job meet MAGA’s standards of beauty. Trump often praises the way her lips move as well as her skill at deflecting questions. And now she sports a baby bump that highlights her femininity even as she disseminates propaganda and insults reporters.

Older women under pressure in Trump’s orbit, like Bondi and Noem, work hard to maintain their relevance by keeping up external appearances and remaining aggressively loyal. Neither of them looks their age.

Bondi, 60, still wears her blond hair long. She has been loyal to Trump since serving on his first impeachment defense team in 2020, and actively supports his false claims of victory in that year’s election. Trump said her appearance this year before the House Judiciary Committee was “fantastic.”

Noem, 54, wears flowing hair extensions and stage makeup, topped off by Border Patrol headgear. Religious historian Diana Butler Bass has humorously suggested that Noem looks a bit like an “evangelical dominatrix:” Consider her sadistic pose in front of tattooed, bare-chested, shaven inmates at a Salvadoran prison while wearing a tight white t-shirt, skin-tight jeans, and a $50,000 Rolex watch.

Noem proved her “mean girl” chops early on by shooting her own puppy. As Secretary of Homeland Security, she has maintained loyalty to the administration by rushing to label slain Minnesota protesters as “domestic terrorists,” even before their deaths were investigated.

It’s no surprise that Trump uses authoritarian figures in feminine disguise to disarm questions he fears might be negative. Their femininity softens the blow as they betray the interests of those they were tasked to protect, including survivors of sexual abuse and immigrants detained without due process.

Some of these MAGA enablers even wear cross necklaces to suggest they are on the side of righteousness. But these women who make a show of Christianity need to know that their words and actions stand in sharp contrast to the faith they outwardly profess, says Benjamin Cremer.

“Christians must be unambiguous: Abuse of power is sin,” Cremer writes. “Sexual exploitation is sin. Harming children is a sin. Harming women is a sin. Silencing victims is sin. Excusing the sin of the powerful perpetuates the sin of the powerful. And any theology that normalizes male dominance while dismissing the suffering of women and children is poisonous.”

These women have betrayed others to stay close to power. They need to be held to account along with the powerful men they shield. Meanwhile, we can trust that our eyes and ears see and hear the truth about them.

We can reject any theology that suggests women are less valuable, capable, and trustworthy than men.

We can encourage legislators who are seeking to hold powerful men accountable for sexually abusing young girls.

We can commit to working for dignity and justice for all, especially women and girls who are most vulnerable.

We can do more than we think we can.

I later wished I had said that embracing diversity might teach us empathy and humility because we learn there are other perspectives besides our own. I knew from workplace experiences that diverse teams do better with creativity and problem-solving because multiple perspectives are brought to the table.

Photo by Pavlos Vaenas on Unsplash

My friend seemed to be expressing a nostalgia for the segregated and familiar era in which he’d been raised, when whites were the majority and considered themselves the norm in our country. A time when America was “great,” MAGA supporters will say.

His question showed he was aligned with MAGA’s ideology of white Christian nationalism, which sees diversity not as a strength but as a threat to be constrained. Adherents believe that America was founded by and for people from Northern European countries, and that real Americans are white and Christian.

My church friend was old enough to have grown up in a time when he rarely came across a person of color in daily encounters--not at the grocery store and certainly not in his church. People around him looked like him, talked like him, and thought like him. It was a cozy little bubble that had no interest in welcoming a wider circle.

Neighborhoods back then often were designed through redlining and racial covenants: discriminatory clauses in property deeds that legally barred non-white people from buying, leasing, or occupying homes in certain neighborhoods. It forced people of color to seek rental property in parts of town that were not well-kept and that whites came to see as dangerous. I’m familiar with that pattern which is still evident in my hometown of Milwaukee.

Milwaukee’s population map proved the city was one of the most segregated metro areas in the country according to the 2020 census. Even today, Blacks whose families migrated in the 1940s from southern states still live on the North side of the city—what we called the “inner core”—while Hispanics settled on the south side, and whites in the suburbs moved further south, west and east. The Polish/Irish/German neighborhoods I grew up in on the south side are now primarily Hispanic.

Being a few decades younger than my MAGA church friend, I came of age during the Civil Rights movement and was far more curious about other demographics. I lived in a highly segregated city, but I saw in the news how Blacks practiced nonviolent resistance to secure their right to vote, and how Hispanic migrant workers later sought fair wages and humane treatment.

And I remember feeling shame after my Mom shared a neighbor’s harsh response to Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination: “Well, what did you expect? He was hanging around with n-ggers!” I also remember the sadness and longing I felt after reading “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the poetry of Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry’s plays, and “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”

Even so, I had no Black friends until my college years. I stumbled into learning about my own white fragility and racial microaggressions as an adult in the workplace. I made more than a few mistakes, but I determined to do better. It takes intention to grow beyond your upbringing and environment.

I moved beyond basic Black History Month lessons to learn about the horrors of lynchings. I visited civil rights museums in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and Washington, D.C. to bear witness to brutal American history, some of which happened in my lifetime. My reading list expanded to contemporaries like Isabel Wilkerson, Ibram Kendi, Jemar Tisby, and Bryan Stevenson. And I have continued learning through conversations with Black brothers and sisters who participate in my church’s racial reconciliation ministry.

Trump, on the other hand, is stuck in a mindset that never evolved beyond his racist language and behavior. His protected billionaire lifestyle has kept him from developing outside relationships. In the 1980s, he was sued for restricting Blacks from becoming tenants at the housing complexes his family owned. He called for the death penalty for the five black and Latino boys wrongfully convicted of raping a jogger in New York City. He later publicly questioned the citizenship of our first Black president. When he launched his own candidacy, he denigrated Mexicans as rapist and criminals.

Some of us saw this all-too-clearly; others either ignored his “mean tweets” or felt unleashed themselves as Trump tapped into the racism that lingers beneath America’s surface and somehow made it acceptable for his base to say out loud again.

As president, he has reset the country to his comfort level of the pre-Civil Rights era by dismantling DEI programs, stripping well-respected Black and female military officers from leadership, using “low IQ” slurs against women of color, restricting visas for international students from non-European countries, and removing reminders of our struggle for racial equality from monuments and classrooms.

This administration unashamedly flies its white Christian nationalism flag. Trump says he believes that Civil Rights protections resulted in white people being “very badly treated.” And JD Vance, who has a brown wife and brown children, told attendees at a Turning Point USA event that “In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”

Both statements are hogwash, aimed at reassuring an anxious white base that these politicians will look out for their interests.

So how’s that working for us in Trump 2.0?

We now have masked ICE agents (who look just like the suspect on Nancy Guthrie’s doorbell video) stirring as much terror as hooded Klansmen in their quest to remove brown people from our country.

We have Trump unbelievably posting a racist trope depicting former president Barak Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama as apes. Instead of apologizing or calling it a mistake, the president has moved beyond racist dog whistles to open contempt.

We even have MAGA supporters organizing their own segregated Super Bowl halftime show because a Puerto Rican who sings in Spanish didn’t fit their white, English-speaking norms.

It’s all about who belongs and who doesn’t, says Cameron Trimble:

“What we are witnessing is not a disagreement about taste. It is a struggle over whether the country will face its own complexity or continue to deny it. One story understands diversity as strength. It sees multiple languages, cultures, and histories as the source of vitality and resilience. The other story treats diversity as a threat that must be contained, policed, or erased.”

MAGA’s Christian supporters should know better, but they somehow ignore the narrative of Scripture they claim to believe. They resist the nudging of the Spirit that prompts them to always widen the circle. They overlook the call to justice so they can maintain control over who they think is worthy of God’s blessings. They ignore Jesus’s mandate to love all our neighbors and refuse to see that God’s favor extends beyond any single nation.

The Spirit keeps pushing the boundaries anyway. God has always honored differences and never moves to erase them.

All of creation speaks of diversity. The Trinity itself is not a single entity but an interconnected dance between divine persons. The Spirit’s descent at Pentecost showed people speaking many languages yet understanding one another without assimilating. And the gospel writer records a lovely vision of how heaven reflects the diversity God always intended, “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.”

No one is excluded from the divine invitation. How can we forget that the very first convert to Christianity was an intersex eunuch from another country? Could the gospel be any more inviting to people who have been marginalized?

MAGA’s values just don’t hold up, especially in a nation made up of immigrants. Ordinary Americans are rejecting this administration’s backward and cruel policies. Hundreds of thousands are pushing back and defending their neighbors, no matter where they come from or what language they speak. Millions are embracing the joy of Latin reggaeton as well as familiar country music, jazz and rock.

They know that MAGA’s messaging is neither American nor Christian. They know that we have done and can do better.

We can be intentional about welcoming and embracing different cultures, music, and languages, knowing that it benefits us all.

We can choose to move through our own discomfort and make room for differences rather than insist everyone conform to what we believe is the norm.

We can reject any ideology that excludes newcomers as unworthy of the blessings that we have come to enjoy.

We can do more than we think we can.