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Growing up closeted in a deeply religious home is a gauntlet of shapeshifting. From the time I understood that what I felt was something I needed to hide, my baseline way of existing became a performance. Every room I walked into required a rapid assessment. Who was there? What did they expect? What version of me did they need to see? What interests, behaviors or reactions were going to draw the wrong kind of attention? I became extraordinarily good at reading people because my sense of safety depended on it. I learned to anticipate judgment before it arrived and to manage perception the way other kids learned to ride bikes; through repetition and necessity and the very clear understanding that falling had consequences.

And so did every other gay kid in the same situation.

Under those constraints, your personality doesn’t develop normally but strategically. You build a version of yourself that is acceptable to the people whose love feels predicated on your performance. You get so good at performing it that you start to lose track of who you are. While I wish that was a metaphor, it’s a real psychological process that takes years to undo and some of us are still in the middle of undoing it.

They danced for the sentry eyes of my family and the people at church who knew my name, prayed for me and would have said without hesitation that they loved me. I believe they did love me in the way they understood love, which unfortunately came with significant conditions. The love was real and so were the conditions. Both of those things being true simultaneously is one of the more complicated griefs I’ve had to hold as an adult.

For a lot of queer people, coming out doesn’t feel like liberation right away but an act of violence. You’re not coming out into a neutral space where people are going to receive your truth with curiosity and openness. You’re coming out in an environment that has already categorized your identity as rebellion, deception or sin. Your self-knowledge gets interpreted as self-destruction. Your self-love gets interpreted as selfishness. The most honest thing you’ve ever done in your life gets treated as a betrayal.

This is why there are plenty of queer people still in the closet right now. They don’t lack courage, they’re doing a risk assessment. They know what they stand to lose. They know which relationships won’t survive the truth. They don’t know who will still be there on the other side or whether the version of their life that’s waiting for them is actually livable. I remember that fear with a specificity that doesn’t fade. Not knowing felt like standing at the edge of a dark pit with no way to see the bottom. Some people have genuinely good reasons to stay where they are for now. Safety is real and their survival matters. I’m not here to tell anyone they’re wrong for protecting themselves.

But I also know what it cost me to keep protecting myself past the point where protection had become its own kind of damage. Underneath all the shapeshifting, performing and careful management of people’s perception, I was organizing my entire life around the avoidance of disappointing people. My operating system said: don’t fail to deliver the version of yourself that everyone has already decided you are. Make yourself smaller, quieter and more manageable and maybe you can hold all of this together without anything breaking.

It’s hard to get mad at the kid version of me who came up with that operating system. He did the best he could with what he knew (which wasn’t a lot.)

While it took longer and cost more than it should have, I had to learn that disappointing people isn’t a catastrophe to be avoided, it’s an inevitability to be navigated. And this isn’t only true for queer people, it’s true for anyone who has ever tried to live authentically inside a world that demanded their compliance in exchange for belonging. At some point the question stops being whether you’re going to disappoint someone and starts being who you’re willing to disappoint and why. Because you’re going to disappoint someone either way. The only choice is whether you disappoint the people who need you to stay small or you disappoint yourself.

I chose wrong for a long time. I disappointed myself, deeply and silently, for years. I told that five-year-old kid who already knew who he was that he had to wait. That kid had to hide, be patient, be relentlessly strategic and make himself acceptable before he could be honest. I made him carry the weight of everyone else’s comfort because I didn’t know yet that he didn’t have to.

Coming out was a promise to that kid. It was me finally saying, “I will disappoint the right people for the rest of our lives.” That’s what I owed him. He hid for decades to keep us alive. I can carry the brunt of the disappointment from bigots and religious wackos who refuse to know any better. Little Mike deserved weightless honesty from the beginning. He didn’t get that but he’s going to get it now.

That’s what Pride means to me at its core. It’s not a party, though the party is good. It’s not a political statement, though the politics are urgent and real and require our attention right now. At its heart, Pride is a collective, public, unapologetic commitment to disappointing the right people. When thousands of people who were trained from childhood to manage perception and perform acceptability decide, together, in public, with intention, to stop, we are choosing to finally take up space and be loud, visible and unashamed in a world that spent years trying to teach us our inheritance was erasure.

The history underneath Pride is the history of people who refused to disappear. The people at Stonewall didn’t politely request acceptance. They were done negotiating the terms of their own existence with people who had no legitimate authority over it. Every march since then, every moment of public visibility, every person who came out in a hostile environment and survived it, every queer kid who found a way through because they saw someone else who made it, all of it is the accumulated evidence that disappointing the right people is not just survivable, it’s the beginning of an actual life.

There are kids right now who are back where I was, sitting in churches and Christian schools and family dinner tables and they’re performing. They’re shapeshifting, dancing for the sentinel eyes of people they love, hoping nobody catches them. And they’re watching to see whether the queer adults who came through this are okay. They want to know if we still have lives worth living or faith if we still want it. They’re watching to see if we still have community and love and meaning on the other side of all that loss.

I want to be someone those kids can see, a disappointment to the right people and thriving. I’ve found that the life waiting on the other side of the performance was more real and more mine than anything I could have built in the closet.

Pride Month is about telling the truth. For those of us who spent years learning to do the opposite, that’s a big deal. It’s the annual reminder that the truth is always worth it. It was never a betrayal to disappoint the people who needed us to be less than we were, it was a necessity that became a promise. And we kept it.

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Six years ago, deep in COVID times, I was a worship pastor at a large church in the Pacific Northwest. Back then, one of my greatest joys was introducing my congregation to songs that had already brought me to my knees. Music was, and is, so connected to me as a person and combining both worship and music feels truly divine.

One of the songs that I introduced back then was “Resurrecting” by Elevation Worship. The simplicity of the song and the words always felt so powerful to me. I just remember always getting goosebumps when the whole room finally understood what they were singing. It was such a beautiful experience.

Before I moved to the Pacific Northwest, I had been prayed over for months at my church in Virginia. My family and I were certain that I was meant to be that pastor. I had been in church ministry for years as a worship leader before that call so it both felt like the next logical step and genuinely a call from God.

Unfortunately, I stepped down from my position in 2021 and we moved once again across the country, to Richmond, Virginia. Just a few months later, I came out as a transgender woman. While my departure and my transition weren’t related, it came as a surprise to my former congregation and I could see conclusions being made that I couldn’t do anything about. Not only did my coming out serve to firmly close the door to my old congregation, almost all congregations that were looking for a pastor were no longer available to me.

During that time I often asked, “What do you want from me God?” I thought I was heeding God’s call and here I was, confused, abandoned, and slightly salty. While I didn’t stop believing in God, I stopped knowing where I fit in. I just felt like I was caught between a closed door and a calling, and I carried that grief quietly for a long time.

A few years later, I was hired as a Director of Administration at The Table Church in Washington, D.C. and every now and then, they asked me to lead worship. While I didn’t quite know what to do with my voice anymore, it did feel like a little homecoming for me.

One Sunday, I decided to sing “Resurrecting.”

If you’re not familiar with The Table Church, it is a radically affirming church. To say that a congregation like that carries some complicated feelings about Elevation Worship would be understating it considerably. But I felt compelled to sing the song anyway.

“By Your spirit I will rise, from the ashes of defeat, the resurrected King, is resurrecting me.

In Your name I come alive, to declare Your victory, the resurrected King, is resurrecting me.”

Those words hit hard before I came out. But standing in front of a room full of queer Christians, they landed fully for the first time. I had lived in the ashes of defeat. I had felt what it is to be undone by an institution that claims to speak for God. And now I was rising, not in spite of my trans identity but through it, in the name of Jesus, with queer people on every side of me singing the same words.

I felt allowed, for the first time in years, to claim both at once: to be trans and to declare God’s victory, to be exactly who I am and mean every word of it. That is what resurrection actually is, not a borrowed metaphor for the occasion but a real, embodied experience, felt in a room full of people who had also come through the ashes.

Queer people of faith are not guests at the table of God’s kingdom. We are not the diversity hire, not the test case, not the exception that proves the rule. We are part of a long lineage of people who held their faith in one hand and their full humanity in the other, and refused to drop either.

I carry multiple identities at once: trans, queer, ASD, Indo (Indonesian and Dutch), Jewish, and Christian. Each of those identities has its own history of survival and its own experience of the closed door. When I say that overlapping systems of power affect us differently, I am speaking from every layer of what I am. And what I have found is that the more layers you carry, the more urgently you understand that liberation for one is only liberation if it holds for all. This is never more true than in the Christian church. And it is never more true than now.

- Lana

Dr. Lana van Essen serves as the Executive Director of Operations for Transmission Ministry Collective, a community dedicated to cultivating the full spectrum of trans flourishing. In their support groups, online community, church education programs, and mutual aid network, they are continuing the work of those who came before us, building the places where trans people can discover God without having to lose themselves first.

This June, two of TMC’s community members have partnered to offer a $10,000 match challenge with a goal to raise $20,000 this Pride. If you belong to an affirming church, consider dedicating one or more of your Sunday offerings to TMC this month. If you are an individual, or an ally, consider setting up a recurring gift. https://transmissionministry.com/partner/donate/

Like Quiche

A weekly newsletter with unconventional theology for a diverse, connected world from Dr. Miche van Essen

By Dr. Lana van Essen

Question: I’m reintroducing the word ‘God’ (and it feels weird), after using Source, Universe, etc. for YEARS because my mom would say that when I said God, it wasn’t the God of the Bible and we were talking about two different things. I know when I say God, I definitely don’t mean the eternal damnation one. So my question is, was there a time you called the God of the Bible by another name in this way?

Yes. For a time it was difficult to speak of God without feeling complicit in something ugly. This is a very normal part of deconstruction—losing language, and then gaining it back in a new form. Often the meaning is more expansive, including and integrating parts of what came before, but transcending it, and shedding the parts that don’t work anymore.

My friend Keri went through a traumatic experience with church leadership. She was a pastor at the time, and yet afterwards she “could no longer speak the things of God,” because it was too loaded with patriarchal abuse. She liked referring to “the algorithm of the universe.” She still saw a universe filled with meaning and a loving presence at the center of it all, but ‘God-talk’ was too loaded.

Losing words is no small thing; it is tremendously sad—it can feel like a death. But things need to die in order to rise again. In fact, this is an essential part of the spiritual journey.

The 13th century mystic Meister Eckhart wrote, “God, rid me of God.” Our tendency is always to be putting God in a box that we can claim and manage. Whatever God we think we know likely contains projections of our own ego. Perhaps the best thing we can do for our relationship with God is get rid of Him completely, get rid of the metaphors (including the ones that call God Him), lose the language, lose the answers. Having no answers is scary, because many of us learned of a punitive God who demands correct answers. Rid yourself of such a God. Why not?—say Universe. Say Source. Say Spirit. Say Nothing At All. There is actually good biblical precedent for this—the Jewish people did not refer to the name of God directly. The four-letter divine name, YHWH, was considered too sacred to pronounce. So when reading scripture aloud, they would substitute Adonai (Lord). Centuries later, medieval Christian scholars who didn’t understand this practice saw YHWH written with the vowel markings of Adonai and mashed them together into “Jehovah”—a name that never existed in Hebrew, a name that only came into being because the original name was too holy to speak. When Jesus refers to the “kingdom of heaven” in Matthew, he means the same thing as when he says “kingdom of God” in Luke. But Matthew was written to a Jewish audience that would have avoided naming God. This refusal to put God in a box reminds us that we do not own God. God is not ours. When we rid ourselves of God, we have the opportunity to encounter something more universal, more loving, and more free.

Another favorite quote comes to mind, from the Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: “Any god who is mine but not yours, any god concerned with me but not with you, is an idol.” Rid yourself of your God—God does not belong to you. Any God worth believing in must be wilder and more unnamable than we have made her.

Early in my deconstruction, I was worried that I might lose faith in God altogether and become an atheist. The best thing I did for my spiritual life was to accept that if I de-converted entirely, that would be totally fine. You do not get moral points for believing in God—some of the most evil people who have ever lived have believed in God, and used that God for supremacist power plays, meanwhile millions of atheists all over the world are loving deeply, serving their neighbors, and being present to their lives in the way that (I believe) God intended.

Jesus’ unique name for God was Abba, a loving, nurturing father. One of the final identities for God in the Bible is the simple pronouncement that “God is love” (1 John 4:8). This one has served me best through seasons where I could not easily speak the name of God. I would just say love. Like God, love is for everyone. It is not owned by any religion—loving is what it means to be human, it’s what life is all about. I still find it very helpful to replace the word God with love. For example, what Jesus spoke of as “the kingdom of God” is truly the kingdom of love—what the world would be like if Love had dominion. May Love’s will be done, on earth, as in heaven.

So don’t be hard on yourself. If God talk doesn’t work for you, getting rid of God may be exactly what your spiritual life requires. Life is not about believing the right things or naming things in a particular way. Life is about love and connection—this, I believe, is what God is about as well, and I want to rid myself of any God that leads me anywhere else.

As usual, James Baldwin puts words to this better than almost anyone. This is a very popular quote that I return to again and again, but although I see it everywhere, I usually only hear the second half of it. The first half is bracing and confrontational, but also difficult to argue with: “It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being… must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”

The churches that introduced us to God have hypocrisies that must be deconstructed, and the lies we were told are so deeply intertwined in our understanding of the divine that ripping out those falsehoods may feel like killing God altogether. Beloved, let me tell you one of the greatest truths I believe: what is real cannot really die. What is love cannot really die. As my friend Tamice frequently says, you cannot kill life. If God is real, if the Spirit is alive, then you are free to get rid of him. For all you will get rid of is death.

As if his hands were tied. It’s not his fault, the empire demands blood—always has, always will.

All day Tuesday I had a queasy lump in my gut. Trump’s word vomit brought us closer to nuclear war than we’ve been in my lifetime and showed a stunning disregard for human life. Iran is a country of 100 million souls, about 10 million in Tehran, the city which would likely be obliterated as the first target in Trump’s imagined nuclear scenario. 10 million people. People nursing babies and getting married. People who kiss, and love, and cook fragrant Persian meals. People working on spreadsheets, people walking dogs, people with deep smile lines who bring joy into every room. Beautiful people just like people everywhere else in the world—just like you and me.

Iran is also the home of some of the great cultural and architectural wonders of the world. From shimmering Medieval mosques to ancient Persian palaces, there is irreplaceable beauty spanning thousands of years.

The destruction of all that art, of all those people, of a “whole civilization,” Trump casually tweeted as if it was the most natural thing in the world. The hubris is unimaginable. And yet, from the perspective of the American Empire, he is absolutely right.

Here is what we must not miss, and what I wish we would all deeply reckon with: as much as we would all like to put all this madness at Trump’s feet, the chaos of the last few days does not simply reveal the cruelty and stupidity of one man, but of the death-dealing logic that has always been at the heart of the American Empire. Of every Empire. I call empire logic “death dealing” because empires deal in death and they deal out death.

When I say we deal in death, I mean that ours is a logic that ranks and trades human lives. In this framework, when 3,000 Americans are killed in NYC, we say “Never Forget,” but when 3,000 people were bombed in Lebanon during our supposed ceasefire on Wednesday, we barely blink. In this system, 175 slaughtered Iranian schoolgirls do not have the same value as 175 white American girls. We did not bomb Iran in defense of human life, but for oil. For economic exploitation. Human life, made in the image of God—in other words, the closest thing to God we have—is treated as a commodity to be traded, up or down. We have Polymarket betting on the possibility of nuclear war, and admin officials surely profited on their insider knowledge. One CNBC host asked on air, “How does an investor process [the death of a civilization]? Is it a bigger downside risk or upside risk?” Our empire does not value life—we deal in death.

We also deal it out. This is a system held together by death and the threat of death. Trump’s negotiation was not “win-win,” it was “Give us what we want, or we will blow you up.” Our leverage does not come from cooperation or mutual benefit, it comes from overwhelming violence. In this century alone, the US is responsible for 900,000 deaths from our post-9/11 wars, with 38 million people displaced. We have been dealing out death, systematically, for decades. And we have built a massive apparatus to continue doing it. The U.S. accounts for 39% of global military spending—more than the next ten countries combined. Meanwhile, we’re the only wealthy nation without universal healthcare. Ours is not a life-sustaining system. The goal is not the flourishing of people and planet. The goal is power and domination, secured by death.

None of this is new. Trump is merely saying things out loud, and in public that are normally said in subtle tones behind closed doors. The shock is not in his strategy—that’s standard doctrine—the only surprise is the lack of a social media handler. Flippantly tweeting mass death is a PR nightmare, but other than that it is imperial business as usual.

As someone raised a deeply conservative Christian, it’s certainly familiar to me. I was raised with the fundamental belief that America must have the largest and most lethal army in the world. Reagan called this doctrine, “peace through strength,” but it wasn’t new for him either—every empire has had this perspective. The Romans called it “Pax Romana,” or the Roman peace they believed their conquest achieved. They dominated every culture and nation, and called it peace. They forced them to pay tribute and taxes to Caesar to fund the lavish lifestyles of the Roman elites and the massive Roman military that established “law and order” through the threat of violence. Dissenters were crucified.

Roman peace was not sustained by justice, equality, and the flourishing of all people. It was a peace brought about by threat of violence. Peace through strength. This is the logic of every empire that has ever existed, so much so that the historian John Dominic Crossan calls it, “the normalcy of civilization.”

It’s shocking when we see it punched out in fat-fingered stupidity in a short tweet, but if we zoom out and get really honest with ourselves, this has always been the story, and many of us have bought into this same logic. We believe that we can only survive as a country by being the strongest, by staying at the top and insisting that everybody get in line under the threat of our overwhelming violence.

Trump is a symptom, a natural result of the system this country has created. Some of us don’t like him simply because he forces us to confront who we have been globally for a very long time. He is an accurate face of the American empire—all masks off.

But let me be clear—”peace through violence” may be conventional wisdom, but it does not work. It has never worked. It is unsustainable. It leads to escalatory violence—an ever ratcheting upwards march of atrocities, and a downward spiral of inhumanity that will ultimately end our species if it remains uninterrupted.

And it is based on a lie. The lie it is based on is that my country can win while another country dies. It ignores the interconnectedness at the heart of all things. Many of us were not aware until the last several weeks how dependent we all are on one small piece of water—the Strait of Hormuz. That narrow passage carries roughly 21% of global petroleum. Its closure leads not only to massive oil shortages, but the collapse of fertilizer supply chains, disruptions in global food distribution, breakdowns in pharmaceutical production, and shortages of essential medical equipment. A prolonged closure could trigger famine in food-import-dependent nations and medical crises in regions relying on global supply chains. The interconnectedness isn’t abstract; it’s life and death. Martin Luther King Jr. understood this when he said, “before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on Earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.” Violence against one people threatens the stability of all people, because at the end of the day we rise and fall together, and over and over again we have to learn this the hard way.

For Christians, it is all the more grievous that Jesus is being used as a divine stamp on these systems of death. Warmonger Pete Hegseth brings up Jesus every chance he gets (when he’s not listing the names of targets he’s had killed). But make no mistake, the logic of peace through violence bears no resemblance to the way of Jesus.

The cosmic, counterintuitive, unconventional idea that Jesus presented is the exact opposite of the imperial logic of domination. Jesus’ message was ‘the kingdom of God,’ which you might also translate ‘the empire of God.’ In other words, Jesus invited us into a different kind of empire—a kingdom without domination, without violence, where the humanity of everyone is recognized. A kingdom made for humans. For life. The formula in the kingdom is not peace through strength, but peace through communion. Peace through justice—which means pursuing a world where everyone is treated equally and everyone has enough. Peace, not because people are punished, brutalized, and bombed if they rebel, but peace because people have their basic needs met. Peace because people are at ease, and experiencing belonging, and are cared for and are caring for others. Peace, not through dominating my enemy, but through loving my enemy. Jesus wanted us to see the world with new eyes—as a world of neighbors.

Until we address this fundamental broken logic at the heart of our empire, we will continue this downward spiral. Simply voting blue (while certainly far preferable to the obscene violence of MAGA) is not enough. We do not need a younger, more polite, or more diverse face to be the spokesman for this same tired logic of domination. We do not just need a female president ordering the strikes, or more black pilots dropping the bombs—we need to ask why we feel the need to have more bombs than any other country, yet won’t give our citizens healthcare.

We need a totally new imagination for what it means to share this planet with one another. Where the logic is not “give us what we want or die,” but “there is enough, and we can work together for the good of all.” It would look like funding schools, healthcare, and secure food for every child, rather than endless wars of extraction and exploitation.

This is not naïve. It is literally the only way we make it out of this alive (and by we I mean our planet and the human species). Those of us who benefit from the current system are most in need of a hard long look in the mirror. If we are living well only because others are made expendable, we are ignoring our fundamental interconnectedness and walking in blindness. When we see that Iranian mothers and American mothers grieve just the same when their children are killed in schools, we can see that we are not enemies with our global neighbors—we are one with them.

Every empire has practiced peace through domination, but these empires also have something else in common: They end. From Babylon, to Alexander's Macedonian empire, to Rome, to the British empire, there is no version of security built on domination that does not eventually collapse under its own weight. We know where that road ends. It's time to take the other one.

The host cued up Laurie, saying, “We are living in bible times no doubt.”

Laurie responded, “Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing if that could break out…if we could have a spiritual revolution in that nation and that we would see millions of Iranians turning to Christ. We’re already seeing it start.”

It is unclear to me how bombing a nation to smithereens and slaughtering hundreds of little girls in school could bring about a spiritual revival, but the host simply replied, “Amazing. As you said pastor Greg, it’s all coming full circle right now…”

The logic that Pastor Laurie is working with is the myth of redemptive violence. That patriarchal strength, dominant Western power, American aggression, military force, and the death of our enemies will somehow bring about the peace of God.

This logic no longer makes sense to me.

War does not bring awakening. It brings a languishing spiral of death and destruction that only leads to more hate, more violence. We are currently creating a future generation of people who (rightly) hate American imperialism—a generation of children Americans will one day call terrorists.

Yet the myth of redemptive violence fuels much of evangelical Christianity. I grew up being taught Reagan’s doctrine of “peace through strength,” and that it was God’s will for America to be a global superpower.

The sad reality is that for all of our warmongering over the centuries, American evangelicals have not opposed a single one. They haven’t even stood idly by. No, they have cheered them on from the front lines. In fact, without evangelical support, many of our wars would have been impossible. White evangelicals were the only religious group to offer majority support to the Vietnam war, and the primary driver for the war in Iraq as well. They’ve yet to meet an American war they didn’t like.

How did the prince of peace become a figurehead for a death cult?

It seems clear to me that the Jesus worshipped by many white American evangelicals has little resemblance to the Jesus of the gospels. He is a God of war, designed to justify our need to dominate.

I can say this confidently, because I grew up worshiping this violent, patriarchal Jesus.

I have a confession.

There was a time when I liked Mark Driscoll.

Okay, I loved him.

I was introduced to Driscoll when I was 19, a student at Bob Jones University, one of the most conservative colleges in the country. Since the Christianity Today podcast series The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, Driscoll has been rightly vilified as an abusive manipulator, but in the early 2000’s he was perceived by many young evangelicals as the future of our movement: he boldly stood for orthodox doctrine without sacrificing cultural savvy.

It’s hard to express without deep embarrassment how cool many of us thought Mark was.

For me, surrounded as I was by hopelessly backwards fundamentalists who didn’t know anything about pop culture, music, or movies, Driscoll was a breath of fresh air. Every speaker at Bob Jones wore a full suit, but Driscoll preached in jeans and a T-shirt. At Bob Jones, I could get expelled for having a single sip of alcohol, but Driscoll frequently talked about drinking beer. He even said an occasional cuss word.

But despite his ‘regular guy’ aesthetic, he (seemingly) knew his Bible better than most fundamentalists, and his preaching did not hold back. Many of his sermons were over an hour long, and contained many references to sin, wrath, hell, and the blood of Jesus.

Driscoll showed a generation of young Christians that we could be “faithful” to God’s inerrant word without looking like total dweebs, and we loved him for it.

Above all, Driscoll was unapologetically faithful to the patriarchal, violent God of white American Christianity.

Mark talked a lot about Jesus, and yet it is clear to me now that he didn’t really like the Jesus of the gospels at all. He had a version of Jesus he loved, that he talked about a lot—the apocalyptic Jesus of Revelation 19.

Jesus the war God.

This extreme, hyper-stylized “war Christ” is the Jesus Mark would turn to most frequently:

I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and wages war. 12 His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. 13 He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God. 14 The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. 15 Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. “He will rule them with an iron scepter.” He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. 16 On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written:

KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS.

- Revelation 19:11-18

Here’s how Driscoll described his favorite version of Jesus, with what can only be described as homoerotic glee:

“In Revelation, Jesus is a prize fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.”

Unlike the Jesus of the gospels, who enters Jerusalem humbly, riding on a donkey, proclaiming peace, this Jesus rides in on a white warhorse to slaughter his enemies.

Never mind the fact that most scholars believe the sword “coming out of his mouth” is a symbol that Jesus does not conquer by physical power, coercion, dominance, and violence, but rather with his word—which was always a word of love, grace, and mercy. Jesus unthrones empire through bold truth telling, dismantling lies, and reimagining the world with a new story rooted in compassion, not domination.

In fact, all of this imagery is metaphorical.

It is significant that Jesus is wearing a bloody robe before the symbolic battle of Armageddon begins—Jesus is not drenched in the blood of his enemies, but in his own blood. The blood is symbolic of his sacrificial love for all—a love stronger than death, that refuses hate or dehumanizing anybody. Throughout the rest of the book of Revelation, the primary image for Jesus is not of a warlord, but of a slain lamb.

This twist that Mark hyper-fixates on—this “prize-fighter Jesus”—is exceptional precisely because it reveals something deeper: that Jesus’ seeming weakness is true strength.

Revelation is using violent imagery to heighten the irony and surprise. The might of empire—Rome, Babylon, and any oppressive system that tramples vulnerable people—will ultimately fall, not merely to the strength of a bigger army, but to the power of sacrificial love itself. In the end, it is the lamb who will reign as king—the servant of all will be Lord of all. The message is not that Jesus will embrace the powers of death, but that love was always stronger than the powers of death. To say that he will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God is to say that the destroyers of this world will meet their end, and that love will have the final say.

The world will be judged by its failure to love, and the meek truly will inherit the earth. These images do not depict the triumph of redemptive violence, but the triumph of sacrificial love.

This is how Jesus wins—how he always wins—not by killing, but by loving unto death.

To miss this, you have to ignore Jesus’ entire life, ministry, and ethical teaching, where he pointed us to this truth over and over.

Matthew 20:28: “...just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

John 15:13: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

As the Roman soldiers were nailing him to the cross, Jesus did not warn them that he was going to come back to make them bleed, instead he prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).

Jesus reveals a God who would rather die for their enemies than kill them—any interpretation of the Revelation 19 Jesus on his white horse has to fit with the Jesus actually revealed in the Gospels.

Unfortunately, this violent vision of Jesus is still popular in some of the most influential evangelical churches.

For example, pastor Phillip Anthony Mitchell, pastor of 2819 church, currently attracts lines around the block that form hours before the service even starts as congregants rush in for the best view of pastor Mitchell’s brand of aggressive, violent, fear-based preaching.

Just like pastor Mark, pastor Mitchell prefers the bloody God of Revelation to the meek and lowly Jesus of history. Here’s what he said in a recent sermon:

“You’ve got to answer what you’re going to do with [Jesus]. You’ll either meet him now as a loving savior, or you’ll meet him later as a wrathful judge. Revelation says he’s coming back to make war. Ain’t no more baby in a manger. No, the next time he comes, his eyes are like a blazing fire, he’s gonna tread out the wrath of god against all ungodliness and unrighteousness. What will you do with Jesus?

…You’ve gotta answer that question, or your death will answer that question.”

For Driscoll and Mitchell, the blood-soaked Jesus of Revelation represents a departure from the gentle Jesus of the gospels—“ain’t no more baby in a manger!”

And this version of Jesus, despite appearing in just one or two obviously metaphorical passages, becomes the controlling image of Jesus for many Christians.

It’s a God-and-country Jesus who blesses our wars.

But in context, even this violent imagery is telling a very different story. It tells us that in a world obsessed with domination—power over others—those dominators will never be able to sustain their grip.

I’m reminded of this quote from Andor, the anti-fascist Star Wars TV show:

“The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle.”

Love will win. It is stronger than death. That’s the message of Revelation, and the message of the resurrection of Jesus.

Right now, pastors like Laurie, Driscoll, and Mitchell are unlikely to prophetically stand against the American empire as we bomb civilians in an unjust war. They are too busy drooling over the possibility of the end times, the death of their enemies, and the spread of their supremacist gospel.

A gospel that endorses war is not the gospel of Jesus. It’s a gospel used to underwrite death and uphold the hierarchies of domination. The reality is that the American war machine is not represented by Jesus in the book of Revelation, but by the beast. The beast of Revelation has a false prophet to give its bloodshed with a divine stamp of approval—the church of America sadly seems content to play this role.

Because the Jesus who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey—the Jesus who forgave his executioners and laid down his life for his enemies—did not come to baptize our wars, he came to end them.

If you appreciated this essay, you will love my book, Hell Bent: How the Fear of Hell Holds Christians Back from a Spirituality of Love.

It’s about reclaiming the Spirituality of Jesus, which was a way of love for the sake of this world, not escaping to the next. The Gospel is so much better than many of us were taught.

By then, I had already deconstructed my belief in Eternal Conscious Torment—the idea that God punishes unbelievers in hell forever. But with my blood boiling from the immense injustice I had just witnessed, I preached on God’s judgment that Sunday.

It was the first Sunday of Advent, the Sunday of Hope. But the hope burning in my chest wasn’t hope in a soft, sentimental God of vague comfort and spiritual platitudes. It was the hope of judgment. At the time, Epstein was still a free man.

I ended the sermon with a verse I hadn’t used in a sermon before, because I tended to avoid the extreme judgment passages—but that Sunday it seemed necessary:

“For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.” (Malachi 4:1)

The miscarriage of justice enraged me, and it made me long for a God who would set things right—and set Jeffrey Epstein and his cast of fellow perpetrators and enablers ablaze.

But here’s the question I still can’t escape: how does that very real, very holy desire for justice square with a God of unconditional love—a God who endures violence rather than perpetrating it, a God who will reconcile all things in heaven and on earth and under the earth, uniting all things in love?

I wrote a book about deconstructing hell, and how God’s love is universally reconciling. That’s where I still believe everything is headed. But could Jeffrey Epstein really be a part of that reconciliation? And if so, do I even want to be there? Would his victims?

Our longing for justice is deeply human and deeply spiritual. It connects us to the suffering of others, and it reflects the heart of God. In a time when too many pastors and politicians refuse to speak about abuse, choosing comfort, silence, or tribal loyalty instead of truth, we want to know: is God like that too? Will God also look away?

No. In fact, I think that silent scream rising in your chest is God’s scream. Our anger at the lack of accountability is the righteous anger of God.

Many of us happily deconstructed hell—but it’s possible we did so from a position of privilege.

Miroslav Volf famously writes in Exclusion and Embrace about imagining yourself giving a lecture on nonviolence and divine love to people in a war zone—people whose villages have been burned, whose daughters have been raped, whose families have been slaughtered. He concludes:

“It takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that God refuses to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die.”

He’s right. When you step outside a charmed life and actually glimpse the violence and brutality that mark the daily existence of so many people, a God of judgment begins to make a lot more sense.

So here’s my thesis: our longing for justice is good and real—but hell is not the answer that fulfills it. Purely punitive solutions do not heal what is truly broken. For many of us, this gut-level desire stops at the sense that “something bad should happen to this guy.” That instinct is human and real, but God’s love and justice go much further—She does not lack our imagination and is not content to merely add violence on top of violence to balance the scorecard.

God will relentlessly restore and do what we cannot do—hold together perfect justice with a commitment to actually heal the root of every broken thing, person, and relationship. God is not content to freeze Epstein and his clients in endless evil and pain forever—that would be an eternal victory for the logic of death. In God’s severe mercy, She will root out the evil from every last one of us so that we will all be made whole.

But that’s God’s job. The longing for justice we feel is a summons for us to do our job—to act right here, right now, not deferring judgment to the afterlife. To build a world where powerful men don’t get to act with impunity, and victims are believed and protected. Our hope that God cares about these things is an indictment of our systems—and an indictment of us—for failing to do God’s will on earth as in heaven.

So no, I don’t believe Jeffrey Epstein is burning in hell right now. But I do believe God’s desire to reconcile all things and all people can still address our need for justice, in ways that are both more just and more emotionally satisfying than eternal hell.

Here are a few reasons why.

1. He will be remembered in contempt.
That may not seem like a big deal to us, but the ancient world placed enormous weight on honor and shame. Your name, your legacy, your remembrance mattered. In fact, although the Hebrew Bible does not speak about hell, the only verse that suggests a kind of hell describes it as “everlasting contempt” (Dan. 12:2). Adolf was once a popular name. Judas was once just another disciple. Epstein’s name will likely join that list—eternally a byword, a name spoken with revulsion. To be remembered this way is a moral verdict written into history—the ultimate evidence of a failed life.

2. He missed out on what life is actually about.
Sin means missing the mark—which means missing the whole point of life. Richard Rohr says God doesn’t punish sin because sin is its own punishment. When you dehumanize others, you first dehumanize yourself. The essence of being human is connection—love, mutuality, communion. He knew none of this. A life given to exploitation and domination becomes smaller, colder, meaner, and less real. Whatever pleasure it extracts is thin, hollow, and rooted in self-hatred. Nobody truly “gets away with it.” A wasted life is a hell of a thing—and Epstein’s life, for all its wealth, was spent in a joyless nightmare. In the ways that matter most, I believe you reap the life that you sow.

3. True reconciliation will demand full exposure, recognition, and reckoning.
There is no reconciliation without truth, no healing without accountability. If Epstein is ever to return to love, he will see what he did—he will know the depth of the pain he caused in a way so complete we don’t even have language for it—and he will weep.

Zechariah imagines a moment when people “look upon the one they have pierced, and mourn.”

They are not saved by punishment, but when they fully see what they have done and experience a collective awakening. Denial collapses, and there is no way around it. This language is actually picked up in Revelation, for a universal reckoning:

“every eye will see him, even those who pierced him…”

The ones who pierced him are the systems and people complicit in violence and domination. Every eye will see—that is an essential part of universal reconciliation.

Perfect reconciliation must mean perfect honesty which leads to perfect empathy—we will fully know and be fully known. This knowledge will be beautiful, but it will also be painful.

The pain of others will become our pain, because we will finally see the truth that our separateness was an illusion. We are all, in John Steinbecks words, “one big soul.” This means, in order to return to love, Jeffery Epstein will not only know what he did, but he will feel it as his own pain.

4. Only the true self will enter God’s love—the ego will be destroyed.
Paul speaks of someone who “will be saved, but only as through fire” (1 Cor. 3:15). The soul will return to love, but their words and deeds are burned up, unfit for eternity. We all have a true self, a God-self—but many of us spend our lives constructing false identities out of domination rather than love. For some who have devoted their whole lives to cruelty and dehumanization, their souls have shrunk so small there is barely a sliver of humanity left. Most of what they call “themselves” is pure ego, there’s nothing human about it, and every bit of it will be burned up and destroyed—there is no place for it in God’s future. The part of them that is returned to love may have almost no resemblance to the inhuman personality that walked the earth.

But I believe there is a part of all of us that can be saved. Before anyone became a monster, they were a child who wanted to be loved. Even if there is only a buried flicker of God-likeness, a smoldering wick of humanity is enough for God to refuse to give up.

Conclusion

Hell tickles our sense of justice in moments like this, but only because we’ve been formed in a retributive world, a world shaped by the logic of redemptive violence, where we’re trained to believe punishment is justice. We settle for the small pleasure of watching a bad man burn and call it redemption—only because we lack God’s imagination.

Hell wouldn’t solve the problem. It wouldn’t give stolen childhoods back. It wouldn’t restore shattered bodies or re-knit broken lives. It wouldn’t heal the open wounds abuse leaves behind. All it would do is take pain and cement it into eternity.

I hold onto the hope that the restoration God wants—for all of us—will not balance evil with more evil, but overcome evil with good (Rom. 12:21).

And seeing what God is like shows us what we must be like too.

The Epstein files reveal more than injustice—they reveal an entire world build by pedophilic billionaires that empowers their evil—this world, and the institutions protecting this evil, must be turned upside-down completely.

God’s justice doesn’t mean waiting for heaven to fix what we keep excusing—it means tearing down the systems that protect abusers and building a world that finally protects the vulnerable.

This shift? Shifting from personal salvation to collective liberation. This is essential, not only for your own spiritual life, but for the life of the world.

White Jesus—the sanitized figure constructed by white American Christianity—may want to be your personal savior, but the real Jesus spoke about “the kingdom of God,” which was a political and social reality in which the last would be first, the poor would be blessed, the hungry filled, the strangers welcomed, the naked clothed, and the imprisoned cared for in their humanity. In other words, every person would be treated as a child of God. This is more than a slightly different approach to the gospel. These two visions are in conflict with each other.

We can see this playing out in our country almost every day.

For example, over the weekend, nonviolent protesters in Minneapolis burst into Cities Church, disrupting their services. They did this because one of the pastors there—David Easterwood—is also the field director for ICE in St. Paul, MN.

Easterwood has publicly defended his ICE department’s brutal tactics in Minnesota, including breaking into private homes without warrants and spraying protesters with chemical weapons that are banned from use in warfare under international law.

The protesters were agitated that a pastor who was managing violent kidnapping operations Monday through Friday could claim to preach the gospel on Sunday. This is the same narrow view of the gospel that once allowed many Christian pastors to be slaveholders.

A gospel that only saves individuals for the afterlife will always make peace with violence and dehumanization in this world.

There was an illuminating moment when the journalist Don Lemon interviewed a Cities Church member as he left the chaotic service, asking him, “Do you understand why they’re angry?”
The man replied, “I don’t understand any of this, ’cause I’m just a simple man who loves the Lord… this is what we look forward to, is coming to be with our family and worship Jesus.”

This is a version of the gospel that can exist side by side with authoritarian violence and shrug: It ain’t got nothing to do with me.
The church member concluded, “This is kind of a bad day for us, but you know, we’re going to heaven, so that’s the best news we got.”

As perverse as this logic is, those of us who grew up in white evangelicalism fully understand what he means. The gospel we learned was not a gospel about justice in this world, but salvation in the next. Hey, at least we’re going to heaven. Worshiping Jesus with your family did not mean your family became invested in the lives of your neighbors or pursued liberation for the people Jesus spent his ministry with—it was a private transaction, achieved by assenting to the correct doctrines.

Many people have told me that as a progressive, I’ve “watered down the gospel.” But it seems very clear to me that it is this individualistic gospel that has truly defanged Jesus. Unfortunately, this lukewarm message is the conventional version of the gospel, at least in white Christian America. It is often explained through what some Christians call the “Romans Road,” a curated selection of Bible verses from the book of Romans that offers a step-by-step guide to becoming a Christian according to this understanding of the gospel.

Here’s how it goes:

Step one: Romans 3:23
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

The evangelical interpretation of this verse is that because of Adam and Eve, we inherited a sin nature—we were born fundamentally wicked, not because of anything we did, but because of who we were.

Step two: Romans 6:23
“For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

We were taught that the just punishment for being born a sinner was death in this life and hell in the next. This is what every person on earth deserved, simply for having the grave misfortune of being born a human being. I was told that my sin separated me from God—that there was a chasm between me and God that I was powerless to cross.

But don’t worry. This is where Jesus comes in.

Step three: Romans 5:8
“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Jesus was God’s answer to the sin problem.

The gospel of personal salvation is, at its core, a story about punishment. I (along with everybody else) was born deserving of punishment, but I was told that if I “believed in Jesus”—which essentially meant believing that Jesus was God and that he died for my sins—then he would stand in for me and take the punishment in my place.

The fundamental premise is that somebody has to be punished. God’s hands are tied. He’s gotta punish somebody: it’s either Jesus… or you.

Then comes the decision point.

Step four: Romans 10:9
“If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”

As simple as that. Pray the prayer, confess belief, and you’re saved.

I’m going to be blunt. I do not believe this is the gospel.
It is not only a distortion—it actively hamstrings Jesus’ true message. The passion of Jesus Christ was not for people to believe the “right” things about God so they could get out of hell and into heaven. His passion was for heaven to come to earth—for people to have their daily bread and their debts forgiven, on earth as in heaven.

“As in heaven” means that it is God’s will for everybody to have enough—to experience shalom, wholeness, and the flourishing of the beloved community.
“On earth” means God wants us to take that will seriously and put it into practice in the societies we create.

Perhaps a healing way for disaffected post-evangelicals to grasp this shift is to revisit and repave that old Romans Road. Many of us struggle to interpret the Bible in fresh ways, outside of the lens of private salvation, so I think addressing each of these verses could be helpful in catching the bigger story of collective liberation.

The Romans Road, Revisited

1. Romans 3:23

“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

Paul is not diagnosing individual depravity, but our shared bondage to the powers of sin. The book of Romans is not framed around getting individual souls into heaven or keeping them out of hell. Paul never mentions hell at all, and he never presents heaven as the goal of salvation. Romans is about how God is creating a unified people, liberated from the powers of sin and death, living under the lordship of Jesus instead of empire—under the lordship of love instead of systems of domination.

To “fall short of the glory of God” is to fall short of what humanity is meant to be together. We were not made for brutal hierarchies of division and oppression, but for connection and mutual relationship.

We all “fall short” because sin is a collective problem, not a personal shame.

2. Romans 6:23

“For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

“Death” is not a metaphor for suffering forever in hell. Death is the all-encompassing power of the systems we live under that produce exclusion, violence, and dehumanization. Sin pays wages: the natural consequences of racism, exploitation, scapegoating, and othering is death. The way of domination can never lead to the beloved community.

This verse does not mean we deserve punishment. God is not forced to punish sin—sin is its own punishment. Sin is what disconnects us from love, from God, and from our own humanity.

The free gift of God is love and life. Grace always comes as an invitation to life, though we are often blind to it. That’s why salvation is described with metaphors like being “born again,” or saying, “I was blind, but now I see.”

Eternal life—zōē aiōnios—does not mean endless life. It means “the life of the age.” It announces a different way of being human. The kingdom of God, inaugurated in Christ and embodied by those following the Spirit of Christ, is a way of life no longer defined by death, but by abundance, community, mutuality, and interconnectedness.

3. Romans 5:8

“But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”

The traditional reading is that Jesus paid our sin debt so God could take us to heaven instead of damning us to hell. But Paul says Christ died not to appease God’s wrath, but to prove God’s love.

Jesus is not killed by God, but by domination systems—by state power, aided by religious collaboration. Like ICE officers who roam our streets with violent impunity, sanctioned by evangelical elites who proof-text their way into condoning authoritarian violence, Jesus’ crucifixion under empire unmasks the brutal logic of domination. These systems promise law and order, but they lead to death, not life.

This is not transactional salvation. It is radical solidarity with the victims of history, with the scapegoats. And it calls us to take up our cross and join Jesus among those still being crucified by these same systems.

4. Romans 10:9

“If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”

This is a political confession. Not magic words that change the status of your eternal soul, but words that reorient your allegiance. We trade loyalty to empire for what Martin Luther King called “an overriding loyalty to mankind.”

Recognizing that we are all in this together, we put an end to othering and scapegoating. We put our faith in the Lamb of God, trusting that although the powers of death threaten to kill us, God raises the dead.

“Believing in the resurrection” is not simply agreeing that a miracle happened two thousand years ago. It is a summons to live in resurrection power in confrontation with the forces of death. That hope saves us—not for the afterlife, but for God’s kingdom here and now. We turn from violence to justice, from domination to love.

Do you see how the small gospel of personal salvation shrinks our world and trains us to neglect our neighbors? Jesus has something so much better for us.

The mission statement at the bottom of the Cities Church website says, “Worshiping Jesus. Loving one another. Seeking the good of the Cities.” But if “loving and seeking the good of the Cities” includes authoritarian violence, kidnapping children, spraying chemicals in people’s faces, and targeting minorities, then the Jesus being worshiped is not the man of sorrows, the friend of sinners, or the savior of the least of these. He is simply a mascot for empire.

In contrast to the defanged gospel being embodied by Cities Church, I think of another recent church experience—attending an ICE observer training in a local church near my home. This was a church that understands the gospel is meant for this world, for the collective liberation of our neighbors, or it does no good at all. People from many faiths gathered to learn how to protect and care for the most vulnerable.

That solidarity was powerfully expressed by Bishop Rob Hirschfeld, who said at the memorial for Renee Good, “It may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.”

The gospel Jesus preached is still available to us—but it is dangerous and demanding. It does not just mean agreeing with doctrines, but disinvesting from systems of oppression.
Not just praying for “the lost,” but creating welcoming communities that include those scorned by society.
Not just worshiping Jesus, but doing what he commanded with our whole lives.

If Renee’s murder makes you angry—and it should—then my encouragement for you is to be brave and zoom out. This is not a story about an officer who lacked training or a lone gunman who acted rashly. This system did not malfunction yesterday. It acted exactly as intended.

We don’t just see it in the actions of ICE, but in the chorus of people defending the indefensible. One wonders if the right-wing influencers immediately siding with ICE even watched the tape in which Renee’s car is seen backing up, making a three-point turn to move away from the officers. After backing up, she clearly turns the car away to drive off. This is when he shoots her.

As a Marine officer, I received training on deadly force and de-escalation. It was drilled into me that deadly force is never authorized for a fleeing suspect. The principles of proportionality and necessity were also taught: deadly force is only justified when non-deadly alternatives are not sufficient to stop the threat.

Yet as this ICE officer steps easily to the side of her slow-moving soccer-mom SUV, instead of backing away from the vehicle to protect himself (as one would expect if it were being “weaponized”), he leans forward with his firearm and blasts this mother at point-blank range.

I was shocked by how many people viewed the same video as me and immediately gave the benefit of the doubt to this officer.

Could they really believe that “proportionality and necessity” meant the only way to deal with an unarmed, non-combatant mother of a six-year-old child who had shown no violent behavior was to shoot her in the face?

Renee Good was not on the scene to murder an ICE agent with her car.

She wasn’t there because she was being targeted by the agents either. She was there as a legal observer—to film ICE and hold them accountable. It has never been more essential to exercise this right. ICE does not follow due process, and their masks embolden them to act extrajudicially and evade accountability.

This is very personal to me, because I recently attended a training event for ICE observers in my community. I took my son with me to learn about the importance of standing up for our neighbors—especially the most vulnerable ones (a clip from the training below).

After Renee was killed, my son asked me if I was still going to try to be an observer. I told him I wasn’t sure. After all, if we can’t observe them, who will hold them accountable? He said, “Dad, I don’t want you to go.” This is why they shot her: ICE doesn’t want me to go either—this system does not want to be witnessed.

The training I went to was held at a Baptist church. Renee probably went to one just like it. It was put on by Christians who were convinced that loving our neighbors means loving all our neighbors. At the event, we were reminded of our rights:

First Amendment: The right to record law enforcement in public and to inform others about their activities.
Fourth Amendment: The right to refuse a search and deny entry to private areas, including a car, without a warrant; law enforcement may not seize your phone without a warrant.
Fifth Amendment: The right to refuse to answer questions that could incriminate yourself.

I grew up surrounded by white Christian nationalism, and I remember being taught that these rights were very important. “Don’t tread on me” was our libertarian policy. Strangely enough, many of the same people who fly that anti-authoritarian flag were the first to exclaim that Renee “should have listened to law enforcement, and she’d still be alive.”

It turns out that “don’t tread on me” doesn’t apply when it comes to opposing the authoritarian enforcers of the dream of white America.

“Don’t tread on me” was always about not being allowed to tread on whiteness. It did not apply to Renee, just as it did not apply to Trayvon Martin.

In case you don’t remember the details, seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was a high-school student who was first stalked and then shot by George Zimmerman. Zimmerman claimed that his life felt threatened. Although Martin was unarmed, Zimmerman’s defense attorney argued that the ground itself was a deadly weapon Martin used against him. They even brought a slab of concrete into the courtroom as an exhibit.

The “stand your ground” law became a national conversation during Zimmerman’s trial, but the theologian Kelly Brown Douglas points out that “stand your ground” is much more than a law—it is a culture. A culture in which moral innocence is granted to whiteness—and especially to police—that Black and brown people are rarely afforded.

It takes a suspension of disbelief to believe an armed man could shoot an unarmed Black teenager because he felt threatened by the ground, just as it takes a suspension of disbelief to believe an ICE officer felt threatened by a supposedly “weaponized car” while stepping toward it and firing three rounds at point-blank range.

Whiteness is the power that decides who gets the presumption of innocence and who deserves to be tread on. This reflex is so ingrained in white Americans that they often don’t even know they’re doing it.

President Obama famously asked, “If Trayvon was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk?”

When Black Americans heard Obama’s question, they knew the answer was no. If you’re a white American who believes that the rights of this country are equally extended to all, I hope that the slaughter of Renee Good shatters this illusion.

Now, I am of course aware that Renee Good is white. But she was killed while standing in solidarity with her brown neighbors. Many of my Black and brown friends have pointed out that Renee is not the first person to be killed by ICE. She will surely get more attention, not only because her death was filmed, but because she is white. But her whiteness did not protect her, because in opposing ICE—enforcers of the dream of whiteness—she committed the unpardonable sin.

Mere blocks from where Renee was shot, Derek Chauvin squeezed the life out of George Floyd on camera in broad daylight. Even with the footage of a modern-day lynching, this was not an open-and-shut case for white America. To this day, many who believe in the dream of whiteness believe Chauvin should be pardoned. His murder was valid, because it enforced the dream.

Let this incident confirm at least this: ICE does not exist to protect the populace. They do not hunt criminals; they hunt immigrants. They do not go after people for being violent, but for being different. They police difference with violence—a logic as American as apple pie.

Of course, America is an immigrant nation. The Anglo-Saxons who formed our nation’s ethos were not native to this land, but as immigration continued from non-Anglo cultures, the pro-immigration spirit of America quickly turned to the question of letting in the “right kind of immigrants.”

President Woodrow Wilson warned that “our Saxon habits of government” were threatened by the “corruption of foreign blood.” President Theodore Roosevelt feared “race suicide.” President Calvin Coolidge later argued that “biological laws” required racial quotas to preserve the nation.

It cannot be emphasized enough that ICE is not an aberration in American history. It is enforcing American exceptionalism as many Americans have always understood it: America as a white Christian nation.

Trump’s re-election was won on a wave of racial resentment. The so-called “big, beautiful bill,” which poured $100 billion into expanding ICE into a nationwide masked military force, is the sociological response to shifting demographics in a nation steeped in white power.

As Charlie Kirk, the patron saint of white Christian nationalism, said, “America was at its peak when we… dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever.” He warned his listeners of “the great replacement strategy… a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.”

This fear—of their country slipping away, becoming less Christian, becoming less white—is what fueled the riot on Capitol Hill. They said the election had been stolen, but of course there was never any proof of that. It was their country they believed was being stolen. From whiteness.

When I see footage from January 6 of white men assaulting the center of our nation’s power, I imagine what would have happened if they were Black men—if the Black Panthers had staged such an assault, I can only imagine the bloodbath.

Our imagination for terrorism rarely extends to white men waving flags with the name of Jesus. We reserve that label for those who threaten whiteness, not for those who kill in its name. Domestic terrorists who kill for the dream of white America? We call those patriots.

Making America Great Again has never meant reducing poverty, increasing literacy, or expanding health care. It has always meant making America more white. ICE exists to enforce this dream. They are the foot soldiers of white supremacy.

That’s why the details of the case do not matter to MAGA. Renee’s crime was not that she weaponized her car—it was that she refused to endorse this dream or recognize the authority of the thugs carrying it out. By showing up to hold ICE accountable and protect her brown neighbors, Renee became a race traitor. This is why they called her a domestic terrorist.

Renee was not a domestic terrorist. She was a mother and a poet who showed up to exercise her legal First Amendment rights in defense of her neighbors. When she was shot, her dog was in her car, and her glove box was filled with stuffed animals.

Now, as we sit with the aftermath of this killing, those of us who want to resist have some reckoning to do. I have to be honest: I’m not sure if I will go be an observer. As a straight white male, perhaps it’s exactly how I should be using my privilege. But then I think about my children, and I remember the face my son made when he found out I was still thinking about going.

I think about how willing they were to shoot Renee in broad daylight.

I want my sons to grow up believing ]that our neighbors are worth showing up for. But I also want them to grow up with a father. And the fact that those desires are in tension tells us everything about the country we’ve become. And for Black and brown people, this has always been clear. It’s the country we have always been.

ICE doesn’t fear violence; they fear witnesses. The man who shot Renee was not afraid for his life—he just refused to be held accountable. And in this country, we will always let thugs like that stand their ground.

Any of us who do still choose to show up to hold ICE accountable must know this: Trump’s America will tread on freedom of speech, tread on justice, tread on truth right before our eyes, and tread on our very lives before it ever lets anyone tread on whiteness.

I do, however, want to suggest that while many of us received a trite, fear-based spirituality, the Christian tradition and the teachings of Jesus contain much deeper wisdom and spiritual depth than many of us were exposed to. I still believe that following Jesus can lead to a rich spiritual life.

In this series, which I am cheekily calling “4 shifts to unf*ck your spirituality,” I want to highlight areas that the white evangelical/American Christian tradition let us down, and discipled us into patterns that took us further from the heart of true spirituality, and how Jesus himself corrects these patterns. The first was from escape to incarnation. Check it out if you missed it. The second I would like to suggest is the need to shift from Christian Separatism to Human Solidarity.

Human solidarity means that we are all in this together. We are all made of the same stuff—none of us are superior or inferior in the eyes of God, who is not a respecter of persons, which means that God doesn’t play favorites. All of humanity is God’s favorite. As Gregory of Nyssa said, “the body of Christ is the whole of humanity.” The Bible is full of this truth, beginning with the concept that every single person is made in the image of God. For Christians, this comes to full bloom in the incarnation and ministry of Jesus, who declared that there is no geographic, racial, ethnic, or religious barrier to who counts as our neighbor.

Many Christian leaders speak words that divide, but a true spiritual leader is always reminding us of our deeper solidarity. Martin Luther King’s mentor, Howard Thurman, wrote, “Human life is one and all humans are members of one another. And this insight is spiritual and it is the hard core of religious experience.” This resonates deeply with me. But we must be honest about the fact that the Christian religion has often been a barrier to this solidarity, rather than a spiritual engine for it.

Human solidarity did not factor at all into the version of Christianity I was raised with. That makes sense, because as a fundamentalist Christian who went to Bob Jones University (nicknamed ‘the bubble’), we were all about separation, not solidarity. We rejected “worldly” music and movies. I wasn’t allowed to go to the theater, because an “unbeliever” might see me there, and it would be bad for my testimony. How, exactly, I’m not quite sure, since they were at the theater too. But we were not like them, and we wanted them to know it.

The world was the enemy seeking to destroy the church, and we were the ones set apart by Christ with the truth of salvation. Salvation meant heaven for us, and damnation for everyone else. To momentarily expand this logic: we believed that only true Christians would go to heaven, which meant that of the 8 billion people on the planet, at least 5 billion were headed to eternal torture. This number was probably higher, because many of these were likely Christians “in name only.”

Needless to say, we were not “all in this together.”

These lines we drew between us and the world were imaginary, and they flowed from our worst impulses—to divide, separate, dominate. I do not need a religion to help me put distance between myself and my neighbor—I do that just fine on my own. Tribalism comes naturally to us—the Spirit of God is the spirit of solidarity.

I grew up being told that “humanism” was demonic, but Jesus consistently and happily prioritized human beings over religious rules (Mark 2:27). He crossed our invented boundary markers—many of them created by religion itself—to draw us into our solidarity with each other, which is the spiritual reality that our delusional barriers blind us to.

In his book, After Evangelicalism, The Christian ethicist Dr. David Gushee uses the term “Christian Humanism” to describe a faith that is anchored in the spirituality of Jesus, but understands “Christianity to be for humans (and the creation), not mainly about protecting Christian doctrinal purity, ideology, or the church’s self-interest.”

What is Christianity for? What is spirituality for? In the paradigm many of us inherited, it was for being right about God, so that you could be on the correct spiritual team, believe the correct doctrines, and ensure that you were going to heaven when you died. Dr. Gushee says that Christian humanism, however, is “concerned with the holistic well-being of all humans in this world, and not just their souls in the next.”

I am increasingly convinced that this is not just the purpose of Christianity, but of spirituality generally—the interdependent flourishing of humans and creation. Shalom in this world, not avoiding torment in the next world. If your spirituality isn’t drawing you into that larger story, it is likely doing just the opposite—shrinking your world, narrowing the scope of whose flourishing matters, and blinding you to the deeper reality: that we rise together and fall together, because we are interconnected.

This is not only a crucial spiritual truth—it’s also a plain fact of life on Planet Earth. We ignore it not only at the peril of our souls, but to the very existence of our civilizations.

Although our modern consumerist society hides this reality, by the time we step foot out of the house in the morning we are already indebted to hundreds of people from all around the world. You wake up and check your phone, which is designed by tech bros in California, but assembled by underpaid workers in Vietnam. You brew your coffee, which says it’s from Ethiopia, and was likely blended from dozens of farms in that region. Hundreds of farmworkers contributed their labor to every sip. When you splash in your half-and-half, you are indebted to more farms that you’ve barely considered. On a day of typical eating, the average American is relying on hundreds, possibly even thousands of individual farms, and tens of thousands of workers, most of whom do not make livable wages.

As Martin Luther King powerfully put it, “whether we realize it or not, each of us lives eternally ‘in the red.’ We are everlasting debtors to known and unknown men and women… Before we leave for our jobs we are already beholden to more than half of the world. . . . All life is interrelated. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

If you think that you won’t be affected by climate change because you live in an area safe from flooding or hurricanes, you are probably failing to consider your total dependence on the climate of places you may never visit, but still rely upon for the readily available we all take for granted.

Ignoring our solidarity, our fundamental belonging to one another, has been spiritual death in the evangelical church. While we attended services, worshiping with people who looked mostly the same way that we looked, and we prayed for the unfortunates of the world who we believed to be separate from us, and separate from God.

We prayed that the gospel would reach the ears of “unreached people groups,” but beneath our pity was disgust. I think of the 60,000 Somalis who make up 1% of the population of Minnesota, but are being blamed for every social problem imaginable, mostly by white Christians. They want them to hear the gospel over there, but they don’t want them to come over here.

Over the last few days, I have seen many white conservative Christians sharing stories about alleged fraud in Somali daycare centers. Any valid fraud should be investigated of course, but the eagerness to jump on a story that implicates a despised minority, while ignoring the rot seeping from the Trump White House on a daily basis—is revealing. When we encounter difference, is our impulse to search for common links of humanity, or to amplify the things that separate us?

Most Somalis are Muslim. Many dress differently than white Americans do. If we already believe ourselves to be separate and superior, we will accumulate evidence to support this story—but in doing so, we move further from the spirituality of Jesus.

When Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan, he was responding to someone who believed this lie of superiority, someone who “wanted to justify himself,” and Jesus told him a parable that reimagined the concept of who a neighbor is—it is always exactly who you don’t want it to be.

We live in a world of neighbors.
The closer you are to this reality, the closer you are to the spirituality of Jesus. Jesus’ favorite title for himself was the “Son of Man.” Many translate this as, “the human one.” Jesus did not identify himself primarily with a tribal sect, but with all humanity.

Moving towards humanity is moving towards God. Failing to do so—failing to see yourself in your neighbor, your neighbor in yourself, and all the threads that connect you to one another and to God—this is what it truly means to be lost.

Pastoral ministry comes with immense pressure: the expectation to have answers and maintain certainty. There’s also the visibility. Being seen is part of why the role attracts people with a bent toward exhibition and grandiosity, but living constantly in the spotlight exacts a cost. Pastors are expected to be beacons of morality and religiosity, and failures that would be merely embarrassing for others are often career-ending for them. Over time, the role can distance people from their own humanity. Many pastors end up playing a part—unsure of who they are, much less inviting others into wholeness.

So it surprised me that I found myself feeling nostalgic for pastoral work at the movies this week.

I saw Wake Up Dead Man, Rian Johnson’s new deconstruction-friendly murder mystery, where the most haunting question of the film is not simply who committed the crime, but whether the church will be a force of love in the world—or merely a reflection of our worst impulses. The two priests in the movie press us with another question: what is the purpose of a pastor? Do we need them? If a pastor is a guardian of certainty, an enforcer of hierarchies, and a gatekeeper of divinity, aren’t they more harm than good?

Monsignor Wicks, played by a brutish Josh Brolin, is the “Trump-y priest.” The allusion is not subtle, but then again, the year of our Lord 2025 is no time for subtlety. This is a year in which megachurches have played AI videos of a racist provocateur speaking to them from heaven. So while the film may seem heavy-handed in painting Wicks and his church with a white-nationalist brush, it barely approaches the bizarre reality we inhabit.

Wicks preaches sermons that scapegoat and divide. He drives queer people out of the church and lambasts single mothers for their sexual sin. The faithful congregants eat it up—the spiritual rush of superiority and belonging heightened by the exclusion of others. Wicks sees the church as the last bastion of morality in a diseased society. He believes it is time to fight. To take our country back.

In contrast to Wicks is Josh O’Connor’s Father Jud. He has no appetite for the culture war. He genuinely wants people to have an encounter with Christ—which is to say, an encounter with love and forgiveness. Jud is disturbed by the militant, aggressive spirituality Wicks is cultivating. He sees that this church is being formed not by love, but by a need to divide and dominate.

He makes it his mission to offer an alternative. When Jud hosts a prayer meeting, he says, “This is all about breaking down walls between us and God, us and each other, us and the world.” Jud rightly sees that the essence of spirituality is not our superiority to the world, or our possession of the right answers and doctrines, but our union with one another and with God. Jud’s ministry is one of reconciliation, not domination.

In reactions to the film online, many viewers are responding viscerally to Jud’s character. We hunger for this kind of spirituality and gentle accompaniment. We have known dozens of pastors like Wicks. We have felt their agendas for us. We have been used on volunteer teams to build their institutions. We silenced our questions because we believed in the “important work” they were doing. And we have watched it all shatter.

But few of us have experienced a pastor like Jud. We may even doubt they exist—which is why his character landed with such emotional force.

At one moment in the film, Jud is anxiously trying to gather evidence to clear his name from a murder accusation. He is rushing a receptionist on the phone for information. But when she learns he is a pastor, she asks for prayer. Jud immediately stops his line of questioning. He listens as she explains that her mother’s health is declining, and that their relationship is fractured. She cries. Jud stays with her. He points her toward everlasting arms.

I found myself weeping.

We do need pastors like this. Not pastors with all the answers and certainties, but people who stand where Christ stood—reminding us that God is not far from any of us, that God’s grace is for all of us, and that we are in this together.

For some, though, this sounds like a weak kind of Christianity.

The Gospel Coalition recently published a review of the film by Brett McCracken, who describes Jud and Wicks as two sides of the same coin:

“If Wicks is the proxy for Trump, Jud is the proxy for the progressive exvangelical’s dream pastor.”

He means this as a criticism. Brett goes on to ask whether Jud’s emphasis on grace amounts to “cheap grace,” and he zeroes in on a line that, for many of us, was the emotional heart of the film.

Jud describes the miracle Christianity offers:

“It’s not about being cured or fixed… it’s about finding the sustaining power to wake up every day and do what we’re here to do—in spite of the pain. Daily bread.”

Brett responds:

“Huh? The core of Jud’s gospel feels flimsy—more akin to ‘follow your heart’ motivation than soul-saving, sin-atoning good news.”

I found Brett’s reaction astonishing.

For me, that line went straight to my heart. Yes!—daily bread. That is the spirituality I crave.

Not certainty, but sustenance for our flesh-and-blood lives. In a world of scarcity, Christ is the sustaining power to choose generosity over hoarding. In a world of violence, Christ is the sustaining power to love and refuse vengeance.

The miracle of Christianity is not a sinner’s prayer that instantaneously changes our spiritual status from “damned” to “saved.” It is food for the long obedience in the same direction. It is not a talisman for safety in the afterlife. It is the wisdom of Christ and the presence of God that helps us love here, in this life.

Brett calls this vision flimsy. This charge is often leveled at progressive Christians—we’re told we’ve “defanged” the gospel, smoothing down its rough edges, especially the call to repentance. “Cheap grace,” Brett says.

But I think the real defanging happens when we are more concerned with converting people to our religion than living the radical way Jesus actually called us to live.

Jesus does speak of a narrow gate, but we don’t walk through it by increasing church attendance or opposing queer people. We walk through it when we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Jesus said this was the heart of the law and the prophets. It’s not complicated—but it is difficult. What comes naturally to us is tribalism and othering. Jud is right to say that the purpose of spiritual gathering is to tear those walls down.

These competing visions for the purpose of Christian spirituality become even clearer in Brett’s reading of Detective Benoit Blanc, played by Daniel Craig.

Blanc is not a Christian. He rejected Christianity because of the harm it has justified, including homophobia. Although Jud and Blanc have several thoughtful conversations, Blanc does not convert by the end of the movie, and Brett finds this deeply significant, writing:

“Perhaps the “inclusive” church that Jud dreams of is the sort of Christianity that might win over a “proud heretic” like Blanc?

It’s telling that at the end of the film, when Blanc gets a goodbye hug from Jud, he brushes off a personal invitation to celebrate Mass. “That’s so nice of you,” he says to Jud. “There’s nothing I would rather not do. Toodaloo!”

Apparently, the “hugs, not fists” Christianity of Jud isn’t enough to compel a skeptic to take it seriously. It’s a nice, inoffensive, inclusive faith, but one most people can easily live without.”

Brett’s takeaway is telling all right—it tells me that for Brett, the goal of Jud’s Christian witness should be for Blanc’s conversion. To take faith seriously, Brett would want him to accept Jud’s invitation to Mass, and to convert to Christianity.

But Blanc has taken faith seriously—in the way that matters most—and Brett misses it.

In the scene immediately before Blanc declines Mass, he experiences an ego death. He shows compassion to a murderer. He relinquishes his need to be admired and creates space for confession, truth, and redemption. As he makes this choice, he is bathed in light. The film isn’t subtle. This is resurrection imagery.

Blanc is “born again,” but the evidence isn’t church attendance or doctrinal assent. It’s that he loves his enemy because he finally sees them as his neighbor. He lays down his life for a friend.

He learned this from Jud, who repeatedly offers himself for others, even attempting to turn himself in to protect the community. Jud is walking the path of Christ. Blanc sees it—and is changed.

What Blanc needed was not a Romans Road presentation or a refined atonement theory about God’s cosmic ledger of sin-debt. What unlocked empathy in Blanc was his relationship with Jud, an imperfect man who had learned to love because he himself had been loved.

That is the grace that fuels Jud throughout the film—and the grace that finally pierces Blanc’s critical shell.

Brett misses this arc entirely, writing,

“It’s no wonder Blanc leaves Wake Up Dead Man as disinterested in Christianity as he was at the start. What he sees on display from both Wicks and Jud is just not that compelling. It’s audience-captured Christianity, not true Christianity.”

But what if the goal of spirituality—of the church, of Jesus himself—is not to get people interested in Christianity?

“Conversion.” What does it mean?

This is actually one of the themes of the movie, as Jud and Blanc repeatedly discuss a “Damascus Road” experience.

In Scripture, Saul’s conversion begins when Christ asks, “Why are you persecuting me?” Saul had never met Jesus, but Jesus identifies himself with the suffering. True conversion opens our eyes to that identification—to the crucified ones of the world—and responds to the call of Christ to take up our own cross and meet him there.

Salvation is not about religious affiliation. One of the most common tragedies in Christianity is people who believe in penal substitution while missing what atonement actually means: at-one-ment. Union. Reconciliation. Right relationship.

In this sense, Blanc does have a conversion—not to the Christian religion, but from the path of ego to the path of grace, where he comes to see himself in his neighbor and his neighbor in himself.

Brett points out that Blanc’s own homosexuality could have been one of his issues with the Christian faith. When Brett accuses Father Jud of being “soft on sin,” I think Brett may have this in mind. After all, Jud never condemns Blanc’s sexuality, or calls him to a life of celibacy, and Blanc’s “conversion” has nothing to do with changing his sexual identity.

But Jud does confront sin throughout the film, directly challenging Wicks. This is not seeker-sensitive therapy. It is a battle for the soul of the church. But the sin Jud was intent on battling was not someones unchosen sexual identity, or any other arbitrary religious rule. The sin Jud confronts is lovelessness—the use of religion to dominate, exclude, and elevate oneself over others.

That, Jud recognizes, is the true betrayal of Christ.

We should be hard on sin in the way Jesus was. That will never be popular with religious people, because Jesus focused on a very different set of sins than we do. Churches often claim to be “strong on sin” because they target queer people, while remaining silent about the systems that actually harm God’s beloved.

The phrase “cheap grace” comes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was not condemning churches for affirming marginalized people. He was condemning the church in Nazi Germany for aligning itself with power, scapegoating the vulnerable, and offering forgiveness without transformation—all while believing it possessed the “right” orthodox doctrine. But the message of Jesus was never about doctrinal correctness, and wrapping oneself in the vestments, theology, and language of the church remains one of the most reliable ways to avoid the demands of the Gospel.

Bonhoeffer wrote, “The Church is the Church only when it exists for others… not dominating, but helping and serving.”

Maybe that’s why Wake Up Dead Man made me miss being a pastor.

Not because I miss authority or answers or the power to draw lines. We don’t need pastors to enforce boundaries or police certainty. We already do that just fine on our own! What we need are voices that call us back to the love that has always been there, even when we forget. Voices willing to remind us that the walls we’ve built—between us and God, and between one another—were never real to begin with. Voices that bring us back to grace: Our daily bread.

From Escape to Incarnation

Like so many Christian kids of the 90s, I grew up convinced that Jesus was returning soon, and one of my deepest fears was being “left behind.”

Our church hosted regular “prophecy conferences,” where speakers dissected obscure passages in Revelation, showing the supposed parallels to modern geopolitical events—the state of Israel restored, an inevitable war in the Middle East. The chess pieces were all aligning: Armageddon was on the horizon. Every new political crisis, war, or climate disaster sparked the same hopeful refrain from the adults around me: “Jesus must be coming back soon!”

Instead of the world’s suffering being a summons to compassion, solidarity, and justice, it became the countdown of a doomsday clock.

This is the gospel many of us inherited. It was a spirituality of evacuation, not incarnation.
Good news for the next world, not this one.

This perspective skewed our spirituality. It kept us from the most important questions—questions like:
“How do we create a society that reflects the dignity of every person?”
“In a world with staggering inequality, how do we lift up the least of these?”
“How do we live sustainably on this planet?”

These are deeply spiritual questions, yet they were dismissed as distractions from the “real” gospel. When Christians talked about justice or liberation for the oppressed, they were often accused of “putting politics over the gospel.”
But a gospel with no use for the real world has little in common with the gospel of Jesus—who prayed, “Your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10), and said that God’s Spirit was upon him “to preach good news to the poor,” “freedom for the prisoners,” and “to set the oppressed free” (Luke 4:18).

Evangelical spirituality is built on salvation for the afterlife, but Jesus preached liberation in this life.

During Advent, Christians reflect on the theological idea of the incarnation (which literally means “in flesh”). This truth reminds Christians that this fleshly world is the focus of God’s love and the very place where God chooses to dwell. To escape this world is not only to flee the source of God’s delight, but to attempt to escape God’s own self. God is with us here, in an animal feeding trough, in abject poverty—in human vulnerability.

When we are taking this seriously, we will not attempt to escape the world, but to build a world that honors this divine presence. We will recognize that social questions are spiritual questions.

Yet, many of us were told that social justice is an unhelpful distraction from the gospel.

Should We Reject Utopian Thinking?

I’ve always thought it was strange that Christians were so hostile to socialism.
In the early church, they sold possessions, held everything in common, and redistributed wealth so that no one was in need.
Basically, socialism.

And when you look at the Christian vision of heaven—no rich or poor, no hunger, no war, no national divisions, and everyone included from “every tribe, tongue, and nation”—you see it again.
Basically, socialism.

Yet despite this ideal in both the church’s origins and its imagined future, conservative Christians rarely pursue a vision of equality here on earth.

Instead, they condemn “utopian thinking.” They say, “Our hope isn’t in what we accomplish here—our hope is in Jesus alone.”
Or: “This world can’t change. People are too sinful. Socialism will never work because people are greedy. Our job isn’t to fix the world—that’s God’s job.”
So instead of seeking justice, peace, and reconciliation for the world’s most vulnerable, we searched for signs of the Second Coming—waiting for a deus ex machina to sort everything out. It wasn’t our job.

Even when evangelicals do try to engage in social issues, it tends to be a bait and switch: If you fed the hungry, you were supposed to give the Romans Road while you did it. If you cared about policies that reduce poverty or expand healthcare, you were “distracted from the eternal.” I was told that focusing on systemic injustice instead of conversion was like “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” If the world is headed to hell, then alleviating a bit of suffering in the meantime didn’t matter much.

This may be why white evangelicals support government spending on the poor at the lowest rate of any major religious demographic. Pew finds that less than 25% believe the government should guarantee access to healthcare. Personal charity is fine—but systemic change? Not the church’s job.

They are also the least likely religious group in America to believe climate change is real or human-caused. Many brush it off entirely because they believe the earth is destined to burn anyway, and they’re “just a-passin’ through.”

I grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh with my parents, where he lampooned climate change as a hoax. My fundamentalist christian parents ate it up, despite the fact that Rush made little effort to appear spiritual. He was a capitalist, through and through, but conservative talking heads like Rush gave a generation of evangelicals permission to ignore the state of our world.

Nobody loves escapist, afterlife-based, pie-in-the-sky religion more than the powerful oppressors exploiting this world. Billionaires and corrupt politicians are perfectly content for Christians to fix their eyes on the next life and leave this one in their greedy hands.

True Spirituality Takes us Deeper into the World

But the world can change for the better. In fact, it has. As people have followed God’s Spirit, we’ve seen massive shifts in racial equity, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ rights. A century ago, women had only just gained the vote. Half a century ago, queer rights weren’t even public conversation. I see these as movements of the Spirit, drawing us toward the humanity of the most vulnerable.
This is our work.

The work of spirituality is here, not there. Not escaping this world, but learning to live in it with a global family of neighbors.
Not praying for people to go to heaven, but longing for it to be “on earth as it is in heaven.”

In fear-based religion, the point of spirituality is being on the right team—believing the right things so you go to heaven instead of hell.
This spirituality is empty and alienating.

True spirituality doesn’t inspire escape. It drives us deeper into the world. It knits us more closely to our human and non-human neighbors. It heightens our concern for the material well-being of others. It makes us responsible creatures of this planet. It makes us more human, not less.

If the point of spirituality is “going to heaven,” then success is measured in converts and church influence—bending society toward Christian dogma so more people can escape.
But if the point is “heaven coming to earth,” success looks like the flourishing of humanity. We are drawn into connection, not tribalism.

True spirituality isn’t merely a theological idea about God’s love but an embodied reality that liberates bodies from oppression.
Less altar calls; more eliminating child poverty, apartheid states, and climate refugees.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of people but is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion.”

Deconstruction can be overwhelming. You don’t have to reconfigure all your beliefs at once. But this is a good place to start:
Let go of a version of the gospel trying to get you out of the world, and embrace a gospel that sends you deeper into it.

Next week I will look at the next shift in this mini-series I am calling “4 shifts to unf*ck your spirituality.” We will explore the shift from a punitive god to a God of Love.

If this reflection resonated with you, you will probably appreciate how I explore these themes in my new book, Hell Bent: How the Fear of Hell Holds Christians Back from a Spirituality of Love.

It’s about reclaiming the Spirituality of Jesus, which was a way of love for the sake of this world, not escaping to the next. The Gospel is so much better than many of us were taught.

Understandably, many of us are on edge—no, we are straight up crashing out.

The weight of our anxiety is being carried in our bodies and felt in our relationships.

So here is a messy little story about a bizarre online exchange I just had, which helped me reflect on the boundaries that are going to keep us sane in a year in which our nervous systems are rapidly collapsing.

Bare with me as I unfold the series of events that led to the crash-out:

Yesterday, I woke up with a sore throat. After several months of nonstop travel, book promotion, and dozens and dozens of podcasts, I felt myself hitting a wall. Ulgh. I am not allowed to get sick! I am headed into another weekend of travel for my book tour, and I had 3 events scheduled that day, including two podcasts—which would mean about three hours of talking. I knew something had to give, so I reached out to the two podcasts to reschedule.

I was proud of myself for doing this—I fucking hate letting people down. There is a little gremlin in my brain that tells me if I am ever late, or cancel on anyone, or drop the ball in any way, nobody will like me because I am a useless piece of trash.

But I listened to my body (and to my girlfriend, who told me I should) and let the podcast hosts know I would need to reschedule. I’m glad I did—I needed it.

So I had removed the most taxing aspects of my schedule, but as a self-employed single dad, a nap was not in the cards for me—I still had a list of errands and other work to do.

But that afternoon, a people-pleasers worst nightmare was fulfilled, when I received the exact DM that cheeky gremlin warned me about. He knew—he knew all along!

“Super disappointed man, you didn’t need to lie—we could have rescheduled the pod.”

Whenever I see a DM insulting me or calling me a liar, I get immediately sweaty. “Who-what-now?” I had a double-take and tried to figure out what was happening.

Read more

If you have a longer-form question you’d love to see me tackle in my writing, email it to contactbrianrecker@gmail.com.

I hope these questions and answers find you well, beloved.

Q:
“I’ve been curious about how you went about talking with your boys about misogyny.”

A:
If you’re raising boys, there is no question: it is essential to teach them about misogyny. And when they’re a little older, the patriarchy. I highly recommend reading bell hooks’ book The Will to Change—it was so helpful for me and spurred me on to take a much more intentional role in counter-formation for my boys under the patriarchy. This is the worldly system we live in, and that means despite our best efforts, our boys will receive anti-women messaging.

By the time they are in grade school, they will hear “gay” used as an insult.

Someone will tell them they throw like a girl.

This will do something within their spirit—something they may not even be aware of.

This pervasive system will push on them an insistent message they will slowly internalize: that feminine traits must be suppressed and a certain version of masculinity must be performed, or they will be bullied by other males who police the boundaries for “appropriate” boyish behavior. This is what we are up against, and I have to be honest, it’s quite overwhelming. Our boys can be swallowed up by it despite our very best efforts—the whole system is working against us.

So here’s what I’ve been doing, and it’s probably not enough.

I have simply tried to bring it up as often as possible, both explicitly and with broader reminders. For example, I remind them all the time that there is not one right way to be a boy or a girl, and that the most important thing is being fully ourselves and letting others be fully themselves.

I also go right to the tension and tell them about some of the messages they will hear, to prepare them. I explain that the world will tell them it’s bad for boys to act like girls, but that’s because people are scared. People are afraid to be themselves, and small, frightened people need something to hate to feel better about themselves.

I tell them about some of the messages they may hear online: that women should be at home or be small and submissive and serve their husbands. I talk to them about how women had to fight for the right to vote, and now there are men who want to take those hard-won rights away.

I can’t tell you how important it is for boys to hear their dad—and not just their mom—celebrate women’s rights and make them a priority.

There are also messages about sex that the patriarchy will tell them, and I want them to hear these from me first. The world will tell them that men need sex more than women, and that women who enjoy sex should be slut-shamed for their “body counts,” while men will be celebrated for their sexual conquests. I want to process these messages with them before they hear them on the internet, so they will be prepared to reject them.

Most importantly of all, I model the behavior I want to see in them. I have female friends, and I let my boys see us interact as equals. We hang out with my gay, trans, and non-binary friends. I take them to a church where they frequently hear women preach and see them lead. I let them see me liking women and refusing to police anybody’s masculinity. I take them to protests where we stand up with queer people who are under attack.

We can’t control who our boys become, and we are up against a lot, but we can model a better way—a way that not only protects women, but also invites boys to be their full expansive selves.

Q:
“Thoughts on what Jesus means when he says to believe in him.”

A:
What does it mean to have faith in Christ? Many of us grew up thinking it meant believing the right things about Christ. A better way of translating this concept is allegiance to Christ—not head knowledge, but aligning our hearts with the priorities of Jesus: living for what Jesus lived for—the kingdom of God, which is to say, the beloved community. For me, to believe in Jesus—to believe that “Jesus is the way,” means that I believe love is the way, even when it could lead to a cross. Father Gregory Boyle says, “Jesus just stood with the outcasts until they were welcomed or until he was crucified — whichever came first.” Faith in Christ means standing with those Jesus stood with, and living for the liberation that Jesus lived—and died—for.

Q:
“How did you/what was it like telling your kids you were separating?”

A:
It was horrible. Next question!

JK, I will try and give you something.

Beloved, when I tell you I dreaded this conversation.

Both my coparent and I got COVID in the week of our separation, so when we moved into separate bedrooms, we didn’t immediately have to come up with an alternate explanation why.

But after two weeks, we knew we had to say something. As the person who did not desire the separation, I wanted to push it out even further—I was wishing things could just go back to how they were. But I do believe it’s best to have the convo sooner rather than later. I don’t want my kids to think it’s normal for a marriage to be emotionally disconnected and separate.

The most important part of this conversation is telling them that you are still a family, that your love for them is not changing, and that neither of you are going anywhere. Get on the same page about this. Your kids don’t need to get any of the inner dynamics of your relationship—it’s not relevant who wanted to separate or why. If one person is moving out, make sure it is crystal clear that they aren’t leaving the family—the family is just going to spread out a bit, take up space in two homes. There is no abandonment here. Your family is taking a new form; it’s going to look different now, but your kids are not losing their family. The focus is on your relationship with the kids and how it is not going to change, even though your marriage is changing.

Of course kids want their parents to stay together and love each other. But what they need more than that is the safety and assurance that each parent will stay connected to them. Make space for grief, but in this conversation they will probably not fully understand what is happening. The grief will likely come later, in difficult moments with statements like, “Why can’t you move back into Mommy’s house?” or “I wish we could all just live together.” All understandable feelings. Don’t try to make it okay for them—it’s okay to be sad about that, and you should hope they always feel safe to share those bad feelings with you. But assure them that you are not going anywhere and that you will always be a family—always be their mom and dad, no matter what.

Q:
“Do you have a relationship with God?”

A:
Yes! In fact, I personally believe you do too, for “God is not far from any one of us; in him we live and move and have our being.” I believe we have all been in relationship with God since birth, and the spiritual life is becoming aware of and more deeply connected to a relationship that has always been there—often hidden in the places of your heart you are afraid to look.

Q:
“How (whether?) to have a healthy honest connection with my Christian Nationalist family as they celebrate the current horrors?”

A:
Boundaries, baby.

If you are deconstructing, or breaking with the ideology of your family of origin, you need to get a Master’s degree in boundaries. You need to learn how to communicate them with kindness and clarity (this will take courage). You need to learn how to adapt with your capacity and where each season of life has you: for example, you may have to bow out this Thanksgiving if Uncle Bob is minimizing Trump and Epstein’s sexual abuse of minors, but you are a survivor of sexual assault. But then you may decide that you can handle showing up for Christmas. I have communicated to my family that boundaries are not because I don’t care about the relationship—they are because these relationships matter to me and I want to preserve them.

Unfortunately though, I have found that the connections can only go so deep with those who rejoice in what is evil, or “celebrate the current horrors,” as you say. But I do what I can to keep the connection, because people surprise me all the time, and because as hard as it is for people to change, in my experience love and connection are the things that do it.

Q:
“Does full healing from religious trauma include not trying to convince family out of religion?”

A:
I think it depends what you mean by “convince out of religion.” If you mean, “encourage your family members to recognize the humanity of queer people,” then I believe that is a noble cause. If you mean, “express to your family that it hurts your relationship when they tell you you’re going to hell,” well that is also totally understandable.

But if you mean, “tell my family there is no God and there never was, and they’re ignorant for thinking otherwise,” well I personally believe you’re crossing the line. I don’t want my family telling me what to believe, and I don’t tell anybody what to believe. What you believe about God or religion is totally up to you, and I think it’s a dick move to push religious or non-religious beliefs on others.

I do think there is a missionary/fundamentalist impulse that can linger on post-deconstruction, where you are trying to convert people to your way of thinking. And I get it—some may even accuse me of that with all my posting. But my aim is never to tell people what to believe, but rather talk about how certain beliefs can hurt people. I think there’s an important difference.

I don’t tell people what to believe, but I do tell them how their harmful beliefs might be impacting people, especially vulnerable people. Especially for those of us who carry privilege—white folks, straight folks—it is good and right for us to stand up to racist or homophobic family members. Marginalized communities need us to “get our people” and hold them accountable.

If these questions and answers resonated with you, you will probably appreciate how I explore some of these themes in my new book, Hell Bent: How the Fear of Hell Holds Christians Back from a Spirituality of Love.

It’s about reclaiming the Spirituality of Jesus, which was a way of love for the sake of this world, not escaping to the next. The Gospel is so much better than many of us were taught.

It comes out TODAY, and I can’t recommend it enough for our moment in history when these oppressive forces have become so explicit, brazen, and culturally dominant. For many of us, Christian spirituality actually formed us to be willing participants in empire, rather than counter-cultural resistors. Our “Christian” mission was little more than a spiritual disguise for colonialism and supremacy. This book will help us reclaim our place on the underside, where Jesus stands with the oppressed and the silenced. It will also help us reclaim our humanness.

In addition to reflections like the one below, the book contains prayers, poems, invocations, and benedictions—tools for forming strong hearts that stand against empire.

I am proud to share this brief excerpt, but I highly encourage you to grab the book, and give her Substack a follow: Some Things Abuelita.

LITURGIES FOR RESISTING EMPIRE

by

Kat Armas

Letting Our Light Shine?

I remember the way we used to sing “This Little Light of Mine” in Sunday School. We’d hold our index fingers up high like tiny flames, and declare with everything in us, “Hide it under a bushel? No!” And with even more passion, “Don’t let Satan blow it out! I’m gonna let it shine!” For us, the message was clear as day: God is not present in the darkness.

For so much of my early faith, that’s what salvation meant. Once lost in the dark, I had become a child of light. And no words shaped that understanding more than the beginning of the Gospel of John:

What came into being
through the Word was life,
and the life was the light for all people.

The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness doesn’t extinguish the light. (1:3–5)

The poetry of John has stirred hearts for centuries, and I was no exception. I was captivated by this image of Jesus—the Word, the light—piercing through the dark. I’ve always loved language, the way a single word can hold a universe. But looking back, I see how these words in all their poetic beauty might have contributed to a way of seeing the world I am now trying to dismantle.

It’s clearer to me now, the subtle way dualism—one of empire’s oldest and most seductive lies—was quietly woven into the faith of my youth. How by raising our index fingers high, we were learning something deeper than a melody: we were being formed to see the world in binaries, a stark division between believers and nonbelievers, saved and lost. What seemed innocent enough in childhood wasn’t harmless at all. It was formation—an early initiation into empire’s way of seeing, a lesson in separation that would take years to unlearn.

I was taught to see darkness only as absence. As something empty, something to fear. No one ever told me that darkness is where seeds are buried before they bloom. That it is the womb of creation. That before God said, Let there be light, the Spirit was already there, hovering over the deep. What if we have spent so much time trying to escape the dark that we have missed the God who dwells within it?

The problem isn’t necessarily John’s understanding of salvation, nor the poetry or language in the Gospel itself. The fracture runs deeper—into the way Greek philosophy has shaped our imagination, training us to divide what was never meant to be split. We learned to read dualism into the Bible, missing its paradox and mystery, and taming what was wild and relational in the Word. This lens doesn’t just shape doctrine; it shapes our very encounter with the divine, conditioning us to seek God in the abstract instead of in the soil, the body, and the breath between us.

Out of this binary imagination grew a theology that justified colonial and missionary efforts to bring the “light of the gospel” to the so- called “heathen” in the non-Western world. The “darkness” wasn’t just metaphorical anymore—it now represented a people, a geography, a skin. The Word became flesh, but in the hands of empire, the message became something that fractured us instead of knitting us together.

Empire’s logic leaves no room of multiplicity. Its dualistic framework strips away the richness of the human experience, reducing whole people to symbols, stereotypes, or monoliths. Frantz Fanon reminds us that the erasure of our complexity is empire’s greatest theft. He speaks of how colonialism erodes identity, reducing People of Color to roles that serve its narrative—always “the native,” always “the oppressed,” as if our existence is static, singular. But we are not one thing. We carry worlds within us, histories and futures colliding in every breath. To resist empire is to reclaim our right to nuance—to reject the binaries that seek to flatten and contain us.

Reducing people to a single story is an act of violence. It severs the sacred chaos of who we are from our bodies and our histories. We are complexity incarnate—uncontainable, defiant in our wholeness, unyielding in our joy, grief, and contradictions. To know ourselves truly, we must surrender the myth of simplicity and sit with the beauty of our depths. We must remember that we are spirit and we are flesh.

This way of seeing echoes an ancient truth in the Hebrew scriptures—a vision of humanity not as a soul trapped in a body, but as a living, breathing whole. Though Jewish thought is diverse, much of the tradition speaks of the human being as an integrated whole—flesh and spirit interwoven, inseparable.

So when John writes that the Word became flesh (1:14), it isn’t just theological; it is radical. It declares that the body is not incidental to faith but central to it. Jesus’s incarnation is not God’s concession to our frailty; it is God’s affirmation that our very flesh is sacred.

And the resurrection? It isn’t just the triumph of a soul; it was the return and restoration of a body, scarred and breathing. This stands in defiance of the Greek idea that death was a release from the material world. Instead, it proclaims that the body—this very skin, this very breath—holds meaning beyond the grave. The early Christian story resisted the hierarchical dualism that pits body against soul, that names one eternal and the other disposable. Instead, it entwined word and flesh, spirit and sinew, light and dark.

This wholly preventable tragedy has revealed something more rotten than government gridlock and incompetence: the cruelty of the conservative MAGA movement, including the white evangelicals that make up their base.

While many evangelical leaders have been silent in the face of this crisis, others have celebrated the lapse in benefits as the end of “handouts.”

SNAP, or food stamps as they are commonly called, has been denigrated by conservatives for decades. People who use them are often stereotyped as lazy or as leeches on taxpayers. Their favorite proof text? “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10).

But people are entitled to food. Food is a human right, and everyone deserves to eat—regardless of employment status or work ethic. And there are deeply biblical reasons to believe this.

The Only Condition is Hunger

Setting that misunderstood proof text aside, the broader witness of Scripture consistently commands us to feed the hungry. There are roughly fifty direct commands to feed hungry people, in addition to hundreds about caring for the poor.

James 2:15–16 – “If a brother or sister is without food and one of you says, ‘Go in peace,’ but does not supply their bodily needs, what good is that?”

James does not mention a work requirement. The absence of food—and the presence of need—makes someone deserving of care, independent of economic contribution.

Isaiah 58:6–10 – “Is not this the fast that I choose… to share your bread with the hungry?”
Proverbs 22:9 – “Those who are generous are blessed, for they share their bread with the poor.”
Matthew 25:35–40 – “For I was hungry and you gave me food.”

Over and over, the only requirement for giving food to someone is hunger. Hungry people deserve food simply because of their humanity.

What Do People Deserve?

Many of us received a version of the gospel that said people were fundamentally undeserving. I was told that because I was born in sin, I was worthy of punishment. If I died in my natural state, all I deserved was death and hell. Any kindness or comfort I experienced short of God’s wrath was considered grace. What I “merited” was torment.

What do you believe people fundamentally deserve?

I believe this question lies at the center of our spirituality, and explains much of evangelicalism’s cruelty. Do people fundamentally deserve hell, or do they deserve love?

I believe people deserve to have their basic needs met.

Jesus fed the hungry without requirements and taught us to pray for “our daily bread.” He also prayed that God would “forgive our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”

Centuries of over-spiritualized interpretation from theologians who knew neither hunger pangs nor debt slavery have hidden how Jesus’ prayer addressed the two deepest social realities of his world: hunger and debt. For the working poor, the next meal was not guaranteed, and many lived in perpetual debt to wealthy landowners.

Jesus’ prayer pointed to a world where everyone had enough bread and debts were forgiven.

Many of us inherited a punitive Christianity that insists every debt be fully paid. But the prayer is not that debts would be paid—it’s that they’d be forgiven, completely cancelled.

This goes completely against the conservative mindset of what people “deserve.” Loan cancellation? Not fair! Food handouts? Freeloaders! But in the world of the Kingdom, people deserve food and forgiveness, for free.

Isaiah 55:1 –
“Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters;
and he who has no money, come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.”

The point of this invitation is that it’s unearned—not because we are unworthy, but because we already are worthy, simply by virtue of being image-bearers of God. Our dignity is innate; it cannot be earned or deserved.

The Kingdom of God vs A Punitive Empire

When you see this truth, it changes how you show up in the world. The Kingdom of God is not a place, and it’s certainly not where we go when we die. It happens when we acknowledge this inner worth, and treat every person as the child of God that they truly are in the deepest part of themselves.

This recognition is a paradigm shift, and it’s a fundamentally different way of calling people into change. Are people punished into change—or loved into change?

Many conservatives have long sought to defund food stamps because they believe hunger is good for the poor—it will motivate them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But this punitive outlook is both cruel and ineffective.

Hungry people don’t work harder—they commit more crimes, and understandably so. They are often so burdened by survival that they can’t contribute meaningfully to society. When people’s basic needs are met, they show up as better citizens.

Punishment does not call out the best in people. If we want people to flourish, we must treat them with dignity, regardless of what we believe they “deserve.”

The wisest spiritual leaders have always known the poor are not undeserving but deserving of care. This is how the early church father St. Basil the Great spoke of what we owe one another:

“The bread which you hold back belongs to the hungry; the coat you guard in your locked storage-chests belongs to the naked; the footwear mouldering in your closet belongs to those without shoes. The silver you keep hidden belongs to the one in need. Thus, however many are those whom you could have provided for, so many are those whom you wrong.”
— St. Basil the Great

Do you agree with St. Basil? Do you believe that the excess food in a wealthy society belongs to the hungry—that we owe it to them, that it is their right?

If you believe they have to earn it, where does that belief come from? This punitiveness is nowhere in the ministry of Jesus, who freely fed the hungry and told his disciples that when they hosted a banquet, they should “invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind,” precisely those who “cannot repay you” (Luke 14:13–14).

Any talk of “deserving” versus “undeserving” poor is foreign to the message of Jesus—to be human is to be deserving.

Weaponizing Paul

A few thoughts on this popular proof-text:

For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” We hear that some among you are idle and disruptive. They are not busy; they are busybodies. - 2 Thess 3:10-11

First of all, this verse is in the context of the early church, a community where believers shared wealth and met material needs. In this Kingdom world, “No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had” (Acts 4:32).

However, Paul is addressing some who are unwilling to contribute to this greater whole. In fact, an increasing number of scholars believe that the “idle busybodies” Paul is addressing are not the poor, but wealthy patrons. In Roman cities, elites lived off rent and others’ labor. Manual work was for slaves and the poor.

Paul calls them to a new mindset: outside the church, exploiting labor might be normal, but those hierarchies don’t exist in the Kingdom. Here, we are equals and carry one another.

So Paul does not seem to be saying, “Poor people shouldn’t eat if they can’t work.” He’s likely aying, “Wealthy freeloaders who scorn work and live off others violate the Gospel.”

The Real Freeloaders

Rolling out this proof text now is especially egregious because most people on food stamps cannot be accused of laziness.

Most on food stamps should not be working at all: children (≈ 44 percent of SNAP recipients), the elderly (≈ 10 percent), or the disabled (≈ 11 percent). Of those who can work, most do—often full-time, and yet they can still barely afford groceries because they do not receive a living wage!

Corporations like Walmart and Amazon have millions of employees on food stamps. Companies with soaring profits pay starvation wages, and taxpayers cover the gap. That is the real robbery, not the aid we give the poor.

Food stamps are not handouts to poor workers—they are handouts to greedy corporations and billionaires like Jeff Bezos, who is worth hundreds of billions, while many working for him need government assistance. St. Basil would like a word.

Paul never rebuked the poor. He was constantly speaking up for them. His call was for mutual responsibility: for each of us to let go of superiority and take our place among our brothers and sisters in one connected family. This, too, was Jesus’ vision.

Jesus declared the Kingdom of God, and when he ascended, the early church put his vision into practice—a society of mutuality, where everyone had enough and no one was seen as undeserving.

This is how the Kingdom comes: when we see that people deserve care and compassion because they are worthy of it. And so are you.

So speak up to protect SNAP, and in the meantime, support local food banks like this one. And may we build a world where everyone matters and belongs—not by the measure of economic contribution, but simply because of our shared humanity.

This is how the Kingdom comes.

If this reflection resonated with you, you will probably appreciate how I explore these themes in my new book, Hell Bent: How the Fear of Hell Holds Christians Back from a Spirituality of Love.

It’s about reclaiming the Spirituality of Jesus, which was a way of love for the sake of this world, not escaping to the next. The Gospel is so much better than many of us were taught.

I appreciate your grace as I may be writing less during this tour, but here is a meditation on one of my favorite passages in the Bible—an iridescent text that calls us to live the life of the Spirit and imagine the world God dreams of.

These verses are the dream.
They are the kingdom come.
It’s this, or I don’t want it.

All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.
— Acts 2:44–45

Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.
— Acts 4:32

“CHRISTIAN REVIVAL ACROSS THE U.S.,” the Fox News banner declared.
And here was the evidence: Bible sales are up 41.6%, religious app downloads up 79.5%, and contemporary Christian music streams up 50%!

Revival indeed, according to all the relevant consumer metrics.
How do we know that revival has come—that the Spirit is at work? Can it be revealed by the products we purchase?

Acts 2 describes the moment of Pentecost—the O.G. revival.
Jesus has been crucified, resurrected, and ascended to heaven, but he does not leave the church alone—the Spirit falls on all flesh, from the least to the greatest.

What now?
Their first order of business is not worship nights or product placements for the evangelical industrial complex, but to sell their possessions and distribute wealth to those in need.

I remember the first time I read these verses with a level of political awareness, and noticed the similarities between Marx’s popular slogan, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” The parallel was difficult to ignore (in fact, many scholars trace the origins of this phrase to these very verses in Acts), and it caused me to wonder why the conservative Christian movement was so vehemently opposed to socialism when it seemed to draw its moral inspiration directly from scripture.

I asked my dad about this, and I remember his answer: “That was how the early church was supposed to live, but that’s not what the government is supposed to do. The church and the government are separate. The government is not supposed to take care of people—that’s what the church is for.”

I accepted this at the time, but over the years, the logic fell apart.

Jesus’ message was “the kingdom of God,” which was not about going to heaven when we die—it was a vision of God’s dream for the world. It was “good news to the poor” and “to set the oppressed free.” Jesus also said that he would “proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,” which was the Jubilee year.

The Jubilee year was an ancient biblical law when wealth and land would be redistributed, debts forgiven, and enslaved people set free. Some scholars have speculated that the people of Israel never actually followed through on the Jubilee year. The Bible scholar John Dominic Crossan says that “the Jubilee is not the year that was, or the year that will be, but the year that should be.”

The Kingdom of God is the great Jubilee—God’s dream for a world with no debts, no enslavement, no othering. A world where we see each other not as enemies but as neighbors to be loved in one human family. A world where those on the margins are brought to the center, because nobody is left out in God’s kingdom. A world that believes every person is worthy of daily bread—a world where everyone has enough.

Jesus announced the world as it should be, and when the Spirit falls, this is the world that comes to life in us—this is revival. And this rebellion of care and compassion cannot stay siloed within the walls of the church; this radical vision of communion is meant to change the world.

The church at its best has carried this vision. As a pastor, I experienced incredible care and nurture from my church community. When we had our twins, neither my wife nor I had family in town, but the church was our family. They brought us meals, threw a baby shower, delivered soup and diapers.

And yet, although I experienced the power of this community, the communion of our church left many people out. Queer people were expected to be celibate. If a woman felt called to lead or pastor, she was told she was out of line. I ultimately left this community because, as nurturing as it often was, it did not fully reflect God’s inclusive heart for all people.

For those of us who have been hurt by exclusionary communities, it can be incredibly scary to trust again. If you’ve made a break from high-control religion, you may have had to do incredible work to recover your sense of self.

Many of us were taught to abandon ourselves for the sake of community—to silence our desires, to obey without question. For the sake of our communities, we kept ourselves small.

Now, many of us have broken from these restrictive communities and have reclaimed our spiritual authority, discovering God in the very places within ourselves we were told did not belong. Many of us have vowed never to abandon ourselves in this way again.

Leaving that world was a necessary liberation, but it has left many of us with a problem: we are lonely as hell!

Many of us now have an instinct to refuse to put ourselves out for others, or be inconvenienced. We have learned to “protect our peace,” say “no,” and set boundaries. All well and good—saying no is an important skill.

But it’s possible we’ve missed the point. Boundaries in relationship exist to preserve ourselves for the sake of being able to engage more deeply in the relationship. They are meant to strengthen communion, not sever it.

It is good to learn self-protection, because we can’t build the beloved community without you—we need your authentic self. But neither will we get there if self-preservation becomes our highest goal. The goal of the Spirit is not cold autonomy, but beloved community.

When the Spirit falls, we will not abandon ourselves, but neither will we disengage from community. Fully alive, we bring the best of who we are to one another. We will hold each other as family. And not only spiritually, but materially.

Revival is economic, not because it’s measured in Bible sales, but because it’s measured in debts forgiven, the hungry filled, and everyone having enough.

Jesus said that his kingdom would be like a mustard seed—starting small and growing to change the world. But it starts with each one of us, being moved by the Spirit to loosen our grip. To no longer find safety in hoarding or in having more than others, but instead find safety in our communion and solidarity with one another.

This is the revival I long for.
May the Spirit fall on all flesh, until every debt is forgiven, every prisoner freed, and every person knows they belong.

That is the dream.
It’s this—or I don’t want it.

If prayer is challenging for you, perhaps you will find comfort from this simple breath prayer. Take a few moments to pause and breathe. Find your breath, and listen for God’s Spirit.

Inhale: I am beloved

Exhale: We belong to each other

Pause

Inhale: Spirit, bring revival

Exhale: Make us true family

If this reflection resonated with you, you will probably appreciate how I explore these themes in my new book, Hell Bent: How the Fear of Hell Holds Christians Back from a Spirituality of Love.

It’s about reclaiming the Spirituality of Jesus, which was a way of love for the sake of this world, not escaping to the next. The Gospel is so much better than many of us were taught.

This September, “Rapture-Tok” dredged up those buried memories. A group of Christians became convinced the rapture would happen on the 23rd. They rearranged their lives—selling cars, giving away pets—and broadcast their prepping online. Now, this was a fringe movement, and most Christians don’t set dates. Instead, they believe Jesus could return “at any moment,” as every generation has for two millennia (including the apostle Paul, who believed that Christ would return in his lifetime), especially during upheaval.

Forrest Frank, today’s biggest Christian music artist, recently released an earworm declaring, “Jesus is coming back soon.” Frank sings, “I can feel it in my bones, the day is coming close.” Conservative influencers echo that feeling. One said, “Evil and demonic presence in this country is at an all-time high… keep oil in your lamps.”

Many would agree that evil feels heightened. The president has declared war on American cities. ICE raids are tearing families apart. Yet for many evangelicals, it’s not the rise of fascism or the militarization of our cities that signals the end but perceived attacks on Christianity—claims of “trans shooters,” Antifa terror, and Charlie Kirk’s supposed martyrdom. When the country feels unstable, evangelicals instinctively make it about themselves. They expect persecution and calamity before Christ’s return, so when it arrives, rather than see it as an occasion for the work of justice, it compels them to circle their insular cul-de-sac, interpreting the crisis as proof of prophecy rather than as a summons to solidarity.

This reveals something deeper: evangelical spirituality is shaped by escape, passivity, and tribalism. I wasn’t taught to care about the planet’s future or humanity’s flourishing—this world was going to burn. Spirituality meant clinging to belief, often with the expectation of martyrdom, retreating into enclaves, and waiting for rescue.

This vision for spirituality is especially tragic in a moment of increasing authoritarianism, social fracture, and injustice, because rather than challenging the systems that create these conditions, they engage in spiritual bypassing—saying things like, “Of course things are getting worse, Jesus is coming back soon.”

But things aren’t really “getting worse” for white Christians. They are getting worse for Black and brown people, immigrants, and queer people—especially trans people, who are being scapegoated more than ever before. But instead of joining in the work of justice, evangelicals look for an escape hatch.

Instead of saying, “The world is hurting—we can be the balm, the restorers of the breach, the defenders of the weak,” they cling to a version of Jesus who will swoop in to fix everything without demanding any systemic change.

But what if nobody is coming to fix this? What if that’s what the work of spirituality was always supposed to be about?

Two Alternate Visions

This escapist vision has shaped much of modern evangelical spirituality: a faith that waits to be rescued rather than participating in God’s redemptive work here and now. But it’s not the only way Christians have understood the return of Christ.

Across history and traditions, many have envisioned Christ’s coming not as a dramatic exit strategy but as a call to deeper engagement with the world—a hope that doesn’t retreat from injustice but meets it with love and active solidarity.

Two visions, in particular, have shaped my own imagination: Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of the Beloved Community and Andrew Sung Park’s interpretation of Christ’s continual coming. Both offer a striking alternative to the passive, tribal eschatology I inherited, and they invite us into a far more participatory story.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s Vision: The World House

Unlike evangelical views that imagine history culminating in a cataclysmic Second Coming, Martin Luther King Jr. saw God’s justice unfolding through human participation in history. For King, the return of Christ was not about escaping this world, but about this world being transformed by divine justice breaking in through human action. He often invoked the line, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

King hoped that God’s justice would prevail not through a sudden, otherworldly intervention, but through God’s love taking root in human hearts and communities. Like the mustard seed, he believed the Beloved Community would grow as justice flourished. His frequent citation of Amos 5:24—“Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream”—underscored his conviction that divine justice requires human participation.

His eschatological vision wasn’t of a disembodied heavenly mansion that God would whisk believers away to, but of what he famously called the “world house.” He wrote:

“We have inherited a large house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together—black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu—a family unduly separated in ideas, culture, and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.”

King’s eschatology was neither passive nor detached from the present. It focused not on the fate of individual souls, or even just on Christians, but on the fate of the whole world. He called believers to participate in bending the arc of history toward justice. The Beloved Community—the world house—was not a utopian dream deferred to the afterlife. Nor was it a tribal vision for Christians alone. It was a vision of global unity that demanded action now.

Andrew Sung Park’s Vision: Christ’s continual coming

Andrew Sung Park is a Korean American theologian whose work focuses on racial reconciliation and the marginalized experience. While King’s eschatology looks toward a future realization of justice and community, Park reinterprets the Second Coming as an ongoing event, not a single future occurrence.

He asks, “Can we see the continual coming of Christ in the form of the least among us?”

According to Park, Christ is already here and has come not a second time, but again and again—if we only have eyes to see him. Christ appears especially in the places where we are least likely to look. Referring to the racism he sees in his own culture, Park observes that “for Korean-Americans, Christ appears in the form of African Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Native Americans, and any oppressed groups.”

Rather than viewing the Second Coming as an apocalyptic event, Park argues that it unfolds whenever justice is enacted: “The second coming will arrive through the coming of the oppressed.” This means it will not happen as long as we retreat into bubbles of whiteness or even Christianity—but when we stand in solidarity with the marginalized.

Park writes, “Parousia is not the end of the world, but the beginning of a new world. We need more people to usher in the parousia, not just wait for it.” Parousia—the New Testament word for Christ’s “coming” or “arrival”—is usually imagined as one future event. Park reframes it. For him, parousia is God’s liberating presence arriving again and again through acts of justice and solidarity.

For Park, the task is not to watch the horizon for a Second Coming, but to notice where Christ is already arriving—often in hidden and overlooked places, among those we might ignore or despise. Every generation of Christians has believed that Christ would return in their lifetimes—Park suggests, maybe they’re all right. Maybe Christ comes back in all of our lifetimes, if we have eyes to see.

I find Park’s vision especially helpful when the “arc of the universe” seems to bend away from justice. When Donald Trump was elected for a second time, many social-justice-oriented Christians had a reckoning that shook their faith: what if the moral arc moves backward as often as it moves forward? Even if that’s true, Park reminds us that Christ’s coming can still be encountered in the least among us and wherever justice is enacted.

Conclusion

These two perspectives challenge the evangelical spirituality of escape, passivity, and tribalism. Salvation is not about securing a place in heaven while ignoring the burning injustices of this world—it’s about joining the movement of liberation here and now. Spirituality is not for some distant world; it’s for this one.

Keeping oil in our lamps doesn’t mean retreating into enclaves and waiting for Jesus to redeem our tribe. It means rolling up our sleeves and learning how to love our diverse human family—how to live together in this world house—before it’s too late.

If this reflection resonated with you, you will probably appreciate how I explore these themes in my new book, Hell Bent: How the Fear of Hell Holds Christians Back from a Spirituality of Love.

It’s about reclaiming the Spirituality of Jesus, which was a way of love for the sake of this world, not escaping to the next. The Gospel is so much better than many of us were taught.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
—Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

It was one conversation that turned my world upside-down.

It was 2020, and I was on a weekend getaway with my wife just as the COVID pandemic was beginning to recede. I was still an evangelical pastor, and had recently preached a sermon about systemic racism—and the backlash was swift. Wealthy white men in their 70s sent me Candace Owens and John MacArthur videos. I met them for lunch to hear them out, and had to restrain myself from grabbing them by the shoulders and screaming, “WHY ARE YOU SO RACIST?!”

I was tired. After months of Zoom church, we were finally returning to in-person services.
My wife and I had taken a much needed retreat to the mountains of Asheville, NC to find our center, so that we could come back strong. But I didn’t want to go back at all. It became unignorable. I turned to my wife in bed and said, “I think I need to quit. We can’t challenge these people in the way they need. This system is broken. We need to get out.”

These were words that I had long been terrified to say, and once they escaped my lips, there was no taking them back.

That’s the thing about facing a truth you’ve been avoiding—once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Opening Pandora’s box is frightening because there’s no closing it back up. That conversation set us on a trajectory I couldn’t predict or control, with 1,000 painful moments along the way. Deconstruction meant the loss of friendships and my church community. It ultimately led us to divorce.

And yet, I wouldn’t change it—because it was honest.
The truth will set you free. And I can say with full integrity that I have never felt more free, more authentic, more myself than I do today.

I want that for you too. I hope to be a companion on this path. Pain is inevitable, but you must know, dear reader—you are not alone. You are seeing what so many of us are seeing.

My book, Hell Bent, comes out tomorrow, and I hope it becomes that moment for some of you—a moment of clarity, of opening the box you know must be opened, despite the cost.

One of the greatest control mechanisms keeping us from opening that box is hell. The fear of punishment has kept so many from embracing an authentic spiritual journey. For many of us, it is in the very foundation of our relationship with God.

I know it was for me.

I learned about hell when I learned about God.
One of my earliest memories is of getting “saved” in my dad’s pastoral office. It’s fuzzy, and it may not have been the first time I got saved—because before memory even began, I was told of my sin that made me worthy of hell, and of a holy God who could not stand to be near sinners.

Over the years, little Brian got “saved” countless more times—just to be sure, because when the stakes were as high as hell, I could never be sure enough. Even if your fear didn’t run as deep as mine, it’s still likely that your mental model for God was also rooted in punishment.

So who did I write this book for? First, for myself—for that five-year-old kid who met God in fear. Even after moving away from that picture of God, I still needed a book like this.
Because it’s one thing to get out of fear-based religion. It’s another to get fear-based religion out of you.

For those of us raised to believe we needed saving from God’s punishment, fear shaped our very understanding of who God was. My journey has been discovering that this was never what spirituality was supposed to be about. And that’s my hope for you as well.

I still call myself a Christian, but my book isn’t about keeping anyone from leaving the faith. If Christianity has wounded you, leaving may be exactly what you need. I want you to step into these decisions with honesty and courage, unhindered by fear.

But fear doesn’t have to have the last word in your relationship to Jesus—not if you don’t want it to. Even if you no longer call yourself a Christian, I wrote my book for you too. “God” and “Jesus” are too big to be owned by fear. I refuse to let the morally vapid religious block that gave us Donald Trump define who Jesus is for me. Not anymore.

Still, my hopes go beyond helping people deconstruct a toxic doctrine. I have a deep love for Christianity. Against my better judgment, I even still love Evangelicalism. These were my people for so long. Watching them get swept into nationalism and cave to their darkest impulses has been painful. I long for them to be better—to get free.

I have faces in mind. Kind people from my past, trapped in the belief that those who are different from them are going to hell.

That superiority is a hell of a prison.

The evangelical gatekeeping machine makes it difficult for a book like this to break through, but I still long for it. I’d love to see American Christianity focus less on saving and converting their neighbors, and more on loving them.

Hell has robbed so much from us—and I’m not okay with it. I’m ready to fight back.
I want my spirituality back. I want Jesus back. The world could certainly use a few billion people deeply imitating Jesus—the one who centered the marginalized, loved the poor and outcast, and made love the center of it all. Instead, we have billions obsessed with being right and dominating others. That’s not the spirituality of Jesus. That’s the spirituality of hell.

We know the phrase, “there’s no hate like Christian love.” That’s really fucking sad, because nobody loved like Jesus. Hell has robbed us of the love that was right there for us. But I believe that love is still right there for us.

At the heart of it all, I hope you come to find your beautiful, beloved self. True spirituality is not the loss of self. When Jesus calls us to “die to ourselves,” it’s the false selves that die—the superiority complexes, fear tactics, and control mechanisms that keep us from discovering who we really are. Those must die, and I want to help you kill them. I want to help you open Pandora’s box. Hell makes it frightening, but authenticity is waiting for us, and I promise you it’s worth it.

Tomorrow, Hell Bent makes its way into the world—and my hope is that it becomes a part of a new conversation that gives us back our voices, our faith, and our beloved selves.

If you want to go on this journey together, I hope that you will order Hell Bent. I do not take this lightly, and I am honored to be trusted to join you in something as precious as your spiritual journey. But I want to assure you—my goal is not to tell you where to land, or what to believe. My goal is for you to reclaim your spiritual authority, your freedom, your self-trust, and your ability to discern for yourself—apart from fear and control. My goal for us all is love.

PS: Don’t forget to download the free study guide, which is perfect for personal journaling/reflection as well as for group discussion or book clubs!