Some of you have known my voice since the summer of 2020, when I stood against the leftist mob that formed after George Floyd’s death. I was standing against that mob long before anyone was listening, for most of my adult life. And when this new movement on the right first stirred, I named it early, and the men I had labored beside to defang the left now called me crazy for it. Far be it from me that my voice remain silent now.

Several of you have asked me to respond to a particular post and the men behind it. I’m not going to. Not because I fear the argument, but because a debate is the one thing they cannot lose. Controversy is how they eat. Put my name beside theirs, and I’ve fed them whatever I say.

I’d rather talk about the men they are actually reaching. Not the ones whose names trend, but the nineteen- and twenty-five-year-olds who found these voices months ago and felt, for the first time, that someone had named what they were carrying.

These men start with something true. A young white man today is told to apologize for things he never did. His color gets read as an original sin. His manhood is a defect, his faith a bigotry to be managed. He watches courtrooms, and corporations size him up as guilty on arrival. This contempt is no figment; anyone who swears it doesn’t exist is lying. I understand the relief of finally hearing it named.

Subscribe now

But I am not naming it from across the room. To some degree, you can sum up the past five years they’ve endured in a simple phrase: “Welcome to my side of the street.”

The offer these young men received came to me first, years ago, from the other side. As a black man in America, I never had to hunt for the victim story. It was the air in every room I came up in. At the holiday table, everyone understood the rule before anyone spoke it, and I knew which side I was supposed to take. At the barbershop, the talk drifted from sports to politics and landed, every time, on some version of, “You know how they are.” Nobody had to say who they meant; they always meant white people. The same lesson came in debates on public policy, and that ran in one direction only: the reflex that read crime as a wound of racism and the courts as one more machine white men built to keep a black man down. Sadly, the same impulse reached the church basement, too, which should have known better.

I knew that script cold because everyone around me was reciting it, and reciting it back was the easiest way to belong. I could have let my skin color do my thinking and never lacked for an amen. Instead, I turned it down. Refusing cost me what conforming never would, and the steepest part of that bill came due among my own: Uncle Tom, Jiggaboo, sellout, race traitor, the black face of white supremacy, and more that I wouldn’t dare put in print.

So I know this machine from the inside. What these men are selling is not a new animal. Mine came from the barbershop and the family table; theirs comes through a screen, and only the classroom has changed. It starts the same way, with talk that finally puts into words what a man has been feeling on the inside but is afraid to say out loud. But grievance is a bottomless pit. You cannot fill it. You only feed it. And feeding it means the targets must stay fresh, and the anger has got to stay hot. So the story darkens. The excuses multiply, the enemy list keeps taking in new names, and a movement that opened by naming real wounds ends up shrugging at Nazism because a grievance that ever stopped escalating would have to admit it was never hunting justice. None of that is hypothetical. Earlier this month, a publisher of Hitler’s speeches kept a booth at one of the movement’s largest conferences. When it was named for what it was, the men running it went on their own podcast and would not call it evil. They apologized only for a flyer handed out against the rules.

That is what these men have done. They took a true wound and handed back the lie I’d long refused. The catechism that called the white man history’s villain now calls him its victim. The same altar, a different idol kneeling on it. The young man never walked out of the room. He was only turned to face the other wall.

This is where they will say I have overshot, so let me be careful. Loving one’s own is not the sin. A man is right to love his family before strangers and his own people with gratitude, and Scripture tells him to provide for his household first. That instinct was not planted by the fall; it was planted by God. When these men speak of natural affection, for a moment, they are standing on real ground. The lie is in what follows. A love kept under God is a gift. The same love, lifted to the highest place, is the oldest idol there is. C.S. Lewis drew the line cleanly: love of one’s own people is good, right up until it hardens into pride and asks to be worshipped, and the moment it does, it turns against the very God who gave it. That is the line these men crossed. They took an affection made to sit under heaven and set it on the throne until a man’s blood decides his worth and the brother across the color line becomes the enemy. The young man was never asked to stop loving his people. He was taught, somewhere along the way, to kneel before them.

Here is the tell. These teachers will rage, rightly, at the man who preys on a child. Ask them to say just as plainly that the man who worships his own race is wicked too, and the room goes quiet. They cannot finish that sentence because they have made blood the highest thing, and once a man’s blood is his god, he has given up the only ground from which racial pride can be judged. A teacher who names one evil but goes silent at its mirror image is not protecting anyone. He is protecting an idol.

Try raising that challenge with them and watch what comes back. Not an argument, a verdict. You’re effeminate or gay, or soft, or secretly a coward, and probably halfway to hell for asking. The question becomes the symptom and disagreement the one sin they cannot forgive. That should stop any thinking man, because the faith they claim to defend has never been afraid of a question. Paul rebuked Peter to his face.

Share

Notice, too, which way the words have been bent. Scripture calls gentleness and self-control the fruit of the Spirit; they call it effeminacy. Run that standard to its conclusion. The Christ of the Gospels called himself gentle and lowly in heart, and Paul wept over his churches like a nursing mother. By their own standard, their Savior comes out soft. An insult that would shame the Lord it claims to serve did not come from his house.

An older voice fought this war with better weapons than a podcast. “We are not waging war according to the flesh,” he wrote. “We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:3-5). Take every thought captive. He grants no exception for the flattering one a man keeps about his own kind, and I had to take mine captive, too. The frame is a stronghold, and the order is to tear it down, not to redecorate it and move in.

Here is what no grievance, left or right, can give a man. At the cross, the oldest ethnic hatred on earth was put to death. “For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility... that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace” (Ephesians 2:14-15). The blood that bought him bought a people out of every tribe and tongue, and made them brothers across the very lines these men would have him die defending. That is a belonging deeper than blood. It does not erase his manhood or the real wrongs done to him. It sets all of it under something that will not rot.

Over the decades, I have watched men reach the end of this road on both sides of it. It does not stop at posts and grievances. More than once, it has ended in blood, in a young man who took the rhetoric more literally than his teachers claimed to have meant it, and a manifesto reciting these same grievances in nearly the same order. The men who sell it disown the ending. Yet, the ending keeps arriving.

These men ask what it takes to be a man again. Good question, bad answer. A man is not measured by how loudly he names his tribe’s enemies. The strongest man on the field takes the blow from the left for refusing its lies and from the right for refusing its lies, and he bows to neither, because his knee is already bent before someone higher than any flag. I know what that costs, and I know there is no other ground worth standing on. It is the only ground the cross has ever held.

Leave a comment

So what does the angry young man like this need? Not a debate he can forward. He needs a real church, with elders who will learn his name and tell him the truth to his face. He needs his hours in Scripture to outrun his hours in their feeds. His anger at real injustice should be honored, not mocked, while his idols are named for what they are. And before the frame hardens, he needs someone close enough to see it happen. Not a stranger online. The believer already standing next to him.

So to those of you who asked me to take these men on directly, this is my answer. I won’t fight a wolf for the flock’s entertainment. I would rather feed the sheep until the bait loses its pull. The young man you’re worried about has not left the room. He only turned to face a different wall, and from inside the frame, he cannot find the door. You are standing where he is not. Go and show him the way out.

Join the Mission

I publish here regularly, working through the questions the culture keeps pressing on the church, including the ones we would rather not face. Most of what I write stays free, because some of it is meant to travel.

The Inner Circle is where the deeper work happens. It isn’t a feed of hot takes or a place to collect outrage. It’s a place for honest conversation and unhurried reflection, the slow kind of formation that leaves a reader harder to deceive. If this piece met you where you are, that’s where we go further.

Free keeps you thinking. Paid takes you deeper.

If you’re new here, subscribe. And send this to the young man you’re worried about.

Subscribe now

Writing produced by the author, with limited use of digital tools for editing and clarity.

A Georgia school district is investigating its superintendent for bias. The real charge is that she married a man who said God made us male and female. Full disclosure: that man is my friend, and I have been a guest on his podcast.

In Decatur, Georgia, a school board has hired an outside investigator to examine its superintendent for bias. Strip away the procedural language, and you find something older underneath: a household on trial for the convictions of the man one of them married.

Dr. Gyimah Whitaker recorded a podcast at a studio her husband, Jason, owns. That raises a fair question about money, and I will come back to it, because honest people do not flinch from a clean audit. But the money is not what brought the cameras to town. Jason Whitaker hosts his own podcast, on his own time, and on it, he said something a progressive city has decided no one may say. On July 16, 2022, he wrote, “God made man and woman.” His critics add that he has spoken about Islam in ways they find offensive.

Subscribe now

Let me tell you what the news will not. Jason Whitaker is my friend. I have supported what he is building, prayed for his family by name long before his wife became a headline, and talked with him about this very mess. So read me as a man with a stake, not a bystander at a safe distance. Weigh what I say knowing that.

A community with no power to hire Jason or fire him has reached instead for the one person it can touch, the woman who shares his name and his table. The conviction belongs to him, and the cost is being routed to her.

The mechanism deserves a name. Guilt by association treats nearness to a belief as proof you hold it. You buy coffee from a company that funds causes you reject, and someone decides your receipt is a confession of faith. The local editorial runs the same logic without blinking, calling the officials who appeared on the superintendent’s podcast “permanently connected” to her husband’s statements.

I am not speculating about that. I have been a guest on Jason’s podcast more times than I can count, and I have publicly backed what he does. I have never once set foot in the Marietta studio at the center of all this. By the logic now running in Decatur, that does not matter. The headphones alone make me a carrier, convicted the moment I agreed to come on. If association is guilt, hand me my sentence. I will be in good company.

Her case runs deeper than a coffee receipt, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. She did not patronize a stranger’s business. She married the man. The accusation is not that she bought something from someone with an embarrassing opinion. The accusation is that she goes home to him. Hold that against your own life. Imagine losing your job because your spouse holds a conviction your employer finds offensive, one you have publicly said you do not share. That is the standard Decatur is reaching for.

Scripture closed this door a long time ago. The son does not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father the guilt of the son (Ezekiel 18:20). Each one dies for his own sin (Deuteronomy 24:16). And if association were guilt, the church would have to throw out its own Lord. The religious experts had a charge they thought devastating: “This man receives sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:2). They counted every shared meal as evidence against him. The God we worship was prosecuted by association. A Christian, of all people, should know this move on sight and refuse to run it on anyone.

Share

Now look at what my friend actually said. He said God made us male and female. That is not a slur. It is the first chapter of the Bible (Genesis 1:27) and the answer Christ gave about marriage (Matthew 19:4). Here is what the outrage cannot afford to notice. The same verse that says God made them male and female says he made them in his own image. The doctrine behind Jason’s claim about men and women is the doctrine that commands him to honor the dignity of every neighbor the city says he despises. Dignity is not a wage you earn by agreeing with me. It is owed to people because of who formed them.

I have talked with the man. The Jason Whitaker I know does not hate his Muslim neighbors. He believes their religion is false, which is a different thing, and a thing every serious Christian has believed since the apostles. To call a religion false is a claim about that religion. To call a man a man states a fact about reality. Neither is contempt, and treating them as contempt is how you manufacture a heretic out of an honest man. Offense is not a trump card. A society that punishes a citizen for saying what he believes about God and creation, because the saying offends, has not risen above orthodoxy. It has swapped one orthodoxy for another and lost the honesty to admit it has one.

I have talked with Jason about the money, too. Let me state the allegation plainly, because the coverage keeps it vague. Dr. Whitaker used her husband’s facility to record a podcast, and the charge is that district money was paid to him for it. Everything I know, including what Jason has told me directly, says no district money was used. The investigation will land in the same place, and when it does, watch how fast the outrage migrates to a new charge. The money was never the point. This was never about a studio invoice. It is about leftist politics, and that politics has stopped behaving like policy and started behaving like a faith, a religion with a doctrine of the human person and a procedure for removing anyone who breaks it. Jason confessed a heresy against that religion when he said God made man and woman. His wife is being made to answer for it because the faith demands a sacrifice, and she was within reach.

Look at what the activists wear. The shirts carry a creed, the same litany you have seen on a hundred yard signs: pro-black, pro-brown, pro-queer, pro-trans, pro-Muslim, pro-science (right up until science speaks about male and female), and pro-choice. It is a confession of faith that you can order in a size medium. Read the whole creed, then notice the one line that never makes the shirt: “pro-Christian.” The religion that names itself “inclusion” keeps a list, and the Christian is the name left off it. The same coalition that wears pro-Muslim to the march is ready to end a woman’s career because her husband questioned Islam, and because he said aloud what the church has always confessed about men and women. They are pro every faith except the one on trial.

I know what I am doing by writing this. The moment it publishes, I am bound to Jason the same way the city is binding his wife, and someone will decide that defending him is the same as being him. I have felt the pull to avoid that before, the quiet urge to let a little daylight open between myself and a man the room had already chosen to punish, so none of it would land on me. That instinct is self-protection in the costume of prudence, and I have obeyed it more than once. I am refusing it here. Loyalty that waits for the verdict before it speaks was never loyalty.

I think about Tomeka, too, who reads every word I write before anyone else, and who would carry the weight of any conviction that ever cost me my seat at a table. She did not choose my positions. She chose me. If the world ever moves to bill her for what I believe, it is running the same play I am watching run against the Whitakers now.

Be fair to the critics, because not every hand raised in that city is running this play. Some have honest questions about spending, and former black residents of the Beacon Hill community want a historic site preserved. Those concerns deserve a hearing on their own terms. But the energy that turned a budget fight into a morality trial did not rise from a zoning dispute. It rose from a podcast.

So she should be supported, and I want to be precise about it. Support her against the creed test, against the demand that she prove the contents of her own heart and disown the man she married. Let the audit run, because the audit is not the injustice. The injustice is a town deciding that nearness to a Christian conviction disqualifies you, then dressing that decision in the language of equity.

Leave a comment

If you want to do something with this case beyond feeling vindicated, start close to home. Name the mechanism out loud the next time it runs in your own circle, when someone’s standing is suddenly at risk for the convictions of a spouse or a friend. Refuse to read a rented room or a marriage certificate as a confession of faith. I will keep praying for the Whitaker family by name, and I am asking you to do the same, because there are children in that house watching their parents get sorted into safe and unsafe. Then sit with the question that costs you something. Ask whether you have ever billed someone for a conviction that was never theirs, and whether you owe them a word you never said.

Join the Mission

This is the moment to stand with Sola Veritas.

I publish here regularly to give you biblical clarity in a collapsing world. But clarity alone isn’t enough — we need conviction, courage, and action.

Join the Sola Veritas Inner Circle for deeper formation, honest conversation, and the kind of community that goes beyond the surface.

Free keeps you informed. Paid forms you.

If you want to wear what you believe, visit the Sola Veritas Store for hoodies, jackets, mugs, and more. Every purchase fuels the mission and spreads the message.

Writing produced by the author, with limited use of digital tools for editing and clarity.

She was new, and I was patient with her, right up until the moment I wasn’t. You could tell she was training, because she touched every button on the screen like it might bite her, and I had the time that afternoon, so I gave it to her. I stood at the counter and watched her ring up my ticket, one slow tap at a time. Then I asked her for one thing. Do not charge the card on file, I said. Use the other account. She nodded like she understood me. She charged the card on file. When I pointed it out, she told me there was nothing she could do.

Something in me went cold and precise. I did not raise my voice because I have never needed to. I turned to the woman training her and said, in the warm tone of a man doing her a favor, that she clearly had her work cut out for her with this one, and that the next time I came in, I expected to be helped by someone who could follow a simple instruction from a customer who had been perfectly clear. Then I left. I walked out feeling like I had won. The message, I told myself, had been sent.

Here is what I did not notice for a long time. I never lost control in that store. I deployed it. The man in the drive-thru video screaming at a teenager over a cold order at least has the decency to look like what he is. I extend no one that courtesy, least of all myself. I do my damage at a conversational volume, in full command of my face, and I can take a person apart in a single sentence and walk away looking like the only reasonable adult in the building. We have a word for the man who yells. We are still hunting for the word for me.

Subscribe now

What makes my version so durable is that I am usually right. She did charge the wrong card. She could not undo it. I had been clear. Every fact stood at attention on my side, and that is precisely the trap, because being right is the perfect alibi. The man who is wrong eventually feels the weight of what he did. The one who is right gets to skip the trial entirely, and I almost always believe I am the one who is right. I walked out of that cleaners with a clean conscience, and a clean conscience over a thing like that is not innocence. It’s anesthesia.

I have started seeing the same alibi everywhere. The man losing it at the counter is certain he was provoked. So is the kid who feels cornered with nowhere to put his fear. So was I, at my tidy little counter, with my tidy little verdict already written. Provocation feels like permission. It is the oldest story we tell ourselves, and it runs the entire range, from the man who screams to the man who only ever slips the blade in quietly.

Last week, I wrote that I could have been the teenager whose name became a national argument after a boy bled out at a track meet over something as small as where to sit. Some people thought I was reaching. I was not. I do not mean I am one bad afternoon from a body. I mean the root is identical, and only the ripeness and the weapon differ. He had a knife within reach and a few unrecoverable seconds. What I had was a sentence and a frightened trainee, plus all the time in the world to choose it. We were both certain we had been wronged. Only one of us got to drive home.

My wife was not at the cleaners that day, and part of me knows that is why it went the way it did. When Tomeka is standing beside me, and the cold thing starts to rise, the conviction lands in minutes. She does not have to say a word. I feel her there, and the alibi I can run for days on my own falls apart in the time it takes to sign a receipt. I would love to tell you that it’s because I am a humble man. The truth is heavier. Left alone with myself, I am still the man who sends the message and strolls out clean, and the verdict only comes quickly when there is a witness in the room who loves me enough to actually see me.

Share

We were never built to be our own judges. The heart that can justify itself will do exactly that, every time, and it will do it with footnotes and exhibits. God does not leave most of us alone with that heart. He sets people next to us whose faces accomplish in minutes what our consciences will not manage in weeks.

There is one courtroom, though, where my volume buys me nothing at all. The Judge there ruled long ago that the road from contempt to killing is far shorter than I want it to be, that the sneer and the stabbing grow from the same seed. He named my exact offense, not the raised hand but the demeaning word, the “You fool” aimed to shrink a person down to nothing (Matthew 5:21-22). In that room, “but I was right” has never once been a winning defense. The young woman at that register carried the image of the God I stand up and preach, and I took my sharpest gift and used it to make her feel like less than that. The sermon is over, and I am the congregation.

I never saw her again. I don’t know whether she kept the job, or whether my sentence was the one that finally cracked a long week, or whether she forgot me before her shift even ended. I don’t get to know. That is the bill for doing your damage and walking out the door. By the time conviction reached me, slow and late because no one I love was standing there to hurry it along, she was already gone, and there was no counter left to return to and no apology to slide across it.

Leave a comment

So the discipline I am after is not a softer voice. It is a sheathed one. The next time the perfect line is loaded and fully deserved and sitting right behind my teeth, the assignment is to let it die there. The harder version of that assignment is to become, when Tomeka is nowhere near the counter, the man I already am when she is. A mistake at a register is not worth a human being made in the image of God. I am slower to speak now, and warmer by the time I get there, not because I have arrived but because I have finally seen what I am capable of in a calm, reasonable voice. The message I sent that afternoon was never really to her. It was about me, and I have decided to stop sending it.

Join the Mission

This is the moment to stand with Sola Veritas.

I publish here regularly to give you biblical clarity in a collapsing world. But clarity alone isn’t enough — we need conviction, courage, and action.

Join the Sola Veritas Inner Circle for deeper formation, honest conversation, and the kind of community that goes beyond the surface.

Free keeps you informed. Paid forms you.

If you want to wear what you believe, visit the Sola Veritas Store for hoodies, jackets, mugs, and more. Every purchase fuels the mission and spreads the message.

Writing produced by the author, with limited use of digital tools for editing and clarity.

If you have watched the statements pour out since the Karmelo Anthony verdict and felt something between bewilderment and rage, you are not alone. You and I are on the same stoop, heads in our hands, asking the same question. How does a delusion this deep take root in an entire culture? I have spent days on that question, and I want to tell you where I finally looked up.

Jeff Metcalf slammed his fist on a courtroom table in McKinney and told the room what grief really is. People think it’s sadness, he said, but it isn’t; it is “pure unfiltered rage.” His son Austin was seventeen, an honor student and the MVP of his football team, and a boy the same age had put a knife in his chest at a track meet over a tent and a shove. If any man alive had earned that rage, this father had.

Then he did the thing the crowd outside the courthouse could not process. He forgave the boy who killed his son. He still affirmed the sentence was deserved, saying that “we’re all responsible for our actions,” yet he refused to “carry the rage, the hate, and that around” for the rest of his days. One grieving white father, one black teenager headed to prison, and a choice made in open court that no slogan on either side knows what to do with.

I keep circling those two moments in the same man, because the war inside Jeff Metcalf is the war I have been fighting in private all week. When the reaction poured in, the celebrities second-guessing the verdict and the officials blaming the jury, something in me wanted what the flesh always wants. Online, a dead seventeen-year-old had become a debating point, and I wanted the delusion answered with force. I have to tell you the truth about that hunger, because it is the same one, wearing my own face, that I have spent years naming in everyone else.

Subscribe now

So let me name it plainly, and let me start with someone who holds office. Hours after the sentence came down, Representative Jasmine Crockett used her podcast to call the verdict “evidence of a broken system” and to insist that Collin County “was not the county for a Black boy.” Then she set about proving the creed by rearranging the facts. She shrank the murder weapon on camera, asking, “Was it a switch? I don’t even know what he had,” and deciding, “You wouldn’t even think it’s a deadly weapon,” though the blade that opened Austin Metcalf’s chest was five inches long. She conjured a three-hundred-pound assailant who never existed, telling her audience that if “a 300-pound man is beating me,” then “I’m not limited to fists.” Metcalf weighed two hundred pounds and was, by the witnesses’ own account, unwilling to fight. He bled to death in the arms of his twin brother. A sitting member of Congress looked at all of that and concluded the boy holding the knife was the one in danger.

His lawyers filed a Batson appeal the next morning, arguing black jurors had been wrongly struck, and here I have to be careful, because this creed feeds on imprecision and I will not borrow its tools. The jury was not all white. It seated no black members, though it did include people of color, and the honest version of that grievance is narrower than the slogan it became. The man with the most standing to make this about race was the one who refused. From the witness stand, having just buried his son, Jeff Metcalf said the killing “was never about race or politics,” and then told the boy who did it, “what you did was to choose to make it about both.”

I know that creed from the inside, which is the only reason I can name it without contempt. There were seasons when the easy road of victimhood sat right in front of me, paved and downhill, and I understood its pull completely, because it asks nothing of you and it explains everything away. I could never lie down at night and rest in it. The story that I am owed, that my skin is a debt the world is obligated to pay, never once felt true, because it isn’t. To walk that road, I would have had to fall asleep on a lie about who God made me to be, and I could never get comfortable there.

Share

Ask the young man at the center of this how the promise paid out. Karmelo Anthony is nineteen now, sitting in a state facility northwest of Houston, sentenced to thirty-five years for a killing he admitted and a jury would not excuse. The creed told him his story would shield him. It handed him a cell. Even Metcalf’s father saw him more clearly than the congresswoman did, grieving over him as “that poor boy” while still affirming the boy got what he earned. The influencers needed a symbol; the father saw a soul.

Here is what I had to do with my own rage this week, the rage that wanted the delusion answered with a heavier hand. I took it to the only place it has ever actually been answered. When I demanded that something be done, the gospel reminded me that something was done, and something still will be. “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord” (Romans 12:19). The wrath I was ready to administer already has an owner, and it is not me. That one sentence is what stands between a man and the cell, or the coffin, that this whole story keeps manufacturing. The men filming beatings for applause and the man seething behind his keyboard are closer kin than either would ever admit, because both have climbed onto a throne that was never built to hold them.

The cross is the one courtroom where the books are not cooked. God did not wave off the murder of His Son with a lecture about historical context. He answered innocent blood with blood and poured out mercy in the same motion on the same afternoon, and neither justice nor mercy was cheated. That is why a grieving father can mean it when he says he will not carry the hate. Whether he could have named it that morning or not, Jeff Metcalf was standing in the long shadow of a Father who watched His own Son die and opened His arms to the killers anyway.

That shadow falls on every ethnic idol at once, mine included. The creed that says a black man cannot be guilty and the creed that says a black neighborhood cannot be trusted both die at the same altar, because the ground in front of it does not slope. “There is no distinction,” the text says, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:22-23). A man who has truly seen that cannot keep score by skin, because he has met the One in whom there is no Greek or Jew, no white or black, only “Christ is all, and in all” (Colossians 3:11).

Leave a comment

So here is the concrete thing, because I am done writing essays that only diagnose. If this verdict stirred something violent in you, in either direction, do not post it. Take it to the cross before you take it to the feed. Name the idol you were about to serve and put it to death there. Pray for the Metcalf family, who buried a son and laid down the rage anyway. Pray for the young man who will spend his best years in a cage, still believing he was wronged, unless someone reaches him with a truer story than the one that put him there. Forgive the way the only sufficient Forgiver has commanded, “as God in Christ forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32), and refuse, today, the religion that keeps promising to make your bitterness holy.

Join the Mission

This is the moment to stand with Sola Veritas.

I publish here regularly to give you biblical clarity in a collapsing world. Clarity is the beginning, not the end. The harder and better work is what we do with it, how we let it reorder our loves and reshape our lives.

The Sola Veritas Inner Circle is where that work happens. It is a space for honest conversation and unhurried formation, where we reflect together and let the truth we profess actually change how we live.

Free keeps you thinking. Paid takes you deeper.

If you want to wear what you believe, visit the Sola Veritas Store for hoodies, jackets, mugs, and more. Every purchase helps sustain the work.

Writing produced by the author, with limited use of digital tools for editing and clarity.

When Karmelo Anthony’s mugshot went around, a lot of people saw a killer. I saw a boy in a mask I used to wear. I know that face from the inside, because I built it myself once, in rooms that were never made for me, and I know the fear it hides. The distance between his story and mine has nothing to do with which of us was the better boy. It has everything to do with who was close enough to tell each of us the truth when the mask began to slip.

The night the mask slipped for him, a boy died. On April 2, 2025, at a track meet in Frisco, Texas, seventeen-year-old Austin Metcalf was stabbed in the chest and died in his twin brother’s arms. Karmelo Anthony, also seventeen, was charged. There is no real mystery about the act. By his own reported words to the officers, he was not merely alleged. He had done it.

Subscribe now

So, understand what the rallying actually is. His family’s spokesman, Dominique Alexander of the Next Generation Action Network, did not argue the boy was guiltless. He argued that the system gave Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny their self-defense, that Karmelo was owed the same, and he called the objectors racist bigots. Read that honestly. It concedes the knife and contests the courtroom’s standing to judge the hand that held it. The claim is not that he didn’t do it. The claim is that your courts are crooked, so they cannot call our son guilty. The fight gets lifted off the dead child and set on the institution, and once it lands there, the boy in the casket stops counting at all.

Here is what my own lane keeps missing. We learned to fear one abomination, the crooked judge who jails an innocent man. Scripture names a second in the same breath, and it weighs the same. “He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the LORD” (Proverbs 17:15). The mob that frees a guilty man for a cause stands exactly where the bribed judge stands. And the logic will not stay caged. If a court’s hypocrisy cancels its right to judge, there is no judgment left for anyone, and the next child bleeding out in a parking lot has no claim either, because his killer’s lawyer will say the same words. You did not expose the double standard. You dissolved the standard, and the ones who freeze in a world without one are never the men holding the microphone.

Then there is the father. Jeff Metcalf watched his son die, and when the cameras found him, he refused the script. He told Fox News the issue was a human being thing and not a race thing, said he had forgiven the boy who killed his son, and handed the vengeance back to the only One who can carry it without being poisoned by it (Romans 12:19). He stood where bitterness would have been understood and preached a better sermon than most of us manage on our best Sunday, while the men claiming to defend the boy spent their breath attacking him. One of them was building the kingdom of God out of the wreckage of his own heart. The other was building a brand on a grave.

Share

I cannot write this from a clean distance, because I have worn the mask the boy in Frisco was wearing. I know the pull to be the hard man in the white room, the bravado that announces itself precisely because it is hollow. The slang was borrowed, and it came from no block I ever lived on. It was a costume that performed hardness so I could survive a room I was never meant to be easy in. Underneath it was the same question every boy who wears it is asking: where is a black boy allowed to be at home?

So let me say the hard thing. I could have been Karmelo Anthony, and the distance is not better character. It’s a gift I never earned. My parents would not let me use my skin as a hiding place for bad behavior, and in their house, my sin was my own, never someone else’s injustice wearing my name. My father had a sixth-grade education and could barely read a page, and he never let a setback talk him into becoming its victim. He was up before light and at work, and he showed me what a man was instead of describing one. The church that raised me had every flaw you would expect, and it still held a line between right and wrong; it would not bend for whose side a man stood on, because the hour a people excuses a sin for the sinner’s tribe is the hour it begins to worship the tribe (James 2:9).

That is the only reason I learned the mask was a mask before it could harden into a face I would never take off. Karmelo knew it was an act, too. Look at the mugshot. That is not the face of a hard man who meant every inch of it. It is the face of a boy who went too far and knows it, with no one in his corner willing to let him say so.

So how does a frightened kid’s act become a corpse and then a cause? In the years since George Floyd, the culture threw out the very things that held me in place. Now, a generation receives the excuse my parents forbade as a birthright. My father’s refusal to be beaten by a setback is called naivety and sometimes betrayal. And the clean line my church guarded has been painted over with partiality, so that what was done matters less than who did it and to whom. The crowd behind Karmelo Anthony is no accident. It is the harvest of that abandonment, and it is doing to him the one thing no one was ever permitted to do to me. It is telling a scared boy that the mask is his real face.

So hear me, especially if this case stirred something in you that wants to fight. There was an era when a black man could not get an honest hearing in an American courtroom, and that history left a real scar. But that is history, not this morning’s docket. The claim that a Frisco jury cannot weigh a knife and a body without tipping the scale by skin is not the country we live in now, and a boy is being handed that claim as if it were. Dominique Alexander is not tending an old wound; he is selling a fresh lie on top of it, and he built a movement on the body of a child. When the verdict comes, he will be in the next city while your sons grow up in the world his argument makes, where a knife is one more word in an argument and a guilty verdict is only racism in a robe. The road that actually beats a corrupt system is the one Jeff Metcalf is walking, in the dark, with a limp. He can still call a killing a killing even though it cost him his son, and you cannot buy that authority by defending the indefensible. You earn it the way he is, by refusing to call evil good while the good thing bleeds in your arms.

So what do we do, those of us who claim Christ before we claim a cause? Stop letting the system is corrupt dissolve sin. A crooked system is real in places, and it is still no license to call a guilty man innocent, because two bent scales have never made a straight one. The next time a man on your side does something indefensible and the urge rises to explain it away because the other team is worse, name it instead, out loud, where it costs you. Raise children the way I was raised, forbidden to file their sin under someone else’s injustice and shown by a steady example what a man does with a setback.

Leave a comment

The crowd outside the Frisco courthouse believes it is standing against an unjust system. But you cannot answer one abomination by committing the other, and a people who lose the power to say wrong about their own have gained nothing. They have surrendered the one thing that ever made them a moral voice. Pray for the Metcalfs, who buried a son and chose mercy anyway. Pray for the Anthonys, who are about to learn that some of the men who swore to fight for them were fighting for themselves. And run the verse across your own heart before you aim it at anyone else’s, because the LORD who hates the crooked bench hates my crooked loyalties exactly as much (Proverbs 17:15).

Join the Mission

This is the moment to stand with Sola Veritas.

I publish here regularly to give you biblical clarity in a collapsing world. Clarity alone will not carry us. It has to become conviction, and conviction has to move.

Join the Sola Veritas Inner Circle. This is where the work goes deeper and slower: longer teaching, live conversation, and a circle of people being formed for the days ahead.

Free keeps you informed. Paid prepares you to stand.

If you want to wear what you believe, visit the Sola Veritas Store for hoodies, jackets, mugs, and more. Every purchase fuels the mission and spreads the message.

Writing produced by the author, with limited use of digital tools for editing and clarity.

Every man I know is climbing something. The ladder wears a different name depending on where you stand, but the motion is identical, hand over hand, toward a rung that always sits one higher than the one you just reached.

I spent years on that ladder before I ever stood behind a pulpit. My day started at the trunk of my car and a storage unit stacked with samples. I worked for Pfizer, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. I wore a business suit and a bow tie, and my trunk was packed with the best-selling drugs on the market: Celebrex, Lipitor, Zoloft, Viagra. My quota was $5.6 million. Three hundred physicians sat inside my territory, and the work was to rank them from highest potential to lowest, then run the list from the top down, win over the nurses and the front desk, get face time with the doctor, and ask him to write the script for a specific patient.

Subscribe now

Here is the part that tells you what the climb actually is. My competition was never only the reps from the other companies selling against me in the same drug class. My real competition wore the same logo I did. I was climbing over the people on my own team for the next promotion, and I was good at it. I told myself I was providing for my family. I told myself I was being faithful with what God had given me. Some of that was true. Most of it was cover.

The real cost did not show up on any quota sheet, and it did not surface for years. I have watched the same pattern run through man after man, and eventually through me. The higher you climb, the more the climb takes of your hours, until a man who never touches another woman still ends up in an affair. He is married to the company. He pours into the work the focus and the best hours that belonged to the people at home, and he cannot understand why his wife feels like a stranger and his children feel like an appointment. I was that man. What I called being driven for the sake of my family was an idolatrous affair with my own ambition, and I had wrapped it in the language of provision so I would never have to call it what it was.

The climb does something to a man, and it does it so slowly he never feels the switch get thrown. It takes the answer to one question out of God’s hands and slips it into his own. The question is the oldest one a soul ever asks, which is simply: who am I. Somewhere on the way up, the climber quits bringing that question to the One who made him and starts bringing it to his work. The title answers it for a while. The paycheck answers it louder. Then the answer wears thin, and he reaches for the next rung to hear it said again.

The younger man feels this as fire. He is going to make something of himself, he means it as a virtue, and the people around him rarely correct it because the culture has agreed to call it “drive.” The older man feels it as something he cannot set down. He has worn the title so long that he no longer knows what is underneath it, and the thought of retirement unsettles him in a way he will not say out loud, because the day the work stops is the day he has to meet whoever he became while he was busy.

It is not only a man’s struggle. For many women, the same idol simply changes its clothes and walks in as status, achievement held up as proof of standing, measured against the slower labor of building a household that no quarterly review will ever applaud. Building a family is work, hard and holy work. It runs on a different clock and pays in a currency the climb refuses to count, which is exactly why the climb keeps whispering that it does not really count at all.

Share

And the church too often blesses the whole thing. We baptize the ambition and rename the idol, calling it “stewardship” when a man cannot stop, calling it “excellence” when he sacrifices the very people he was given to keep. The word changes. The altar does not.

So we keep climbing, and the thing nobody warns you about is that reaching the rung does not quiet the question. It only sharpens it. You land the promotion, and the relief lasts until Monday. The number you finally hit quietly becomes your new floor. You stand on the rung you spent years reaching for, look up, and find another one waiting. The view from the top turns out to be a clearer look at how much farther there is to go.

Solomon climbed higher than any of us ever will. He built houses and planted vineyards. He gathered silver and gold, and he withheld from himself nothing his eyes desired (Ecclesiastes 2:4-10). Then he turned and looked hard at all of it. “Behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 2:11). That is the field report from the actual summit, filed by the one man with the means to reach it. A striving after wind. You can close your fist on it as hard as you like, and your hand still comes back empty.

The problem was never the work. God set the man in the garden to work it and keep it before sin had touched a single thing (Genesis 2:15). Labor is good, and ambition can be holy. The problem is the weight the climb hangs on the work. It asks a job to do what only God can do, to declare that you are worth something, and to settle the question of your name. No job was ever built to carry that load. So it buckles, you mistake the buckling for a motivation problem, and you climb harder to repair what climbing broke.

There is a way off the ladder, and it is not the ground floor of laziness. The man who quits climbing and calls his neglect “rest” has only swapped one idol for a softer one. The way off is not down. It is sideways, onto solid ground, where your worth was settled before you worked a single hour, settled by a God who calls you His before you produce one thing for Him. From there, the work changes register. It stops being the engine that makes you somebody and becomes the thing you do as somebody already made. You labor six days, and you lay it down on the seventh, not because the job is finished, but because you were never the one holding the world together (Exodus 20:9-11).

Leave a comment

That reordering is the whole question this study exists to answer, and I want to walk through it with you this summer. Starting Monday, June 15, I am opening a guided reading study for paid subscribers called Enough. We will read slowly, the way these books were written to be read, and each week I will hand you the distilled version along with commentary you will not find anywhere else. We will deal with the climb honestly, the fire in the young man, and the grip on the old one, and we will name what the same idol does to a woman when it trades the household for the scoreboard. Then we will put work back where it belongs, under the call of Christ and pointed at your neighbor instead of your name.

If you have ever stood on a rung you worked years to reach and felt the question grow louder instead of quieter, this study is for you. The climb will never tell you when you have done enough. Come find out where that word actually comes from.

It is early, and you have maybe fifteen minutes before the day takes you. You are scrolling, half-awake, and the feed hands you the images it knows will move you. Crowds in the streets of New York and Houston, in places that used to feel a safe distance away. Flags that are not the flag. A chant you do not recognize and do not want to. Something in you sharpens, because you have read enough to know exactly what to say. You could reach for Surah 9:29, or 47:4, the verses about fighting the unbeliever, and you could line them up against the woman in the hijab on your screen and frame her with them, and you know before your thumbs even move that the post would land. Your side would roar. The amens would arrive by the dozen before you finished your coffee.

I know that feeling well, because I have answered it more times than I want to admit. I have also learned to be suspicious of it, because of what it is actually offering me.

Subscribe now

Here is what I was never afraid of. I was not afraid of the woman in the hijab, and I was not afraid of being hated by the crowd in the street. I left the fear of their disapproval behind a long time ago, and I told myself that made me free. But the fear of man does not only show up as the dread of being rejected. It has a quieter form, and it is the one that hunts a man who is no longer afraid. It is the craving for your own side to cheer. The amen is applause from the people whose applause you have decided is safe to want, and the price of it, that morning, was a human being made in the image of God, flattened into a target so a feed would clap.

Now hear me carefully, because this is the part that is easy to misread. The ideology is real. I am not going to pretend that political Islam is a fever dream invented to frighten you, or that the texts I could have quoted do not say what they say. They are on the page. The ideology has to be named, and named plainly, and I have spent real work doing exactly that. But a verse on a page is an idea, and the woman on my screen is a soul, and the moment I take what was forged for the idea and fire it at the soul, I have changed wars without noticing. “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood” (Ephesians 6:12). Paul could not have been clearer about who the enemy is and who it is not. The enemy is the lie and the power standing behind it. The enemy is never the person the lie has captured, and the second I treat her as the enemy, I have started serving the very darkness I think I am fighting, and I have done it to be applauded.

This is why it is always easier to go after people than ideas. An idea does not flinch when you hit it, and it does not make your followers cheer. A person does both. So the lazy path, the flattering path, is to aim low and make the human being the villain, because the human being bleeds in public, and the crowd loves the show. It feels like courage. It is usually a man feeding his own need to be the one who said the devastating thing.

Share

I think of the man who did the hard version of this better than almost anyone I have known. Charlie Kirk could take an idea apart down to the studs, leave nothing of it standing, and still turn to the person who had been holding that idea and love them enough to put the gospel in their hands before they walked away. I had the privilege of knowing him, and the thing that struck me most was that the man off the stage was the same man who stood on it. The humility was not a costume he removed when the cameras stopped. His opponents sensed it, and it unsettled them, because the love was the thing that made him dangerous, not the debating. Anyone can win an argument. Almost no one can dismantle a position and leave the person more loved than they were found, which is the whole of what Peter asks of us when he tells us to make our defense with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15-16). Charlie carried that. And we know what it finally cost him, which is part of why I will not cheapen it by firing my words at people for sport.

So here is the discipline, and it is harder than the outrage it replaces. Be merciless with the lie and tender with the person the lie has taken. Want her at the table more than you want the amen. Remember that the aim of taking an idea apart is never to bury the one who held it but to free her, because Christ is the truth (John 14:6) and the truth was always meant to set a captive loose, not to win you a round of applause from people who already agree with you. The next time the feed hands you the easy target and the verse that would land, ask one question before your thumbs move. Are you aiming at what is false, or at who is made in the image of God? Are you after her freedom, or your own roar?

I should tell you plainly that I am not good at this yet. No one masters a thing like this from a single verse about it, and I am no exception. The clearest evidence is that it has slowed me down. On most mornings, there are a dozen things I could say, lines I know would land and bring the roar, and I am leaving more and more of them unsaid. Not because I have run out of things to say. Because I do not yet trust myself to keep the idea and the person separate once my thumbs start moving, and I know how easily the reward of collapsing the two and devastating both can drown out the slower work of winning one. What I am becoming good at, so far, is catching the pull before I obey it. The harder thing still in front of me is to live consistently in the light of what I have finally learned to see.

Leave a comment

The man who modeled this for my generation is gone, and the surest way to dishonor him would be to make him the point. He was following someone. Paul gave us the only kind of imitation that is ever safe. “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). Charlie carried the hammer and the hand because Christ carried them first and carried them perfectly, all the way to a cross where he disarmed every power that stood behind the lie and still turned in mercy to the dying man beside him. So when we take this up, the honor does not stop at Charlie. It runs through him to the One he was following. Be devastating to every lie that lifts itself against the truth, and gentle with every soul that lie has stolen, and you will not be polishing a man’s legacy. You will be following his Lord into the only war that was ever real. It was never against flesh and blood.

Join The Mission

I publish here regularly to give you biblical clarity in a collapsing world. If this caught you in a habit you had not named, share it with one person who fights the way you have been tempted to fight, and join the mission below.

Join the Sola Veritas Inner Circle for deeper briefings, behind-the-scenes intel, and live strategy roundtables that equip you for the battles ahead, the ones in the public square and the quieter ones at your own table.

Free keeps you informed. Paid prepares you for war.

Subscribe now

If you want to wear what you believe, visit the Sola Veritas Store for hoodies, jackets, mugs, and more. Every purchase fuels the mission and spreads the message.

Writing produced by the author, with limited use of digital tools for editing and clarity.

There is a question you are not allowed to ask in certain rooms, and I have learned over the years that the penalty for asking it has very little to do with politics. I wrote recently about a girl who shamed me for making the honor roll and taught me to hide the best of myself to keep my place in the group. The grown version of that lesson is everywhere now, and it runs deeper than party. We have made a religion of our politics, and you do not question a religion without being treated as a heretic. The loyalty has hardened into a kind of faith, and the party a person votes for has quietly become the thing he expects to save him.

So let me ask the heretical question and let the wreckage answer. What happens to a people who hand a prince the trust that belongs to God alone?

Subscribe now

The Reformers understood something about the human heart that our age has worked hard to forget. John Calvin described it as a perpetual factory of idols, a forge that never cools, always at work turning good things into gods. The prophet put it more bluntly. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). An idol is rarely an ugly thing. It is usually a good thing asked to do what only God can do, and few idols are more seductive than a political savior, because he arrives dressed in the language of justice and rescue and belonging.

This is the part you will want to dodge, so I will close the exit before you reach it. The idol is not a partisan possession. The progressive who believes the right party will at last deliver justice and the conservative who believes the right man will at last restore the nation are kneeling at the same altar in different clothes. Both have taken a hope that belongs in heaven and nailed it to a candidate. If you have already decided this essay is about the other side, you are the one it was written for.

Look at what the idol leaves behind where it has been served the longest, because the bill comes due in proportion to the trust. Take two cities where a single party has held nearly total power for generations, Chicago since 1931 and Baltimore since 1967, both majority-minority, both governed by the party that promised to be the people’s deliverer. The promise was believed, election after election, with a devotion most churches would envy. Here is what the devotion purchased.

In Baltimore, where roughly seven in ten students are black, state testing showed only about one in ten students proficient in math, and a few years back, Project Baltimore found nearly two dozen city schools where not a single student tested proficient in math at all. That came with a budget of over $1.5 billion and more than $21,000 per student. In Chicago, spending climbed 97% since 2012 while reading proficiency fell 63%, and an inspector general found the district spending millions on staff travel to destinations as far away as Egypt and Finland, in years when a South Side pastor was measuring reading in his own neighborhood at 6%. Two Baltimore mayors left office in disgrace, one of them for misusing gift cards meant for needy families. In Chicago, a single alderman held power for fifty-four years before a jury convicted him, and he was roughly the fortieth alderman convicted since the early 1970s. The people kept the faith. The prince kept the proceeds.

Now turn the mirror before you get comfortable. The man who stakes his peace on a national strongman, who tells himself one more election will finally turn the tide and hand back the country he grieves, has handed his hope to a son of man, too. Whether his prince governs better or worse than the other camp’s is a real question and an argument for another day. It is also beside the point standing here, because even a better prince cannot do the one thing this man is asking of him. He cannot save him. When his prince wins, the man is no less captive, only captive to a brighter mood, and when his prince fails him, and a prince always does, the disillusion lands just as hard. The idol disappoints its worshiper in the end. That is the one promise every idol keeps.

Share

I do not want to speak about the people buried under all of this as though they were an argument. They are the plundered, and Scripture will not let me discuss their plundering coldly. “Because the poor are plundered, because the needy groan, I will now arise, says the LORD” (Psalm 12:5). There is a grief that belongs here before any lesson does. Grieve the children robbed of their minds and the mothers who buried sons. Grieve the provision meant for the hungry that vanished into a pocket. And grieve too the quieter ruin on the other side of the aisle, the ruin of a man who poured his whole hope into a thing that was never able to carry it. Misplaced faith does not merely fail. It wounds the faithful.

And yet grief is not the whole truth about these people, and to stop there would be its own kind of insult. They are image-bearers, not children and not pawns, and image-bearers are moral agents who answer for what they choose. The deception was real at the start, and I do not doubt it. But a deception that survives decades of firsthand evidence, funeral after funeral, and failing school after failing school, slowly stops being something done to a people and becomes something a people are doing to themselves. Israel was told in plain terms how a king would take their sons and a tenth of everything they owned, and they looked the warning in the face and demanded the king anyway (1 Samuel 8). A people can do the same with a party. At some point, the cage door is no longer locked from the outside. It is being held shut from within, by hands that have grown used to the dark. To say so is not to pile on the wounded. It is to pay them the respect of believing they can still choose, which is the only ground on which anyone is ever free to walk out.

The cure is not a better prince. There is no candidate clean enough and no movement pure enough to bear the weight you keep trying to set on it, and the search for one is the idolatry, not the escape from it. “Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation” (Psalm 146:3). The Psalmist is not telling you to abandon the public square. He is telling you where salvation does not live, so that you will stop demanding it from an address that cannot supply it. “It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in princes” (Psalm 118:9).

Leave a comment

Here is the freedom waiting on the other side of that reordering, the same freedom the honor-roll boy went years without. When your hope is already secured in the only One who can hold it, no politician owns you, and no election can destroy you. You are free to throw yourself into the work of justice with open hands, because the result was never the thing carrying your soul. The man whose trust is rightly placed can labor in the fight harder than anyone, precisely because he is not enslaved to it. He can even ask the forbidden question without fear, since his hope was never riding on the answer.

The boy who hid his honor roll handed his identity to a room, and I told you that a room is a terrible god. A people can hand their salvation to a prince just as easily, and a prince is a terrible savior, for exactly the same reason. Both ask a created thing to do what only the Creator can do, and both leave the worshiper poorer than they found him. Get your trust in order, and the cage opens. You will still love your city and your country; you may well love them more, but you will no longer be owned by them, and you will finally be free to serve your neighbor instead of worshiping the man who promised to.

Join The Mission

I publish here regularly to give you biblical clarity in a collapsing world. If this named an idol you had not noticed you were serving, share it with one person on the other side of the aisle who needs to see their own, and join the mission below.

Join the Sola Veritas Inner Circle for deeper briefings, behind-the-scenes intel, and live strategy roundtables that equip you for the battles ahead, the ones in the public square and the quieter ones at your own table.

Free keeps you informed. Paid prepares you for war.

If you want to wear what you believe, visit the Sola Veritas Store for hoodies, jackets, mugs, and more. Every purchase fuels the mission and spreads the message.

Writing produced by the author, with limited use of digital tools for editing and clarity.

She came to Tulsa the way I had, carried in from somewhere that made the rest of us feel small. I had come down from upstate New York. She was from the city, and she wore it, the accent and the easy certainty that she already knew what was cool while the rest of us were still guessing. She said she was black and Puerto Rican, and whether that was the whole story or not, she carried it like a passport none of us thought to question. I was twelve, I was smitten, and within a week, I had decided that the distance between her world and mine was a problem I could solve.

So I went to work on myself. When my mother took me school shopping, I asked for the gear I had seen the cool kids wearing, the labels that told everyone you belonged. I started borrowing the girl’s slang and wearing the words around the house until they sounded less like a costume. For most of a semester, I made the kind of progress a boy measures in a glance, held a beat too long, or a laugh I was sure I had earned. I thought I was closing the gap.

Then the report cards came, and in our school, that was a public event. The honor roll students were handed a paper invitation in homeroom, a summons to a celebration in the auditorium, and every kid in the room knew exactly what those slips meant when they hit a desk. I waited for mine, and when it landed, I did what any twelve-year-old does. I looked up to see who else was holding one. The girl was not. Before the moment could turn into anything good, she looked at the slip on my desk and laughed out loud. “Oh,” she said. “You must be trying to be white.”

Subscribe now

A semester of work evaporated between her words and the bell. Everything I had bought and borrowed was gone, and I understood, with the speed only humiliation can teach, that I had been measuring the wrong thing the whole time. The gap had never been the clothes or the slang. The thing that disqualified me was the slip in my hand, the proof that I was good at school, and good at school had just been translated for me, out loud and in front of everyone, as a betrayal of my own people.

I was a quick study, and that was always the problem. From that day forward, I carried my grades like contraband. I loved to read, and I loved to write. I would finish something and feel a light come on inside me, and I taught myself to put it out before anyone could see it, because I now knew what it cost to let it burn. The lesson did not stay in the classroom. I learned to keep two voices, one for the auditorium and one for the block, and to know without thinking which room called for which. I told myself this was survival. I would not have used the word "performance" because performance was the very air I breathed, and you do not notice the air.

Here is the part I have carried longest, and the part I am only now willing to say plainly. The boy who learned to hide that he loved words grew into a man who cannot live without them. I write for a living. I teach, and I preach. I have spent my adult life doing in public the very thing a twelve-year-old girl shamed me into hiding, and she did it in an afternoon, with three words, over a slip of paper she had not earned herself. That is what the cage takes from you. It does not announce the theft. It convinces you to hand over the best of what God put in you, and to feel cool while you do it, and to call the handover “loyalty.” I buried my calling to win the approval of someone who could not pass the test she mocked me for passing. It took me years to understand that I had not lost a competition that day. I had volunteered for a cage.

Sit with the lie folded inside her sentence, because it is still doing its work in a million homerooms. The lie says that excellence belongs to white people, and that for a black child, faithfulness to his own means staying small. It is a brilliant lie, because it needs no enforcer. It recruits the very children it intends to keep down, and it teaches them to police one another, so that the brightest among them learn to dim themselves before any outside hand ever reaches for the switch. A people that teaches its children to bury their gifts will do to itself what no enemy could accomplish from the outside. The cruelty of it is that everyone involved believes they are protecting something.

Share

What I could not have named at twelve I can name now. I was afraid, and I built my whole young life around managing that fear. “The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the LORD is safe” (Proverbs 29:25). The snare is not dramatic. It is a slip of paper on a desk, a girl’s laugh, and a quiet decision made a thousand times after that to be less than you are, so a room will keep you. Paul asked the one question that ever cuts the cord. “For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ” (Galatians 1:10). I spent a long time seeking the approval of rooms that were never going to save me.

If I could get back to that homeroom, I would not tell the boy to be braver. Bravery was not his problem. I would tell him who he was, in the right order, because everything else runs downstream of that. He was first an image-bearer of the living God, made on purpose and stamped with a worth no classroom assigns, and no girl can revoke (Genesis 1:27). If he came to Christ, and he would, then the verdict that governs a life had already been spoken over him, and no auditorium and no corner could overturn it. He was a son and a brother. He was a boy who loved words, and that love was not a defect to be hidden but a gift to be spent. His color was true and good, and the last thing on the list, never the first. The day he got that order wrong was the day he handed the keys of his identity to a room, and a room is a terrible god. It changes its mind every semester, and it never tells you the new rules until you have already broken them.

You have a homeroom, too. Maybe it is not a classroom now. Maybe it is a comment section, a profession, a friend group, a crowd whose approval you are still quietly buying with pieces of yourself. You know which room it is, because you can feel the small editor in your chest that decides what to show and what to hide before you ever open your mouth. Here is what I would tell you, having paid for the lesson at full price. Stop putting the light out. Do the excellent thing and let it be seen, speak in your own voice in every room, and let the rooms that cannot bear the sound of it walk away from you. Refuse to translate your gifts into someone else’s idea of who your people are allowed to be. The approval you are chasing will not save you, and the One whose approval already rests on you in Christ has set you free to stop auditioning. The boy in that homeroom believed he lost something the day he finally stopped hiding. He gained the only thing that was ever his to keep.

Leave a comment

I publish here regularly to give you biblical clarity in a collapsing world. If this finds you in a room you have been performing for, share it with one person who needs the same permission, and join the mission below.

Join the Sola Veritas Inner Circle for deeper briefings, behind-the-scenes intel, and live strategy roundtables that equip you for the battles ahead, the ones in the public square and the quieter ones at your own table.

Free keeps you informed. Paid prepares you for war.

Subscribe now

If you want to wear what you believe, visit the Sola Veritas Store for hoodies, jackets, mugs, and more. Every purchase fuels the mission and spreads the message.

Writing produced by the author, with limited use of digital tools for editing and clarity.

I have not written about politics in weeks, and the silence has been deliberate.

I still tape Fearless with Jason Whitlock every week, where current events are unavoidable, so it is not that I stopped paying attention to the world. I stopped letting the attention point only outward. For most of my life, the easiest place to spend my focus was on what some man in Washington was doing wrong. The hardest place to spend it was on me. So I have been giving less of myself to the latest move on the political board and more of myself to a harder question: whether the man writing about everyone else is still willing to be written about by God.

Scripture does not treat that question as optional. We are told to examine ourselves, to test ourselves, to see whether we are in the faith (2 Corinthians 13:5). And every time I actually obey that command, I run into the same discovery. Apart from disciplining my life toward the things of God, my attention will not sit still. It goes looking for somewhere else to live. It hunts for another idol to embrace.

Here is how ordinary it is for me. I sit down to study for a talk, and an hour later, I have reached the bottom of a feed with nothing to show for it, telling myself I was only taking a break. I open a listing for a car I will never be able to afford and lose half a morning comparing trims and colors on a vehicle that exists only in my imagination, telling myself there is no harm in looking. And then there is the one that exposes me most. I open my Bible to read, and within a paragraph, my mind is three rooms away, drafting the day’s to-do list, anywhere but on the page in front of me. The Word is open. I am not.

Subscribe now

My justification is always the same, and it is always reasonable. None of these things is sinful. There is nothing wrong with a short break or a car I will never buy. And that is exactly the problem. The most effective idol is never an obvious one. It does not announce itself as rebellion. It wears the face of something harmless, because a harmless thing slips past the conscience without a fight. The deceitful heart does not reach for what is plainly evil. It reaches for what it can justify. So the issue was never that I lost an hour, though I did. The issue is what I was doing with the hour, which was building a small, respectable shelter where it felt as though God could not look at me, and I did not have to look at myself.

It is the oldest reflex we have. The first man sinned, and the first thing he did was hide himself among the trees (Genesis 3:8), as though leaves and shade could put him beyond the sight of God. They could not. The voice still came walking, and it still asked where he was. We have been building shelters ever since, and not one of them has ever worked.

That is the discovery that took me longest to accept. Stepping back from politics did not cure me of anything. The moment I set the political costume down, the same impulse simply reached for a new one. Politics was never the disease. It was only the costume the disease wore in public.

Scripture will not let me locate the trouble out there. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). The problem is not that I keep choosing bad hiding places. The problem is that I am the kind of creature who is always looking for one. Calvin said it without mercy: “Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols” (Institutes 1.11.8). The factory does not specialize. It will manufacture whatever keeps my eyes off my own soul, and it never closes for the night.

For some of us the product is politics. For another it is work, where a man buries himself in achievement so he never has to sit alone with his own soul. Plenty of us reach for something more respectable than that. Devotion to family can become its own altar, where pouring yourself into your children turns into the reason you never examine your own walk with God. Even theology can serve the purpose, that strange capacity to study holiness as a subject while resisting it as a demand. The factory will gladly retool itself to produce ministry, until the platform built to serve God becomes a way of hiding from Him in plain sight.

Share

The costumes change. The factory stays the same. No amount of smashing one idol will shut it down, because by morning, it will have built another.

The one tool that could expose the whole operation is the very one we keep pointing the wrong direction. The Word of God was never meant to be a telescope aimed at my enemies. It is a mirror, and mirrors are merciless. James says the man who hears the Word without obeying it is like someone who studies his face in a glass, then walks away and forgets what he looks like (James 1:23–24). That cuts against the grain of our age, because we are surrounded by people who consume truth as information while resisting it as transformation. They know everything wrong with the world. They have never once let truth undo them.

If the heart is a factory of idols, then the answer was never going to be a sharper argument or a stricter discipline. You cannot argue a factory into closing. The idol factory falls silent in only one place, when the heart that built it is captured by something greater than anything it could manufacture. A man stops fashioning substitutes for God when he has finally seen God Himself. The cross does what willpower cannot. It does not merely shame the idol. It dethrones it, by giving the heart a treasure it no longer needs to counterfeit.

So this is where the cycle has to break, and breaking it is more ordinary than you would expect. Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is step away. Turn off the feed. Close the listing. Walk outside and recover the ordinary world that still belongs to God. Let silence expose how much noise has colonized your inner life, and sit there long enough to notice what rises in you when nothing is left to distract you.

Then open the Scriptures, not to gather ammunition for your next argument, but to stand under judgment yourself. Ask the Lord to search you. Ask Him to expose what your resentment has been hiding and what your pride has been justifying. Ask Him to show you which idol you reached for this morning before you reached for Him.

Start small enough to actually do it. Give the first fifteen minutes of your morning to Scripture before you give a single second to the feed. Let the Word reach your conscience before the algorithm reaches your nervous system. Hold that one practice for a season, and it will tell you more about the state of your soul than a thousand headlines ever could.

Then do the harder thing. Name the idol out loud to someone who knows you. Tell your spouse the thing you have been hiding behind. Tell your children that the man teaching them to examine senators is learning to examine himself. Confession is hard precisely because it cannot be performed for applause. There is no audience for honest repentance, no tribe gathering to cheer your surrender. Yet that is exactly where freedom begins. The man who has truly faced himself before God no longer needs the narcotic of endless outrage or the approval of a crowd. He has found something better than ideological adrenaline. He has found mercy.

Leave a comment

And mercy changes the way a man talks. When Christ breaks your chains, do not hide the evidence. Tell the truth about what once ruled you, the sins that mastered you, and the grace that overcame them. The world has no shortage of angry commentators and polished accusers. What it lacks are men and women whose peace cannot be manipulated, because it has been rooted somewhere deeper than politics, deeper than any idol the heart can build.

The one the Son sets free is free indeed (John 8:36).

Join the Mission

This is the moment to stand with Sola Veritas.

I publish here because the loudest voices in our moment are not the ones telling the truth about themselves. I am trying to be a different kind of voice, and I want you with me. Not as a spectator. As a brother or sister learning, alongside me, what it costs to let the mirror do its work before we ever pick up the megaphone.

Join the Sola Veritas Inner Circle for deeper briefings, behind-the-scenes intel, and live strategy roundtables that equip you for the battles ahead, the ones in the public square and the quieter ones at your own table.

Free keeps you informed. Paid prepares you for war.

If you want to wear what you believe, visit the Sola Veritas Store for hoodies, jackets, mugs, and more. Every purchase fuels the mission and spreads the message.

Writing produced by the author, with limited use of digital tools for editing and clarity.

I owe my readers a sentence I should have written days ago.

When I published I’ve Been Telling the Truth the Wrong Way, the inbox split clean down the middle. One half wrote in relief, thinking I had finally come to my senses. The other half wrote in alarm, convinced the men who hated my voice had finally worn me down.

Both halves were reading the same essay. Both halves were wrong.

I did not take the posts down. The disproportion is real. The grief is real. The idolatry that has hollowed out the homes I love is real, and a man who claims Christ is not at liberty to lie about any of it for the sake of a quieter inbox. Every claim in those posts could be defended on the merits today, tomorrow, and the day after that.

What I confessed was not the truth in the posts. It was the temperature of the man posting them.

The readers who applauded the softening and the readers who warned against the retreat both missed it because they were arguing about the wrong axis. The argument was never about whether to speak. The argument was about which hand was holding the blade.

The blade and the hand

Every shepherd carries a blade, and Scripture does not give him the option of laying it down. Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and doctrine (2 Tim. 4:2). That verb reprove is a surgical word, and the pastor who refuses to use it is not gentle but negligent.

So the question for any of us who handle the word in public is not whether the blade should be drawn. The blade is drawn the moment we open our mouths. The question is what hand is on it.

A prosecutor and a surgeon both hold blades, and the instruments are nearly identical. The difference is what the man behind them is trying to do with the cut. A prosecutor cuts to expose. He wants the wound visible, the blood public, the gallery convinced. He does not stay after the verdict to close the incision, because closing was never his job.

A surgeon cuts to remove. He wants the diseased tissue out and the bleeding stopped. He stays after the cut to close the wound, because the wound was not the point but the price of getting at what was killing the patient. A surgeon will draw more blood in a single afternoon than a prosecutor sees in a year, and his hands will be steadier the whole time, because his aim is not the cut. His aim is the patient.

I was a prosecutor for three days on my timeline. The case was airtight, the cuts precise, the gallery cheered. And when the verdict came in, the patient I am sworn to serve — the people I am from, the people whose Sundays and weddings and funerals I have stood inside for thirty years — was still on the table bleeding, with no one closing the wound.

That is what I confessed. Not the diagnosis. The orphaned blade.

Subscribe now

Heat and light

The older brothers in the faith used to put it another way, speaking of preaching as the giving of heat and light, and they were careful to distinguish between the two.

Heat is what a fire produces. It draws a crowd, warms a house, and on a cold enough night can save a life. But heat by itself is not navigational. A man cannot walk by heat, he can only feel it, and when heat is the only thing a fire is producing, the same fire that could have warmed the house will burn the house down.

Light is what a lamp gives. Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path (Ps. 119:105). Notice the geography of that verse. The lamp is not held aloft to illuminate the failures of the people across the valley but is at foot level, showing the man who carries it where to put his next step. Light is the part of preaching that tells a hearer what to do on Monday. Without it, the most accurate sermon ever delivered is still a sermon the listener cannot walk out of.

A pulpit can produce heat without light. So can a Substack, and so can an X feed. The crowd is drawn and warmed and told, with increasing intensity, what is wrong with the people who are not in the crowd. Then the crowd goes home with no lamp, no path, no place to put a foot on Monday morning, and nothing has changed in any house anywhere because nothing was given that could change a house.

That was my feed. Not because the things I said were false, but because they were heat without light, and heat without light eventually consumes the very thing it was meant to save.

Confrontation and formation

There is a name for what I was doing, and there is a name for what I should have been doing, and the church has known both names for centuries.

Confrontation is the moment a faithful shepherd names the disease. He says this is what is killing you, and he says it plainly enough that the patient cannot pretend not to have heard. Without it, the patient dies under a misdiagnosis, and the death is on the shepherd’s hands. Son of man, I have set thee a watchman unto the house of Israel; therefore hear the word at my mouth, and give them warning from me (Ezek. 33:7). That is not a suggestion. It is the office.

But confrontation is not the whole office. It is one beat inside it. The full office is confrontation and formation, and formation is the part most loud voices in our moment leave on the cutting room floor.

Formation is what a shepherd does after the diagnosis. He walks the patient through what comes next, hands him a regimen, puts him under the means of grace, shows him the text he is to live in and the people he is to live with. Formation is slow and unglamorous. It does not trend, does not generate quote-tweets, and is the part of a pastor’s life no algorithm has yet found a way to monetize, which is one of the cleanest tells that it is the part the Spirit cares most about.

A ministry that is all confrontation and no formation produces angry men with no church. A ministry that is all formation and no confrontation produces comfortable men with no spine. The church does not need either. The church needs men who can do both in the same week, in the same sermon, sometimes in the same sentence, because the patient in the pew needs both and the One who appointed the shepherd commanded both.

I have, in seasons, leaned hard into confrontation because confrontation is what the moment seems to demand and what the platform rewards. On certain days, I have mistaken the reward for the calling. The confession in Telling the Truth the Wrong Way was the moment I stopped pretending I had not noticed.

Share

What this means for the writing

Some of you will want to know whether the harder pieces are coming back. They never left. The shepherd who refuses to cut is not the shepherd the Great Physician put in the field. There will be hard pieces, sentences that cost me readers and cost me sleep, diagnoses the comfortable wing of the inbox does not want to hear, because the diagnoses are true and the comfortable wing has been comfortable for too long.

What will be different is the hand on the blade.

Every piece from here forward will be asked the same question before it leaves my desk. Is this cutting to wound, or cutting to heal? If it is cutting only to wound, it will not run, no matter how true the cut is or how many quote-tweets it would earn. If it is cutting to heal, the heat in it will be paired with light, the confrontation in it will be paired with formation, and the reader will close the tab knowing not only what is wrong but where to put his foot.

That is the only kind of writing a shepherd is licensed to publish. The rest is a man with a horn.

This afternoon I will sit across from Jason Whitlock, and some of this conversation will happen on his show. I am not going on to relitigate. I am going on to teach the distinction in public, because the distinction is what my readers need, what my critics need, and what I needed when I was three days into a quote-tweet bender that was scoring points and saving no one.

Heat and light. Confrontation and formation. A blade in a surgeon’s hand. That is the office, and I will keep trying to grow into it for as long as the Lord leaves me in it. When I miss, and I will miss, I will tell you, the way I told you days ago, because a shepherd who will not be corrected in public has no business correcting anyone else in public.

Leave a comment

Soli Deo Gloria.

Join the Mission

This is the moment to stand with Sola Veritas. I publish here regularly to give you biblical clarity in a collapsing world. But clarity alone isn’t enough—we need conviction, courage, and action. Join the Sola Veritas Inner Circle for deeper briefings, behind-the-scenes intel, and live strategy roundtables that equip you for the battles ahead. Free keeps you informed. Paid prepares you for war. If you want to wear what you believe, visit the Sola Veritas Store for hoodies, jackets, mugs, and more. Every purchase fuels the mission and spreads the message.

Writing produced by the author, with limited use of digital tools for editing and clarity.

Inner Circle,

A quick word before I get to tonight: my apologies for the late notice. The morning started earlier than usual, and I got away from me before I could get this in your inbox. Thank you for your patience.

Tonight at 8:00 PM ET / 7:00 PM CT, we’re back together on Zoom — and we have a guest worth showing up for.

We took Monday off in observance …

Read more

If you have followed me on X for any length of time, you know my feed. A crime clip, a quote-tweet, and a line underneath it sharpened to a point: Can you name the white supremacy or the oppression that caused this? I’ll wait. The next morning brought another clip and another quote-tweet with the same blade. Three days of that, fifteen posts in a row, and I went back recently and read them the way a stranger would.

I am a black man, and by my own framing, I was indicting the group I belong to. The framing said nothing true about me, nothing true about my wife, nothing true about the faithful father three doors down, the deacon in my church, or the boy doing his homework tonight under a single lamp while his city makes noise outside the window.

This essay is what I saw when I finally slowed down. It is not a recantation of the facts. It is a reckoning with the frame.

Subscribe now

What I will not take back

The disproportion is real. On homicide and several categories of violent crime, black Americans appear in the national data—as offenders and, let it never be forgotten, as victims—at rates above our share of the population. The footage is real, too. We have all watched the riotous teen takeovers shutting down city blocks, the violent brawls inside restaurants while families try to eat, and we have watched the unprovoked beatings of strangers chosen for the color of their skin and recorded as trophies. I have never believed a Christian is permitted to lie for the sake of comfort, and I am not going to start now by pretending these things are not happening or that the cameras invented them.

The grief is real, too. I am sick of the funerals, sick of the mugshots of boys who should have been carrying textbooks. A conscience that feels nothing in front of murder is the broken one.

I keep the facts, and I keep the grief. What I am laying down is the way I have been carrying both.

A text I almost didn’t read

A pastor who sits across from me on a show I do every week sent me a text in the middle of all this. We are not only brothers in Christ but friends, the kind of friends a man calls when things have been hard, which is a rarer thing in ministry than it ought to be. He sent a long, careful text, the kind a brother writes when he loves you enough to spend an hour saying something he knows you will not want to hear.

I skimmed it because I was busy sharpening the next post. I told myself I would get back to him with the natural and well-sharpened fury of a prized fighter, developing the correct prose to make my point clear and win the argument. That was not the posture of a pastor or a watchman, but of a fighter training to land a combination, and so I kept posting.

Here is where I want you to slow down with me, because I think it matters for more than my story. With every post, the platform learned what I responded to, and it fed me more of it. More clips, more carnage, more material for the blade. By the end of day two, I was angrier than I had been at the start, and my feed had become a closed loop. I was feeding it my outrage, and it was feeding me my next occasion to be outraged, and the cycle tightened with every refresh.

I know what is happening to my own people on these platforms. I have written about what is happening to them. I have warned other men about exactly this, and there I was, a teaching pastor who has read Harari and can give you the chapter and verse on how algorithms imprint themselves on the human person, being formed in real time by the very mechanism I have lectured about. That is the part I want to confess plainly: the algorithm did not care that I knew its name. It does not respect your library. It disciples whoever shows up daily, and I was showing up daily.

On the third morning, I sat down and actually read the pastor’s text. I won’t give you the whole thing, and I won’t pretend I agreed with every line, but the substance of what he wrote was this: sin is not skin-color coded. He named the fatherlessness, the poverty, the incarceration rates, all of it. And then he said something I have not been able to shake. Wherever there’s a turning from God to idolatry, the same fruit grows. The sentence was not new to me. I had said something close to it from a pulpit, written something close to it under my own byline, and used it to correct other men more times than I can count. Perhaps that is what cut. My own words, in another man’s mouth, were being used with clear-eyed precision against me, and there was nowhere to go with them but down.

Share

What I saw when it broke

For a long season, I have written about Reformed and so-called discernment circles where men have made a profession out of cataloging other men’s sins. I have watched ministries I once respected grow brittle and joyless, full of clips and quote-tweets, and the cold pleasure of being right out loud. I have said, in print, that the watchman is told to weep while he warns, and that a watchman who has stopped weeping has quietly become something other than a watchman. I meant every word, and I just could not see that I had walked into the same room and pulled up a chair.

It is easy to see self-righteous prosecution when it is dressed in someone else’s theological tribe, and much harder to see when it is wearing your face. The men I have critiqued and the man I had become were doing the same work with different jerseys on, building the case and filing it, never quite getting around to the gospel I claim is the only thing that has ever raised a dead man.

Disproportion is not causation

Once the heat came down enough for me to think, I had to admit something else. A number that correlates with a people is not an explanation; it is the beginning of a question, and I had been treating it as the end of one.

When you actually chase the question down, race is not the thing doing the work. The single most powerful predictor of whether a young man becomes violent is not the color of his skin. It is whether he grew up with a father in the home, in a neighborhood with some order left in it, under a church that discipled him. Account for fatherlessness, family structure, and the disorder of a place, and the racial gap shrinks dramatically. It shrinks far enough that race stops being a serious candidate for the cause.

We are not over-represented in violence because we are black. We are over-represented in fatherlessness, and therefore we are over-represented in everything fatherlessness produces downstream. The chain runs from the empty chair at the table to the ruin in the street.

But I have to push it one beat further, because fatherlessness alone is not the whole story. We have built a culture around it that celebrates the very degeneracy it produces. A matriarchal structure has hardened into place that crowns the woman who does not need a man and treats his absence as her strength rather than her wound. Our children are raised on music that glorifies the debauchery, that names the absent father as freedom and the present one as a fool, and that turns every variety of self-destruction into a hook the music producers will pay for. The chain is not only generational; it is curated. Each link is sold back to the next generation as identity. That is not a thing white supremacy did to us last week. It is a thing we have done to ourselves and continue to do, and the gospel will have to address it as such, or it will not address it at all.

The pastor’s line says it better than my paragraph does. Wherever there’s a turning from God to idolatry, the same fruit grows. The fruit in the videos I quote-tweet is the same fruit you find anywhere men are left without fathers in the home and without the fear of God in the church. The skin is incidental, and the idolatry is the cause.

This has a date on it

Here is the fact that should have stopped me cold years ago. The dysfunction I have spent my time documenting is not “black culture.” It is far too young to be a culture at all.

Go back to my grandparents. Under Jim Crow, in conditions not one of us would survive a week of, the two-parent black home was not the exception but the rule. Black men married, and black children were raised by the men who made them. The collapse came later, and it came fast: the share of black children born outside of marriage moved from roughly one in five to roughly seven in ten in about two generations.

A thing that changes that quickly is not an essence and is not in the blood. It was adopted under welfare structures that paid a mother to keep a father out of the house, under a sexual revolution that tore intimacy loose from covenant, and the very black church that once held the line went hollow while it happened. That is the most hopeful sentence I can write, because what was adopted within living memory can be repented of within living memory. “Black culture” tells a man the wound is who he is. The truth tells him it is a wound, recently inflicted, and wounds can heal. One of those is a curse on a people, and the other is the kind of news the gospel was sent to bring.

The diet, and what it was doing to me

There is one more thing to confess, and it is the hardest part to write. I told you I was sick and tired, and I wore the phrase like a credential. But sit with what I had actually been doing to my own soul. Every day, for hours, I was consuming the most depraved fraction of human behavior I could find, concentrated on a loop, and calling the result discernment. It was not discernment but a slow poisoning, and no man stares into that furnace daily and walks away unmarked.

I had started to relish the arrests. YES—I wrote that word more than once when the cuffs went on. Justice should satisfy a man, but it should never delight him. The Word says do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and somewhere along the way, I had begun to. The watchman is told to weep while he warns, and I had stopped weeping. A watchman who has stopped weeping has quietly become something other than a watchman.

Tomeka noticed before I did. She is a talker, and anyone who knows our house knows that, so when she goes quiet on something I have written or posted, that silence is a kind of weather. It does not nag, and it does not argue; it just waits. She knows when I’m having a moment, and she lets me have it, because she also knows the road I am on right then is a road I am walking alone. She will be there when I get back, with open arms and a smile that says she is happy for my safe return. I read three of those posts to her in the middle of those 72 hours, and she did not say much because she did not have to. The silence was the sermon.

Getting back on the wagon

So let me name what this is, plainly. It was a 72-hour bender; I fell off the wagon, and I am getting back on. I am a minister, and for three days I did the work of a prosecutor and called it ministry. That stops here.

I am not going silent. The watchman does not abandon the wall, and I will not pretend the wall is sound when it is breached. But the truth has to be aimed from now on rather than merely fired. The real enemy has a name, and the name is not a people. It is the fatherlessness that produces the lawlessness, and behind both of those is a generation discipled by no one, or worse, discipled by the algorithm that just spent three days trying to disciple me.

From here, I will diagnose less and prescribe more, because I happen to hold the cure: the gospel that makes a dead man new and the church that builds a new man into a husband and a father. That is not theory to me. It is the testimony of my own house, and it is the one sermon I can preach without a single note. When I do cover the darkness, and I will, I want the camera to find the fathers stepping back in and the boys being caught before the street can have them. That is also true, and I simply was not pointing at it. The gospel has to be louder than the indictment because the indictment has never once saved anyone, and I know exactly Who did.

Leave a comment

A better blood

The blood of every victim cries up from the ground. I have heard it, and it is why I write at all. But there is another blood, and it speaks a better word than vengeance over every bit of this. The darkness in those videos is real, and it is old—older than my outrage, as old as a brother lying in a field in the fourth chapter of Genesis. It is not the final word, and it never was. If my feed told you otherwise for three days last week, my feed was lying to you about the size of God.

I told the truth the wrong way. By His grace, I intend to tell it the right way now.

I publish here regularly to give you biblical clarity in a collapsing world. But clarity alone isn’t enough—we need conviction, courage, and action.

Join the Sola Veritas Inner Circle for deeper briefings, behind-the-scenes intel, and live strategy roundtables that equip you for the battles ahead.

Free keeps you informed. Paid prepares you for war.

If you want to wear what you believe, visit the Sola Veritas Store for hoodies, jackets, mugs, and more. Every purchase fuels the mission and spreads the message.

Writing produced by the author, with limited use of digital tools for editing and clarity.

I was devastated, not disappointed or merely rattled, but devastated. A year ago, I sat down in this space and told you the truth about what had just collapsed. What happened was the kind of moral collapse that arrives without warning and unmakes things you thought were solid. The National Conference was gone, and the grief of what collapsed alongside it was the kind that gets into your bones. I wasn’t sure what would come next. I’m not sure I needed to be.

That moment told me more about the year ahead than I could have anticipated.

Where I Am

Tomeka and I landed in Gilbert, Arizona, in the East Valley outside Phoenix, a place that was never once on our list of where we thought our lives were heading. We did not plan to be here, and we love it. There is a strange and specific grace in ending up exactly where you were not trying to go. The place is a quiet explosion, which is an oxymoron until you’re standing in the middle of it. Growth you can see forming in real time, culture taking shape around you, a combination of high-tech progress and neighborhood feel that seems like the future arriving before anyone announced it. We are genuinely amazed to be here.

You already know I’m serving as Teaching Pastor at Redeemer Bible Church. I teach regularly during Bible Hour, I’m on the preaching rotation, and I substitute-teach where opportunities present themselves. I also served in a consulting role for the One Gospel Conference held here at Redeemer, and I have the privilege of working on the Christ in Culture series the church hosts twice a year.

Nine months into the role, I am now part of the team working through a building acquisition. Lord willing, we are in a new building by early 2028, moving from five services to three. What the men at Redeemer have carried at this pace for years is something you have to see up close to appreciate.

As for my writing, I am still writing for The Standing for Freedom Center, TPUSA Rise, Redeeming Truth Media, and others. I’m still recording the Just Thinking Podcast, still preparing weekly for appearances on Fearless with Jason Whitlock, and still fielding speaking invitations. A documentary is also in development. Through all of it, God has been gracious to me in ways I have not earned.

But none of that is what I want to say.

What the Year Did

The real update is what the year did to me on the inside. I am freer, and not in some vague spiritual-sounding way. When you are part of a large organization, any organization, you absorb its ethos without fully realizing it. The ideas you are allowed to have narrow. Your voice calibrates to an institution that may not even be asking it to. I don’t carry that weight anymore. I write what I believe and say what I see, and the freedom has made me more useful, not less.

The year also pressed something deeper into me about character. What a man does when no one is watching, when the choice costs him, and there is no audience for the decision, that is where he actually is. Whether he stays there is settled by what he does next. I have paid more attention to that gap this year than in any previous season of my life. And it raised a harder question about the men we call great. The men we idolize are equally frail at the same points as the men whose names no one will ever know. The platform doesn’t change the frailty. It delays the exposure. That is not cynicism. It is freedom. When you stop expecting men to be more than men, you can receive what they actually are.

Friendship got clarified, too. Real friendship has no benefit attached to it beyond the friendship itself. When there is nothing to gain from knowing you and something to lose from standing with you, the ones who stay are the ones who were there all along. I know who mine are now. And I understand trust differently than I did twelve months ago. I used to extend it more freely than I should have. What I’ve learned is that you offer an open hand, honestly, until it is slapped. After that, trust is earned. That is not a wall. It is a standard.

What Remains

All of that would be small comfort without the more fundamental fact: God showed himself faithful through it. Not in the dramatic ways I might have hoped for in the middle of the pain, but in the slower ways. In a city I never planned for and a church I never expected, alongside men I genuinely respect. In conversations that happened because something fell apart and made room for something else. Trials do not create faith. They expose what was always there. They strip away faith that was propped up by results and momentum, and leave you with what was actually true.

Jeremiah wrote from the ruins of Jerusalem. I am not writing from ruins. But I understand why he had to say it out loud: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:22–23). Because sometimes the only thing more surprising than how far something can fall is how faithful God is in the falling.

A year ago, I said I was not retreating from this work and not going silent. I meant it then. I mean it now. The difference is I have twelve months of evidence behind those words.

I still believe. Not in platforms or personalities, but in Providence.

That lands differently now than it did when I first wrote it.

I publish here regularly to give you biblical clarity in a collapsing world. If this piece was useful to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber. It makes this work possible.

Writing produced by the author, with limited use of digital tools for editing and clarity.

I have dropped my sons off at a practice field at six in the morning.

If you’ve raised boys in the South, you know the ritual that defines a football summer. Two-a-days run through July, with the early practice at sunrise because the heat is already climbing, and the second practice after six in the evening, when the field is still throwing back the day’s temperature like an open oven. The drive home happens with the windows down because the gear in the back seat is past the point of perfume.

I watched my sons go through it. I watched the boys they played with go through it. I watched their mothers pack the coolers, their fathers leave work early, and their grandmothers show up to games they didn’t fully understand because the boy was on the field, and that was enough.

There was a young man from our area we knew of, not personally, who earned a scholarship to a major program. When his Saturdays came, we watched from a distance with a particular kind of attention. My son would catch sight of him on television and lean forward, pointing at the screen and calling out to me from across the room that the face he recognized was now playing under stadium lights on national broadcast.

We knew the hustle and the two-a-days, and we knew what that scholarship had cost his family to earn long before it ever paid out.

I’m telling you this because the organization that just launched a boycott of his future was nowhere in sight for any of it.

Subscribe now

The NAACP, alongside the Congressional Black Caucus, launched a campaign this week called “Out of Bounds.” The premise is that the organization disapproves of the congressional maps being drawn in eight Southern states, and so it is asking black athletes, recruits, and their families to walk away from the major public university programs in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas.

The leverage is the kids.

Read that again, because the press release will not put it in plain English. The leverage in this campaign is the kids.

The Premise Is False Before We Begin

The NAACP is selling this campaign as a defense of voting rights, and that framing depends on a claim that needs to be challenged directly: no one is taking voting rights away from anyone.

What is actually happening is that courts are correcting decades of districting that drew lines around majority-minority areas as if skin color alone were the qualifying standard for political representation. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments do not guarantee racially sorted districts; they guarantee equal protection under the law and the right to vote regardless of race, which are not the same things at all.

Representation cannot be assigned by skin color as if every black voter held the same views and the same priorities. The Supreme Court has been saying this with increasing clarity, most recently in Louisiana v. Callais, because the prior practice required courts to assume a kind of racial essentialism that the Constitution does not permit. If a district is going to be drawn on racial grounds, there has to be actual proof of present marginalization, not merely the demographic composition of an area or the desire of an advocacy organization to preserve a seat.

This matters because the entire moral weight of the “Out of Bounds” campaign rests on the assertion that black voters are being silenced, which they are not. What is actually ending is the assumption that the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus get to draw the maps that produce their preferred outcomes simply by invoking race. That is not the same thing as disenfranchisement, and calling it disenfranchisement is a category error that happens to serve the people making the claim.

Racism is not racism because someone with a microphone says it is. It has to be demonstrated, with evidence, by actual standards of law. The civil rights tradition at its best understood this and produced the evidence that won cases in court because those cases were real. The current campaign skips that step and goes directly to mobilizing teenagers as a way of making the case unnecessary.

Once you see the foundation is false, everything else about the campaign becomes legible.

Where Was the NAACP at the Pop Warner Game?

The boy whose Saturdays we watched did not get there by accident. His family poured twelve years into that scholarship before it existed. The mothers I knew were paying registration fees their budgets could not really hold, the fathers were burning vacation days on tournament weekends, and the boys were running stadium steps in August heat that would put a grown man in an ambulance.

Where was the NAACP for those twelve years?

Was Derrick Johnson at the booster club fundraiser, was the Congressional Black Caucus paying for the cleats, was anyone from the national office in the bleachers in the cold November rain? The answer is the same in every case, which is that they were nowhere to be found.

But now, at the doorstep of the thing those families bled for, the same organization that was absent for over a decade has an urgent opinion about what these young men should do with their next four years. The opinion is that they should give it all up for a map in a town the boy has never visited, drawn for a politician he has never met.

That is not advocacy. That is a stickup at the finish line.

Share

Do They Understand What NIL Means to These Families?

We are not in 2015 anymore, and the scholarship is no longer the whole prize.

Under the current Name, Image, and Likeness landscape, a four-star recruit at a flagship SEC program is not just earning a free education; he is earning a paycheck that, for a lot of these young men, represents the largest income their family has ever seen at one time. That money is paying rent, catching up the mortgage, buying the grandmother a car that starts in the morning, paying for the younger brother’s tutor, and keeping the lights on in a house where the lights used to flicker every time the bill came due.

NIL is not a luxury for these families. For a sizable share of black athletes at major programs, it is the first real generational income their family has ever produced.

The NAACP is asking these young men to walk away from that money.

The campaign is not just asking a teenager to forfeit an education, which would already be a serious ask. It is asking him to forfeit the income that is currently feeding his family, paying his mother’s bills, and giving his siblings a stability the family has not known in his lifetime, all in exchange for a political fight between people who have never met his mother and would not recognize her if they passed her on the street.

This is the part the press release will never put in print. The cost of compliance with “Out of Bounds” is not abstract; it is measurable in dollars per month leaving a black family’s bank account so that a non-profit can hold a press conference about voting rights.

The same organization that has spent decades telling black families they were being economically exploited is now telling those same families to voluntarily exit the largest economic opportunity any of them has ever had access to. The grandmother knows the math, the mother knows the math, and the young man who has been doing his own math since he was thirteen knows the math. The only people who seem confused about the math are the ones standing at the podium.

What Has the NAACP Actually Done?

Let us be specific about what we are dealing with. The NAACP has existed since 1909 and the Congressional Black Caucus since 1971, and both organizations have been operating in majority-black congressional districts, in cities run by black mayors and black police chiefs and black school superintendents, for decades.

Consider any major American city where these organizations have had the most influence, whether that is Baltimore or St. Louis or Detroit or Memphis or Birmingham or Jackson, and ask the honest question: are those communities more prosperous than they were thirty years ago, are the schools better, are the families more intact, are the businesses more vibrant?

The honest answer is that they are not.

The NAACP has been at the table the entire time, the CBC has been at the table the entire time, and the communities they claim to represent are, by every measurable indicator, worse off than they were when these organizations had less influence and fewer dollars. The leadership that cannot explain what happened to Baltimore now has urgent advice for a seventeen-year-old in Tuscaloosa, and that order of operations is itself the indictment.

There is a precondition of moral authority that the campaign violates at the level of basic logic. You do not get to direct other people’s sacrifices when the people you have already directed are visibly worse off for the directing. The grandmother who watched her own neighborhood empty out under decades of the same leadership knows this in her bones, because she watched the school close and the storefronts board up under leadership that gave her press conferences instead of plumbing.

And now they want her grandson.

Where Are the Players? Where Are the Schools?

Here is the part nobody on cable wants to talk about, which is that the campaign has produced exactly zero institutional buy-in from the people it claims to be helping.

Not one major program has voiced support. None of the athletic directors at the named schools have endorsed the campaign, none of the head coaches have publicly aligned with it, none of the booster networks have signaled even quiet agreement. More telling still, the players themselves, who are the supposed beneficiaries of all this leverage, have said nothing. No black quarterback at a flagship program has stepped forward, no senior captain has held a press conference, no Heisman candidate has cut a video, no five-star recruit has flipped his commitment in solidarity.

The reason for that silence is not confusion, and it is not fear. The reason is that these young men remember Colin Kaepernick.

They remember what happened to a quarterback who let an organization tell him his career was worth less than a movement, and they remember the magazine covers and the documentaries that followed. They also remember that the same activists who promised him he was making history could not deliver him a roster spot once the cameras turned off.

He took a knee for them, and they got jobs. He did not.

These young men have watched that film, they have done the math, and they have noticed that the people asking them to sacrifice never seem to lose anything themselves. The NAACP president still has his salary, the CBC members still have their seats, the cable hits still happen, and the book deals still get signed. But the quarterback never threw another pass in the league he was trying to wake up.

The “Out of Bounds” campaign is, in essence, an attempt to manufacture forty Colin Kaepernicks at once, on the theory that volume will create the pressure that individual sacrifice did not. The players have already seen the experiment run, they know how it ends, and so do their mothers. The silence you hear from the locker rooms is the sound of a generation that has learned to read the menu before they sit down.

Leave a comment

What This Actually Is

Now we can put a name on what we are looking at.

There is a word for the practice of taking the next generation and offering it to a political power in exchange for protection, and the prophet Samuel warned Israel about it when the nation demanded a king. He will take your sons, the prophet said, for his chariots and his fields and his harvest. The people heard the warning, they wanted the king anyway, and the king took the sons exactly as the prophet promised he would.

The “Out of Bounds” campaign is the same transaction in modern dress. The map is the chariot, the press conference is the throne room, and the teenager with the scholarship offer is the son the king has come to claim.

This is not civil rights advocacy in any sense the original tradition would recognize. The civil rights tradition fought to recognize the personhood of black Americans against a system that denied it, while this campaign treats black Americans as a bloc to be deployed in service of an institutional agenda. Those are not the same thing; they are opposites.

A movement that loves people protects their futures, and a movement that needs people consumes them. The “Out of Bounds” campaign is consuming, and calling the consumption a form of love.

What Pastors Should Be Saying This Sunday

If a young man in your church has a Power Five offer on the table, here is the counsel he needs from his pastor.

His vocation belongs to God, not to a political organization. His scholarship is the answer to twelve years of his mother’s prayers, not a chip to be cashed by activists who were absent for those twelve years, and his NIL income is the bread on his family’s table, not a tax to be levied by an organization that did not raise him. His four years on a campus in Tuscaloosa or Baton Rouge or Athens will shape the man he becomes, and the man he becomes will matter to his future household long after the redistricting map has been redrawn several more times.

The NAACP is asking him to mortgage all of that for a press conference, and the right answer to that request is no.

That no needs to be said clearly to his grandmother if she is being pressured, to his coach if he is being pressured, and to anyone else who shows up at the door with a microphone and a cause. The boy is not for sale, his future is not collateral, and his life is not the leverage in someone else’s political fight.

If the NAACP wants to fight gerrymandering, then let them fight gerrymandering through the means actually available to a civil rights organization, which is filing lawsuits and funding legal teams and doing the patient registration work the tradition has always required. That kind of labor is honorable, and Christians can disagree about the policy outcomes while still respecting the work.

But conscripting teenagers is not the work; it is the substitute that arrives once the original mission has been quietly abandoned and no one wants to admit it out loud.

The Bottom Line

The organization that was missing for twelve years of two-a-days in the July heat is now demanding a sacrifice from the families who endured those summers without them. The organization that has been present in every city that has cratered under its preferred leadership is now positioned to instruct families it has not previously helped. The organization that has produced no institutional buy-in from the players or the schools is calling its own isolation a civil rights campaign, and expecting the rest of us to call it the same thing.

I think about that young man whose Saturdays we used to watch from a distance, and I think about my son leaning toward the television, pointing at the screen and calling out to me when he saw a face he recognized in pads and a helmet. I think about what it would have meant if, on the day that scholarship offer came through, somebody in a suit had shown up at his family’s door and said the offer should be declined because of a congressional map four states away.

That family would have shown that man the door, and they would have been right to do it.

Every family who has actually done the work knows this in their bones, because the work itself teaches you what your son’s future is worth and who has the standing to ask you to surrender it. The silence from the locker rooms is the answer that the families have already given, and the press conference cannot override what the kitchen table has already decided.

Leave a comment

The sons we are willing to spend are the measure of the gods we actually serve, and the NAACP has answered the question with this campaign as clearly as any organization ever has. The rest of us should answer it differently, because the God of Scripture does not require the sacrifice of sons in exchange for political protection. He provided one Son, once, and that provision is the reason the rest are not for sale.

Join the Mission

This is the moment to stand with Sola Veritas.

I publish here regularly to give you biblical clarity in a collapsing world. But clarity alone isn’t enough — we need conviction, courage, and action.

Join the Sola Veritas Inner Circle for deeper briefings, behind-the-scenes intel, and live strategy roundtables that equip you for the battles ahead.

Subscribe now

Free keeps you informed. Paid prepares you for war.

If you want to wear what you believe, visit the Sola Veritas Store for hoodies, jackets, mugs, and more. Every purchase fuels the mission and spreads the message.

Writing produced by the author, with limited use of digital tools for editing and clarity.

I spent an hour on a call this week with men who have to apologize for doing the right thing.

They lead a grassroots organization. No payroll worth mentioning, no donor class behind them, no building. What they have is a conviction that the decisions made in their county, on free speech, on religious liberty, on whether the unborn are protected, will eventually reach the doors of every church in it. So they go to pastors. They ask for ten minutes, a table in the lobby, permission to put real information in front of real people.

And here is what they have learned to do before they walk in. Strip the language. Sand down every call to action until it sounds like a weather report. Never say the word that makes a pastor flinch. One of them put it plainly, and the others kept echoing it through the hour like a password they had all agreed to use: we have to let the pastors know we are not pushing politics, we are promoting the Bible.

Sit with that. Grown men, doing righteous and unglamorous work, have to keep reassuring shepherds that righteousness is not partisan. The men carrying the compass have to apologize for the gift.

I could not believe what I was hearing was the norm. Then I realized I had heard it before, in quieter forms, for years.

Subscribe now

We need to name what is happening in those lobbies, because it is not prudence and it is not Gospel focus. It is sentimentalism. The same sin I have written about before, the one that feels holy while it avoids the wound. We usually picture sentimentalism as softness, as a man too tender to confront. But in a pastor it almost never looks soft. It looks like silence. It looks like a shepherd who will not speak to a question his people are actually facing, and who has found a respectable name for it. Staying focused on the Gospel. Not being political. Keeping the peace.

Avoidance is sentimentalism with a deeper voice.

Here is the error underneath that silence, and it is worth more than a charge of timidity. The pastor who will not speak to a public question because he does not want to be political has quietly accepted the world’s map of reality. He has agreed that there is a fenced acre called “politics” where the lordship of Christ goes muted, where Scripture may hold private opinions but the pulpit has no jurisdiction. That map is a lie. There is no acre of human life that sits outside the rule of the One who made it. How a Christian stewards a vote, how he thinks about his neighbor’s life and liberty and speech, is not a partisan question handed to him by a campaign. It is a discipleship question handed to him by God.

So the silent pastor has not avoided politics. He has discipled his people by omission, teaching them with nothing more than a closed mouth that this entire region of their lives is theirs to navigate alone. And the catechism class never closes. If the man God appointed to feed the flock will not speak into that acre, someone else will.

Share

I saw what that costs while I was in Texas not long ago. A man who knows his city well told me that the communities around him who take their faith seriously treat showing up as a settled obligation. Not a mood. A discipline. They vote every cycle, they learn the issues in front of their own neighborhoods, and they have watched that steady, unspectacular faithfulness move the policy of the places they live. Meanwhile Christians who could shape the very same ground assume it will hold itself, and stay home. That is not a story about another people to be feared. Fear of being outnumbered is only unbelief with a spreadsheet. It is a mirror. Those neighbors are doing what a serious people does with the stewardship in front of them, and the shame in the comparison belongs to us.

Silence is not neutrality. Silence is instruction.

I want to be careful naming this sin, because it would be easy to write it as an attack on cowards I have discovered. I cannot write it that way honestly, because I have stood close enough to the moment to know its weight.

The Friday the Supreme Court handed down Obergefell, I was not the lead pastor. I served one. The decision came down, the weekend arrived, and the sermon we had prepared was no longer the sermon the moment required. I got the call to come in and help think through what that Sunday now needed, to help our church meet a national decision with a word from God instead of a flinch. Did I feel the nervousness of helping carry a message that contradicted what the whole country had just celebrated? I did. There was a room to consider, and not everyone in it was going to leave comfortable. We did not water it down. Truth-telling is the work, and there is no version of the work where you trim God’s Word to fit the mood of the week. But I felt the pull, which is why I will not pretend the silent shepherd is a different species. He felt what I felt. He simply gave the feeling a kinder name and went home.

What I finally saw, somewhere in that hour on the call, is that Christians have grown comfortable in a quiet and dangerous assumption. We have started to believe that tomorrow will be as easy as today, that the liberty we inherited maintains itself, that we can sit on the sideline indefinitely and still enjoy protections other generations bled to secure. That is not faith. It is presumption wearing faith’s coat, and it is the sentimental Christian’s favorite belief, because it asks nothing of him. But the bill for our presumption does not come to us. It comes to our children, and I have three of them.

So I will not end this with a battle cry. The God who governs every acre has not called His people to panic, and He has not called us to scramble for power. He has called us to faithfulness in the acre He has actually given us, and to trust Him with the harvest. But faithfulness is a verb, and it has been a long time since many of us treated it like one.

Go to your pastor. Not to ambush him, and not to hand him a voter guide. Go as a member who genuinely wants to be formed, and ask him how he thinks about equipping the church for the moral decisions its people are actually facing. His answer will tell you a great deal. Then turn the same honesty on yourself, because a congregation that punishes a pastor for clarity will train him, over time, to be vague. It is possible you have welcomed the quiet because it spared you discomfort, too. Learn your own city the way that man in Texas knows his, and vote as an act of stewardship rather than tribal habit, because the authority in a citizen’s hands was placed there by God and will be accounted for.

The Church was never called to be soft. She was also never called to be loud for its own sake. She was called to be faithful, with tenderness in her tone and steel in her spine, in every acre her Lord already owns. That includes the one outside the sanctuary doors.

Do not let your silence become the lesson.

I publish here regularly to give you biblical clarity in a collapsing world. If this piece served you, become a paid subscriber and help keep the work going. If this is not the season for that, share it with someone who needs to address this kind of sentimentalism.

Writing produced by the author, with limited use of digital tools for editing and clarity.

Tonight, Monday, May 18, at 8:00 p.m. EST, we gather again. The Zoom link is here, and I’ll keep it simple: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85681299984. Put it on your calendar now. Set a reminder. Tell your spouse. This is one you don’t want to miss.

Before I tell you why, I want to tell you what this past week has been like for me.

My inbox has been full. So …

Read more

Church had just let out, the sermon still ringing in her ears, when she stopped to talk with Pastor Darrell.

I noticed her and her husband from the corner of my eye and let them have the moment. But as I looked closer, I could see it on her face, the kind of seriousness that tells you something is wrong before a word is spoken. Darrell waved me over and told me what was happening.

This dear sister had come to share a heartbreak. Her brother had begun taking hormones to transition. He had imbibed the gender ideology, and now he had committed to doing more than talk about it. As evidence of how far he had gone, she opened her phone. She had photographed sticky notes, yellow squares of his handwriting, left for the family to read. He had written them in response to a pamphlet the church had produced, a pamphlet that was simply trying to teach what a human being is. She had photographed each one. I asked her to send me the notes so I could sit with them.

I want to tell you what those notes said, and then I want to tell you the harder thing, which is why I could not answer her as quickly or as cleanly as she hoped.

Subscribe now

The first note read: “God created transness so that we could participate in the act of creation.” The second leveled a charge, “doctrinal oversight due to erroneous philosophical framing of the text.” The third was the longest. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The Bible does not explicitly negate nonbinary or trans identities, and thus holds space for them, allowing the church to respect trans human rights.”

Her brother is now taking hormones. He believes he is becoming a woman. He is not. No chemical reorders what was set in the body before he drew his first breath. But that sentence, true as it is, was not what she needed first, and I knew it.

She asked me a simple question. What do I do?

I did not answer right away, and I want to be honest about why.

This is the thing I most want you to hear, and I want to be honest about how I come to say it.

I am not new to these arguments. I have stood in front of rooms across this country and traced them back to their sources, to Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler, to the clinical work of John Money. I have studied the social contagion that has pulled so many adolescent girls toward this ideology, and I can tell you where the ideas were born and why they spread. I understand the architecture of this thinking better than most people you will ever meet.

None of that is what wins the day.

I learned this early, not slowly, because I loved this child long before any error entered the picture, and the error has not loosened that love by an inch. When someone you love embraces something false, your love does not weaken. It narrows. It burns off the lesser thing, the hunger to be proven right, and presses down hard on what actually matters. If knowing the arguments could rescue a person, the child I am thinking of would already be standing where my wife and I raised them to stand. I have had to sit with this reasoning as a father before I ever sat with it as a pastor. Mastery of the ideas is the thing I am best at. It is not the thing that saves.

So when this woman asked what to do, she was not asking a man with a tidy answer. She was asking a man who carries the same weight she does.

That is why I want to slow down before we touch the notes themselves.

Share

Look again at what the three of them are actually doing. They are not three arguments. They are one move, performed three times. Each one manufactures permission. Each one takes a silence or an uncertainty and converts it into a license.

The first dresses rebellion in holy clothing. To participate in creation, in the way Scripture means it, is to work with the grain of what God made, a husband and a wife, a field and a harvest. It is never about overriding the body you were given. The note takes the oldest offer ever made to a human being, the promise that you may decide good and evil for yourself, and it calls that offer worship.

The second note is the one built to intimidate. Erroneous philosophical framing. It is meant to make a believer feel unqualified, as though the plain reading of the text were a kind of naivety. But notice what it quietly skips. Everyone is framing. Her brother did not step out of philosophy into pure truth. He traded one set of assumptions for another, a newer one that says the self inside is sovereign and the body is only clay. The question was never whether to use a lens. The question is which lens tells the truth about what a person is.

The third note is a syllogism, and it collapses when you press it. Scripture does not name every distortion. It does something better. It lays down a design so clear and so positive that it does not require a list of exceptions. Male and female, made in the image of God, the body received as a gift and not fought as an enemy. You do not need a verse forbidding every departure when the blueprint itself is that definite. And the appeal to absence cuts the other way. In a book that speaks openly about the body, about marriage, about desire, on nearly every page, the total absence of one affirming word is not a space waiting to be filled. It is an answer.

Here is what I had to learn the hard way, and what I want you to learn faster.

Her brother is not an enemy. The child I love is not an enemy. The church keeps reaching for its sharpest argument, as if the goal were to win a war against the person in the room. But the person in the room is usually not an opponent. He is a captive. Someone handed him a permission slip and told him it was a key. He believes it will open a door to himself. It will not. It opens onto a hallway of grief, and many who walk it say so only later, quietly, when the cameras are gone.

We do not out-argue a captive into freedom. We tell him the truth, and we stay close enough that the truth has somewhere warm to land.

So, finally, what do I do? The sister’s question. Maybe yours.

Do not go silent, and do not go to war. Those are the two easy exits, and both of them abandon the person. The silence calls itself peace. The fighting calls itself conviction. Both of them leave him alone with the lie.

Stay in the room. Keep showing up in his life, keep calling, keep the relationship intact, because a relationship is the only structure strong enough to carry hard truth without snapping. If you burn it down in one righteous conversation, you will have nothing left to carry anything.

Say what is true. You do not have to be the one who brings it up, and you should not go looking for the fight. But when it surfaces, and it will, do not step around it. He already knows where you stand. What he needs to see is that your honesty and your love are not two separate things he has to choose between.

Leave a comment

And pray, even when the praying falls apart. There will be nights when you have no words left, when you have said everything to God that can be said and the sentence will simply not form. That is not the failure of prayer. When you have run out of words, the Spirit has not. He intercedes for you with groanings too deep to be spoken (Rom. 8:26-27), carrying to the Father exactly what your exhausted heart means but cannot say. A parent watching a grown child stand far away may pray that wordless prayer more than any other. It is heard. It is the prayer of the Spirit Himself, and it does not depend on your strength to hold it up.

Your brother is not too far. The child I love is not too far. No one is past the reach of the One who made them, made them on purpose, and does not make mistakes with bodies or with souls.

I still have those three sentences. I keep them close. They remind me to be honest, to be unafraid, and to not leave the room.

I publish here regularly to give you biblical clarity in a collapsing world. If this piece served you, become a paid subscriber and help keep the work going. If this is not the season for that, share it with someone carrying a heartbreak like the sister in this story.

Writing produced by the author, with limited use of digital tools for editing and clarity.

Here’s what I notice about high performers when no one is performing. They stop posturing and start asking. The room gets quieter, and the work gets sharper.

That’s what I watched yesterday in a Dallas coffeehouse conference room. Seven and eight-figure operators around a long table. Coffee in hand and laptops open. The kind of ease that only shows up when the room isn’t a stage.

The coaching firm that brought them together is unapologetically Christian, though membership isn’t gated on it. The team I joined happened to be all believers, drawn from a half dozen denominational backgrounds. What held them together wasn’t a shared building or a position on every secondary doctrine. It was Christ, and the conviction that the company belonged to Him before it belonged to them.

What I watched them do, most of their local churches haven’t figured out how to do. I’ve been around church leadership long enough to know why. We tend to slot people into familiar categories when we disciple them. Men’s group, women’s group. Married, single. Young families, empty nesters. The lines are reasonable, and the gatherings serve real purposes. What I’ve been thinking about, as someone who came into pastoral ministry from a business background, is how rarely we equip believers around the place where many of them spend most of their waking lives. The marketplace.

Subscribe now

I’m not suggesting men’s groups can’t do this. I’m not suggesting women’s groups don’t. The point is more specific. There’s a particular kind of pressure that lands on the believer who is building a company, managing a team of two hundred, signing the front of a payroll check instead of the back of one. The man or woman carrying that pressure usually walks into a church gathering where no one in the room shares the same gravitational pull. They sing the songs and take the Lord’s Supper. Then they go back Monday morning to a set of stresses no one around them is positioned to speak into with any specificity.

I know this terrain because I lived in it. Before I attended Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, I completed my MBA in 2000 while working as a sales representative at Pfizer. The path from there carried me into institutional and hospital sales by 2004, then into a specialty role by 2007, then into district management at Daiichi Sankyo by 2010. Every step came with more money, more visibility, more responsibility, and less margin in every direction. The next rung on that ladder was vice president of sales. I was tracking toward it.

I needed discipleship at that point in my life more than at any other point in my life. I had less of it than at any other point in my life.

Here’s something I noticed watching the men ahead of me on that ladder. Most of the ones who took the next step paid for it. Not all the marriages that ended ended in infidelity. Plenty of them ended in something quieter. Neglect. Absence. A husband who was married to his work and visiting his wife on the weekends when he wasn’t traveling. There’s a peculiar ego that attaches to the climbing man, a self-justification that gets richer the more his bank account does. He tells himself the absence is worth it. He tells his wife the absence is for her. The math eventually breaks. Mine was breaking too. The cracks were there, and I had no business pretending otherwise.

Share

What I needed was a brother who had walked the same road and could speak to me from inside the conditions, not at me from outside them. God gave me one. His name is Benji Cunningham. Benji had worked as a manager at Pfizer before me. He understood the calendar pressure, the metrics, the territory politics, the quiet drift that happens when you start measuring your worth by your number. When Benji walked with me through that season, he wasn’t translating from a different vocabulary. He had carried the same weight. That changed everything.

What I saw in Dallas yesterday was the same kind of provision, scaled.

The men and the one woman around that table weren’t being coached by strangers. They were being sharpened by people who had run the same gauntlet. The veterans in the room spoke to the younger operators with the authority of those who had paid the tuition. Some had paid it twice. The middle of the day brought a presentation on mergers and acquisitions delivered by a younger specialist who had clearly done his work. I could write at length about how strong that session was, and I will, in another piece.

What I won’t forget is the hot seat. They brought one of my own projects into the room and turned the tables on me. Every assumption I had carried in got pressed. Every soft spot got identified. I came in to observe, and I left with my own thinking sharper than when I arrived. That kind of work doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when the people doing the pressing have earned the right to press.

Here is what I’ll keep turning over in my mind on the flight home.

The believer in the marketplace is not a second-tier disciple. The work of building a company, managing capital, hiring well, firing rightly, negotiating contracts under the eye of the Lord, this is the work of bringing dominion under the King who owns it all. Vocation is not the runway to ministry. Vocation is the ministry, when it’s submitted to the One who gave it. The man across that table in Dallas, head bowed over his laptop, was doing pastoral work in his company, whether anyone in his church had ever told him so.

The problem is that many of these believers receive no specific formation for the conditions they actually live in. The Sunday teaching is general. The small group is mixed. The men’s breakfast covers ground useful to everyone, therefore often particular to no one. The marketplace believer walks back into Monday carrying weight that nobody in his church is positioned to help him carry, because nobody in his church is carrying anything quite like it. So he goes looking. Sometimes he finds a parachurch space that meets him where he is. Sometimes he finds nothing and slowly hardens into a man whose calendar runs his soul.

Leave a comment

What I saw in Dallas is a good gift. I want to be careful with what I say next. The local church is the primary context for the believer’s formation. No parachurch table replaces the table of the Lord. No coaching cohort replaces the elders who keep watch over the souls of those entrusted to them. The men I watched yesterday would tell you the same thing. They came back from Dallas to their local congregations, not the other way around.

What I’m saying is this. The local church has often outsourced what it could have provided.

A pastor reading this who shepherds a congregation with marketplace believers in it has a few questions worth sitting with. Do you know who in your flock is carrying the weight of building? Do you know which of your men are one promotion away from a marriage they will not be present for? Are there older believers in your congregation who have walked through that pressure and come out the other side with their families and their faith intact, men and women who could be intentionally placed alongside the ones still climbing? Discipleship in the marketplace isn’t a program to add. It’s an eye to develop. The flock is more vocationally varied than the average sermon series accounts for, and the cost of not seeing that shows up in burned-out leaders and in the men in your congregation who serve faithfully on Sundays and quietly come apart by Thursday.

A marketplace believer reading this has a different word coming.

Don’t wait for your church to figure this out. Find brothers and sisters further along on the road you’re walking. Open your business books and your marriage to people who have the right to look. Submit the company to the Lordship of Christ in specific terms, not vague ones. Decide today, before the next deal, who the work is for. There are two masters in this story. You will serve one of them. The climb will cost you something. Make sure it isn’t the calling.

I’m flying home from Dallas more convinced than when I left. The church is sitting on a discipleship terrain it has barely walked. The men I watched yesterday are doing work the local church was meant to do, and would do well if it would see what’s in front of it.

Every church should have one of these. I cannot stop thinking about what it would look like in ours.

Join the Mission

This is the moment to stand with Sola Veritas.

I publish here regularly to give you biblical clarity in a collapsing world. But clarity alone isn’t enough — we need conviction, courage, and action.

Join the Sola Veritas Inner Circle for deeper briefings, behind-the-scenes intel, and live strategy roundtables that equip you for the battles ahead.

Free keeps you informed. Paid prepares you for war.

If you want to wear what you believe, visit the Sola Veritas Store for hoodies, jackets, mugs, and more. Every purchase fuels the mission and spreads the message.

Writing produced by the author, with limited use of digital tools for editing and clarity.