No satire for you today, but then again, our entire lives have become satire. This statue was dedicated at Trump’s golf course in Doral yesterday by a group of pastors.

In his remarks, pastor Mark Burns said, “Let me be clear: this is not a golden calf.” 1

I have nothing further to add. You cannot make this stuff up.

A couple things to share this week—

I had a great conversation and missions with . His book The Justice of Jesus has had such an impact. This guy is everywhere! I’m so grateful to him for sharing his platform with me.

Masala Chai Theology with Fr. Joash P. Thomas

Decolonizing Evangelical Missions with Dr. Holly Berkley Fletcher

One of the things I get asked about the most (not just online but also at in-person speaking engagements) is what it looks like for us to decolonize Christian (specifically, evangelical) missions work. The first step to this decolonizing work is to reckon with the damaging impact of western evangelical missions - not just on the Global South but also on…

Listen now

3 days ago · 26 likes · 11 comments · Fr. Joash P. Thomas and Holly Berkley Fletcher

I’m back with Pastor talking prayer.

Brewing Theology with Teer Hardy

Stupid Questions: Intercessory Prayer

If you’ve ever wondered what keeps preachers writing instead of napping, this is it. Pay it forward and become a paid subscriber…

Listen now

a day ago · 5 likes · 3 comments · Teer Hardy and Holly Berkley Fletcher

I’m going to take next week off in hopes I can make good headway on a book proposal! Yes, I am planning to write another book. Stay tuned, maybe I’ll have some news in a few months.

Grace and peace, friends. Go well. Godspeed.

This is yet another element of what is now called “Christian nationalism” with which I was raised in plain ‘ole mainstream white evangelicalism.1 I recalled on the show that when I was just 5 or 6 years old, my parents—who would turn a movie off over one curse word—showed me the movie The Hiding Place, the true story of a Dutch Christian family sent to a concentration camp during World War II for hiding Jews. The movie was a lot for me to take in at that age, full of violence and hard historical truths. To this day, I remember a scene in which a guard smashes Betsey Ten Boom’s arm with a rifle butt.

I also vividly remember the discussion our family had at the conclusion of the movie. My parents told me that we, too, may be asked to give our lives for our faith, as the world, including America, became more hostile to Christians2. It was important that when that day came, we affirm our faith in Jesus Christ with the assurance that we would go to heaven. The implication was that if we did not, we risked hell (that was the implication of almost every small step out of the evangelical box, in fact).

I couldn’t go to sleep that night, and I had nightmares over many subsequent nights, of guards coming to smash my arm with a rifle, or asking me to choose between Jesus and my life. I pondered whether I would be brave enough, especially if faced with a painful death like that of Jesus himself. I worried I would chicken out and lose my salvation entirely.

Friends, while religious persecution may be a reality faced by some 6-year-olds in the world—which does feature horrible religious persecution of many kinds, including against Christians—it is not something your average child should have to consider. Certainly not in America. But the focus on persecution is indeed a large feature of white evangelicalism.

The historical roots are a bit of a lasagna that I will greatly oversimplify here.

• A foundational layer is the very real persecution of the early church, starting with Jesus’s crucifixion, and scriptures recounting martyrdom and instructing Christians that they may be persecuted or even be killed for their faith.

• Then you have centuries of many Christians dying for their faith, including in the American colonies. A key point, however, is almost all of them were killed by other Christians. After Constantine converted, Christianity has been wrapped in power, and Christians themselves have done most of the persecuting. This part of the story is glossed over in evangelicalism.

• Moving to the American context, the Civil War is instructive. Today’s white evangelicalism is most directly descended from white southern Christianity, shaped in the context of defending slavery and losing the Civil War. The Big Bad Federal Government forcing the South to end slavery and otherwise “destroying our way of life” is definitely a thread in the evangelical persecution complex.3

• The fundamentalist-liberal theological battles of the early 20th century, in which fundamentalists were forced to defend a pretty weak intellectual position in the face of scientific and historical revelations and were often mocked for it in more elite, educated circles. , for example, believes this feeling of shame was a major influence on the evangelical persecution complex.4

• Lost Cause Part II/The Federal Government Strikes Back during the Civil Rights movement when the South, and white religious institutions directly, were forced by the government to desegregate and otherwise respect the civil rights of Black Americans. Many historians of this period have observed that this, and not the abortion issue, was the real galvanizing force behind the formation of the Religious Right.

• More generally, the secularization of American society and the rise of women’s rights and gay rights and constitutional tests that explicitly affirmed and enforced the separation of church and state have eroded white evangelicals’ feeling of power and influence in America, even as their political power has persisted. The Religious Right was born in and continues to run on grievance.

• The Trump Administration continues to maintain a grip on white evangelical loyalty by wielding their sense of persecution. Most recently, you can check out this 500 page (!) report of how (devoutly Christian, unlike Trump) Joe Biden persecuted Christians. My favorite band of Christian historians did a great job explaining how this report is really aimed at solidifying Trump’s hold on evangelicals and discrediting “other kinds” of Christians who don’t support him.

Many people, including anti-MAGA evangelicals like David French, have debunked the white evangelical persecution narrative, but it’s also pretty self-evident by looking at who is in power, the outsized political influence our system grants to typically more religious white rural areas,5 the fact that millions of white evangelicals freely attend worship and school and college at tax-exempt institutions that continue to exclude and/or limit women and LGBTQ individuals, and the number of millionaire megachurch pastors and other evangelical influencers out there.

The white evangelical persecution complex is built on a false claim on political privilege in America—on American itself—and the reality of their privilege in much of American history—when, in fact, legally speaking, they are simply one group among many that our Constitution and system of pluralistic democracy allows to exist, and frankly, thrive. White evangelicalism has benefitted greatly from democracy and religious freedom.

That complex has had an enormous impact on our politics, looking at [waves hands]. Authoritarians have always run on grievance and victimhood. Religiously fueled grievance is the absolute best kind, because nothing beats feeling like your victimhood is a direct result of your godliness. That stuff is rocket fuel to the moon, but with insufferable, sociopathic billionaires instead of adorable, photogenic, philosophizing astronauts on board.

But what you may not realize is how instrumental the white American evangelical persecution complex has been in our foreign policy. You probably know the obvious cases, in the Middle East, as they pertain to the evangelical identification with Israel. Some of that is a straightforward persecution complex and some of it gets into some whacky end times stuff that is nonetheless persecution-adjacent. I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole. Or maybe you’re aware of the heavy overlap of missionary activity and American imperialism at the turn of the 20th century.

From my experience as a missionary kid and from my perch in the US government, it is abundantly clear that American evangelicals continue to engage in the world almost solely on the basis of Who is a (real/evangelical) Christian and Who is not. Missions are completely focused on winning souls, with some humanitarianism thrown in as a vehicle, and overall, that is how most white evangelicals understand the world writ large. There is very little interest in understanding the history of other cultures and countries or how systems of oppression, underdevelopment, and ethnic conflict feed even very real cases of the persecution of Christians. Even Islamist extremism is related to these dynamics, as terrorist networks use economic grievance and the lack of opportunity in their recruitment.6

One big example of this was the evangelical championing of South Sudan’s independence during the Bush administration. Long story short, American evangelicals (and some unusual bedfellows, African Americans, who frankly, have a similar tendency to mistakenly impose their American experience on Africa7) construed the north-south war in Sudan as a religious one, fueling support for South Sudanese independence in the American government.

Sadly, no sooner was that goal achieved than the Christians in South Sudan began killing each other and the Very Devout President of South Sudan began stealing all the country’s oil wealth. South Sudan remains a violent, failed state; American evangelicals can’t find it on a map these days, nor is the American government terribly interested in it. Or in the other Sudan, where the world’s worst humanitarian disaster is in its fourth year and a bonafide genocide is happening. But they are all Muslims.

But American evangelicals and their political leaders are laser-focused on Nigeria, where, they claim, a Christian “genocide” is unfolding. And I want to credit reader who lived and worked in Nigeria for decades, for helping me understand this issue more deeply through our email exchanges of late. As with South Sudan, there is no question that Nigerian Christians are in many cases being killed for their faith, which is terrible. But as with South Sudan, it’s more complicated than that.

In the far north of the country, Islamist extremist groups have essentially taken over, as they have across the Sahel region. They have killed and kidnapped and destroyed the homes of thousands of Nigerian Christians. But they have done the same to moderate Muslims, by some estimates in even greater numbers.

In the middle of the country, which is more evenly divided between Christians and Muslims, the situation is more nuanced. Religion overlays with ethnicity and economics, as different groups battle each other for scarce land. According to the American evangelical narrative, the pastoralist, Muslim Fulani are the unequivocal bad guys, and they have indeed committed violence against Christian farmers. But Christian farmers target the Fulani and their cattle as well. Christian groups even fight each other. It’s tit-for-tat communal violence that has resulted from poor governance, poverty, and cycles of revenge that become more severe over time.

Christian Nigerians—who are undoubtedly suffering, no one is doubting that, and they are understandably desperate for solutions—have fueled an anti-Fulani narrative at home and abroad with tragic results. The Nigerian authorities are now arbitrarily detaining Fulani people in concentration camps, and 150 have died in custody.

Not surprisingly, Nigeria’s form of Christianity is highly evangelical, and there are robust ties between Nigerian and American evangelicals. Not coincidentally, Nigeria also happens to be one of the most pro-Trump countries in the world. Nigerian Christians have found an eager audience among Republicans and their evangelical base.

You’ll be shocked to learn that not all American engagement on this issue is helpful.8 Both the House bill and report on Nigeria presents a one-sided anti-Fulani narrative—including recommendations for the unilateral disarmament of Fulanis and what amounts to the ethnic cleansing of land on which they live—that will almost certainly cause more violence.

It will probably also encourage more reckless American freelance activists, such as the young evangelical influencer whom the Nigerian government deported this month for exacerbating tensions with his attempts to aid Christian communities affected by violence. According to the government, two Muslims were killed after he gave an inflammatory speech in Jos. Lovely.

A last example of myopic evangelical activism in Africa is one you probably are already aware of—draconian anti-LGBTQ legislation in Uganda. And let me just concede up front that most traditional African cultures need no help being homophobic, so this isn’t all the result of a “colonial” effort by outsiders. But American evangelical groups have flooded an already toxic stream with money and propaganda and elevated the issue.

Once again, it’s a case of American evangelicals’ domestic agenda, rooted in cultural grievance, being inserted into a place they do not care to understand. They don’t seem to care that Uganda is an authoritarian regime ruled by a (devoutly evangelical, of course) brutal, elderly dictator. Human rights there are not really a thing. Poverty is endemic. In America, an anti-LGBTQ agenda means suing a bakery. In Uganda, it means jailing and even executing gay people. And not prosecuting vigilante attacks on them.

Incidentally, much of the USAID work on behalf of LGBTQ people that American evangelicals found so objectionable they supported the destruction of the entire agency, resulting in he deaths of 700,000 people—the vast majority of that work involved the protection of gay Africans’ very lives and other basic human rights.

The sad fact is, when most American evangelicals look out at the world, they are really only interested in the success of (their version of) Christianity, its spread through conversion, and the fate of its believers. When it comes to war and suffering and injustice, their gaze goes to where (their kind of) Christians are the victims9—I saw this over and over and over again, around the world while working in the government—because that is the narrative that reinforces their domestic political-cultural agenda.

As scholar Melani McAlister, whose book The Kingdom of God Has No Borders explores American evangelical engagement overseas through missions and other endeavors, writes, "Americans believers' identification with...suffering Christians elsewhere allows them to see themselves as persecuted by a secular American public, making them fellow victims in a global assault on Christianity."

What white American Christians have overlooked time and time and time again is that, while Christians in other places confront genuine persecution and live with real injustice, white American believers have never naturally assumed the role of Christ on the Cross. Just by virtue or their relative power, wealth, and privilege, they slip more easily into the role of the oppressor. And historically, that has more often been their role, whether it be holding people in slavery and violent discrimination or continuing to harbor racial and gender inequality, abuse, and hatred.

Jesus said a wealthy man getting into heaven was like a camel going through the eye of a needle. Which at the very least requires a lot of determined, sustained, very hard work. Rather than doing that work, most white American Christians spend their time complaining the needle is stabbing them in the eye.

No, Jim Comey did what retirees the world over love to do at the beach, wander around looking for seashells. In fact, studies have shown that once a person reaches the age of 50, the part of the brain interested in shells—as well as birds, loose leaf tea, and high fiber foods—becomes exponentially more active.

Personally, I wouldn’t think Boomer1 beach activities posed a societal threat that warranted prosecution. I say that even as a victim of an aggressive elderly seashell collector, specifically my great Aunt BJ, with whom my sister and I went to South Padre Island when we were in college and who constantly harassed us to “go shelling” with her despite our repeated declinations in favor of lazily cultivating skin cancer and flipping through In Style magazines. Aunt BJ had various personality quirks that undoubtedly had various people hoping for her prosecution—she was frequently intoxicated—but she remained free to roam the beaches of south Texas picking up copious amounts of shells.

As of this week, however, I would say the (liberal)2 elderly had better watch themselves more carefully while on the shore. If shelling can be rendered dangerous and illegal, many other Boomer beach activities could become suspect. For instance:

• Power walking in groups wearing linen could be interpreted as forming an illegal, Leninist militia.

  

• An argument could be made that wearing giant sun hats endangers passers by and even the planet, by blocking out the sun.

• Setting up copious amounts of furniture in cabanas could be construed as owning an undeclared second home. Letting your grandson’s frat brothers sit in it in exchange for a six pack of wine coolers could entail collecting rent on the home in contravention of the mortgage.

• Ditto for building large sand castles with grandchildren. You better get some paperwork for that, especially if dolls plan to live in it.

• Staring out to sea with binoculars could be rendered as illegal surveillance. Ditto inserting oneself into the conversations of a nearby stranger detailing a fight with their mother over using store bought pie crust at Thanksgiving.

• Offering them wine coolers in exchange for gossip=drug dealing. Offering them snacks in exchange for gossip=food vending without a license.

• Playing The Carpenters on a boom box violates the civil rights of nearby African Americans, about which the Trump administration cares very deeply.

• Reading romance novels with some kind of torn bodice on the cover is in violation of federal obscenity statutes.

Summer is coming, folks. Have fun, be safe, and don’t give the DOJ a reason to prosecute you.

It was a big week for me online, because a few different things I did elsewhere all dropped at once!

First, here’s my latest for Good Faith Media. It’s about rethinking religious “success” and decline, using the Quakers as a case in point.

Then I had a piece at :

The Bulwark

Trump Called It ‘White Genocide.’ Now the White People Are Flocking Home.

SINCE HIS FIRST TERM, DONALD TRUMP has insisted…

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13 days ago · 276 likes · Holly Berkley Fletcher

Lastly, the interview I did with dropped:

Video:

Audio:

His blog:

Cults, Culture & Coercion with Dr. Steve Hassan

The Missionary Kids: Unmasking the Myths of White Evangelicalism

Missionary kids often carry the weight of their parents’ choices. They are inculcated into the faith without opportunity for independent thought, according to author, historian, and former intelligence analyst Holly Berkley Fletcher, PhD. Her parents were Evangelical Christian missionaries in Kenya, and she speaks about that and the experiences of other…

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14 days ago · 36 likes · 3 comments · Dr. Steven Hassan

Some reading from around my circles.

My friend resigned from the State Department and shares his most woke moments (he even resigned using Calibri font):

Expatriarch

My Woke, DEI State Department Career

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12 days ago · 9 likes · 2 comments · Jose Melendez (Dan Kobayashi)

My friend had a really insightful post that gets at something that has confounded me for awhile—why the increasing number of Global South/non-white/non-Americans in missionary work doesn’t represent a meaningful change in missionary culture:

Global Witness, Globally Reimagined.

#136. How Far Shall We Decolonize?

I’ve just returned from Arusha, Tanzania—and I’m more convinced than ever that much of what we call “mission” needs to change. I was there with the Network for the History of Mission, where we examined in detail the entanglements between mission and colonialism. In the case of Tanzania, it became unmistakably clear that the story of early missionaries c…

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12 days ago · 20 likes · 3 comments · Harvey Kwiyani

has a new devotional out, for those of the devotional persuasion:

The Deep End

Carry Me Through

After a year of writing, rewriting and editing, my tenth book, CARRY ME THROUGH: 90 Devotions for When You Can’t Go On is finally available…

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16 days ago · 3 likes · 13 comments · Linda S Clare

And finally, I am reading a truly amazing book by a real life friend, Karen Masterson, about the US government’s war on malaria during World War II. I have learned so much about a disease that plagues the continent where I grew up (and which I have had!). I really was unaware of its American history. For subscribers of Dog Shirt Daily , we will be discussing it at our book club meeting Sunday night with Karen herself.

Last, last thing—if you live in the area-ish, I will be a panelist (and moderator) at the For Good Conference in Charlottesville, VA May 8-9 with Full-Fledged Fancy Person Jamelle Bouie and other Pretty Darn Fancy People Laura K. Field, Sarah Posner, Allyson Shortle, Adam Gurri, and many others.

As usual, I’m absolutely sure I am forgetting something, but I’ve gone on long enough SO—

Grace and peace, friends. Go well. Godspeed.

Like for real, of an actual award, not a cruise in the Bahamas that I could claim if I would wire a small refundable deposit to a Nigerian prince.

To be specific, Joe told me I had won the Religion News Association’s Book of the Year Award. The RNA is the premier professional organization for religion journalists, including many writers I admire. And those cool people had decided my little ol’ book was THE BEST.

That I was THE BEST.

I have very, very, very rarely been declared the best at anything. I was close but no cigar for high school valedictorian. I lost by an even smaller margin for college valedictorian. I have definitely never won an athletic contest, or even managed to not humiliate myself in PE class. I have never won any other contest, either.

I can’t even say, “Always a bridesmaid, never the bride,” because I’ve only been a bridesmaid twice, which is as many times as I have been a bride, and unlike everyone else on the planet, I like being a bridesmaid.

I did win first place at the 1984 Kenya Music Festival for a piano duet, and my school won in the Western Dance category and the Choral category. I’m sure colonialism had nothing to do with it. You can read that amazing story here:

Kevin and I were so excited that I had been declared THE BEST that we went searching for past winners to see what kind of company I was in. It was indeed impressive. We also looked at the 2nd and 3rd place winners, and, because I am enormously petty and pathetic, I was gratified to see that an author who inexplicably ignores me despite the obvious overlap of our subject matter and friends in common had only gotten 2nd place one previous year.

Fortunately, I was sworn to secrecy until the awards banquet, otherwise I would have immediately plastered my entire house and car and social media feeds with this news and maybe gotten my first ever tattoo, of the RNA logo. And I don’t think tattoos are a good look for me. My skin is very sensitive and blotchy.

I did tell a few writer friends, my doting mother-in-law, my agents, and my editor. All of them were ecstatic. We all enjoyed a good 18 hours of me being THE BEST.

And then my phone rang. It was Joe. And he informed me that they had made a mistake, and I was actually only THE SECOND BEST. Which really does not have the same ring to it.

I waited to wake up from the nightmare I was having. Which I did not do. I waited for Joe to tell me I was being punked. Which he did not do. Instead he apologized over and over and told me how embarrassed he was and that second place was still a very nice achievement.

Kevin was incensed. “If you make that mistake, you just announce first place was a tie,” he said. “This isn’t the Oscars.”

I regressed several decades in my self-esteem journey in the course of a day and imagined the author who ignores me hanging out at a fancy party with the mean girls from high school,1 all the people who judged me for my divorce, all the women in the moms group at my former evangelical church who successfully breastfed their babies, the two valedictorians, and my childhood friend whom my mother constantly tells me is so beautiful and who no longer speaks to me because she is a MAGA. And they all looked at me pityingly and said, “Awww, you thought you were the best, didn’t you? How adorable.”

And then I texted all the people I had told I was a winner and told them that in fact I was in fact a loser, and I moped around all day and felt sorry for myself.

And then I did what I am forced to do very, very often. I physically slapped myself in the face.

I reviewed the record of the last six years. I reminded myself how I had already exceeded my own expectations as a writer a thousand times. I recalled that I had another whole cool job that had nothing to with writing books. I remembered getting a book contract without making even one TikTok video. I informed myself that though I of course don’t look it at all, I am 51 freaking years old and don’t need any of this. I reminded myself of all the talented writers who don’t have awards or books or Substacks and what an absurd industry this is and that I had already won several jackpots here.

And then I re-read some of the emails from missionary kids that I have gotten and recalled meetings others in person who told me they gave my book to their parents and therapists and spouses and children, who now understand them better.

And then I told myself to stop being a ridiculous, pathetic whiner about the author who ignores me, who undoubtedly is busy and stressed out and has better things to do than sit around and actively reject me. Like maybe wash their hair.

And then, I thought about Joe. I thought about how terrible he must feel. I thought about how mistakenly informing someone that they won an award is exactly the kind of space-cadet thing I would do.

And then I rewatched the clip from the Oscars when they announced the wrong Best Picture. Y’all, the La La Land people HAD STARTED GIVING THEIR SPEECHES by the time folks realized the mistake. Those people had to shut the F up and go sit their butts down. Kevin was right, this ain’t the Oscars. That was so much worse.

And then of course I continued to mope around about it off and on for a couple more weeks, because I am a very slow learner and extremely petty and also I was indeed sent to boarding school at age 10 and have lasting insecurity to this day, please feel very sorry for me.

And finally, finally, finally, I got over all that, and I realized that second place is still pretty damn good, and more importantly, what an amazing story this is, how funny and disastrous and relatable.

Like the story of how Kevin and I got engaged, which he will sadly never let me tell in print, and which is so much better than the perfectly executed, romance-novel-worthy scene that I once thought I wanted and how those things are hardly ever representative of how desirable the bride is or how solid the marriage and how those guys who do the over-the-top proposals and are so smooth and un-disastrous are also fairly often massive d-bags.

And how the fact that I attended pretty crappy schools instead of impressive ones was of some comfort to my daughter as she walked through the college application process and how fun it actually is to be at Ivy League gatherings with Kevin and watch people’s confused faces when I tell them I went to a Southern Baptist college in Nowhere, Texas and then a state school with a better football team than a history department for graduate school.

And how the dinner party I hosted a couple weeks ago was more memorable because the entire grill caught on fire and how it makes me smile to remember my friend Jamie’s baby throwing up all over her at the wedding where I last saw her before she died and how I hope never to become a full-fledged Fancy Person, actually, because I love the schtick of pretending I am just dying to be one and how I hope that author continues to ignore me so I can keep laughing at myself for caring at all.

And mostly how, given a choice, I would rather be funny and disastrous and relatable than impressive and triumphant and talented because the company is better and the love is unconditional and the stories are the prize.

And this one is going in a frame.

I will be going to Chicago tomorrow for another film screening/book discussion with the brilliant Ari Ali. If you are nearby, please come!

Another Cabinet member, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-Deremer, was fired, and unfortunately I don’t have time to make her a proper good-bye video like I did for Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem. Which is OK, because she probably threw herself a massive farewell party with public funds like she did for her birthday.

So I’m just going to write the lyrics and have you imagine me singing them in my frog costume.

(To the tune of Candle in the Wind by Elton John)

Goodbye Lori

We didn’t even know your name

Til you got fired and

We found out you are insane

You slept with your subordinates

Took them to a strip-mall strip-bar

Your husband and father

Creeped on female officers

And it seems to me you did your job

Like you ran a frat house

You misunderstood what kind of labor

You were Secretary of

But your male family’s not any worse

Than your pedo president

His love ran out long before

A full investigation

I also wrote a mini-parody about my family’s profligate beverage receptacle usage (say that 10 times fast).

(To the tune of Every Breath You Take by The Police)

Every sip you take

Every drink you make

Every thirst you sate

Every beverage you partake

You use a clean cup

Oh can’t you see

You’re driving me crazy

And my poor brain pleads

With every glass you dirty

Every coffee you sip

Every milk you swig

Every time you pour

Every H2O

You use a clean cup

I have like 15 other ideas in my head at all times, most of them not very good. It’s my special little affliction.

Speaking of funny, I cracked up at my friend ’s account of attending a Vivek Ramaswamy event.

The Bulwark

Who Goes to See Vivek at Ohio State?

Columbus, Ohio…

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18 days ago · 200 likes · 40 comments · Jim Swift

This piece by will blow your mind if you are anything like the average American Christian, who has no idea that one of the oldest Christian traditions in the world is in…India. And, yes, evangelicals still send lots of missionaries there, of course. From this piece, it sounds like American Christians could benefit from Indian missionaries.

Masala Chai Theology with Fr. Joash P. Thomas

How St. Thomas' Doubting Helped Eliminate Extreme Poverty in Southern India

Welcome to Masala Chai Theology with Father Joash P. Thomas: a space to spice up our spiritual journeys with ancient, Empire-resisting, and precolonial Christian ways of understanding God and neighbour - in ways that risk upsetting our Empire-shaped religious palettes. This space builds on Fr. Joash’s bestselling book…

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a month ago · 27 likes · Fr. Joash P. Thomas

Lastly, ran a fairly long piece by yours truly this week. I did quite a lot of research and reporting for this, and I’m thankful for outlets like LC that love in-depth pieces. I think it turned out pretty well.

https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-untapped-potential-of-organized-mainline-american-protestantism/

It always seems like I am forgetting something in these round-ups…The curse of the middle-aged brain.

Definitely check back on Monday, when I can finally tell a rather bananas story.

Grace and peace, friends. Go well. Godspeed.

I can’t cover the entirety of the sessions and speakers and conversations, but I’m going to offer a few vignettes.

I watched a remarkable documentary called A Leap of Faith, about a cohort of Protestant pastors across the theological spectrum who agree to meet together repeatedly over the course of year to discuss the knottiest of issues surrounding difference and disagreement.

The beating heart of the film is a Methodist pastor named Joan. Joan is a married lesbian, and others in the group come from traditions that are not LGBTQ affirming (and I think some that don’t even ordain straight women). Much of the film focuses on this divide.

Although all of the pastors are impressive in the gentle way they engage and their willingness to listen and learn and to offer grace and friendship to those with whom they disagree, it’s Joan who stands out. She takes personally, in the best of ways, what is essentially some of the others’ rejection of her, not by being huffily defensive and combative, but at one point in particular, by openly, excruciatingly displaying how deeply it wounds her. She weeps as she describes her heartbreak, and you can feel the energy shift in the room, as some of the pastors are forced to confront the collateral damage of their doctrine in a specific human life, a human they have genuinely come to love. And one who is undeniably Christ-like. Even the most conservative of pastors remark on how her life displays the character of Jesus.

The film doesn’t tie things up in a tidy bow. It’s unclear to what extent anyone has changed any of their core beliefs when the credits roll. But it’s clear that the group truly loves and likes each other and that they believe in each others’ good intentions. They believe in their own and their friends’ capacity for change and growth.

That last part struck me most personally. It took me back to remarks I heard from Rev. William Barber at one of the Moral Monday rallies I attended last year on Capitol Hill. He referenced Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words about how loving one’s enemies contains the potential to transform everyone involved. Rev. Barber said something to the effect that loving our enemies means being open to them changing. He said that there’s no point in political activism if you’ve already written off your enemies as irredeemable. We should be open and receptive to them changing.

Which sounds kind of obvious—of course we want people who disagree with us to change their mind and come to our side. Right? But on deeper thought, if we’re really honest with ourselves, we might admit to the ways in which it’s gratifying to have an enemy. We can feel like self-righteous heroes or martyrs when we confront the wrongness of others. Warring against them gives our life purpose.

Or maybe we’re just afraid to do what it takes to see someone change. That requires engaging them beyond the surface, wading into a murky waters, hearing hurtful, infuriating words. There’s a high emotional cost to building an authentic relationship of love with someone with whom you fundamentally disagree. There’s a fear that if we let them in, if we spend the time and energy, if we try to understand them, we’ll just be disappointed at best, betrayed at worst.

But if we love our enemies, we have to be open to their growth. And to do that, we have to be willing to meet them with an open, vulnerable heart. To risk heartbreak when our love doesn’t bring the result we want, when they don’t respond in kind, when our enemies only discover more and better ways to hurt us.

Joan joined the group knowing she was rejected at the outset, but willing to loving her enemies. She laid herself bare. And she did get her heart broken. And then she just kept on loving them.

Coincidentally, I met one of the subjects of the documentary at the festival (not Joan). She told me some stories that didn’t make it into the film. I’m not sure it’s OK for me to detail them here, so I’ll just say that the relationships in the movie continued after its conclusion, and they go on to this day. And it turns out, there has been real and profound change in the group. Theological change, even. Not in everyone, but some.

All because Joan showed up ready to love instead of fight. Open to be hurt, once again, as she has so many times in a world that marginalizes queer people. Willing to turn the other cheek and let her tears be her only defense. Believing her enemies could change, and allowing them to do so.

I was equally moved by emergency room chaplain . I had followed him some on social media, but he just flattened me with his insight, wisdom, and even humor. He reminded me of the Artemis astronauts, someone who has been steeped in profound experience—in his case, suffering and death—and can find enough words to pass that on to others in some form.

He talked about the universal awkwardness we all feel when confronted with others’ grief. His own awkwardness even, after years of doing this work. We are often guilty of “giving the tissues too soon,” rushing in with some lame word or gesture, ostensibly with the aim of bringing comfort, but ultimately in order to ease our own discomfort. Or we wait too long to offer the tissues, we allow people to grieve alone.

I’ve long thought it just bizarre how bad most of us are at responding to death, which, in addition to birth, is the most universal of human experiences. We don’t all get an education or get married or have children or even have a close friend, but we are all born and we all die. And we all have people in our life die. And yet we don’t know what to do with it.

I think it’s because death is our ultimate vulnerability. It’s our deepest fear. Our own, and that of those we love. It’s a gun pressed against our temples at all times. So much of what we do in life, all our striving and activity and motion, is a charade of denial.

JS Park said that we look to resolve others’ grief to resolve our own. But none of it really can be resolved. Grief is love’s twin, and everything good we do and leave on this earth is irrevocably tangled up in it. We search for its meaning, we attach words and song and religious belief. And that can help.

But ultimately, he said, it’s not about the offering tissues. It’s about being the “connective tissue” that joins our grief with that of others, that sits uncomfortably with it.

(Sadly, I see on social media that just hours after I saw him speak, Rev. Park’s mother was hit by a drunk driver. She is in serious condition in the very same hospital where his job is accompanying others’ pain. Life can be cruelly poetic sometimes. Peace be with his family.)

I went to a few different sessions on journalistic practice, as I try my hand late in life as a sort-of, sometimes journalist-ish-writer-whatever.

Everyone was unanimous, the name of the game is listening, curiosity, and laying aside your own ego and your own agenda so you can get at the truth of another person’s perspective.

As I sat in session after session, the list of mistakes I’ve already made unfurled in my mind, to the point where I wonder if I have already shut the door on at least some forms of journalism with the posture and opinions I have already committed to the page.

Then again, I was reminded of the times I have gotten into that frame of mind and how empowering it felt. How judgment can be a form of self-protection, and when you lead with curiosity instead—when you let down the fortress of your perspective, when you shift out of fight-or-flight, when you become vulnerable in that way—how much safer you ironically feel.

I listened to Estead Hernon, who is Black, talk about interviewing white supremacists and being completely nonplussed. He said that as a journalist, he is so focused on getting the story, on understanding the stories behind the story, he goes into “a headspace where no on can hurt me.” “You have to remind yourself, it’s not about you,” he said.

It takes a lot of courage to put yourself to the side for a greater goal. But it also gives a lot of freedom.

I met a lot of other writers, of course, people I have known a bit online and those who were completely new to me. How lovely to hang out in real life with and , and to meet and . I was in a wonderful lunch discussion group on publishing with several new friends, led by the helpful, supportive, and knowledgeable . I even got to chat for a bit with .

What I loved most about all the conversations I had was the honesty. As you’ve heard me talk about before, the writing scene can be a soul-destroying, mind-bending, house-of-mirrors in which you never really know where you stand. It’s an industry that makes absolute no sense according to the cost-benefit rules of economics. There are so many people who want in, so little success to be had, and so little to be gained even from the success.

In such settings, anxiety can infuse the air. I myself am deeply affected by it. I’ve never been an ambitious or competitive person. I hate hate hate hate the hustle.

Cultures built around the hustle can be mean, petty, and preening. Academia, for instance. The posturing is intense.

But that wasn’t the case this weekend. I found in my fellow writers much comfort. We are all in a co-dependent relationship with a diva of an industry that we just can’t quit because we love what we do. We are all careening around winding roads that veer from discouragement to exhilaration, confusion to insight, unacknowledged talent to dumb luck, nausea to delight, depression to joy, fear to love.

Most of the conversations arrived at places of vulnerability in short order. Someone would confess how little money they have made. Someone else would say they can’t get on a podcast they really thought they might. One showed us her spreadsheet of rejection (and some successes, too). Another said he met with an editor at the festival about an idea, and she basically shut him down.

And everyone admitted to some degree and in so many words that while they were enjoying the festival, it was also making them feel anxious, inadequate, and overwhelmed. And that instantly made me feel less anxious, inadequate, and overwhelmed.

I left feeling thankful I went. Not for the networking, not for the inspiration, not for the fan-girling, not for the professional boost.

For the courage of community. For shifting into that vulnerable headspace that gives you power. For the chance to name the monsters under the bed and watch them disappear. For confronting the enemy within and watching her change and grow.

It turns out faith and writing really do go together.

I’ve only got a minute today, so I’m going to blurb my latest satire piece on Bad Faith Media.

Evangelical leader Franklin Graham, the son of late evangelist Billy Graham, is blaming Jesus Christ for President Donald Trump’s recent foibles, including the disastrous war on Iran and rising costs.

“As we all know, Donald Trump is The Lord’s chosen vessel,” Graham explained this week. “He takes his orders directly from God. So if you don’t like the high gas prices, take it up with Him, not Donald Trump, who is simply being faithful to his calling.”

In particular, he points to Trump’s recent strikes on Iran, which seem to have strengthened Iran’s hand rather than precipitate regime change, as was one of the administration’s aims at one point, but maybe not anymore, along with unconditional surrender, civilization annihilation, extra-destroying Iran’s already destroyed nuclear program, preventing Secretary of WAR Pete Hegseth’s return to drinking out of boredom, and getting some wicked cool video of things exploding.

“Maybe Jesus isn’t much of a Middle East expert,” Graham says.

Go read the rest over at Bad Faith Media, and check out some of their other LOL content.

In case you doubted just how difficult satire is these days (unlikely), a few days after I published that piece, the real Franklin Graham actually said this:

I do not believe President Trump would knowingly depict himself as Jesus Christ—that would certainly be inappropriate. I’m thankful the President has made it very clear that this was not at all what he thought the AI-generated image was representing—he thought it was a doctor helping someone, and when he learned of the concerns, he immediately removed the post.

When I looked at the illustration, I didn’t jump to the same conclusion as some. There were no spiritual references—no halo, there were no crosses, no angels. It was a flag, soldiers, a nurse, fighter planes, eagles, the Statue of Liberty, and I think this is a lot to do about nothing. There is so much ill-intended speculation. I think his enemies are always foaming at the mouth at any possible opportunity to make him look bad.

And the illustration from someone else he reposted on Truth Social yesterday, I must say that I like the fact that this is a picture of Jesus whispering in his ear, or at least His hand on his shoulder, guiding him. We all need that—we all need to be listening to Jesus. Again, I think there is an attempt to spin this into something that it isn’t. Remember, President Trump didn’t draw this, he didn’t create it, he reposted it on his social media because he thought it was nice—I would have to agree.

I give up. I can’t do any better.

Incidentally, my evangelical sources tell me that this Dr. Trump Jesus image has really broken through. There is genuine outrage out there. Which is interesting, because from my perspective, that image is the probably on the mild end of the spectrum of the blasphemous, sacrilegious, un-Christian, offensive things he has done and said in the last 10 years.

As a Christian, I gotta say folks are still massively missing the point. As an American, I draw some hope from this.

Speaking of satire, check out this great piece from our friend .

John’s Newsletter

Fixing Our Teen Birth Problem

In the midst of all the other craziness in the world — Trump as Jesus/Doctor, Pope Leo “weak on crime”, Swalwell and Gonzales, Melania’s speech, failed negotiations with Iran, and Orban’s ouster — the one I keep coming back to is how the right is freaking out about declining teen birth rates…

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24 days ago · 11 likes · John Hawthorne

That’s all I have time for today!

Last, last thing—if you are in Chicago, please come see me and Ari Ali next Saturday night!

Grace and peace, friends. Go well. Godspeed.

In the past year, Africa has already lost almost 1 million of its most vulnerable people from the reckless, sudden closure of USAID. What aid that continues has been severely disrupted. The Trump administration’s “replacement” is highly transactional health programs that some governments are rejecting because they would let the US hoover up massive amounts of personal health data. In the case of Zambia, the Trump administration is using health aid to extort the government for mineral extraction.

Forget the moral responsibilities of being the richest country the world has ever seen. “To whom much is given, much is required” has been changed to, “To whom much is given, by whom much more can be taken.”

Then there is the racist farce that has become the US refugee program. Halfway through the fiscal year, Trump has admitted less than 4,500 refugees (in the last year of the Biden administration, 100,000 refugees were admitted, which in my opinion is still too low for a country so wealthy and multicultural). And ALL BUT THREE of them are white South Africans, who don’t meet any of the criteria of a refugee and are barely vetted at all.

I have a friend who works with refugees from neighboring countries in Uganda. She told me last summer that her organization had supported a couple dozen Congolese refugees through the process over the course of years. They were vetted and vetted and vetted, and they waited and waited and waited. When Trump took office, they were all set to come to the US. Some had plane tickets. Then they were told their admissions were canceled. A month later they watched 59 white South Africans, whose processing took mere weeks, arrive in the United States.

Then there are all the less measurable, less tangible ways that America’s abandonment of its influence in Africa, which I saw even during the first Trump term, encourages tyrants, erodes democratic development, and sustains conflict. I can’t prove that the faltering of American democracy and global leadership is linked to the decline of African democracy in the last ten years. But certainly it doesn’t help.

The civil war in Sudan is now in its fourth year, with no end in sight. It has long been the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. I’ve written about my skepticism that the US can resolve this conflict, but now we aren’t even trying. And it certainly doesn’t help that the people running Trump’s foreign policy—his un-Senate-confirmed son-in-law and real estate tycoon buddy—and Trump himself—have deep financial ties to the primary external power (the UAE) that is fueling the conflict.

And now the war in Iran. The poorest continent is already paying the price for that, too. The impact will be devastating for Sudan and other vulnerable populations in Africa. Here’s Rachel George writing in Just Security:

For humanitarian organizations, price increases translate directly into higher operating costs at every step…The International Rescue Committee reports that operational costs are up by as much as 30 percent in some areas, further limiting aid delivery…. The system was already running on fumes when bombs began to fall on Tehran…..

The Iran war has made this worse in both direct and structural ways. Sudan imports more than 50 percent of its fertilizer from the Persian Gulf region, meaning that the Strait closure has not only disrupted the delivery of existing humanitarian aid, but also is undermining the very agricultural foundation that Sudanese families depend on to feed themselves….

The International Rescue Committee warned in March that pharmaceutical supplies worth $130,000 intended to support about 20,000 people in Sudan were stuck in Dubai, as disruptions to shipping routes delayed deliveries. Save the Children told the Council on Foreign Relations’ Think Global Health that almost $600,000 worth of essential medicines intended for 90 primary care facilities in Sudan were stuck in their Dubai shipping hub….

The political attention deficit makes this even harder. Sudan has struggled for years to compete for international focus against higher-profile conflicts. Now, with the Middle East consuming diplomatic bandwidth and media oxygen, the risk is that Sudan disappears from view entirely — even as the material conditions driving its crisis are actively worsened by the same war that has dominated the headlines.

For the more fortunate countries in Africa, like Kenya, the war is causing long lines at gas stations and soaring costs that ordinary people can’t at all afford. For an American family, rising prices might mean no summer vacation. For a Kenyan family, it can erase generational progress out of poverty. For the country, it can do the same, as well as exacerbate political tensions ahead of an election next year.

I have heard from three Kenyan friends this week. My tour operator friend is seeing his profit margin for safaris already paid up vanish. My young friend Patrick lost his job in a hotel that is cutting workers to make up the shortfall. He doesn’t know if he’ll be able to find another, and he was the main breadwinner for his widowed mother and four siblings. My friend Philemon, who uses his own funds to provide food aid to a pastoral community a couple hours away, thinks he’ll have to cancel his next trip.

I’ve discussed the excellent book Why Nations Fail by economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson before. The book details the chicken-and-egg problem of the deeply intertwined processes of democracy building and economic development. Nations fall into self-reinforcing cycles that can either be “vicious,” resulting in exploitative political economies that only benefits a vampire elite, or “virtuous,” in which strong institutions build the kind of trust that democracy and free enterprise require.

Most African nations, with their origins in extractive colonial political economies that have been perpetuated by indigenous political elites, are locked in intransigent vicious cycles. To the extent some of them, like Kenya, have made real political and economic progress, they’ve clawed their way up. Democracy and prosperity in Africa are too often three steps forward, two steps back. If not three steps, or more.

Although virtuous cycles are easier to fall out of than vicious ones—creating is so much harder than destroying—well established virtuous cycles are surprisingly stubborn, too. Politically, it does take some doing to completely dismantle democracy, its institutional framework, and especially the culture it fosters. Trump has done his worst, and yet Americans still fill the streets and airwaves with their views, information is free flowing, juries are rather uncooperative with authoritarian designs, and votes are cast mostly without malfeasance. Obviously, there is a corrosive effect of allowing authoritarianism any oxygen. But there is resilience in the virtuous cycle.

Economically, this is even more true. And frankly, more annoying, because the real economic pain that has become the kryptonite of authoritarians elsewhere in the world—Viktor Orban being the most recent example—has mostly eluded us.

The American economy is miraculously, stubbornly resilient. Partly that’s due to the fact that there aren’t better alternatives for the world’s investors. Partly that’s due to the insatiable appetite of American consumers and the easy availability of credit. I’m sure Kevin could tell me multiple other factors, but this is what immediately comes to mind.

The American economy is a force of nature, a virtuous cycle that it seems very little can arrest. Despite a big, stupid trade war and now a big, stupid war war, the American economy seems rather nonplussed. The stock market has come down slightly in the last few weeks, but generally has roared right along. Unemployment is up, but still pretty darn good in the grand scheme of things. Inflation is pesky, and gas prices are definitely up, but so far sustainable. And the American consumer generally keeps eating it up. Now, there are plenty of signs that this party on wheels is about to hit a phone pole, but economists have been warning about a recession for a while, and merrily we go along.

And here’s the thing, even if we do have a recession, we will probably absorb the blow fairly well in the end. The poor will definitely suffer. Racial disparities were once again widen. Some in the middle class will fall out of it. But most Americans will still be able to afford an iPhone. I don’t mean to minimize American pain, and on the individual, micro-level, I am deeply sympathetic. But writ large, in the global-historical big picture, American pain doesn’t compare to African pain. In the grand scheme of human travails, 21st century Americans don’t know what hardship is.

That’s certainly how they have been voting. As a population, Americans vote as if they are promised, and entitled to, all the tomorrows. They get angry when their eggs get slightly more expensive, and they return a dangerous sociopathic president to power because how bad can it get? They wallow in a virtuous cycle that has become a firm, secure foundation for their lives. And in the macro, they pay few prices for their irresponsibility.

But there is a price to be paid. By the time the average American Trump voter feels a pinch from their chosen President’s latest debacle, millions of Africans have already felt a wallop. Thousands more Sudanese will die. Thousands of small Kenyan businesses will go under. Millions of African youth with lose their scarce jobs. Pastoralists will go hungry. Countries that have clawed their way to within spitting distance of middle income status will lose ground. Governments marginally better than their predecessors might be thrown out in favor of the usual corrupt rabble-rousers that promise people the world and then take it all for themselves. And unlike ever-burgeoning American corruption, African corruption is quite literally and directly deadly.1

When and if Americans finally do pay a severe economic price, revenge won’t be sweet for the rest of humanity. When the American economy falters, American consumers buy less, American companies invest less, American tourists travel less. Kenyan tour operators and hotel managers have few customers. They lay off young staff, whose siblings can’t afford school fees, whose futures are destroyed. Curio vendors and wood carvers along the tourist routes sell less, and their kids eat less. The Maasai communities who help conserve land and wildlife have less incentive to do so. Kenya’s national treasure begins to diminish. Any virtuous cycle begins to revert.

As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, ““Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Injustice isn’t distributed fairly, though, and the powerful face less accountability. As America goes, so goes the world. As America votes, so the world is governed. And when we elect a mad man, it’s the world’s most vulnerable who are tormented. I would wish for us the full consequences of our actions, but that would only cost them that much more.

So instead I just burn with rage, once again, at my country men and women who voted for this, many of whom should absolutely know better, some of whom in my own life spent many years in Africa and claim to love Africans.

Enough to send them missionaries they don’t really need. But not enough to vote like an African child’s life depends on it.

Bleakly humorous side note to wrap things up: Uganda’s chief nepo-baby, the insane, alcoholic son of the President, who is also the Chief of Defense and probably his elderly father’s successor, is up to his usual antics.

Meet Muhoozi Kainerugaba, who likes to drink and tweet, troll the world for his next wife (he offered 100 cows for Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni), threaten to invade neighboring countries for no particular reason, and do more real-world-nefarious things, like jail and torture his opponents. Here’s his wikipedia page. Can’t say I am optimistic for Uganda’s future.

Such African dictator antics used to be more amusing. Now I can’t say they are any different from what comes out of our President on the daily. We have Muhoozi with nuclear weapons.

Muhoozi is a big Donald Trump fan, by the way. Of course.

If you: 1) are an American citizen or longtime US resident who is over 18 2) once considered yourself an evangelical Christian (if you don’t know what that means, you almost certainly were not evangelical) 3) no longer consider yourself an evangelical Christian AND 4) still consider yourself a Christian, please take my survey.

It should not ask for your email or name. If you are already logged into google or have a google drive, it may ask for that but it will not save it. I cannot see your name or email.

Please share with others who may fit the parameters.

I will be using this for some upcoming projects. Thanks!

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSev2tLUntLVRpKka-GuyK0s-d6ClGHAoLb7VgEe1nH9IyO31A/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=112317820762514452557

I was raised in poverty, filth, and chaos. My drug addicted mother barely fed me actual food, much less the spiritual food that is essential for a meaningful life. As a child, I could have used some of Jesus’s transubstantiated flesh and blood on both counts. Sometimes I snacked on my own hangnails just to survive.

I needed communion. Like, literally, some bread and wine would have been nice.

I grew up, changed my name, changed my name again, went to Yale, learned how to use silverware, made a bunch of fancy people feel good about themselves for helping out a hick, married a Hindu, wrote a best-selling book, and had biracial children. I seemingly had it all. And yet I felt empty inside.

I needed communion. Like, with a therapist.

But going to therapy is such a beta move, and I already had a really thick, black eyelashes that looked like makeup and a weak jawline that no beard could disguise. So instead I became a fascist. Because nothing gives you a sense of belonging, a feeling of fullness in the empty cavern where a soul should be/spiritual Ozempic, and a chiseled, manly jaw like unadulterated power and racial pride.

But I still had the Hindu wife and some brown kids. Also, you can’t just come out and say, “I’m a fascist.” OK, these days you can, because Bari Weiss and Donald Trump have restored free speech, but way back when I was running for Senate on the Fascist Tech-Bro ticket you needed to dress it up somehow.

I needed communion. Like, with a God I invented to justify my fascism.

So I became a Catholic. Because, let’s face it, evangelicals are super weird. I don’t want Jesus to be my BFF, I just want him to make me look good. And Catholics look good, with all their robes and candles and altars and sh*t. They speak in fancy language and have a bunch of classy, fancy stuff. Like Yale, actually. Yale is basically one big gothic cathedral. Becoming a Catholic is kind of like another chance to fit in at Yale. And by fit in, I mean tell everyone at Yale to go to hell, as if that’s not already where they are going.

I love the majesty and mystery of Catholicism. I like not being able to understand some of what is said, because let’s face it, I probably wouldn’t like it. An all Latin mass would be ideal, very good plausible deniability.

I like the order and the hierarchy, too. I like men being in charge, even when their wives are equally well educated and make more money than they do. Especially then. The Catholic church was once a thoroughly corrupt theocratic dictatorship, so it really gets what I am all about. I am a majestic, mysterious, aspiring dictator, and now I have a God who is worthy of me.

Now I have finally found communion. Really, I have. I don’t hate myself anymore because I have hand-crafted an entirely different self from the dollars of rich white supremacists and the votes of the delusional masses I openly derided as fools in my bestselling book.

The only problem is that NO ONE TOLD ME ABOUT THE POPE. I mean, I knew there was a Pope, I’m not an idiot, I just thought if I got enough power, I would get to be my own Pope. You know, like King Henry VIII.

But that’s not what happened. The last Pope and now the new “American” Pope don’t seem impressed with all the power I have accumulated. And they really don’t seem to understand Catholicism. It’s quite a scandal, that the Holy Catholic Church would be led by someone who can’t fathom the basics of the institution they lead and doesn’t seem to believe in its foundational teachings against immigration, multiculturalism, and the dignity of all human beings. It’s almost like having a President or Vice President of the United States who doesn’t understand the Constitution or believe in democracy.

And that’s why I wrote this book, to teach the Pope and all the people whom he is leading off a cliff of heresy about Catholicism. But I put a Methodist church on the cover because a lot of my followers think Catholics are going to hell, which they aren’t, of course, only the ones who follow this Pope. And also the last one. And, frankly, a lot of the Methodists, because too many of them are woke.

And that’s also why I had one of my allies at the Department of WAR haul in the Pope’s Ambassador to the US and threaten him with an obscure 13th century papal precedent involving France. TAKE THAT, WOKE POPE.

Everyone needs communion. With my version of God, or, if they aren’t white, with their original primitive tribe, back in the lands of their great-great-great-great grandparents.

Salve Imperium Semper Infidèles Pax Americana Et Tu Brute.

Amen.

In case you missed it and in case you need more Friday Fun, I also bid Pam Bondi a fond farewell. I hope she will forgive the delay, as I was on vacation when she was fired. I’m going to start working on Tulsi’s next….Maybe Hegseth’s… I mean, Trump’s would be nice, too….

If you didn’t get enough Artemis talk from Tuesday’s post, and I also discussed it on DogShirtTV. Audio only version here.

Pastor Teer and I also did another episode of Stupid Questions. This time, he takes my questions about the resurrection (which he really does believe happened! I want to believe, and am thankful for pastors and a church that let me be honest about that). Audio only version is here.

You might also enjoy Teer’s amazing Easter sermon from a couple years ago that he references in the conversation. Complete with picture of Jesus holding a Ketchup bottle.

Brewing Theology with Teer Hardy

Grace in a Ketchup Bottle

Brewing Theology with Teer Hardy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber…

Listen now

a year ago · 2 likes · Teer Hardy

From our community, I want to tell you about Bob Beatty, author , which is all about the Allman Brothers Band. Bob literally wrote the book on the ABB, too. My interest in the ABB is mainly because my husband is a huge fan. I had never heard of them when we met, but Kevin took me on a deep dive into their music and lore and sucked me in to the point where I walked down the aisle to “Blue Sky.”

Bob (and Kevin) is an example of how passion is contagious. Someone who is enthusiastic enough about a subject can make it interesting to others who know nothing. Anyway, whether you are a fan of the ABB or not, check out Bob’s Substack and learn a little something about this extraordinary band. Here’s Bob talking about his favorite song:

There are so many Substacks out there, it’s hard to keep track of which of you have ones that you actually write regularly. If you have one that needs some love, please flag it for me. As I have said, I have benefitted so much from boosts from other writers, I would like to pay it forward. I don’t have the massive platforms of a or , but I will do what I can.

Grace and peace, friends. Go well. Godspeed.

And God grant us peace. Sheesh, it’s a lot.

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But as we all do, I grew up and became more cynical. Human space exploration began to seem more hum-drum and less wondrous. The claims of scientific discovery of value to life on earth seemed questionable. The costs seemed extravagant. The whole point and direction of it was not clear.

So when I heard of the Artemis II mission, my general reaction was

Then I started seeing the astounding photos and videos. And hearing from the astronauts. And allowing myself to experience awe. Yesterday I found myself tearing up, multiple times.

It’s hard for any of us to put into words the thoughts and feelings the universe invokes. It’s beyond what our minds can hold. We live in space and time and three dimension and flesh and blood. Our worlds can be so small. We can be driven to distraction by a crooked picture on the wall or driven to our sickbeds by a microscopic creature. We can be tiny, petty, and pathetic in the confines of our bodies and our selfishness and our fears.

Even the four astronauts, earth escapees, vanquishers of gravity and of human limitations both universal and personal, still gotta wipe their butts up there. Personally, I want the gory details from Christina Koch on how she manages to be a woman in a tiny space with three men while maintaining some semblance of dignity. I hope she’s not on her period.

The universe is vast, eternal even. What is beyond the universe? What was before it? And if anything, what is beyond and before that? What does eternity even mean, as a concept and for us as finite, located beings?

We are not the universe. We are small and mortal. And yet. And yet.

At one point, the crew named two new craters, one for their spacecraft, Integrity, the other for the late wife of Commander Reid Wiseman. She died of cancer six years ago, leaving him with two girls to raise alone. But not completely alone, because this crew has long been a family. As one of the other crew members announced crater Carroll, his voice cracked with emotion. The others wiped their eyes. You can’t see it in the video, but I imagined tears floating off their faces as tiny droplets into the air. They embraced.

They also had some love to pass on to their fellow humans. Pilot Victor Glover bridged his Christian faith with the universal human experience. “We are the same thing.”

Mission specialist Christina Koch spoke eloquently after a planned 40 minute communications blackout while they flew around the far side of the moon about the importance of science and discovery, but how humanity trumps it all. “We will explore, we will build…but ultimately, we will always choose earth, we will always choose us.”

They also woke up one day with a surprise taped message from Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell, who passed away in August.

The Artemis crew carried their human bodies to the moon and hopefully will return with them to earth. They also carried their love. Their faith. Their trust, in each other and their team back on earth, who hold their lives in their hands. And in the future. We are frail and fallible and finite, and yet. And yet.

Our love takes us to another realm. It lifts us beyond our humanity. It is the baton we hand off to the next one and the next and the next. Like the universe, our love is eternal. Like gravity, it is a force of nature, and of everything beyond nature. It is more than who we are but also the very essence of it.

What does space travel get us in real terms? Who knows. Is it worth the cost? I have no idea. Will it lead somewhere? No way to tell. But that’s true of everything we do. We invest in a future we will not see. We pour out our energies and gifts and love on the planet, hoping it will overwhelm the efforts of those who never can get beyond the blackholes of themselves that threaten to drag much more with them down to destruction. Hoping it will pass something on. Trusting it will mean something someday, somewhere, to someone.

And then there are those who just can’t quite believe, and so they insist on knowing. They insist they can know, what it all means and their place in it. And they take the mystery and eternity of the universe and they cram it in a little box and they strain all reality and all love and all humanity through a narrow funnel. And then they hold their little cherished piece of certainty tighter than a vice.

Maybe they are Christians or Muslims or atheists. Maybe they are just your crazy uncle. Or maybe they rule the world. It doesn’t really matter in principle, they are all the same. They are sure they are right, floating on a tiny speck in a universe that can’t be known. Such dogmatic, irrational certainty is always fear in disguise. They insist they are right because they are terrified to be wrong. Or just that they don’t know.

It’s hard to be in relationship with such tiny people. You can only touch them through glass. You can only see and be seen through screens. They see through a glass darkly, and they know not love. They will leave this life having missed its entire point.

Most of them are fairly harmless. But when they have power, it’s terrifying. They bomb and bombast and bluster. They stomp around the planet like a petulant giant. They lay waste and destroy.

I wonder if the Artemis crew might catch a glimpse of the Middle East today, on their way home. I wonder if they will see the rockets’ red glare and the bombs bursting in air, the finger paints of a mad man. If he delivers on his threats, it will probably look lovely from up above, if you can delude yourself.

We are enveloped by eternity, yet too many of us insist on staying small because we can’t accept our smallness. The Artemis crew gives us a glimpse beyond ourselves, through their scientific endeavors and through their love. We can’t all blast off on a rocket, but we can all look up at the stars and into each other’s eyes and towards all that shines bright and beautiful on this good earth.

We will meet tonight at 8 pm EDT. We will share joys and concerns and help each other feel less lonely and afraid. If that is something you need but aren’t a paid subscriber, let me know. Remember, all profits from this Substack go to pro-democracy causes and organizations. The link will go out to paid subscribers in a separate email momentarily.

I was immediately reminded of something.

If that scene isn’t the perfect encapsulation of Trump’s Iran policy, I don’t know what is.

I loved the Peter Sellers Pink Panther movies growing up (admittedly the Cato character has not aged well). Basically they are a string of episodes in which the disastrous inspector a) lucks his way into an assignment/position that is way over his head b) makes whatever problem he is tasked with solving bigger or otherwise completely fails at his job while destroying a lot of property c) pretends that was the plan the whole time and he is in complete control of the situation.

The doorbell scene above is a classic case. He arrives at the house in a very poor disguise to investigate Lady Litton for a jewel theft. The doorbell malfunctions, and he “fixes” it by completely destroying it. He goes on to do the same to Lady Litton’s phone and office while trying to listen in on her conversations. And he never solves the case, someone else does but he gets the credit.

But I could have used any number of scenes, for instance:

• Ticketing a “blind” beggar and his pet monkey for solicitation instead of arresting the thieves with whom they are in league who are robbing the bank right in front of him. (When Clouseau’s boss, Dreyfus, informs him the beggar was the lookout for the thieves, who got away, Clouseau replies, “How can a blind man be a lookout?” Dreyfus replies, “How can an idiot be a police inspector?” Or a President, for that matter.)

• Getting drugged by Lady Litton while pretending to seduce her so he can get information from her.

• Destroying a hotel room with a vacuum cleaner while searching it for evidence.

• Destroying another hotel room by leaving the tub running while talking on the phone.

• Destroying every apartment he lives in during fights with his butler whom he has instructed to attack him randomly as some sort of training exercise.

• Destroying a swimming pool by driving a truck into it.

• Slipping on wax and running into a cable left by a jewel thief, thereby knocking a precious artifact off the wall in a museum while investigation the crime scene. (“Ah, the element of surprise, of course I knew it was going to happen all the time but nevertheless.”)

• Getting punched in the face by a go-go dancer and then falling into a pool while trying to pick up Lady Litton in a bar.

If these films were made today, I would swear they were intentional parodies of Trump. This is truly the Clouseau Presidency, in which the only talent on display is completely and utterly f*cking up everything that is touched while preening around like a some kind of elderly lobotomized peacock. Trump is Inspector Clouseau with nuclear weapons.

Incidentally, Clouseau’s poor boss ends up going certifiably insane from watching him stumble ass-backwards into what appears to enough people like success.

I think we all can relate.

I am now in Arizona at the Grand Canyon. What can I say, it is a very large canyon. We are staying in an Airbnb with its own power supply, and it is smarter than both our Ph.Ds combined. Granted, neither one of them is in anything practical or handy in any way. Kevin can probably run a regression or whatever to determine exactly how much energy the house conserves (I myself have nothing at all to bring to the situation), but we had to watch a training video in order to use the coffee pot.

We also did Bryce Canyon before we left Utah, and Antelope Canyon, Lake Powell, some other stuff. Everything is so beautiful, but I am reaching canyon saturation. My daughter scolded me for whining today, and I deserved it. That’s right, I’m officially less mature than my child.1 OK, that’s been true for several years.

I recorded an amazing conversation with and Mekdes Haddis in December, and it’s now up on Harvey’s podcast. Both of them were sources for my book, and their books, about equity and justice in missions, are full of rich insight and perfect companions to mine.

Not much time to read this week, although I am almost finished with Matthew Sutton’s essential new book, Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity. He covers the good, bad, and the ugly, American Christianity in all its multiplicity and complexity. And he does it all in one, not-too-terribly-long volume. A great resource.

Lastly, we will have our Zebra Dazzle for paid subscribers Tuesday at 8 pm EDT. A link will be provided earlier that day.

I hope all our Jewish and Christian friends are enjoying a blessed Holy Week.

Grace and peace, friends. Go well. Godspeed.

I have heard from a lot of readers of my book since it came out in August. Predictably many of them are missionary kids. Some of them offer a brief thank you for writing the book, or opening up a dialogue with their parents or children. Some of them pour out their entire stories, many of them full of pain. Some of them disagree, usually only slightly, with the book’s characterization. Fair enough, as I say in the introduction, there’s no way to capture everyone’s experience, nor was that my goal.

Another category of readers is missionaries or former missionaries, and these have been most surprising, because they haven’t been argumentative (the many haters probably don’t bother to write). Instead they are usually confessionals, of how screwed up the system is and the ways they participated in it, of how they treated their children or what they put them through, of their disillusionment with the American church and the culture that sent and celebrated them. Some of these emails have been from friends and colleagues of my parents, which really gobsmacked me. One of them simply said, “Everything you have written is true.”

The other day I received a really, really unusual email from a middle eastern Christian (I’m going to obscure some details). He had grown up in a family of Islamic extremists and converted to Christianity first through the Russian Orthodox Church, believe it or not, while living in Moscow. Then he moved back to a predominantly Muslim country that nonetheless has many Christians. He became an evangelical.

Here’s what he wrote:

But my “newborn” experience was in xxx two years ago, where I actually got to know in theology who exactly Jesus is and what is the Trinity, I read the whole bible and studied it with videos from The Bible Project.

I became a spiritual junky, ended up in some charismatic church, where strangely I met southern Baptist missionary (it seemed that he had no choice but to go that church haha )….Anyways, he baptized me…

Worth saying, I did feel different and my life became better since I chose to be christian and believed in Jesus….

As a vulnerable lonely person…I’ve encountered a really ugly manipulation. I am not a saint though, instead of leaving I decided to play games with them, out of curiosity, and out loneliness and the need for a community and maybe the need for some drama that I needed to have as a distraction in my life.

I do like publicly stating that I am a christian. I do feel the Holy Spirit working on my life, I have some real testimony of how reading the Bible transformed me and I did enjoy telling this story publicly to Muslims around me.

Now I am dividing deeper into understanding the evangelical dilemma. For some reason, I am enjoying the dive.

He said he found my book helpful in his journey. I replied that I hoped if nothing else he understood that Jesus is not American and that he would pursue and find the real thing, whatever that is.

I loved his story for its complexities, which are true to life. He found Christianity through a church that is pretty darn pernicious. He found evangelicalism through the internet, a major argument against sending missionaries, but then through a missionary. He sees both the pros and cons, the authenticity and the cynicism, of his experience. It’s all very human and divine at the same time.

It’s the story I tried to tell in my book, although I emphasized the human because the divine has already been proclaimed from the rooftops for hundreds of years in order to cover up the human.

Whatever God is and however it moves through people’s lives, I don’t know. But it’s important to hear others’ stories even in they don’t confirm your own. Reality is terribly complex, and faith lives in the least definitive wing of reality. Good faith should bring more questions than answers.

This is the foyer where the Wealthys would welcome their guests in a warm and friendly way that said, “We have more money than you.” In olden times, you couldn’t possibly have people directly walk into an actual room upon arriving at your house, you had to usher them into a hallway large enough to accommodate 500 layers of clothing and stuffed with enough expensive sh*t to deter poor people with an allergy to Italian marble.

Our historians clawed at the walls with their fingernails for an entire year then analyzed the shavings under a microscope to identify the exact wallpaper pattern, which they then reproduced using a restored 18th century loom. It is very important that we did this in order to determine that the Wealthy family was not just wealthy, but very wealthy, because only very wealthy people would have had this style of wallpaper. Although Home Depot actually sells something strikingly similar for $1/square foot.

Guests would then be brought into this sitting room to uncomfortably perch on a tiny, granite couch. This is all period furniture but none of it is original to this house, except for that armoire, which was built in this room and weighs 70,000 pounds. We found a dead body in it when we first acquired the house back in 1947.

But what I really want to tell you about is the paint color. Our historians meticulously stripped the wood paneling of 27 layers of lead-based paint using tiny Barbie brushes and nail polish remover to reveal that the original paint color was…GREEN. Truly a breathtaking discovery. We didn’t even know with certainty that the color green existed 300 years ago but now we know there was green paint, which challenges all our assumptions about color in the 18th century.

Next, let’s head into the dining room. Here we have Chippendale chairs, not to be confused with either the talking chipmunks or the exotic male dancers, neither of which existed when these chairs were made (although based on one of Mrs. Wealthy’s diary entries about her husband’s “intemperate” waltzing at a Christmas party, Mr. Wealthy may have had a rare condition that causes loose hip joints).

As you can see by all the plastic food we acquired from a local preschool and have helpfully piled on this exquisite Countess of Pembroke dining table so that you can more easily imagine people of the past eating, the Wealthys consumed such delicacies as bread, apples, and potatoes. We could have deduced their diet based on written agricultural and purchasing records, as well as common sense, but instead we decided to dig up their corpses and analyze the dust in their stomach regions. And I’m so glad we did, because we found turnip dust, even though there is no record of turnips ever being brought into this house, or even of turnips being at all edible by humans. Another thrilling discovery that completely changes our understanding of turnips.

Also, we found this taxidermy duck carcass in a chifforobe and thought it should go somewhere, although it’s possible the duck was a family pet instead of a meal.

After dinner, the men and women would have gone to separate rooms to perch uncomfortably on more tiny furniture. The men would have smoked, gambled, cussed, whored, and dueled, while in the next room the women did needlepoint and engaged in the occasional lesbian orgy, although it’s possible that’s just how women expressed friendship at the time.

Please note this hand-carved staircase. This is original to the house. Please keep your voices down as you ascend because sound waves damage the original plutonium-based lacquer.

Upstairs we have the bedrooms. At bedtime, Mrs. Wealthy would take off her corseted evening gown, don a corseted nightgown, and lie on another slab of granite with some insect-infested straw thrown over it. But don’t you wish you had this absolutely transcendent four-poster bed, hewn from a single oak tree by brutally enslaved people with whom Mr. Wealthy likely had multiple children. Slavery was extremely, very bad. But the enslaved people really did some amazing carpentry on this bed, which has been refinished with original pig lard varnish, crafted by our historians using their long accumulated bacon grease.

This next room is where George Washington’s wig maker would have stayed overnight in 1792. He was the second cousin thrice removed of Mrs. Wealthy’s fifth cousin twice removed. We don’t really know if he was traveling with the wig, or any wig, but had that been the case, he almost certainly would have placed it in this cherry-finished chifforobe, which is not original to the house. In fact, we found the duck carcass downstairs in one of the drawers. But if you close your eyes and click your heels together three times, you can almost see George Washington’s wig lying in this top drawer, with the duck carcass.

This chamberpot is original to the house, and we know that because we managed to scrape some DNA out of it that was a perfect match to one of the Wealthy corpses, and also the stomach dust. Of note, this testing further confirmed the presence of turnips here.

That brings us to the end of the tour. To summarize what we have learned, the color green has been around for a long time, turnips are edible, slavery was very bad, bacon grease has many uses, important wigs may or may not have been here, and if you were rich enough in the 18th century, you would never know a moment’s bodily comfort. Also, our historians all have cancer now but the wallpaper alone was worth it.

The historic homes do tend to run together. Incidentally, so do the geothermic features in Yellowstone. There’s no need to see them all.

Friends! I hope you are going to No Kings tomorrow, because I cannot.

I will be somewhere in the middle of Utah or Colorado or Arizona on a trip with my family. I tried to convince Kevin we need to find a protest in some tiny angry place, but he said no. I think we can all agree that Kevin is a traitor to his country.

But you, you all are patriots of the first order. To the ramparts!!!

A few things of interest to pass on:

• I found this Oprah podcast on AI to be a very balanced treatment more accessible to the layman than a lot of other things I have encountered that nonetheless still has me pretty freaked out.

• Similarly, on Dog Shirt TV this week, , , and I talked about how everything is becoming a betting market (most especially US foreign policy) and then when you combine that with AI everything is even more terrifying.

• As an antidote to all that, I appreciated the soothing sounds of Al Gore’s voice on the Bulwark pod. I remember long ago when I thought he was boring. Man if I wouldn’t sleep on an 18th century bed for the rest of my life to have him as President now.

  Incidentally this is still the greatest SNL skit of all time:

• and I had another Stupid Questions, on capitalism, but for some reason it did not post it on my feed. So here it is on his.

• I enjoyed Elizabeth Bruenig’s reflections on faith in The Atlantic. (that’s a gift link)

From our community:

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Life Its Ownself

The Latest on the Border Wall

Welcome to another installment of Life Its Ownself. If you like what you read, please 1) hit the Like button at the bottom of this installment, 2) subscribe to this newsletter, and 3) tell your 1,000 best friends to read and subscribe. Also, feel free to comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts…

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a month ago · 9 likes · 3 comments · DeeceX

Grace and peace, friends. Go well. Godspeed.

The Sea Islands have a fascinating history. The enslaved people on the plantations there were often left unattended, as the white planter families fled the heat and diseases of summer. The African origins of the enslaved populations there also tended to be more homogenous, as they were specifically captured for their experience growing rice and indigo in West Africa. As a result, unlike most other enslaved populations, these people retained more of their African language, religion, and culture and melded it with other influences into something truly unique.

This area of the country was also on the forefront of Reconstruction efforts after the Civil War, because the Union controlled pockets of the Sea Islands as early as 1861 and freed the enslaved people in this area well before the Emancipation Proclamation. It was here that the idea of giving them parcels of plantation land was actually realized, although most of that land was later taken back.

Still, given the undesirability of some of this territory, communities of Black Americans were able to retain or later buy pieces of it. Pin Point was established after a hurricane devastated the area in 1896. A cooperative of Black residents of the area purchased it at auction for $1,000.

Pin Point’s residents made their living off the boggy waterways of the Moon River, as oyster farmers and eventually employees in a canning factory owned by a white man (that was a convoluted, classically American story, whereby the owner used his racial and economic privilege to acquire the factory but then became a truly beloved member of the community, even watching the Pin Point babies while their mothers worked).

Nobody in Pin Point got rich, or even remotely middle-class. Its most famous son, Clarence Thomas, got out. It is clear in watching this award-winning documentary about Pin Point that poverty is rife. The children played with dolls made out of grass and fabricated sports equipment. The work of shucking and canning oysters was monotonous and grueling.

And yet the joy and the pride of being part of the Pin Point community leaps off the screen.

Clarence Thomas, despite whatever one may think of his character and jurisprudence, is the usual rags-to-riches success story Americans love. Despite all odds, including racism and poverty, he rose from Pin Point to the highest heights of power. There’s no question his life is more comfortable and his health is better than the average person from Pin Point.

But I highly doubt he is happier. And especially given what he has supported in recent years, I would put his legacy and accomplishments as significantly less than the average resident of Pin Point.

I don’t mean to minimize the real hardships and injustices of poverty, especially poverty largely borne from racial oppression, or to suggest that finding happiness amidst poverty makes it all OK.

But if we’re talking about success—I can’t imagine any higher success than cooperatively sustaining a community and a culture over decades that stands as a living monument to the beautiful perseverance and stubborn joy of a people who had to claw and dig and unearth everything they have and are out of the mud and mire of history.

I have a dear friend, I’ll call her Stacy. I have heard her refer to herself as a failure, although I hope that’s not how she truly feels about herself. Mainly because she was forced to medically retire early from a successful career due to mental health. She has bipolar disorder. The ending of her career was messy and ugly and humiliating.

She moved from a fulfilling life in the big city back to her small hometown, where she struggles to make ends meet on her retirement income and in the wake of bad financial decisions she made in the throes of manic episodes. She had to declare bankruptcy a few years ago.

She knows a lot of people there, but has few deep friendships. She doesn’t have much in common with most people. She’s more educated and liberal than almost everyone around her. But that’s where she can afford to live and where her elderly mother is, so she stays. She’s rarely if ever had a serious romantic relationship, certainly not a healthy one.

When we are together, I can hear her contrasting herself with me. Other than my divorce, which seems like part of a different person’s life, I have had few visible failures, and much visible success. And I do have a good life, there’s no question about that.

The subtext of much of her conversation with me is, You are a success, I am a failure. But the truth is, I have been lucky, and she has not.

Now, I have been unlucky on occasion and in certain aspects. I have not always been dealt a great hand. But Stacy has been dealt terrible hand after terrible hand, over and over and over. And unlike in a card game, the deck is never shuffled, never primed for a fresh start. Each new deal is drawn from the last round of terrible cards.

In her case, those cards include multiple sexual assaults. Domestic violence. Devastating loss. Parental neglect. Financial hardship. And a brain that rebels at every turn and fuels vicious, compounding cycles of cause and effect. Anxiety. Depression. Mania. Attention deficit.

But somehow Stacy managed to put herself through college. Somehow she managed to become a CPA. Somehow she managed to get some really impressive, well-paying jobs. She has also managed to run a marathon and complete many other races and become really knowledgeable about art and work in a museum.

And somehow she has managed to become a good person, with a wonderfully soft heart and unfailing kindness and a generous spirit. Somehow she is not a bitter, brittle asshole. I’ve met plenty of those with far fewer excuses.

Stacy has a semi-colon tattooed on her wrist as an emblem of her ultimate achievement, survival.

She is an astounding, breathtaking success.

I have found this writing career, such as it is, a real mind f*ck. A true roller coaster ride of expectations. An achievement hall of mirrors in which it is nearly impossible to judge your own success. Unless you hit the New York Times bestseller list, which few writers do. And even then, your monetary payoff relative to that apparent achievement is probably meager, and your fame, such as it is, is pretty niche and fleeting.

Between an unpublished blogger with five readers and Barbara Kingsolver is a vast wilderness of writers stumbling around, many of them in circles, trying to figure out where they are going, if anywhere at all, without the benefit of roads, markers, or maps.

Unfortunately, one of the only navigation devices seems to be comparing oneself with other writers in a similar vein or place. Jealousy and pettiness is a constant, horrible companion that only serves to make you feel like a moral failure on top of a writing failure. I won’t mention any names, but there are a few writers out there that I practically loathe, without even knowing them at all, simply because they have achieved a few degrees more of a success I might have reasonably expected to attain. It’s a really bad look.

Oh, speaking of pettiness. I have to take a little detour here to share something we saw in Charleston. Give it up for this guy. Bless him.

I can’t go into details, but this past week I got some really, really great writing news one day that was dialed back into merely great news the very next day. Instead of being happy about the great news, I was super duper bummed about not having the really, really great thing. I had a pretty decent pity party about it. And then I smacked me in the face, literally, and told me Get Thy Sh*t Together.

Then I reminded myself, for the millionth time, that all of this—the book, this Substack, the articles I’ve been able to publish elsewhere, the connections I have made, the other opportunities I’ve had—is the stuff of my dreams, a gift I never expected to get, a major life surprise. It is frankly embarrassing and incredibly stupid that I am stealing my own joy by wanting more and more and more.

Because if you’re talking about the traditional measures of success in our society—money, power, accolades, fame, advancement—there is always more. There is no ceiling. Hell, Clarence Thomas isn’t content to be a Supreme Court Justice after being born in Pin Point, he had to take bunch of ethically dubious cash. Not to mention wreck American democracy. Me thinks what Clarence really needs is some therapy.

Also, none of that stuff lasts (well, Clarence’s demo project is likely to have some enduring impact. Congrats to him and his insurrectionist wife). Working in a large organization, I saw over and over how easily everything moved on and the gap filled when someone left, no matter how high up and important they were. Like taking a spoon out of gravy.

One of my first bosses, the guy who interviewed me in fact, worked and clawed his way up to a fairly high rank. He had a Father’s Day card from his young daughter in his office with a stick figure depiction of him and “5 things about my Dad” written on it. One of them was “Never home.”

I sat across the aisle from his daughter a few years later at his funeral. He died far too young from a rare cancer. She looked devastated. The CIA went on as if he never existed.

Well, that’s not exactly true. Many of us remember him fondly to this day. Not for his skillful navigation of the bureaucracy that allowed him to achieve most of his success. I remember how he took the time to explain his very good edits and helped me become a better writer. He invested in me as a person. In a way that reflected his skills and talents, yes, but let’s just say I had many people edit me over the years, and I don’t remember most of them fondly.

And next time you feel unsuccessful or wonder if you’ve wasted your life, consider that there are MULTIPLE US Presidents that the vast majority of Americans could not pick out of a line-up.

Success isn’t a fancy promotion or a big house or an advanced degree or a painless life. It isn’t publishing a book or publishing another book after that or winning an award or being invited on a podcast by someone WHO TOTALLY SHOULD HAVE ME ON HIS PODCAST BUT CLEARLY THINKS HE IS BETTER THAN ME TO HELL WITH HIM

Success is laughing with friends while you shuck oyster after oyster in the stifling heat. It’s a joyful, toothless smile when you think about your place in a warm community. Success is seeing the beauty in art and making beautiful art out of the garbage life dumped on your head. It’s being a good friend after having far too few good friends. It’s getting out of bed in the morning and walking outside and noticing the sunshine. And knowing that no matter what and despite it all, you found a way to put love out into the world.

It’s fine to have goals and chase dreams and to be ambitious. We all have a drive to find our purpose and use our gifts. That’s one of the engines of history.

But the others are plain old perseverance and love. We make our mark simply by surviving and by miraculously rising above our own selfish need to survive.

So count it all as a win, my friends, and let the rest go on a breeze you can’t possibly predict or control.

I’m sure you’ve seen the explosive New York Times story detailing Cesar Chavez’s abuse of women and girls, including another celebrated leader in his movement, Delores Huerta. (That’s a gift link)

There’s no need to go into the details here, except to offer a word about Huerta. She is 96 years old and has revealed for the first time that he raped her, presumably in response to the other women coming forward. Her own legacy is deeply connected with Chavez’s. She married his brother, with whom she has several children. She had two children as a result of Chavez’s assaults. She hid the pregnancies and gave the children to other families to raise, although she subsequently developed relationships with them. She says she didn’t know he was also abusing children, and she is “sickened” to discover this.

She could have easily stayed silent at this point. Or she could have challenged the women’s accounts. But instead she told the truth. Not just about Chavez, but about the reasons why she didn’t speak up before.

I carried this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work. The formation of a union was the only vehicle to accomplish and secure those rights and I wasn’t going to let Cesar or anyone else get in the way. I channeled everything I had into advocating on behalf of millions of farmworkers and others who were suffering and deserved equal rights.

Chavez has been dead for over 30 years. There are schools and roads and libraries named for him. There are museums and festivals and holidays celebrating his legacy as a champion of farm workers and the rights of Latinos in America more broadly.

He spent his public life advocating for the rights of others. While in private he grossly violated others’ rights and personhood. Their very bodies.

Such hypocrisy is sadly all too common among human beings. Especially when there’s a larger cause on the line. Huerta may not have known about Chavez’s abuse of girls. But you can bet that many, many, many people did. And they all stayed silent because they didn’t want to harm The Cause. They believed Chavez was too essential to it. They believed it was worth sacrificing a few children to advance a movement.

The Chavez story hits close to home for the kids of missionaries, and I’m sure some of my fellow MKs, especially those who suffered similar abuse by “heroes of the faith,” are reeling today.

But even those who didn’t suffer this kind of abuse grew up under the shadow of The Cause. Some suffered real harm—early boarding school, other forms of neglect, being put in dangerous situations, enduring war and witnessing violence.

Many more simply felt deprioritized by the people meant to love them more than anyone else. People who seemed to love their notion of God and their version of The Cause more.

It’s a rotten trade every time when you harm people while trying save people. When you put your cause over your character. When you put righteousness over relationship. You’re robbing Peter to pay Paul. You’re mopping the floor wearing muddy boots. You’re living a disintegrated life. You’re grossly missing the point.

Don’t get me wrong, there are hard decisions when it comes to the hard work of change. Policymaking in particular is an impossible task. The art of bringing the most benefit to the most people will always leave some people out.

But activism, charity, and ministry is less complicated. And far more self-righteous. If advancing your cause, whether secular or religious, necessitates abuse, especially of children, it can’t possibly succeed. Not wholly. Not really. Not in the long run.

What is The Cause if not loving others? There is no other cause.

I’ve seen a few more conservative types commenting on the Chavez story with something akin to, “See, abuse happens in liberal circles, too.” And that’s true, it can, and it does.

But this kind of statement is also misleading. Because whether you’re talking about Cesar Chavez or Joseph Duggar—that’s right, a second Duggar son has been arrested for the sexual abuse of children—it’s all the same thing.

It’s patriarchy. It’s the abuse of power. It’s some people being assigned a lesser value than other people.

It can happen anywhere, and it does. But these days, as opposed to Cesar Chavez’s days, when women’s rights lagged behind other civil rights advances, there’s a lot more of it in conservative religious settings that intentionally elevate men above women, use harsh parenting to teaching children to unquestioningly obey authority, and restrict women’s roles. I’ve recommended the work of and to you before on the nexus of evangelical parenting and abuse.

But in fact, in any kind of setting, cultivating homogenous leadership structures alone encourages abuse. According to political scientists like , these environments discourage accountability. And the lack of accountability fosters abuse.

For my book, I spoke to scholar Marie Griffith, who studies sexual abuse in religious settings. She is working on a comparative analysis of the Catholic and Southern Baptist abuse crises. There are many differences between the two cultures, but the obvious similarity is the exclusion of women from leadership. She told me denominations that include women in leadership have less abuse. It’s kind of an obvious point, but she’s accumulating the data to prove it.

But another key element in evangelicalism’s abuse problem (and I assume the Catholic one, although I am not very knowledgable on Catholicism) is the importance of The Cause. White evangelicals have long believed they are specially tasked with a mission from God to save humanity from hell and redeem the culture. Implied in that is that they are better than the culture—more righteous, more correct, more wise—and that their ways are the best ways.

Despite pithy evangelical sayings like, “We’re not perfect, just forgiven!” or a theology of us all sinners, there’s an inherent arrogance in evangelicals’ exclusive claims not simply to God, but to Christianity itself. We have finally nailed Christ’s teachings, we know how to be saved, we correctly interpret the Bible, we know how to live, our lives are more successful.

But what if they’re not? Like pretty obviously? When you’ve staked not just your life, but your afterlife on such claims, what happens when they turn out to be false? When you fail at the most basic task of loving others?

It takes a lot of work—a lot of denial, a lot of dissonance, a lot of deflection and decoration and diversion—to live in a house of cards. Communal arrogance is a powerful antidote to accountability.

Incidentally, while abject patriarchy remains far more common in conservative Christianity than in secular liberalism, cause-worship remains a problem in all kids of settings.

Just for one thing—Bill Clinton is still invited to things. His abuse of women, including a credible rape, is well documented by unbiased sources. Feminists at the time excused his behavior because he was a champion of their issues.

Or Jeffrey Epstein—although there wasn’t even a cause involved there, just greed for money and power, some of the scientists and philanthropists in his network probably justified their association along these lines. Harvey Weinstein funded Democratic campaigns and liberal causes and “made great art.” Bill Richardson and George Mitchell were great diplomats. Deshawn Watson was a great quarterback.1

Even getting beyond such horrific sorts of abuse, we’ve all known leaders who are verbally abusive, unkind, entitled, awful people. But if they do good work, if they benefit the organization, if they are talented enough, if they advance The Cause—it’s all good. Just put up with it.

We want our team to win. We want our organization to thrive. We want our cause to succeed. We tell ourselves it’s better for everyone that it does.

Human beings of all kinds are capable of terrible things. We really are all sinners. But the vast majority of us also respond to incentives. And when the mistreatment of others isn’t tolerated, it really does tend to decrease. And when it’s allowed to continue, it really does tend to increase. It’s not rocket science.

And ultimately, we’re all enlisted in The Cause of all Causes, to ensure that each human being is treated as a child of God with equal value.

I had a lovely week away with Kevin, seeing the sites of the Sea Island low country. Thank you for giving me Monday off, I’m sure you all were just devastated not to get a post.

A few things to pass on:

• I will be in Grand Rapids April 17-19 for Calvin University’s Faith and Writing conference. If you live there and would like me to speak somewhere with at least a dozen or so people, let me know.

• I will be in Atlanta, briefly, for the Religion News Service conference April 23-24, not sure I’ll have time to speak, but let me know if you have an idea.

• I will be in Chicago even more briefly for another joint film screening-book discussion with Ari Ali on April 25. Come see us!

• Lastly, I will be in Charlottesville, VA speaking at the Pulaski Institute’s For Good Conference May 8-9, with the likes of Jamelle Bouie, , Sarah Posner, Allyson Shortle, and more! It’s FREE, so come see us.

Incidentally, at this point, I am mainly trying to get my name out and about and build my skills and resume as a public speaker. So if you would like me to come see you and think you can round up a decent number of folks, let me know, I’ll see if we can work something out. I do not charge money as of now, although I will gladly accept donations.

No reading recs this week, I’ve been too slammed! Sorry.

Grace and peace, friends. Go well. Godspeed.

These sorts of American history-laden trips are always an embarrassing tour of forgotten knowledge for me, a person who supposedly has a Ph.D. in the subject. Kevin only makes it worse by asking such probing questions over dinner as, “Who was the best antebellum President?” and “Who was the best Gilded Age President (besides Grant)?” Both these questions are akin to asking, “Who is the least awful Trump official?”

Long story short, we did a quick search through my expertise, which predictably came up short, and then through the internet. The correct answers are Zachary Taylor, who was simply the least bad, and Benjamin Harrison, who was shockingly not bad.

An entirely forgettable figure who served only one term—which he won only by virtue of the Electoral College—Harrison was a rare champion for civil rights at the time. He tried to prosecute voting rights violations in the south (jury nullification blocked these attempts) and early prototypes of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act. Alas, there was not enough support in Congress.

This is from a speech he gave before Congress in 1893:

The colored people did not intrude themselves upon us; they were brought here in chains and held in communities where they are now chiefly bound by a cruel slave code...when and under what conditions is the black man to have a free ballot? When is he in fact to have those full civil rights which have so long been his in law? When is that quality of influence which our form of government was intended to secure to the electors to be restored? ... in many parts of our country where the colored population is large the people of that race are by various devices deprived of any effective exercise of their political rights and of many of their civil rights. The wrong does not expend itself upon those whose votes are suppressed. Every constituency in the Union is wronged.^[141]

No wonder he lost reelection.

Incidentally, Benjamin Harrison has nothing whatsoever to do with Savannah, except that Kevin and I had a conversation about him over dinner in an amazing restaurant called The Grey, which is housed in what was once a segregated Greyhound Bus terminal here.

Before we left, I made a parody that I think is pretty awesome. Now I can’t wait for other Trump officials to be defenestrated so I can make sequels. Tell me who you think is next so I can get a head start.

I also published pieces at both Good Faith Media and Bad Faith Media:

Singing Next to Karen: Notes on Resistance from the Choir Loft

Are You Mainline or Evangelical? Take this fun quiz!

And I did another Stupid Questions with :

That should give you enough content to consume if I am not able to write anything on Monday :)

From the community:

American Vets in Defense of Democracy

There Was No Plan for Trump's War on Iran

Like any good strongman President Trump delights in force and power. In fact, he is so besotted with American military might that before the U.S.-Israeli (U.S.-I) war against Iran he stated that victory would be “something easily won.” As we now approach the third week of the war Trump’s White House has taken to propagandizing and attempting to glorify …

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2 months ago · 7 likes · 8 comments · Shawn Howard AVDD

John’s Newsletter

Andy Ogles and Freedom of Religion

Last Saturday while driving to a school event I listened to Dahlia Lithwick’s Amicus podcast. Her guest was Rachel Laser, CEO of Americans United for Church and State. The episode notes read like this…

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2 months ago · 5 likes · John Hawthorne

Grace and peace, friends. Go well. Godspeed.