Jesus Began With Complexity

Jesus once said something that should make every simplistic conversation about gender, sexuality, and “biblical manhood and womanhood” slow down.

In Matthew 19, Jesus is teaching about marriage, divorce, and human relationships when he says, “There are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.”

That is not usually one of the verses embroidered on throw pillows.

But maybe it should be.

Because here is Jesus, in the first century, naming that not every human body, not every human story, and not every human life fits neatly into the categories people try to enforce. Some, he says, are “born so.” Some are “made so.” Some live differently for reasons of calling, circumstance, survival, or vocation. However we interpret the word “eunuch” historically, Jesus is clearly acknowledging a reality many religious people still refuse to acknowledge: human bodies and human lives are more complicated than rigid categories allow.

And notice what Jesus does not do. He does not panic. He does not call them abominations. He does not say they are threats to the family, civilization, children, the church, or the future of Western society. He simply names their existence.

Some were born that way. Some were made that way. Some chose a life outside the expected pattern.

Then Jesus says, essentially, “Let anyone accept this who can.”

That may be one of the most honest lines in the whole conversation, because some people still cannot accept it.

Creation Has Footnotes

We live in a time when certain Christians want to pretend that humanity is simple: male and female, fixed and obvious, no complexity allowed. They speak as if every person’s body, chromosomes, hormones, anatomy, identity, and lived experience all line up in one tidy little Sunday School chart. Blue column. Pink column. No footnotes. No exceptions. No questions.

But creation itself has footnotes.

Science tells us that biological sex is real, but it is not always as simple as “XX means female” and “XY means male.” There are people with sex chromosome variations such as XXY, XYY, XO, XXX, and other variations. There are also people whose chromosomes, hormones, anatomy, or reproductive development do not fit typical binary expectations. Some intersex traits are visible at birth. Others may not be discovered until puberty, adulthood, infertility testing, or sometimes not at all.[1][2]

This does not mean bodies are meaningless. It means bodies are more wondrous, varied, and complex than the culture-war slogans admit.

And before someone says, “Well, that is science, not Scripture,” I would simply point back to Jesus. Long before anyone knew about chromosomes, Jesus knew enough not to flatten human beings into categories that erase them. Jesus knew there were people who did not fit the expected reproductive, marital, or social pattern. Instead of turning them into a threat, Jesus turned them into a teaching moment.

Maybe the real question is not whether Jesus knew modern science.

Maybe the real question is whether modern Christians know Jesus.

What the Clobber Verses Actually Do

Of course, whenever LGBTQ+ people are discussed in church, someone eventually reaches for what are sometimes called the “clobber passages.” You know the ones. A handful of verses, usually pulled out quickly and swung like a weapon. The goal is rarely careful interpretation. The goal is usually to end the conversation, shame the person, and make the room understand who is really in charge.

But these passages deserve more honesty than that.

Take Sodom and Gomorrah. For generations, some Christians have claimed the sin of Sodom was homosexuality. But the Bible itself gives us a different answer. Ezekiel says the sin of Sodom was pride, excess, prosperity without compassion, and failure to aid the poor and needy. Genesis 19 is not a story about loving same-sex relationships. It is a story about violence, humiliation, attempted gang rape, and the abuse of strangers.

If someone reads that story and thinks the problem is “gay people,” something has gone terribly wrong in their moral imagination.

Then there is Leviticus. Yes, Leviticus contains prohibitions about male same-sex behavior. It also contains all kinds of holiness-code regulations Christians do not apply in the same way today. We do not build our ethics by lifting isolated verses out of an ancient purity system and pretending we have solved everything. Leviticus was speaking into a world concerned with lineage, ritual purity, patriarchal honor, reproduction, and the survival of a distinct people. It was not discussing two women celebrating their fiftieth anniversary, two dads packing school lunches, or a transgender teenager trying to survive high school.

Then there is Romans 1. Paul describes a world disordered by idolatry, lust, excess, and exploitation. His concern is not a faithful, mutual, covenantal relationship between two people of the same sex. He is describing people consumed by desire in a culture of status, domination, and pagan excess. If Paul walked into a modern church and saw two married men taking communion together, raising children, caring for aging parents, serving at the food pantry, and arguing gently in the parking lot about where to go for lunch, I am not convinced Romans 1 is the text he would reach for.

And then there are the words in 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy, often translated in ways that sound much more certain than the Greek actually allows. One word can suggest softness, moral weakness, or exploitation. Another is rare and difficult to translate with confidence. Yet some Christians take these complex ancient terms and confidently declare they settle every question about LGBTQ+ identity forever.

That is not interpretation.

That is weaponization.

Even If You Disagree

And here is the thing: even if someone disagrees with me on every single interpretive point, they still have to answer a deeper question.

Why would a follower of Jesus want to make anyone’s life harder?

Seriously. Why?

If you are a person of faith, why would your faith make you more committed to burdening people than blessing them? Why would your reading of Scripture lead you to become a source of fear, shame, rejection, and despair in someone else’s life? Why would you want your theology to be the reason a child is afraid to come out to their parents, a teenager dreads going to church, a young adult leaves faith entirely, or a beloved child of God wonders whether the world would be better off without them?

That is not hypothetical.

The Trevor Project’s 2025 U.S. National Survey found that 36% of LGBTQ+ young people seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year. Among transgender and nonbinary young people, the number was 40%. Ten percent of LGBTQ+ young people reported attempting suicide in the past year.[3]

Let those numbers sit in the room.

These are not talking points. These are children. These are teenagers. These are young adults. These are choir kids, theater kids, athletes, gamers, artists, baristas, seminarians, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, neighbors, and members of our churches. These are human beings created in the image of God.

The same survey also found that 90% of LGBTQ+ young people said recent anti-LGBTQ+ laws, policies, and debates caused them stress or anxiety. And LGBTQ+ youth who experienced anti-LGBTQ+ victimization — including bullying, threats, physical harm, discrimination, or conversion therapy — were more than three times as likely to attempt suicide in the past year as those who did not report those experiences.[3]

In other words, rejection is not neutral. Bullying is not neutral. Derogatory language is not neutral. Church exclusion is not neutral. Theology that tells LGBTQ+ people they are disgusting, disordered, dangerous, or damned is not neutral.

It deals death.

Bad Fruit Is Still Bad Fruit

Now, someone will say, “But I’m just standing for truth.”

Fine. Then let us talk about truth.

The truth is that Jesus said the greatest commandments are to love God and love neighbor. The truth is that Jesus said we would know a tree by its fruit. The truth is that Paul said love does no harm to a neighbor. The truth is that the Spirit’s fruit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

So if your theology consistently produces fear, shame, family rejection, suicidal despair, spiritual trauma, and dead children, then maybe it is time to stop calling that theology “biblical.”

Maybe it is just bad fruit.

And Jesus had things to say about bad fruit.

The point is not that every Christian must understand every scientific detail about chromosomes, hormones, gender identity, sexual orientation, intersex variations, or the full complexity of human development. Most of us are still trying to understand our printer settings. We do not have to know everything to be kind. We do not have to master every field of study before we decide not to harm people.

We can begin with humility. We can begin with listening. We can begin with the possibility that our categories are not as complete as God’s creation. We can begin with Jesus, who saw people pushed to the margins and moved toward them with compassion.

The Christian question should never be, “How do I use the Bible to win an argument against you?”

The Christian question should be, “How do I love you in a way that helps you live?”

LGBTQ+ People Are Not Debates

That does not mean love is vague or sentimental. Love can be fierce. Love can tell the truth. Love can protect the vulnerable. Love can challenge harmful interpretations. Love can stand between a child and the religious stones being gathered against them.

In fact, love must.

Because LGBTQ+ people are not debates. They are not issues. They are not threats. They are not a problem for the church to solve. They are people. They are beloved. They are made in the image of God. They carry gifts, callings, wounds, wisdom, humor, holiness, and joy.

And many of them have heard enough death from people who claim to speak for God.

It is time for the Church to speak life. It is time to say to the child who is afraid: You are loved. It is time to say to the teenager who is hiding: You are not alone. It is time to say to the parent who is learning: Choose your child over your fear. It is time to say to the church: Stop making life harder for the very people Jesus would have moved toward.

And it is time to say to those who keep using Scripture as a weapon: you can memorize every clobber passage and still miss the heart of God.

Jesus said some were born eunuchs. Some were made eunuchs. Some chose a life outside the expected pattern. He did not erase them. He did not condemn them. He made room for them in the conversation.

Maybe we should too.

Because in the end, the question is not whether we can win a debate.

The question is whether our faith helps people live.

And any theology that makes it harder for LGBTQ+ people to survive, flourish, love, breathe, pray, worship, belong, and exist is not good news.

It is death dressed up in Bible verses.

And followers of the risen Christ should know better than to deal death.

Sources

[1] Nature Education, “Genetic Mechanisms of Sex Determination.” This overview discusses human sex chromosome patterns including typical XX/XY development and variations such as 47,XXY; 47,XYY; 45,X; and 47,XXX.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/genetic-mechanisms-of-sex-determination-314/

[2] interACT, “Intersex Definitions.” interACT defines intersex as an umbrella term for variations in reproductive or sex anatomy, including variations in chromosomes, genitals, or internal organs, and notes that some traits are identified at birth while others may not be discovered until puberty or later.
https://interactadvocates.org/intersex-definitions/

[3] The Trevor Project, “2025 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People.” The survey reports that 36% of LGBTQ+ young people seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year, 10% attempted suicide, 40% of transgender and nonbinary young people seriously considered attempting suicide, 90% said recent anti-LGBTQ+ laws, policies, and debates caused stress or anxiety, and LGBTQ+ youth who experienced anti-LGBTQ+ victimization were more than three times as likely to attempt suicide.
https://www.thetrevorproject.org/survey-2025/

Every June, like clockwork, somebody somewhere discovers the Book of Proverbs. Mostly one verse: “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Proverbs 16:18.

Suddenly every Facebook theologian with a suspiciously selective reading of Scripture and a cousin they “love but don’t agree with” is ready to explain why Pride Month is obviously unbiblical.

“See?” they say. “The Bible says pride is bad.”

Well, yes. The Bible does warn against pride. It warns against arrogance, domination, superiority, and self-exaltation. It warns against kings who think they are untouchable and religious leaders who love the best seats.

But many of the people quoting “pride goes before a fall” at LGBTQ+ people do not seem nearly as worried about arrogance when it comes dressed in a suit, carrying a Bible, holding political power, and trying to control everybody else’s life. Apparently, pride is a deadly sin when queer folks dance in the street, but “religious liberty” when Christians try to make the whole country obey their theology.

Funny how that works.

So yes, the Bible condemns pride when pride means arrogance, domination, and haughtiness. But that is not what Pride Month is about. At its best, Pride is not the boast, “I am better than you.”

Pride is the holy refusal to believe, “I am less than you.”

The pride Scripture condemns says, “I do not need God, and I do not need my neighbor.” The pride we celebrate in June says, “God made me, God loves me, and your fear does not define my worth.”

That is not sin. That is resurrection.

Fearfully and wonderfully made

Psalm 139 declares, “For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”

Notice what the psalmist does not say. The psalmist does not say, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made, except for the parts of me religious people find inconvenient.” The psalmist does not say, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made, but only if I can squeeze my life into somebody else’s narrow understanding of gender, love, family, and holiness.”

No. The psalmist looks at their own life, body, and existence and says, “God did this. And it is wonderful.” That is not arrogance. That is praise. To receive your own life as a gift is worship. It is the soul telling the truth after being lied to for too long.

So when LGBTQ+ people say, “I am not ashamed of who I am,” that is not a rejection of Scripture. It may be the first time they have believed it.

Instead of shame

The prophet Isaiah says, “Instead of your shame you shall have a double portion; instead of dishonor they shall rejoice in their lot.”

Instead of shame. That is the heart of it.

To understand Pride Month, you have to understand shame. Not theoretical shame. Real shame. The kind that gets preached into people’s bones. The kind that teaches children to hide before they even have language for who they are. The kind that makes teenagers wonder whether God would rather have them dead than honest.

That is why Pride matters. It is not simply about flags, parades, glitter, or corporate logos that turn rainbow in June and mysteriously repent in July. Pride matters because shame is still killing people. Somewhere, right now, someone still believes they would be better off dead than queer. For some people, hearing “you are beloved” is not a slogan. It is a lifeline.

Some people hear “Pride” and imagine arrogance. But for many LGBTQ+ people, Pride means, “I survived shame.” It means, “I made it through the closet.” It means, “I made it through the prayers that tried to fix me.” It means, “I made it through the church that called it love when it was really control.”

Pride is what happens when shame loses its power.

That is deeply biblical. The exiles come home. The outcasts are gathered. The stones the builders rejected become the cornerstone. The crucified one is not contained by death.

When someone asks why LGBTQ+ people need Pride, one answer is simple: because shame was public. The sermons were public. The policies were public. The exclusions were public. The jokes were public. The church votes were public. So yes, the healing gets to be public too. If shame got a microphone, dignity gets a parade.

That is not too much. That is repair.

Greater honor

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12 that the church is one body with many members. Then he says the members that seem weaker are indispensable, and the members treated as less honorable should receive greater honor.

Greater honor. Not reluctant tolerance. Not “you can come here, but don’t talk about your spouse.” Not “you are welcome in the pews, but not in leadership.”

That is why visible affirmation matters. That is why Pride Sunday matters. That is why churches need to say it out loud and without footnotes: LGBTQ+ people are not merely allowed here. You are part of the body. You are indispensable. Your gifts matter. Your leadership matters.

A church that has been very clear about who it excludes does not get to be vague about who it welcomes.

Paul helps the church know what repair looks like.

But Jesus shows us why shame never gets the final word.

What is to prevent me?

In Acts, Philip meets an Ethiopian eunuch reading from Isaiah. We should be careful: the Ethiopian eunuch was not “gay” or “transgender” in the way we use those words today. But his body, identity, nationality, and religious status made him complicated in the eyes of the religious establishment.

He was powerful, but still excluded. He was spiritual, but still kept at a distance. Then the Spirit sends Philip to him.

The church does not include the eunuch as an act of institutional generosity. The Spirit gets there first. Philip tells him about Jesus. They come to water, and the eunuch asks, “What is to prevent me from being baptized?”

Not, “What is to prevent me from being studied?” Not, “What is to prevent me from being debated?”

What is to prevent me from belonging fully, right now?

And the answer is water. The one who had every reason to expect another religious “not yet” finds the Spirit saying, “Why not now?”

Disregarding its shame

And finally, it comes back to Jesus.

Jesus touched the untouchable, ate with the wrong people, made religious gatekeepers nervous, and was publicly shamed by empire and religious power working together. Hebrews says Jesus endured the cross, “disregarding its shame.”

The cross was designed not only to kill, but to humiliate. Crucifixion was Rome’s way of saying, “Look what happens to people who challenge our power.”

The cross was shame made visible.

Rome said, “Criminal.” The religious authorities said, “Blasphemer.” The crowd said, “Crucify.” The cross said, “Failure.”

But God said, “Beloved.”

And on Easter morning, the story Rome tried to end got loose in the world again, exposing the whole shame machine as a liar.

That is why this matters. The deepest Christian story is not about God protecting respectability. It is about God vindicating the shamed. It is about love outlasting violence. It is about the One rejected by the powerful becoming the clearest picture we have of God.

So yes, Proverbs says pride goes before destruction. And we should listen. Arrogant pride is destructive. Haughty pride is destructive. Nationalist pride, racist pride, patriarchal pride, and religious pride are destructive. The pride that wraps cruelty in Bible verses is destructive.

But Pride Month is not about that kind of pride. Pride Month is about dignity after shame. It is about people fearfully and wonderfully made refusing to let anyone call them a mistake. It is about dishonored members receiving greater honor. It is about the excluded person asking, “What is to prevent me?” and finding out that God’s welcome is wider than the church’s imagination.

And finally, it is about Jesus showing us what God does with shame.

The pride that climbs over others to feel superior? Condemn it. The pride that hoards power and calls it holiness? Condemn it. The pride that uses religion to shame the people God loves? Condemn it twice, with footnotes.

But the pride that rises after shame? The pride that says, “I will not hate what God has made”? The pride that says, “I am not a debate, I am beloved”? The pride that says, “You tried to bury me, but God grows gardens in places like this”?

That is not the pride that comes before a fall.

That is the pride that comes after resurrection.

And thanks be to God, resurrection has always made religious people nervous.

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There is a reason the story of Pentecost feels dangerous right now. Not dangerous because of wind and fire. Not dangerous because people speak in languages they did not expect to speak. Not even dangerous because some folks in the crowd thought the disciples had gotten into the wine a little early.

Pentecost is dangerous because it tells the truth about God: the Spirit of God does not create unity by making everyone the same. The Spirit creates unity by making sure people can be heard across difference.

This reflection grows out of my Pentecost sermon, “A Spirit That Breaks Barriers,” preached at New Covenant Christian Church in Oklahoma City. The sermon explored Acts 2, the miracle of many languages, and the Spirit’s refusal to erase difference in the name of unity. You can listen to the full sermon on my podcast, Progressive Christian Sermons with Rev. David Wheeler, by clicking here.

That sermon has stayed with me because Pentecost is not just a church holiday. It is a public witness. And in a political and religious moment when Christian nationalists, MAGA politicians, and the hard right are working overtime to demonize diversity, equity, and inclusion, Pentecost has something to say.

Before diversity, equity, and inclusion became a corporate acronym, a university office, a campaign talking point, or a right-wing boogeyman, there was Pentecost. And Pentecost was the Spirit of God saying: your language matters. Your story matters. Your people matter. Your difference is not a problem to be solved before you can belong.

The book of Acts tells us that when the Spirit came, people from all over the known world were gathered in Jerusalem: Parthians, Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Egypt, Libya, Rome, Crete, Arabia, and more. Luke does not flatten them into one generic crowd. He names them. Their places matter. Their languages matter. Their cultures matter. Their particularity matters.

And the miracle is not that everyone suddenly speaks one official language. The miracle is that everyone hears the good news in their own language.

That is not colorblindness. That is not culture-blindness. That is not forced assimilation. That is not “leave your identity at the door so we can all get along.” That is Pentecost. The Spirit does not erase difference. The Spirit honors difference, crosses difference, and creates communion through difference.

Which means Pentecost has something to say to every effort to scrub diversity from the public square.

In January 2025, the Trump administration issued an executive order titled “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” and another order revoked Executive Order 11246, the long-standing federal contractor equal employment opportunity order. The Department of Education soon announced it was eliminating DEI initiatives from public-facing communication channels and its workforce, and The Chronicle of Higher Education continues tracking state legislation aimed at prohibiting DEI offices, staff, training, diversity statements, and certain considerations in admissions or employment.

The point is not subtle. The hard right has learned to turn words like diversity, equity, and inclusion into threats. They have taken words that should simply mean “people are different,” “systems should be fair,” and “everyone should have a place,” and turned them into symbols of cultural decay.

But Christians should be careful before joining that chorus.

Because the birthday of the church is a story about diversity. It is a story about equity. It is a story about inclusion.

Pentecost says diversity is not a threat to the church. Diversity is the setting in which the church is born. Pentecost says equity is not favoritism. Equity is what happens when the Spirit refuses to let one dominant language control access to good news. Pentecost says inclusion is not weakness. Inclusion is what happens when God widens the circle beyond the people who assumed they were already at the center.

And that is exactly why Christian nationalism cannot make peace with Pentecost.

Christian nationalism wants a God who blesses one nation, one culture, one hierarchy, one version of history, one kind of family, one approved way of belonging. It wants Christianity to function as a tool of domination, not liberation. It wants the cross draped in the flag and the church enlisted as chaplain to empire.

But Pentecost will not cooperate.

Pentecost does not hand Christians a microphone so we can speak over everyone else and call it unity. Pentecost does not baptize domination. Pentecost does not confuse public faithfulness with religious control. Pentecost does not say, “Now that the Spirit has arrived, everyone else needs to become more like us.”

Pentecost says the Spirit is already moving in places we did not expect, through people we were not taught to hear, in languages we may not understand until grace teaches us to listen.

That matters because the attack on DEI has never really been only about a few offices or training sessions. Like any human program, DEI efforts can be done well or poorly. They can become bureaucratic. They can become performative. They can use too much jargon. Christians do not have to pretend every institutional DEI initiative is perfect in order to tell the truth about the backlash.

The backlash is not really about improving DEI. It is about punishing the very idea that difference should be named, inequity should be addressed, and belonging should be widened.

That is why so much anti-DEI rhetoric sounds less like a critique of bureaucracy and more like resentment that historically marginalized people have become visible at all. It is why “DEI” gets used as an insult against Black leaders, LGBTQ people, immigrants, women, educators, students, and anyone who dares to suggest that America’s public life has not always been equally public for everyone.

Christians should recognize that move. We have seen it before.

Whenever the Spirit widens the circle, someone calls it disorder. At Pentecost, some people are amazed and perplexed. They ask, “What does this mean?” But others sneer and say, “They are filled with new wine.”

That part feels familiar. When the Spirit disrupts the status quo, someone will always try to explain it away. They must be confused. They must be radical. They must be woke. They must be Marxist. They must be drunk. They must be making trouble.

But Peter stands up and says, no. This is not drunkenness. This is prophecy.

Then he quotes the prophet Joel: “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.”

All flesh.

Not just men. Not just elders. Not just clergy. Not just citizens. Not just the respectable. Not just the powerful. Not just the people already used to being heard. Sons and daughters shall prophesy. Young people shall see visions. Old people shall dream dreams. Even those the world treats as servants, even those the world pushes to the margins, even they shall receive the Spirit.

Pentecost breaks the barrier around who gets to speak for God. That is what makes it so threatening.

Because once we believe the Spirit can speak through all flesh, we have to listen differently. We have to listen to people whose accents we have mocked, whose neighborhoods we have ignored, whose histories we have sanitized, whose grief we have politicized, whose labor we have depended on while keeping their wages low, whose bodies have been treated as problems, whose love has been treated as a threat, whose presence has been treated as an inconvenience.

Pentecost does not let us say, “I don’t see color,” when color has been seen in this country for centuries.

Color was seen when land was stolen. Color was seen when human beings were enslaved. Color was seen when neighborhoods were redlined, schools were segregated, wealth was denied, votes were suppressed, and people were told where they could live, work, worship, study, sit, and belong.

So when people who have benefited from whiteness say, “I don’t see color,” it may sound generous. It may even be well intended. But too often it means, “I do not want to see the history. I do not want to see the pain. I do not want to see the inequity. I do not want to see the ways whiteness has been treated as normal while everyone else has been expected to adjust.”

Pentecost will not let us hide there. Pentecost sees the Parthians. Pentecost sees the Medes. Pentecost sees the Elamites. Pentecost sees the Egyptians and Libyans and Romans and Arabs. Pentecost sees difference. Pentecost hears difference. Pentecost blesses difference.

The miracle is not that everyone becomes the same. The miracle is that everyone is understood.

That is the public theology we need right now. Not a thin unity that says, “Let’s stop talking about race.” Not a false peace that says, “Let’s not make people uncomfortable.” Not a Christian nationalism that says, “Let’s rededicate America to God,” when what it really means is, “Let’s force everyone else’s country to bow to our version of Christianity.”

That is not Pentecost. That is empire wearing worship clothes.

Pentecost gives us a better vision. A braver vision. A more faithful vision. True unity does not require people to disappear. True unity does not ask people to check their histories, bodies, cultures, languages, wounds, or hopes at the door. True unity is not sameness. True unity is communion honest enough to tell the truth and humble enough to listen.

That is what the Spirit creates. And that is what the church is called to practice in public.

A Pentecost church cannot join the campaign to erase difference from schools, universities, workplaces, libraries, government agencies, and public life. A Pentecost church cannot treat diversity as a threat when Scripture treats it as the birthplace of Christian witness. A Pentecost church cannot pretend equity is unbiblical when the prophets thunder against unjust scales, neglected workers, exploited neighbors, and systems that crush the poor. A Pentecost church cannot dismiss inclusion as weakness when Jesus built his ministry around tables wide enough for the people respectable religion kept excluding.

So yes, let’s be honest: “DEI” is an acronym. Pentecost is a holy day. They are not the same thing.

But if the words diversity, equity, and inclusion make Christians angry, suspicious, or afraid, we should ask what gospel we have been reading.

Because the Spirit of Pentecost is diverse. The Spirit speaks through many languages, many peoples, many stories. The Spirit of Pentecost is equitable. The Spirit refuses to let the dominant group control access to good news. The Spirit of Pentecost is inclusive. The Spirit falls on all flesh.

And in a time when powerful people are trying to make the public square smaller, colder, whiter, straighter, more fearful, and more obedient, Pentecost calls the church to become wider, braver, more truthful, and more loving. Not because it is trendy. Not because it is politically correct. Not because some consultant told us to. Because this is what the Holy Spirit has been doing since the beginning.

The church was born when people who were not supposed to understand one another suddenly heard good news together. The church was born when difference became the place where grace showed up. The church was born when the Spirit broke open the room, broke open the language, broke open the boundaries, and made the good news too large to be contained by one culture, one nation, one race, one class, one gender, one accent, one party, or one way of being.

So maybe Pentecost really was the original public DEI program.

Not the bureaucratic kind. The holy kind.

The kind where God says: I see you. I hear you. I know the language of your heart. I know the story you carry. And the good news is for you, too.

May that Spirit fall on us again. May that Spirit burn through our false peace and our false unity. May that Spirit open our ears to the voices we have ignored. May that Spirit loosen our tongues for mercy and justice. And may that Spirit make us brave enough to build a public life where difference is not erased, equity is not demonized, and inclusion is not treated as a threat — but as a sign that the wind of God is still blowing.

Amen.

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On Sunday, thousands of people gathered on the National Mall for a Christian prayer rally called Rededicate 250, framed around the upcoming 250th anniversary of the United States and billed as a rededication of the country as “One Nation Under God.” The event included conservative Christian leaders, public officials, patriotic imagery, worship music, and a video message from President Trump. According to AP, it was a mostly conservative Christian prayer gathering tied to the nation’s 250th anniversary. Religion News Service described the event as part of a broader conversation about religious freedom, Christian nationalism, and what America’s founding story means 250 years later.

As a Christian pastor, I am not troubled by people praying in public.

I am troubled when public prayer becomes a flag.

There is a difference between praying for a nation and praying as though the nation itself has been chosen, sanctified, and set above others. There is a difference between asking God to make us more just and asking God to confirm that we already are. There is a difference between faith that humbles power and faith that flatters it.

That difference matters.

Public faith is not the problem

I believe faith belongs in public life. Deeply. Faith should shape how we treat the poor, the immigrant, the prisoner, the child, the stranger, the worker, the enemy, and the neighbor who does not pray the way we pray. Faith should form our moral imagination. It should make us more truthful, more merciful, more courageous, and more committed to the common good.

So no, I do not want a privatized Christianity that only speaks in sanctuaries and never in city halls, school board meetings, courtrooms, neighborhoods, or voting booths. The prophets did not keep their faith private. Jesus did not keep his compassion private. The early church did not keep its table private.

But public theology is not the same thing as Christian nationalism. Public theology asks, What does love require of us in public? Christian nationalism asks, How can Christianity help us claim public power?

Those are not the same question.

The problem is not prayer. The problem is possession.

Christians can and should pray for the country where we live. We can pray for our leaders, even when we disagree with them. We can pray for wisdom, repentance, peace, justice, humility, courage, and the healing of wounds we did not create but are still responsible to help mend.

But when Christians speak of “rededicating” America to God, we should pause long enough to ask what exactly we mean. Are we rededicating ourselves to truth-telling about our history? Are we rededicating ourselves to repair what has been broken by racism, greed, violence, and exclusion? Are we rededicating ourselves to religious liberty not only for Christians, but for Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, and everyone else? Are we rededicating ourselves to the Sermon on the Mount?

Or are we rededicating the nation to a story in which America is God’s favorite project, Christianity is the nation’s default identity, and some neighbors are made to feel like guests in their own country?

That is the danger.

Because the moment prayer becomes a tool for deciding who really belongs, it has stopped sounding like Jesus.

Jesus refused this temptation

One of the most important political moments in the Gospels comes before Jesus ever preaches a sermon. In the wilderness, the devil shows Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world” and offers him their glory and authority. All Jesus has to do is bow.

It is a stunning temptation. Not merely personal comfort. Not merely wealth. Not merely fame.

Power.

The power to rule. The power to command. The power to impose. The power to win. And Jesus refuses.

That refusal ought to haunt every Christian attempt to merge the cross with the machinery of empire. Jesus does not reject public life. He does not reject the world. He does not reject the needs of real people living under real systems of power. But he rejects the bargain that says the kingdom of God can be built by bowing to domination.

This is where American Christianity keeps being tested. Not only in whether we believe in Jesus, but in which Jesus we are willing to follow. The Jesus of the Gospels blesses the poor, welcomes the stranger, touches the untouchable, forgives enemies, confronts religious hypocrisy, and warns that nations will be judged by how they treated the hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, imprisoned, and vulnerable.

That Jesus is very hard to wrap in a flag.

The country is not the church

The United States is not the church.

That sentence should not offend Christians. It should protect us. The church does not need the nation to become Christian in order for Christians to be faithful. The church does not need official status in order to love its neighbors. The church does not need political dominance in order to bear witness to the gospel.

In fact, political dominance may be one of the most spiritually dangerous things Christianity can seek. When Christianity becomes a preferred religion of the state, it rarely becomes more Christlike. It usually becomes more useful to those in power. It learns to bless what should be challenged. It learns to excuse what should be confessed. It learns to call domination “order,” cruelty “strength,” and exclusion “faithfulness.”

That is not revival.

That is captivity.

And it is especially dangerous in a religiously diverse democracy, where the promise of religious freedom only means something if it protects everyone. Religious liberty is not the right of Christians to control the public square. It is the right of all people to live without the government establishing one faith as the measure of full belonging.

That concern is not hypothetical. Pew Research Center reported last week that 17% of U.S. adults now say the federal government should declare Christianity the official religion of the United States, up from 13% in 2024. Pew also found that 37% of adults now say religion is gaining influence in American life, the highest share Pew has measured since 2002.

So this conversation is not just symbolic. It is not merely about one rally, one phrase, or one political moment. It is about what kind of public faith we are forming.

Christian faith should make us better neighbors, not more entitled rulers

Here is a test I keep returning to: Does our public faith make our neighbors safer? Does it make the poor more visible? Does it make immigrants more human? Does it make children more protected? Does it make truth harder to avoid? Does it make mercy more likely? Does it make power more accountable? Does it make people of other faiths — and people of no faith — more confident that Christians will defend their freedom too?

If not, then whatever we are practicing may be religious, but it is not the way of Jesus.

Christianity at its best does not need to dominate the public square. It needs to leaven it. It needs to serve it. It needs to tell the truth in it. It needs to stand with those crushed by it. It needs to remind every nation, including this one, that God is not impressed by flags, borders, slogans, or ceremonies if justice is absent.

The prophets said this long before America existed. God does not ask for louder songs while the vulnerable are ignored. God does not ask for more public displays of piety while truth is trampled. God does not ask for national self-congratulation while neighbors are treated as threats.

The prayer God seems to honor is the one that changes us.

So pray for America. But do not confuse America with God.

Pray for America to become more honest. Pray for America to become more just. Pray for America to protect the religious freedom of every person. Pray for America to repent where repentance is needed. Pray for America to care more about hungry children than political theater. Pray for America to welcome the stranger, tell the truth, restrain violence, and seek peace.

Pray for America to be humble enough to know it is not the kingdom of God.

But do not confuse America with God. Do not confuse the flag with the cross. Do not confuse political victory with faithfulness. Do not confuse public prayer with public righteousness. And do not confuse the loudest religious voices in the country with the voice of Jesus.

Because the question is not whether Christians should bring faith into public life. We should.

The question is what kind of faith we are bringing.

A faith that blesses power?

Or a faith that blesses the poor, the grieving, the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers, and those who hunger and thirst for justice?

One of those can be wrapped around a nation.

The other still sounds like Jesus.

And for Christians, that should make all the difference.

Thank you for reading. Paid subscribers help make space for this kind of deeper theological reflection and public faith writing, and I’m grateful for every reader — free or paid — who is part of this conversation.

The sermon I offered last Sunday circled around one of the most important questions faith can ask: What kind of power does God have?

That question matters in the sanctuary, of course. It shapes how we pray, how we read Scripture, and how we speak about God. But it also matters far beyond Sunday morning. It shapes how we live with suffering, how we understand responsibility, how we treat our neighbors, and how we imagine the work of love in a world that is still unfinished.

It also connects with my last article about the power of God. In that piece, I reflected on the difference between imagining divine power as control and imagining divine power as the persistent, creative, persuasive power of love. That second way of seeing God is at the heart of process theology.

Process theology grows out of the work of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and was developed by theologians such as Charles Hartshorne, John Cobb, Marjorie Suchocki, Catherine Keller, and many others.

You do not have to know those names to understand the heart of it. But it helps to know this is not simply a vague spiritual preference or a softer way of talking about God. It is a serious theological tradition that has spent generations thinking carefully about God, freedom, suffering, science, creation, Scripture, Jesus, and love.

What draws me to process theology is not that it makes faith more complicated. It helps faith become more honest: honest about suffering, honest about science, honest about human freedom, honest about the Bible, and honest about the God we actually meet in Jesus.

Process theology begins with a deeply relational view of reality. Everything exists in relationship. Nothing stands entirely alone. Every moment is shaped by what has come before it, and every moment opens into some new possibility. Life is always becoming.

God is part of that becoming — not as a distant force outside the world, occasionally stepping in from somewhere else, but as the living presence of love within creation, calling every moment toward healing, beauty, justice, connection, and wholeness.

That may sound subtle, but it changes the feel of almost everything.

God

In process theology, God’s power is best understood through love.

God is powerful because love is powerful. Love can create. Love can heal. Love can invite courage where fear has taken root. Love can open a door in a life that seemed completely closed. Love can call people, communities, and even whole movements toward something more faithful than what they have known before.

This does not mean God causes every event or arranges every tragedy for some hidden purpose. It means God is present in every event, working with the real materials of that moment to bring forth whatever good is still possible. When someone is grieving, God is not the author of their loss. God is the deep companionship that meets them in the grief. When injustice happens, God is not secretly using cruelty as a tool. God is the holy unrest that refuses to let cruelty have the final word.

When we pray, we are not trying to talk a reluctant God into caring. We are opening ourselves to the God who is already present, already loving, already calling us toward the next faithful response.

Creation

Process theology also takes creation seriously as a living, unfolding reality. The world has freedom, agency, risk, beauty, and unpredictability woven into it. Creation is still becoming. The universe is alive with possibility, and God is intimately involved in that process.

This means the world matters. The material world is not a temporary waiting room for heaven. Bodies matter. Soil matters. Water matters. Communities matter. Systems matter. The choices we make inside this creation are part of the way the future takes shape.

God’s work is not to erase the world but to lure it toward life. And we are invited to participate.

Human Beings

Human beings, in this view, are deeply relational creatures. We are shaped by families, neighborhoods, histories, cultures, bodies, wounds, privileges, fears, hopes, and choices. None of us arrives in the world as a blank slate. We are born into stories already underway.

That helps me think about sin in a way that feels both truthful and compassionate. Sin is more than rule-breaking. Sin is the distortion of relationship. It is what happens when love gets bent toward fear, domination, selfishness, exclusion, or indifference. It shows up in personal choices, but also in habits, institutions, and systems that train us to see some lives as more valuable than others.

When Christians have talked about “original sin,” they have often been trying to name something real: that human beings do not begin from a place of pure neutrality. We are born into a world already tangled in harm. We inherit wounds, fears, prejudices, systems we did not design, and stories about who matters and who does not. Eventually, in ways both obvious and hidden, we participate in that brokenness.

Process theology allows us to take sin seriously without reducing human beings to depravity. We are wounded and capable of wounding. We are also beloved, responsive, and capable of becoming more whole. God is always working in that tension, calling us toward repair.

Jesus

Jesus is central because Jesus shows us what a human life looks like when it is profoundly open to God. In him, we see a life shaped by compassion, courage, truth, tenderness, and justice. He moves through the world with an extraordinary responsiveness to the suffering and possibility around him.

He touches people others avoid. He welcomes people others exclude. He feeds people who are hungry. He tells the truth to people with power. He forgives, weeps, heals, confronts, gathers a community, and refuses to answer violence with violence.

Jesus reveals God by embodying God’s love in history, in flesh, in relationship, and in public life.

That matters because Christian theology can become very abstract very quickly. We can speak of God in enormous concepts: omnipotence, sovereignty, transcendence, holiness. Those words have their place. But Jesus keeps bringing us back to earth. If our idea of God cannot be recognized in Jesus’ way of loving, healing, welcoming, truth-telling, and suffering with the world, then something has gone wrong.

Salvation

Salvation, in this way of thinking, is the healing and transformation of life. It is God drawing us into deeper wholeness. It is liberation from the powers that keep us trapped: despair, resentment, hatred, greed, fear, shame, violence, and the false stories we tell about ourselves and each other.

Salvation is personal. It reaches into the hidden places of the heart. But it is never merely private. God saves us into relationship, into community, into neighbor-love, into justice, into mercy, and into a life that becomes more open to the movement of love.

This is why salvation cannot be reduced to what happens after death. Eternal life is not only a future destination. It is a quality of life that begins now as we are drawn more deeply into the life of God.

The Church

The church, at its best, is a community learning to respond to God together. We gather to listen for the Spirit. We tell ancient stories. We break bread. We confess. We sing. We grieve. We hope. We practice forgiveness, courage, mercy, and the art of becoming the kind of people who can recognize and respond to love.

Of course, the church often fails at this. Sometimes spectacularly. But the calling remains.

The church exists to help people become more available to God’s transforming love — not only in their inner lives, but in their relationships, decisions, neighborhoods, politics, economics, and public witness. Faith is never sealed off from the rest of life.

The Future

Process theology also reshapes how we think about the future. The future is open. What we do matters. What communities choose matters. What nations normalize matters. What churches bless or resist matters.

God is always calling creation toward beloved community, toward justice, toward peace, toward beauty, toward reconciliation, and toward the fullness of love. That calling is steady and trustworthy. But it does not cancel human responsibility.

Hope, then, is active. Hope is joining the movement of God’s love in the world as it is. It is feeding, healing, welcoming, repairing, resisting evil, making peace, practicing mercy, telling the truth, and choosing love when fear would be easier.

That is one of the gifts of process theology for me. It does not require me to deny reality in order to have faith. I do not have to pretend suffering is secretly good. I do not have to explain away tragedy as God’s plan. I do not have to call domination “power” in order to call God powerful. I do not have to imagine faith as escape from the world.

Instead, I can trust that God is deeply present in the world, patiently and persistently working through love, calling each moment toward whatever healing is possible next.

And that brings me to something I have been thinking about more and more lately.

Because our theology does not stay in church. Sooner or later, the way we imagine God shapes the way we imagine everything else.

I want to take the next portion of this article a little more personally and directly. What follows is for paid subscribers, with my gratitude for everyone who reads my work, whether free or paid. And I’m especially grateful for paid subscribers, whose support helps make space for this kind of deeper theological reflection and public faith writing.

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Over the years, I have had dozens of conversations with people who have quietly stepped away from faith. Some call themselves agnostic. Some say atheist. Some say spiritual but not religious. Some avoid labels altogether. They just know that somewhere along the way, the faith they were given stopped working.

And I want to say something very clearly: I am not especially worried about those folks.

I do not mean that dismissively. I mean it because I trust that God is not confined to the church. Sometimes, honestly, it is safer outside the church than inside it — especially when church has become a place where rigid doctrines, spiritual fear, exclusion, shame, or bad theology are doing real harm. Sometimes stepping away is not a failure. Sometimes stepping away is how a person protects the tender, sacred part of themselves that the church should have protected in the first place.

This reflection grows out of a sermon I preached this past Sunday on Acts 17 and John 14. I’ve been thinking about it ever since, because the question underneath the sermon feels bigger than one Sunday morning: What kind of power does God actually have — and what kind of power should Christians refuse to imitate?

You can listen to audio of the full sermon here.

If you have trouble with the link above, you can copy and paste it into your browser from here: https://revdavidwheeler.podbean.com/e/the-god-you-already-know/

Very often, when people tell me they have stopped believing in God, what they have actually stopped believing in is a particular picture of God. They have not rejected love. They have not rejected compassion. They have not rejected justice, mercy, beauty, truth, healing, or the possibility that something sacred is woven into the world. They have rejected a God who no longer looks like love.

And honestly? I understand that.

The God many people were handed

A lot of people were handed a God who was far away, sitting above the world, controlling everything from a distance. They were told God was “all-powerful,” and by that they were taught to mean that God could stop anything, prevent anything, fix anything, heal anything, rescue anyone, rearrange any circumstance, and override any tragedy — but often chooses not to.

Then life happened. Abuse happened. Cancer happened. Violence happened. Depression happened. Grief happened. War happened. Children suffered. Prayers went unanswered. And the question became unbearable: If God could have stopped this and didn’t, what does that say about God?

If everything happens according to God’s plan, then what kind of plan includes this? If God is in control of every detail, then how do we keep calling God good?

I do not think those questions are a failure of faith. Sometimes those questions are a sign of spiritual integrity. Sometimes people are not rejecting God so much as rejecting an image of God that no longer looks like love. Sometimes they are saying, “I cannot worship a God who seems less compassionate than I am.”

That is not rebellion. That may be honesty. It may even be faith trying to survive.

Why this matters now

This is not an abstract theological debate for people who like to argue about doctrine. This matters in hospital rooms. It matters at gravesides. It matters after diagnoses, divorces, overdoses, betrayals, layoffs, funerals, and late-night conversations when someone is trying to decide whether God is cruel, absent, powerless, or simply not real.

But it also matters in public life.

The picture of God we carry shapes the way we understand power. It shapes what we admire, what we excuse, and what we are willing to call holy. And right now, this could not be more urgent, because a muscular, forceful, domination-seeking version of Christianity is on the rise in American public life.

Christian nationalism does not merely invite Christians to participate in democracy, which of course Christians can and should do. It seeks to fuse Christian identity with national power. It imagines the church’s task as taking control, defeating enemies, enforcing its will, and ruling from above.

That vision may use Christian language, but it does not look much like Jesus.

It looks more like Caesar with a Bible verse.

Underneath that kind of religion is usually a particular picture of God: God as supreme controller, divine enforcer, the one who gets his way through command, punishment, conquest, and power over others. Once that is the image of God, it becomes much easier to imagine that faithful people should seek the same kind of power.

If God’s power is domination, then domination can be baptized. If God’s power is control, then control can be called faithfulness. If God’s power is coercion, then coercion can be dressed up as righteousness.

But if the power of God looks like Jesus, then Christian nationalism is not a faithful expression of Christianity. It is a betrayal of the way of Christ.

Because Jesus does not reveal God’s power as domination from above. Jesus reveals God’s power as love from within. Not control, but call. Not coercion, but invitation. Not fear, but mercy. Not the crushing of enemies, but the hard and holy work of reconciliation, justice, truth-telling, forgiveness, and beloved community.

This is why theology matters. Bad theology does not stay in the sanctuary. It spills into voting booths, school board meetings, legislative chambers, family systems, and social media feeds. A cruel picture of God eventually creates cruel religion. A controlling picture of God eventually creates controlling religion. A dominating picture of God eventually creates a church that mistakes domination for faithfulness.

But Jesus offers us another way.

Maybe the problem is not God

Maybe the problem is the picture of God many of us inherited. Maybe the issue is not that God is absent, but that we were taught to look for God in the wrong way.

Maybe we were taught to look for God as a force of control from above, when Scripture keeps pointing us toward God as sacred presence from within.

In Acts 17, Paul stands in Athens surrounded by altars, idols, and religious searching. He sees people reaching for the sacred. He sees people trying to name the mystery. He sees people building monuments to what they do not yet understand. And Paul does not begin by mocking them. He says, in effect: The God you are searching for is not as far away as you think.

God does not live in temples made by human hands. God is not contained by shrines or statues or religious systems. God is not dependent on us, as though God needed something from us. Rather, Paul says, God gives life and breath to all things.

Then comes the line that still takes my breath away: “In God we live and move and have our being.”

That is not the language of distance. That is the language of immersion.

And in John’s Gospel, Jesus says something remarkably similar in a different key. He tells his disciples that he will not leave them orphaned. He promises the Spirit, the Advocate, the presence of God who abides with them and will be in them.

Again, this is not distance language. This is abiding language. Indwelling language. Presence language. Breath language. Love-near-enough-to-live-in language.

A different kind of power

Many of us were taught that God’s power means control. God can force, override, intervene, and rearrange reality whenever God wants. And I understand why that can sound comforting at first.

But eventually, for many people, that comfort collapses. Because if God controls everything, then God becomes responsible for everything. And suddenly we are left trying to explain things that should not have to be explained.

We say things like, “Everything happens for a reason.” Which is the sort of thing people put on coffee mugs, but should be used very carefully in hospital rooms.

Sometimes that sentence does not heal. Sometimes it wounds. Sometimes it asks people to call evil good. Sometimes it asks people to call tragedy a divine plan. Sometimes it asks people to defend God by making God morally monstrous.

And I do not think we have to do that.

I do not believe faith requires us to pretend every terrible thing was secretly designed by love. I do not believe God causes abuse to teach lessons. I do not believe God sends cancer to build character. I do not believe God plans violence so that some mysterious purpose can unfold. I do not believe every disaster is a message from heaven.

And I do not believe saying those things makes God smaller. I think it may help us recover a God who is more loving, more present, and more worthy of trust.

Love is not lesser power

This is where process theology has been deeply helpful to me. I know “process theology” may sound like something that happens when a church committee forms a subcommittee to study the committee process. But at its heart, process theology has given me a more loving way to understand God’s power.

It asks us to imagine God’s power not as coercive control, but as relational love. God does not control like a dictator. God calls like love. God does not control the world from outside. God lures the world from within. God does not override creation. God works with creation, in creation, through creation, moment by moment, offering the next possible movement toward healing, justice, beauty, connection, and life.

This does not mean God is absent. It means God is intimately present. It does not mean God is weak. It means domination is not the kind of power most worthy of God.

God’s will is not a script imposed on the world. God’s will is the living possibility of love offered in every moment.

God is affected by the world. God feels with the world. God suffers with creation. God rejoices with creation. God receives every tear, every act of courage, every injustice, every kindness, every wound, every beginning again.

This is not the God who stands untouched above it all. This is the God who abides. The God who gives life and breath. The God in whom we live and move and have our being. The God who is not far from each one of us.

The power revealed in Jesus

Someone might ask, “But doesn’t that make God less powerful?”

I suppose it depends on what we mean by power. If by power we mean the ability to dominate, then yes, this is a different kind of power. If by power we mean the ability to control every outcome, then yes, this revises that idea.

But what if domination is not the highest form of power? What if control is not the power most worthy of God? What if the deepest power in the universe is not force, but love?

When Christians look at Jesus, what kind of power do we see? Not control, but call. Not domination, but healing. Not coercion, but invitation. Not violence, but truth-telling. Not superiority, but solidarity. Not a throne protected by fear, but a table widened by grace.

We see teaching, feeding, forgiving, welcoming, challenging, foot-washing love. We see power that does not coerce love, because coerced love is not love.

That means the church cannot faithfully pursue domination in the name of Jesus.

The church can pursue justice. The church can tell the truth. The church can protect the vulnerable. The church can challenge systems that crush people. The church can participate in public life. The church can speak with moral clarity.

But the church cannot follow Jesus by trying to rule like Caesar.

The way of Jesus is not Christian nationalism. It is not spiritualized authoritarianism. It is not domination with hymns playing in the background. It is not the cross wrapped in a flag and turned into a weapon.

The way of Jesus is cruciform love. It is power poured out for the sake of life. It is truth without cruelty, courage without contempt, justice without dehumanization, and strength without domination.

The God you may already know

Maybe that is the God you already know.

Maybe you have known this God, even if you did not always call it God. Maybe you have known God as the quiet nudge toward compassion, the ache for justice, the courage to tell the truth, the tenderness that showed up in grief, the friend who sat beside you when there were no words, the strange hope that whispered, “There is still another way.”

You may have called it conscience. You may have called it love. You may have called it courage. You may have called it beauty. You may have called it something you could not name.

But maybe Paul would say: God was not far from you.

Maybe Jesus would say: The Spirit was abiding with you.

Maybe faith is not always about finding a distant God. Maybe faith is becoming awake to the sacred love that has been with us all along.

What this asks of us

This way of seeing God changes how we live. We stop asking faith to explain every tragedy. We stop trying to defend God by excusing suffering. We stop telling wounded people that their pain must be part of some secret heavenly plan.

Instead, we begin asking better questions: Where is sacred love present now? What healing is being offered? What next faithful possibility is God luring us toward? How might we cooperate?

Because if God’s power is persuasive love, then our response matters. God is not going to love the world instead of us. God is not going to do justice instead of us. God is not going to offer mercy instead of us. God is not going to build beloved community instead of us.

God calls. God lures. God invites. But love asks for cooperation. Love asks to take on flesh in us.

That may not answer every question. It may not solve every mystery. But it gives me a God I can trust. A God I can love. A God I can recognize.

Not the distant ruler controlling all things from above, but the sacred love present in all things, surrounding all things, calling us moment by moment toward life, healing, justice, and belonging.

The God in whom we live. The God in whom we move. The God in whom we have our being. The God not far from any of us.

The God who has been here all along.

The God you may already know.

If this reflection speaks to you, I’d be grateful for your support as a paid subscriber, which helps me keep writing about faith, public life, and a more loving way to follow Jesus.

Every year, as Mother’s Day approaches, I know some people wonder why our church does not make a big production of it during Sunday worship.

It is not because mothers do not matter.

They do. Deeply.

I say that as someone who loves my own mother dearly. I am, without apology, a mama’s boy — grateful for her love, her strength, her faith, and the countless ways she has shaped me.

Many of us have been loved, carried, taught, corrected, fed, defended, prayed over, and held together by mothers and mothering people whose love helped make us who we are. Some of us can trace the grace of God through the hands, voices, kitchens, hospital rooms, car rides, bedtime prayers, and stubborn faithfulness of the women who raised us. That kind of love is holy.

But that is also part of why I am careful with Mother’s Day in church.

The day is not simple for everyone

Because Sunday worship is not only for those whose stories fit neatly inside the greeting card version of the day. It is also for the woman who desperately wanted children and never had them; for the person whose mother died too soon; for the parent whose child has died; for the mother whose relationship with her child is broken; and for the child whose relationship with their mother is painful, complicated, or unsafe.

It is for the person who was raised by grandparents, neighbors, foster parents, two dads, two moms, an aunt, a church member, or a whole village of people who stepped in and loved them when biology alone was not enough. It is for the woman who is not a mother and does not need the church subtly suggesting that her life is somehow incomplete. It is for the mother who is exhausted by all the ways our culture praises mothers one day a year while failing to support them the rest of the year.

And it is for those who simply came to church needing resurrection, not another reminder of what hurts.

Mother’s Day has a more complicated history than we often remember

Mother’s Day is a cultural holiday. It may be meaningful. It may be beautiful. It may be worth celebrating in homes, restaurants, phone calls, cemeteries, family gatherings, and quiet moments of gratitude. But it is not a holy day in the Christian calendar.

And even the history of Mother’s Day is more complicated than many of us realize. In the United States, Mother’s Day did not begin simply as a sentimental celebration of private family life. Some of its roots were public and political. Julia Ward Howe called for a mothers’ peace observance after war. Ann Reeves Jarvis organized mothers’ work clubs focused on health, sanitation, and community care. Later, Anna Jarvis helped establish the modern Mother’s Day to honor her own mother — and then spent much of her life resisting what the holiday became as it was commercialized and sentimentalized.

That history matters, because it reminds us that honoring mothers was never meant to be only about flowers, brunch, greeting cards, and a few minutes of public applause. At its best, it was also about peace, public health, community repair, grief, gratitude, and the real conditions under which women, children, and families live.

Not every cultural observance does the same work

That does not mean the church should never recognize what is happening in the world around us. Of course we should.

We make room for Black History Month. We celebrate LGBTQ Pride. We mention Hispanic Heritage Month. We observe Earth Day. We pray in response to elections, wars, disasters, court decisions, and public events that shape people’s lives.

So the question is not simply, “Is this on the church calendar?”

The better question is, “What does this observance do in the room?”

When we recognize Black History Month, we are not simply importing a secular observance into worship. We are telling the truth about a history too often ignored, distorted, or whitewashed. We are remembering the faith, resistance, leadership, suffering, beauty, and brilliance of Black people in a society — and too often a church — that has marginalized them.

When we celebrate Pride, we are not merely acknowledging a theme month. We are naming the sacred worth of LGBTQ people in a world where religion has too often been used to shame, exclude, and harm them.

When we mention Hispanic Heritage Month, we are not checking a diversity box. We are honoring stories, cultures, languages, and communities often treated as peripheral in a country and church still shaped by whiteness.

These observances can help the church repent, remember, repair, and widen its imagination. They can help us tell fuller truths. They can help us see people whom the church has too often failed to see.

Mother’s Day can reinforce ideals we should question

Mother’s Day usually functions differently.

Not because mothers have it easy. They do not.

Mothers are often exhausted, underpaid, under-protected, overburdened, and asked to carry impossible expectations. Many mothers are doing holy work with too little support and too few resources. If we were serious about honoring mothers, we would talk less about flowers and more about paid leave, affordable childcare, healthcare, food security, domestic violence, maternal mortality, workplace flexibility, and the crushing loneliness many parents carry.

But the idealized image of “the mother” already holds a powerful place in American religious culture. Churches do not usually need encouragement to sentimentalize motherhood. We are already very good at that.

Too often, Mother’s Day in church becomes a celebration of a very specific kind of family story: a woman who gives, nurtures, sacrifices, smiles, and holds everything together. That story may be beautiful for some, but it can also become a cage. It can make women without children feel invisible, people with painful family histories feel exposed, grieving parents feel forgotten, and mothers who are struggling feel like failures. It can quietly suggest that a woman’s highest calling is to pour herself out for everyone else.

A woman’s worth is not tied to bearing children

And underneath that ideal is an even deeper danger: the suggestion that a woman’s worth is somehow tied to whether she bears children.

That message may not always be spoken out loud, but it is often absorbed. It shows up when women are treated as incomplete without children, when motherhood is framed as the natural destiny of every woman, or when the church talks as if bearing and raising children is the primary way women reflect the image of God.

But women do not have to become mothers to be whole. They do not have to bear children to be faithful. They do not have to nurture everyone else in order to matter. A woman’s sacred worth is not earned through motherhood. It is not proven through sacrifice. It is not completed by children.

It is given by God.

Full stop.

And when the church baptizes any ideal that says otherwise, even subtly, we are not challenging power. We are reinforcing it.

Worship should be wider than sentiment

The church gathers on Sunday for something deeper and wider than sentiment. We gather to practice the way of Jesus, to tell the truth, to pray for the world as it actually is, and to make room for grief and joy, gratitude and anger, celebration and ache. We gather at a table where no one’s worth depends on their family status, marital status, gender, fertility, parenting history, or ability to fit inside a cultural ideal.

That does not mean we pretend Mother’s Day is not happening.

It means we handle it gently.

Our practice is pastoral, not dismissive

In our church, we may give thanks for mothers and mothering people. We may pray for those who are grieving. We may honor those who nurture, protect, mentor, and love. We may acknowledge the beauty and the complexity of the day. But we do not ask all mothers to stand. We do not hand out flowers only to certain people. We do not preach a sermon that turns motherhood into the highest calling of womanhood. We do not make the whole service revolve around a holiday that brings joy to some and pain to others.

That choice is not a rejection of mothers. It is an act of pastoral care.

It is also an act of theological resistance.

It is a way of saying that the church does not exist to bless every cultural script simply because it is popular, familiar, or emotionally powerful. Sometimes the church’s work is to ask what a tradition does, who it centers, who it wounds, who it leaves out, and whether the gospel is calling us into something more honest and more spacious.

We see more than one story in the room

We see the mother who is proud. We see the mother who is tired. We see the mother who is grieving. We see the person who misses their mom. We see the person who had to survive their mom. We see the person who wanted to be a mom. We see the person who never wanted to be one. We see the people who mother without ever being called mother. We see the families formed by birth, adoption, foster care, friendship, covenant, and love.

And most of all, we trust that God sees them too.

So no, we do not “celebrate Mother’s Day” in worship in the traditional sense. And for the same reasons, we do not turn Father’s Day into a major worship celebration either.

Fathers matter. Fathering people matters. Many of us have been blessed by the love, steadiness, tenderness, protection, and presence of fathers and father figures. But Father’s Day can also be complicated. Some are grieving fathers. Some are estranged from fathers or children. Some carry wounds from abusive, absent, or emotionally unavailable fathers. Some longed to become fathers and never did. Some are exhausted by expectations of what fatherhood is supposed to be.

So our practice is consistent: we do not ignore these days, but we do not let them define the worshiping life of the church.

The good news is wider than one family story

But we do bless love wherever it has taken root. We honor care wherever it has been given. We tell the truth about grief wherever it is carried. We refuse to make anyone feel invisible in the house of God.

And we remember that the good news of Jesus is not that everyone has the same kind of family story.

The good news is that everyone is held in the wide mercy of God.

There’s something I don’t often say out loud, but I think it’s worth saying here.

Every week—sometimes every day—I’m making decisions about what to say publicly… and what not to say.

Not just in sermons.
Not just in articles.
But in posts, comments, conversations, interviews—everywhere my voice shows up.

And those decisions aren’t casual.

They’re layered.
They’re prayerful.
They’re sometimes exhausting.

Because the truth is, every time I choose to name something clearly—especially in this cultural and political moment—I know it might cost something.

And every time I choose not to say something, that has a cost too.

That’s the tension I live in.

What follows is a more personal, behind-the-scenes reflection that I share with those who help support this work.

If that’s not you, no pressure at all—I’m grateful you’re here just the same.

So what goes into those decisions?

More than people might think.

Read more

If you’ve spent any time in church, you’ve likely experienced it:

A tune you recognize…
but the words are different.

That’s not a mistake.
It’s tradition.

Christians have long practiced what’s called contrafactum—writing new words to familiar melodies. Sometimes it was practical. Familiar tunes are easier to sing, easier to remember, easier to carry with us.

But often, it was something more.

It was theological.

Because as communities grow, as understanding deepens, as the Spirit keeps moving—sometimes the old words are no longer enough to say what we now know to be true.

So we sing the tune again.
But we tell the truth more fully.

“What Child Is This” is sung to the tune of Greensleeves, a melody older than the hymn itself.
“O Sacred Head, Now Wounded” began as a secular love song before being given sacred text.
“Amazing Grace,” written by John Newton, is most often sung today to NEW BRITAIN, a tune it was not originally paired with.
And many of the hymns of Charles Wesley have been sung to a variety of tunes across time, allowing the words to travel freely across melodies.

The Lutheran tradition offers another thread in this story. Martin Luther didn’t just write hymns like “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”—he helped lead a shift toward congregational singing in the language and musical patterns of ordinary people. Worship was no longer something performed for the people, but something sung by them—so that faith could be voiced, remembered, and lived in everyday life.

In traditions like the Stone-Campbell Movement, congregational singing has long drawn on shared tunes and accessible forms so that the whole community could participate fully in song.

And in more recent generations, especially in traditions like the United Church of Christ, hymn writers such as Thomas H. Troeger, Shirley Erena Murray, Ruth Duck, and Brian Wren have continued this work—crafting new texts, often set to familiar tunes, to reflect a growing commitment to justice, inclusion, and the expansive love of God.

The church has never only preserved its songs.
It has also reimagined them.

Not to erase the past—
but to let grace keep speaking.

In that spirit, I offer the following.

These lyrics are offered for congregations ready to name and celebrate the sacred worth of LGBTQ+ beloveds—members, family, friends—and to sing a faith that makes room where harm has too often been done.

🌈 Come, Thou Fount of Boundless Welcome

(sung to the tune NETTLETON — the tune commonly used for “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing”)

Verse 1
Come, Thou Fount of boundless welcome,
tune our hearts to sing Your grace;
every life and every story
finds in You a sacred place.
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
flow through those once cast aside;
in Your love we claim our stories—
fear and shame no longer hide.

Verse 2
We were told that we were different,
we were named as less-than, wrong;
still Your Spirit moved among us,
whispering, “You still belong.”
You have called us, claimed, and known us,
blessed the truth we could not hide;
in Your image, all reflected—
each beloved, dignified.

Verse 3
O to grace how fierce and faithful,
breaking chains of fear and shame;
healing wounds from church and culture,
speaking life in love’s own name.
Bind us now to one another,
make us strong and make us brave;
send us out to live Your welcome,
love more boldly, wide as grace.

Verse 4 (optional)
God of covenant and promise,
sign of hope across the sky,
call us into deeper justice,
where no child is cast aside.
Till all people live in freedom,
till all know their sacred worth,
we will sing and work for welcome—
love alive in all the earth.

A Note for Use and Sharing

If this hymn speaks to you, you’re invited to use it—in worship, in community gatherings, in Pride services, or wherever people need to hear that they belong.

All I ask is simple attribution if you share it more widely.

Preferred attribution (please include if sharing):
“Come, Thou Fount of Boundless Welcome” by Rev. David Wheeler

A Quiet Invitation

If this kind of work matters to you—creating resources for more inclusive, expansive, and grace-filled faith—I’d be grateful to have you as a paid subscriber. Your support helps make and share more like this.

There’s a phrase we keep hearing from Donald Trump and J. D. Vance:

religious freedom.

It’s invoked like a sacred principle. A constitutional right. A moral high ground.

But their recent clashes with the moral voice of the Catholic Church—including tensions involving Pope Leo XIV—tell a very different story.

In recent days, both Trump allies and Vance have pushed back against Catholic teaching on issues like immigration and just war—openly challenging the authority of the pope and the broader tradition he represents when it conflicts with their political priorities.

Apparently, “religious freedom” applies—right up until the religion starts sounding like Jesus.

When the Pope’s Voice Doesn’t Count

At the center of these tensions is a simple question: what happens when one of the most visible Christian leaders in the world speaks—and his message doesn’t align with political power?

We’re seeing the answer play out in real time.

Instead of engaging the substance of Catholic teaching—on migrants, on human dignity, on the ethics of violence—the response has been to dismiss, reinterpret, or sideline it.

The implication is hard to miss: Christianity is welcome in public life—so long as it says the “right” things.

A Familiar Pattern

This isn’t new for Trump.

When Pope Francis criticized his immigration proposals in 2016, Trump responded:

“For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful.”

In other words, when a pope applies Christian teaching in a way that challenges political power, the problem isn’t the policy—it’s the preacher.

Rewriting the Faith

Vance has taken a different route—not rejecting Christian teaching outright, but reshaping it.

In defending nationalist priorities, he has argued that love and moral obligation should be ordered first toward one’s own family, then toward one's nation, and only afterward toward the broader world.

That framing stands in clear tension with the papacy's consistent message—that the dignity of the stranger is not secondary, optional, or negotiable.

So when the pope speaks in that tradition, his voice isn’t treated as authoritative.

It’s treated as inconvenient.

Selective Christianity

Here’s how selective Christianity works:

When faith reinforces political goals, it’s elevated.
When it challenges them, it’s questioned.

When it draws boundaries, it’s praised.
When it expands compassion, it’s dismissed as “political.”

That’s not religious freedom.

That’s control.

Performative Religion

There’s a difference between a faith that forms us and a faith we perform.

Performative religion quotes Scripture when it helps. Ignores it when it challenges. And resists it when it threatens power.

It doesn’t ask, What does Jesus teach? It asks, What helps us win?

And when even the pope becomes a target for speaking from within his own tradition, that tells us everything.

What This Really Is

This is not about defending religious freedom.

It is about defining which religion is allowed to speak.

A Christianity that blesses power is protected.

A Christianity that challenges it—even from Rome—is resisted.

The Question That Matters

Do we want a Christianity that follows Jesus—or one that follows power and calls it Jesus?

Because those are not the same thing.

And confusing them may be one of the most dangerous forms of hypocrisy we face today.

If you find value in thoughtful, faith-rooted reflections like this, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to support the work.

A political leader posts an AI-generated image of himself in a Jesus-like role—healing, powerful, almost divine—and the reactions come quickly: outrage, mockery, disbelief. Add to that the ongoing feud with Pope Leo—and the suggestion that the Pope should “stay out of politics”—and it all feels like one more escalation, one more moment that leaves people wondering how we got here.

And yes, it’s disturbing.

But if we stop at outrage—if we treat this as just another example of one man’s ego—we’re going to miss what’s actually happening right in front of us. Because the real story isn’t that a politician is acting like Jesus.

The real story is that, for some Christians, this version of Jesus already makes sense.

This isn’t about Trump thinking he’s Jesus. It’s about the kind of Jesus some Christians have been waiting for.

For generations, Christians have pointed to a very different picture. The Jesus we meet in the Gospels refuses the temptations of power in the wilderness. He resists being turned into a political messiah on the world’s terms. When one of his followers reaches for a sword, Jesus tells him to put it away. When crowds try to crown him, he withdraws.

He kneels to wash feet.
He blesses the poor.
He tells people to love their enemies—not defeat them.

This is not a side note in his teaching. It is the center of it.

And yet, in many places, that vision of Jesus has become increasingly difficult to hold onto—not because it isn’t compelling, but because it isn’t immediately useful. It doesn’t protect us in the ways we want to be protected. It doesn’t win in the ways we’ve been taught to value winning. It doesn’t offer the kind of control we often crave in a world that feels unstable and threatening.

So, slowly and often unconsciously, something begins to shift.

Jesus isn’t rejected outright. Instead, he is reframed. Reinterpreted. Reshaped into someone who looks a little more like what we need him to be—stronger in the ways we recognize strength, more willing to fight the battles we want fought, more aligned with our sense of who is right and who is wrong.

Over time, the difference can be subtle enough that we barely notice it.

But the end result is significant.

Because once Jesus is reimagined in the image of power instead of love, it doesn’t take much for a powerful figure to start feeling like a natural extension of that vision. Not because they actually are divine, but because they reflect the kind of strength, certainty, and dominance that version of Jesus has come to represent.

When Jesus is remade in the image of power, power will always feel like Jesus.

That’s why an image like this doesn’t land as absurd as it should. It resonates. Not with everyone, of course—but with enough people to matter.

And that should give us pause.

Because at the same time this image is circulating, we’re hearing calls for religious leaders to “stay out of politics.” As if faith, at its best, should remain private, quiet, and non-disruptive. As if the role of the church is simply to comfort, not to challenge.

But that, too, reveals something deeper.

Because the Gospel has never been apolitical.

Jesus didn’t get crucified for telling people to be nice to each other.

The cross was Rome’s answer to a threat—not to kindness, but to a different kind of kingdom.

He was executed by the state because his life and teaching carried public consequences. He proclaimed a kingdom that stood in contrast to the kingdoms of this world. He disrupted systems of exclusion. He challenged religious and political authorities alike—not with violence, but with a vision of reality that threatened the way power was being used and maintained.

To say that faith should stay out of politics is to misunderstand the nature of the Gospel itself.

Not because the church is meant to be partisan, but because the teachings of Jesus inevitably shape how we engage the world—how we think about power, justice, belonging, and responsibility to one another.

The question has never been whether faith has political implications.

The question is what kind of politics our faith produces.

Because if Jesus is primarily about power, we will gravitate toward the powerful.
If Jesus is about winning, we will follow whoever we believe can win.
If Jesus is about protecting us from them, we will elevate anyone who promises to do exactly that.

And before long, it becomes difficult to tell where faith ends and politics begins—because the two have been fused together in ways that feel natural, even necessary.

But if Jesus is about self-giving love—if Jesus is about humility, about laying down power rather than seizing it, about standing with the vulnerable rather than securing advantage—then no political figure, no matter how charismatic or effective, could ever convincingly occupy that role.

They wouldn’t fit.

Their instincts would be off. Their methods would feel out of sync. The dissonance would be obvious.

And maybe that’s the clearest indicator we have.

Because what we’re witnessing right now isn’t just a political moment. It’s a theological one. It’s a mirror held up to the church, asking whether the Jesus we claim to follow is still the one we meet in the Gospels—or one we’ve slowly, subtly remade in our own image.

This isn’t just about one image, one post, or one personality. It’s about the conditions that make something like this possible in the first place.

It’s about a faith that, in some expressions, has become so intertwined with power that it no longer knows how to recognize Jesus apart from it.

We didn’t just blur the line between faith and power. In some places, we replaced one with the other.

That’s the uncomfortable truth underneath all of this.

Not just that a line has been crossed—but that, in some places, the line has been moving for a long time.

And now we’re seeing where it leads.

If this kind of reflection helps you make sense of faith in a complicated world, I’m grateful you’re here. And if you’d like to support this work and go deeper with me, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

There are signs—quiet, uneven, easy to miss—that something may be shifting within Trumpism. Not a mass exodus or a sudden collapse, but small cracks that are beginning to show. Recent polling over the past year from Pew Research Center and Gallup suggests that while support for Donald Trump remains strong among his core base, there is growing hesitation among independents, softening enthusiasm among some Republican voters, and rising unfavorable views overall. Recent election analysis from FiveThirtyEight and The Cook Political Report has also noted that Trump-backed candidates don’t always perform as strongly as expected, even when they win. The movement is not disappearing—but the certainty around it may not be as solid as it once was.

You can hear that shift not just in numbers, but in tone. In interviews and focus groups reported by outlets like The New York Times and CNN, some voters who once sounded unwavering in their support for Trump now sound tired, conflicted, or uncertain. People don’t always leave movements like this with dramatic exits. More often, they drift. They hesitate. They stop defending what they once defended without question. And if we’re honest, many of us don’t quite know what to do with that.

For years now, many of us have been speaking out—about cruelty masquerading as strength, about policies under Trump and within Trumpism that have harmed immigrants, LGBTQ people, and the most vulnerable, and about a version of Christianity that has too often aligned itself with power instead of compassion. We have said, clearly and consistently, that this is not the way. So if some people are beginning—even slowly and imperfectly—to step back, to question, to reconsider, then in some sense this is what we were hoping for. It is what change looks like at the beginning: not dramatic, not clean, but real.

And yet it doesn’t feel like victory. It feels complicated, because the harm associated with Trumpism was real. Families were separated. LGBTQ people were targeted. Entire communities were made to feel unsafe, unseen, and expendable. Policies weren’t just debated—they were experienced in people’s bodies, families, and daily lives. Trust, once broken, does not repair itself simply because someone begins to rethink their position. So when we hear that some are stepping away, there is a part of us that resists. A part that wonders where this clarity was before, and whether it can be trusted now. Forgiveness is easy to preach when it is abstract; it is much harder when it has a face.

It’s one thing to hope people will change. It’s another thing to face what that change demands of us when they do.

This is where the gospel becomes uncomfortable. In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, we often focus on the one who leaves and returns, but the more revealing figure may be the one who stayed. The older brother does everything right, remains faithful, and yet cannot understand how grace could possibly extend to the one who walked away. The real scandal of that story is not that someone messed up—it is that they can come back, and that the door is still open when they do.

Of course, welcome does not mean pretending nothing happened. Grace without accountability is cheap, and accountability without grace is simply punishment by another name. If people are truly rethinking their support of Trump and Trumpism, that process must include telling the truth about harm, listening to those who were affected, and committing to live differently going forward. That matters deeply. But if we believe in transformation at all—if it is central to our faith—then we also have to wrestle with what it looks like when that transformation begins in real time, and in people we may not yet trust.

There are not millions of people abandoning Trumpism overnight, and the movement is not suddenly collapsing. But something may be shifting. The enthusiasm is not quite what it was, the certainty not quite as unquestioned. For some, the question is no longer “Are we all in on Trump?” but “Is this really who we want to be?”

And that leaves us with a deeper question—one that has less to do with them, and more to do with us.

If people really are beginning to step away—even slowly, even imperfectly—will we become the kind of people who know how to receive them? Or have we spent so long being right that we have forgotten how to be redemptive? Because it is one thing to call out the harm of Trumpism. It is another thing entirely to welcome those who are beginning to walk away from it.

We believe in accountability. We believe in truth-telling. We believe harm must be named and repaired. But if that is all we believe, then we are not preaching transformation—we are just managing consequences.

The gospel dares to ask more of us than that.

It asks whether we actually believe people can change—even people who once supported Donald Trump. It asks whether grace is something we practice, or just something we prefer to receive. It asks whether we are willing to hold both justice and mercy at the same time, even when it feels costly.

Because if we mean what we say—if we really believe in transformation—then sooner or later someone who once supported Trump and Trumpism is going to turn around and come back.

And when they do, the question will not be whether they deserve it.

The question will be whether we still know how to open the door.

Sources include recent polling and analysis from Pew Research Center, Gallup, FiveThirtyEight, The Cook Political Report, The New York Times, and CNN.

In his well-known reflection “The Work of Christmas,” Howard Thurman reminds us that once the celebration ends, the real work begins—finding the lost, healing the broken, building a more just world.

Easter asks no less of us.

So this is my attempt to say what the work of Easter looks like right now—
not in theory, but in the world we are actually living in.

When the lilies begin to wilt,
and the brass falls silent,

when the last alleluia fades
and the sanctuary empties out—

when the photos have been posted,
and the outfits put away,
and the sugar rush of resurrection
wears off—

when Monday comes
just as it always does—

the work of Easter begins.

And that’s where the trouble starts.

Because if Easter is true,
then death does not get the last word—
which means neither does fear.

And we are living in a time
that runs on fear.

Fear of the other.
Fear of losing power.
Fear dressed up as patriotism.
Fear baptized as faith.

If Easter is true,
then all of that is called into question.

If Easter is true,
then movements built on exclusion—
including what we now call
Christian nationalism—
are revealed for what they are:
a grasping for control
in the face of a God
who refuses to be controlled.

If Easter is true,
then you don’t get to celebrate resurrection
while supporting systems
that harm vulnerable people.

Not when LGBTQ+ youth
are still being told
they need to be fixed—
and the door remains open
for practices that deepen shame
instead of offering life.

Not when immigrants
are treated as threats
instead of neighbors.

Not when war is spoken of
as spectacle—

when leaders like Donald Trump
take to social media
and threaten entire nations with destruction,
promising they will be “living in hell,”
using profanity and bravado
as if domination were strength
instead of a denial of everything Easter stands for.

If Easter is true,
then you don’t get to celebrate resurrection
while ignoring the crucifixions
happening all around you.

At the border.
In our politics.
In the lives of those
who are pushed aside,
shamed,
or erased
in the name of God.

The work of Easter begins
when we refuse to look away.

It begins
when we tell the truth
even when it costs us.

It begins
when we stand with those
who have been pushed aside
and say, with our lives,
you are not alone.

Because resurrection
was never meant
to be a moment we admire—

it is a reality
that rearranges everything.

It disrupts
who belongs.

It dismantles
who holds power.

It refuses
to let death—
whether physical, political, or spiritual—
have the final say.

And that is not good news
for everyone.

But it is good news
for those who have been told
they do not matter.

So make no mistake—

The work of Easter begins…

not in the sanctuary,
not in the music,
not in the moment—

but in what we do next.

There’s a version of Jesus we tend to prefer.

The one riding into Jerusalem on a donkey.
The one receiving palm branches and praise.
The one who feels… safe.

That’s Palm Sunday Jesus.

But by Monday, everything changes.

A Different Kind of Power

In gospel according to Matthew, chapter 21, Jesus enters the temple and begins overturning tables.

Coins scatter.
Chairs crash.
The entire system grinds to a halt.

It’s not polite.
It’s not quiet.
It’s not what anyone expected from a “Prince of Peace.”

And yet—this is exactly who Jesus is.

Not Here to Keep Things Comfortable

The temple wasn’t just a place of worship.
It was a system.

A system of economics.
A system of access.
A system that worked… for some.

And Jesus walks in and disrupts it.

Not because he’s angry for the sake of being angry.
Not because he’s trying to make a scene.

But because the system had drifted so far from its purpose that it no longer reflected the heart of God.

And sometimes, when that happens, love doesn’t look like gentleness.

Sometimes it looks like disruption.

When Faith Gets Uncomfortable

We often talk about faith as something that brings peace.

And it does.

But not all peace is peace.

Sometimes what we call “peace” is just the absence of tension.
Sometimes it’s quiet maintained by systems that benefit us.
Sometimes it’s comfort that comes at someone else’s expense.

Jesus refuses that kind of peace.

He disrupts it.
He exposes it.
He overturns it.

And if we’re honest, that should make us a little uncomfortable.

Because it raises a question we don’t always want to ask:

Where are the tables in our lives that need overturning?

Maybe it looks like…

Tables where Christianity is used to gain political power instead of embody sacrificial love.

Tables where immigrants and refugees are treated as threats instead of neighbors—where fear shapes policy more than compassion.

Tables where LGBTQ+ people are told they’re welcome—as long as they don’t fully belong.

Tables where women are still limited, sidelined, or scrutinized in ways men are not.

Tables where wealth is quietly equated with blessing, and poverty with failure.

Tables where access—to safety, to dignity, to opportunity—is determined by status, paperwork, or proximity to power.

Tables where “law and order” is valued more than justice and mercy.

Tables where the church protects its reputation instead of protecting people.

Not all at once.
Not all loudly.

But honestly.

Because if our faith never disrupts anything,
it may not be following Jesus very closely.

Following Jesus Into Disruption

It’s easy to follow Jesus when the crowds are cheering.

It’s harder to follow him when he starts flipping tables.

When faith calls us to examine systems we benefit from.
When it invites us to speak up instead of stay quiet.
When it pushes us beyond comfort into something more costly, more honest, more real.

Holy Week doesn’t move from celebration to crucifixion by accident.

It moves there because Jesus refuses to play along.

Because he embodies a kind of love that won’t stay contained.
A kind of truth that won’t stay silent.
A different kind of power that won’t protect itself at the expense of others.

This Is Where the Story Turns

Palm Sunday may draw the crowds.

But Holy Monday is where the stakes become clear.

This is the moment everything begins to shift.
This is when Jesus stops being merely popular and starts becoming dangerous.

Not because he sought power.

But because he challenged it.

And systems built on control don’t respond well to that.

So What Do We Do With This?

We could keep following the version of Jesus who calms things down.

The one who never disrupts.
The one who never challenges.
The one who fits neatly into our lives without asking too much of us.

Or…

We could follow the Jesus of Holy Monday.

The one who walks into broken systems and refuses to leave them untouched.
The one who loves enough to disrupt.
The one who reminds us that faith isn’t always about keeping the peace—
sometimes it’s about telling the truth.

Even when it costs something.

Especially when it does.

And if this is the week that leads to the cross…

Then maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that it starts with overturned tables.

If this kind of honest, grounded, and challenging reflection matters to you, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to support this work.

We need to talk about the words we are hearing—and the kind of people those words are forming us to be. Because over time, the language we repeat and absorb doesn’t just describe the world—it shapes how we see others and how we respond to them.

Recently, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth used language like this: “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.”

In September 2025, Donald Trump publicly suggested renaming the Department of Defense as the “Department of War”—a name the United States hasn’t used since 1947.

That change hasn’t happened—at least not officially. Trump did so by executive order.

But listen closely to the language we’re hearing.
It doesn’t sound like defense.
It sounds like war.

And when the language of war starts shaping not just policy but imagination—not just strategy but spirituality—we should pay attention.

Because words don’t stay where they’re spoken.
They travel.
They shape.
They disciple.

And increasingly, that same language of enemies, domination, and destruction is showing up far beyond the battlefield.

From the Battlefield to the Pulpit

What makes this moment different is not just what political figures are saying—but how that language is being echoed and amplified in religious spaces.

In recent days, a pastor connected to Pete Hegseth spoke about James Talarico in stark, condemnatory terms—warning that voices like his are not just mistaken, but stand in opposition to Jesus himself. This pastor stated that he believed Talarico should needed to be “crucified with Christ.”

For Christians, language about being “crucified with Christ” comes from Galatians 2:20—where it names a life of self-giving love, humility, and transformation. But when that language is turned outward—used to label or condemn someone else—it takes on a very different tone. Especially when it’s paired with the kind of “no mercy” rhetoric we’re hearing elsewhere, it begins to sound less like spiritual formation… and more like spiritualized violence.

This is how it happens.

The language of the battlefield doesn’t stay in the realm of policy or geopolitics.
It seeps into our politics. And then, slowly, it seeps into our theology. And our theology shapes how we live in community with one another.

We begin to talk about people—not ideas, not policies, but people—as enemies.
We begin to believe that faithfulness looks like winning.
We begin to confuse conviction with conquest.

And when influential voices who claim the name of Jesus speak this way—and Christians begin to echo it, defend it, and normalize it—the line between the battlefield and the church starts to blur.

Because once the church starts sounding like the battlefield,
we have already lost something far more important than any political fight.

What Kind of People Are We Becoming?

Even if the original context is war—even if the “enemies” in question are real, geopolitical threats—the language itself does something to us.

Because when we are steeped in phrases like Hegseth has used recently:

• no mercy

• no quarter

• hunt and kill

…it becomes easier—almost natural—to begin seeing more and more people through that same lens.

Not as neighbors.
Not as fellow citizens.
Not even as others who were created in the image of God.

But as enemies.

And once someone is an enemy, almost anything can be justified.

This Is Not Just Political. It’s Spiritual Formation.

This is the part many people miss. We tend to think this is about politics. Strategy. Messaging. But it’s deeper than that.

It’s about formation.

Every time we consume this kind of rhetoric—especially when it’s wrapped in religious language—we are being shaped into a certain kind of person:

• quicker to divide

• slower to listen

• more comfortable with contempt

• more willing to dehumanize

And over time, that formation sticks.
It becomes who we are.

Jesus Never Spoke This Way

Which brings us to the unavoidable tension. Because whatever else we might say about national security or global conflict, we cannot ignore this:

Jesus never formed his followers through the language of domination.

He said:

• love your enemies

• bless those who persecute you

• put away your sword

Not because enemies aren’t real.
But because what we become in response to them matters just as much.

We Are Not That Kind of Christian

So let’s be clear about who “we” are.

We are followers of Jesus who refuse to let the language of war become the language of our faith.

We are people who believe:

• strength is not the same as cruelty

• conviction is not the same as contempt

• faithfulness is not measured by who we defeat

We are not interested in “no mercy.”
We are interested in grace.

We are not interested in “no quarter.”
We are interested in making room at the table.

We are not interested in forming enemies.
We are interested in loving our neighbors—
even when that love is difficult, costly, and misunderstood.

And the good news is…we don’t have to keep going down that road.

We can choose a different way.
A way that refuses to mirror the violence around us.
A way that tells the truth without turning people into enemies.
A way that resists the urge to mock, shame, or dehumanize—
even when we strongly disagree.

A way that speaks with conviction, but also with humility.
A way that remembers the person on the other side of the argument is still a person—still worthy of dignity, still made in the image of God.

A way that sounds less like the battlefield…and more like the table.

A way that looks a whole lot more like Jesus.

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Many of us are exhausted.

Not just by politics. Not just by the news.

But by people we love.

Family members. Friends. People we sit next to in church. People who claim the name of Jesus—and yet continue to support Donald Trump and the policies and patterns of harm surrounding him.

People who defend or minimize policies that separate families and expand detention through ICE. People who justify escalating violence in war. People who support efforts—at both state and national levels—to erase or deny the dignity and existence of transgender people.

People who repeat conspiracy theories, refuse to oppose the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, and describe January 6 as something other than what it was. People who support policies that make life harder for the poor while protecting power for the already powerful. People who are unbothered by patterns of behavior and allegations that would disqualify almost anyone else from leadership.

And the question many of us are quietly carrying is this:

What do we owe them now?

This Isn’t Just Political Disagreement

Let’s be honest about what this is—and what it isn’t.

This is not about tax policy or the size of government. It’s not about ordinary political differences that reasonable people can debate in good faith.

This is about harm.

When policies target the vulnerable, when rhetoric strips people of dignity, when power is used in ways that deepen suffering rather than alleviate it—Christians are no longer dealing with a simple difference of opinion.

We are facing a moral and spiritual crisis.

The Trap We Keep Falling Into

In progressive spaces, we tend to fall into one of two responses.

Some of us cut people off, write them off, and assume they are unreachable. Others stay quiet, keep the peace, and avoid hard conversations in the name of “love.”

But neither of these is the way of Jesus.

One abandons relationship. The other abandons truth. And both, in their own way, abandon love.

What Jesus Actually Teaches About Conflict

In Matthew 18, Jesus offers something surprisingly direct.

If someone causes harm, go to them. Tell the truth. Name what has happened. If that doesn’t work, bring others. Widen the circle of accountability. And if there is still no change, acknowledge the rupture honestly.

This is not a blueprint for punishment. It is a framework for refusing to pretend that harm is acceptable in the name of keeping the peace.

Jesus assumes something we often try to avoid:

Love will require conflict.

Caring Enough to Confront

In his book Caring Enough to Confront, Mennonite pastor David Augsburger reminds us that real care is willing to tell the truth, even when it risks the relationship.

Real care is not passive. It does not look away, pretend, or prioritize comfort over truth. It is willing to risk tension—even the relationship itself—in order to be honest.

And just as importantly, it is willing to be confronted in return.

Because love is not control. It is mutual accountability.

Why Silence Isn’t Love

When people we love support harm—when they defend cruelty, spread falsehoods, or dismiss the dignity of others—our silence is not neutral.

It communicates something. It says this is acceptable, tolerable, not worth challenging.

But if we take Jesus seriously, we are called to something more.

Not cruelty. Not self-righteousness. Not public shaming. But truthful, relational courage.

Because:

If we never confront harm, we may be preserving relationships—but we are not practicing love.

What Faithfulness Looks Like Now

This kind of love has shape.

It looks like naming harm clearly without dehumanizing the person. It looks like refusing to normalize what should not be normalized. It looks like setting boundaries when necessary and choosing honesty over comfort.

And yes—it may cost you something. Awkwardness. Distance. Even loss.

But the goal is not to win arguments. The goal is to refuse to participate in harm while still refusing to give up on our shared humanity.

A Different Kind of Love

We are not called to be passive. And we are not called to be cruel.

We are called to be people who tell the truth, stay grounded in love, and refuse both dehumanization and denial.

That kind of love is harder. It takes more courage than silence, more humility than outrage, more faith than avoidance.

But it is the only kind of love that has the power to actually transform anything.

Including us.

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It’s hard to ignore how heavy the world feels right now.
The headlines don’t let up.
The tension feels constant.

And for a lot of people, it’s not just out there—it’s personal.

Conversations are strained.
Trust feels fragile.
And more than a few of us are simply… tired.

It’s not just exhausting—it’s disorienting.
It can make you wonder what’s solid, what’s true, what actually matters anymore.

In moments like this, it’s natural to want something solid to hold onto—something clear, defined, certain.

Many of us were given that in the form of faith defined by belief—statements to affirm, doctrines to hold, lines to stay within. There’s something grounding about that. Something that offers clarity in a complicated world.

And there’s a long tradition in the church of naming what faith is not before saying what it is—drawing boundaries, making distinctions, trying to get it right.

But eventually, you have to say what you’re for.

And for many of us shaped by a more progressive expression of Christianity, faith is less about what we agree to believe and more about how we choose to live.

Not just a set of statements.
A way of being in the world.

A faith that looks like something.
A faith that can be seen, felt, practiced.

We are people who practice love—even when it costs us something.
Not a vague or sentimental love, but one that expands the circle, refuses to give up on people, and shows up when it would be easier to walk away.

We are people who make room at the table, not guard the guest list.
We believe dignity is inherent, not earned. Belonging isn’t something to be granted—it’s something to be recognized.

We are people who choose curiosity over certainty.
We are not afraid of questions, because we’ve learned that faith deepened by honest searching is more resilient than faith protected by fear.

We are people who pursue justice as a spiritual practice.
Not as a trend or talking point, but as a way of aligning our lives with the heart of God—especially for those pushed to the margins.

We are people who take Jesus seriously—and follow his way.
We see in his life a pattern of compassion, courage, and boundary-breaking love that we are invited to embody.

We are people who believe faith should look like something in the world—something visible, tangible, real.

Others have tried to name this vision before—like the well-known Eight Points of Progressive Christianity. And while no list can fully capture it, they point in a similar direction: a faith rooted in love, inclusion, justice, and spiritual growth.

We are also people who take the Bible seriously—but not simplistically.
We don’t pretend to come to Scripture without perspective. None of us do. Every reading is shaped by experience, culture, and context.

We don’t check our humanity at the door when we open the Bible.
We bring our questions.
Our stories.
Our hopes.

So the question isn’t whether we read the Bible through a lens.
The question is: which lens will we choose?

We choose to read through the lens of love.

Love that expands rather than restricts.
Love that restores dignity.
Love that moves toward the marginalized.
Love that looks like Jesus.

Jesus himself read Scripture this way—again and again pulling it back toward mercy, toward compassion, toward life. He didn’t discard Scripture. He re-centered it.

If a reading of Scripture leads us away from love—away from compassion, justice, and human dignity—we trust we’ve missed something. Not because the Bible isn’t sacred, but because love is the clearest picture we have of the Divine.

And so we return, again and again, to that center.

We are people who believe that small acts matter.
That showing up matters.
That how we live—day by day, moment by moment—is where faith becomes real.

As Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said,
“Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.”

This kind of faith won’t always fit neatly into a statement.
It won’t always be easy to explain.

Not perfect.
Not finished.
But real.

And it shows up.

In how we love.
In how we listen.
In how we make space.
In how we keep going—even when the world feels heavy.

And maybe that’s what faith was meant to look like all along.

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For many of us, the story went something like this: God is holy. Humanity sinned. Justice required punishment. And so Jesus came to take the punishment we deserved. The cross, we were told, was necessary—required by God so that God could forgive us.

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We know what performance looks like.
We’ve seen the posts. The staged prayers. The carefully worded statements that sound faithful but cost nothing. The politicians quoting Scripture they do not embody. The leaders invoking God while harming the very people God consistently centers. Most people can feel it now, almost instinctively: something is off. Not just insincere—but hollow. Not just hollow—but harmful.

We even see it play out in real time. In a recent Senate confirmation hearing, Senator Markwayne Mullin pressed Senator Rand Paul in a moment that, depending on how you read it, could be taken as principled scrutiny—or carefully calculated performance. Maybe it was genuine. Maybe it was theater. Time will tell. But that’s the point: in a culture shaped by performance, that line gets harder and harder to see. And eventually, the distinction starts to matter less than the optics.

Jesus had a word for this.
Hypocrisy. Not as a cheap insult—but as a serious spiritual diagnosis. In the Gospels, Jesus reserves some of his strongest language not for outsiders, but for religious insiders who perform righteousness while neglecting justice, mercy, and humility. They looked faithful. They sounded faithful. But their lives told a different story. And Jesus was clear: that kind of religion doesn’t heal the world—it burdens it.

Performance always prioritizes appearance over substance.
And when appearance becomes the goal, truth becomes flexible. Compassion becomes optional. People become props. Faith becomes a tool—something to be used, leveraged, and displayed rather than lived. This is where religion stops being transformative and starts becoming transactional.

This is where faith becomes dangerous.
Because once faith is reduced to performance, it can be used to justify almost anything. Harm can be reframed as righteousness. Exclusion can be baptized as holiness. Violence—whether physical, emotional, or systemic—can be defended as necessary, even faithful. If the appearance of being right matters more than actually being loving, then the ends will always justify the means.

This is the myth of redemptive violence.
The idea that harm can somehow produce good. That suffering, when inflicted or accepted, is inherently meaningful. That force, domination, or coercion can bring about something holy. It shows up in politics. It shows up in war. And yes—it has often shown up in theology. In fact, much of our theology has done more than reflect this instinct—it has reinforced it. Bad theology kills. Literally. We even say it to ourselves—mostly to convince ourselves when things are not pleasant: “no pain, no gain.” We know, deep down, it’s not always true. But humans have this instinct to try to make meaning out of suffering. Sometimes that instinct helps us endure. But often, it tempts us to justify what should never have been justified in the first place.

One of the clearest examples is what’s known as substitutionary atonement.
The idea that Jesus had to die in order to satisfy God. That God required a payment for sin—and that Jesus became that payment. For many Christians, this isn’t just a way of understanding the cross—it’s the way. It’s treated as the very heart of the gospel itself.

But historically, that’s simply not the case.
This understanding wasn’t central to the first thousand years of Christianity. It was first fully developed by Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century, drawing on the logic of feudal systems—where honor had to be repaid and debts had to be satisfied.
In other words, it says more about medieval social structures than it does about God.

And once we accept that framework, it begins to shape how we read everything else.
We start to see it in the Bible—even in places where it was never implied by the original authors. We assume violence must be necessary. That suffering must be required. That somehow, this is what God has always been like.

And while it has been meaningful for many, it also carries real consequences.
Because when we center a story where violence is required for justice…
where suffering is necessary for forgiveness…
where God’s will is ultimately fulfilled through harm…
it becomes much easier to accept those same patterns in the world around us.

Because what we believe about God inevitably shapes how we move through the world.
And if we come to believe that some suffering is necessary… that some lives must be lost… that harm can be justified for a greater good…
it doesn’t stay in our theology.
We begin to read it into our politics as well.

But if not that—then what?
If the cross is not about God requiring violence, then what does it reveal?
For many Christians across history, the cross has not been about payment—but about presence. About a God who does not stand apart from suffering, but enters into it. A God who exposes the violence of the world rather than endorsing it. A God who absorbs hatred without returning it—and in doing so, breaks its cycle.

Some have understood the cross as liberation—God confronting the powers of sin, empire, and death, not by mirroring their violence, but by undoing it through self-giving love. Others have seen it as invitation—a call to follow in that same way of life: courage over coercion, mercy over domination, love over fear.

In other words, the cross does not show us a God who needs violence.
It shows us a God who refuses to participate in it.

But the story of Jesus resists that logic.
Jesus was not killed because God needed bloodshed.
Jesus was killed because empires do.
Because systems built on power, control, and fear always resist a love that refuses to play by those rules.

This is why so many people are tired.
Not because they’ve rejected faith—but because they’ve been formed by a version of it that feels disconnected from anything real. A version that speaks loudly but loves poorly. A version that demands belief but resists accountability. A version that shows up most clearly not in acts of compassion, but in displays of power.

Lent invites something different.
Not performance—but honesty. Not image—but examination. It asks us to take a hard look at what in us is real, and what is merely rehearsed. What is rooted in love, and what is rooted in fear. What reflects the way of Jesus—and what only borrows his name.

Because the truth is this:
Performative faith will never transform the world. It can only protect itself. It can only maintain appearances. It can only justify what it has already decided to do.

But lived faith—embodied faith—costly, honest, grounded-in-love faith?
That’s different. That kind of faith doesn’t need to prove itself. It doesn’t need to dominate. It doesn’t need to win. It simply shows up—again and again—in compassion, in courage, in truth. And over time, it changes things.

So maybe the question for all of us this season is not “What do I believe?”
But “What kind of faith am I living?”
Is it performative?
Or is it real?

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If you’ve felt unusually tired lately… you’re not alone. Not just physically tired. Not just “busy week” tired. But something deeper. The kind of tired that sits in your chest. The kind that comes from watching something you love—your faith, your country—be reshaped in ways you barely recognize. It’s a particular kind of exhaustion. A kind that doesn’t come from doing too much… but from having to make sense of too much.

The exhaustion isn’t random

Part of what makes this moment so draining is this: on some level, many of us recognize what’s happening—even if we don’t always have language for it. We’ve seen something like this before. Not exactly this. History never repeats itself that neatly. But there is a pattern. A playbook. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

The old playbook

Across different countries and different eras, movements that drift toward authoritarianism tend to follow familiar steps. Not all at once. Not always in the same order. But enough to notice.

• Undermine trust in shared sources of truth
  Journalists become “enemies.” Experts become suspect. Facts become negotiable.

• Create an “us vs. them” narrative
  A group is identified as the problem—immigrants, minorities, political opponents. Fear becomes a unifying force.

• Fuse identity with loyalty
  To belong, you must align. Disagreement becomes betrayal.

• Wrap it all in something sacred
  Nation. Tradition. Faith. The movement becomes not just political—but moral, even holy.

• Normalize what once felt unthinkable
  Language shifts. Lines move. What would have shocked us a few years ago becomes… background noise.

At some point, many people start reaching for a word to describe patterns like these. Often, that word is fascism. It’s a heavy word. It should be. The point isn’t to make cheap comparisons or win arguments. It’s to recognize warning signs early enough to respond with clarity and courage.

Again—this isn’t about making one-to-one historical comparisons. It’s about recognizing a pattern that has shown up often enough that we should pay attention when it starts to feel familiar.

Why this moment feels different for many Christians

For a lot of people, what makes this especially painful isn’t just politics. It’s what’s happening to faith. Because what we’re seeing isn’t simply Christianity showing up in public life. It’s something else. Often called Christian nationalism, it blends faith with power in a way that confuses the gospel with political dominance, treats one cultural expression of Christianity as the “real” one, and uses the language of faith to draw lines between who belongs… and who doesn’t. And for those who love their faith—who have experienced it as a source of grace, justice, mercy, and humility—that distortion cuts deep. It’s not just disagreement. It feels like something sacred is being repurposed.

No wonder we’re tired

This is where the exhaustion comes in. Because this kind of environment doesn’t just ask you to think differently. It asks you to constantly sort truth from spin, respond to the latest outrage, explain—again and again—why certain things matter, and hold onto your values in a space that feels increasingly unrecognizable. It’s not just mental fatigue. It’s moral fatigue. Spiritual fatigue. The weariness that comes from trying to stay grounded when everything feels like it’s shifting. And sometimes, if we’re honest, it leads to questions like: Is any of this making a difference? Why does it feel like we’re going backward? How long can this go on? If you’ve felt that… you’re not weak. You’re paying attention.

So what do we do with that?

Not everything has to be solved in one article. But there are a few things worth holding onto.

1. Naming what’s happening matters

Clarity is not panic. Recognizing patterns doesn’t make you dramatic. It makes you awake.

2. Exhaustion is not failure

The goal of environments like this is often to overwhelm. To keep people reacting instead of grounding. So if you’re tired, it doesn’t mean you’ve lost your way. It may mean you’ve been trying to stay faithful in a moment that makes that hard.

3. Faith was never meant to be used this way

At its best, the Christian tradition points toward humility, not domination; compassion, not exclusion; truth-telling, not manipulation; love of neighbor, not fear of the other. Any version of faith that consistently pulls in the opposite direction is worth examining—no matter how loudly it claims authority.

4. You don’t have to carry this alone

One of the quiet lies of this moment is isolation: you’re the only one seeing this… you’re overreacting… it’s just you. It’s not. There are more people than you think who feel the same tension, the same grief, the same determination to hold onto something better.

A quieter kind of resolve

This moment doesn’t just call for urgency. It calls for steadiness. Not checking out. Not giving in. But also not burning yourself out trying to fix everything all at once. Just this: staying awake, staying grounded, and refusing to let fear or distortion have the final word. If you’re tired, take that seriously. But don’t mistake it for the end of your capacity to care. It might actually be a sign of how deeply you do. And that still matters.

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