Common Life Politics

Dear friends—

Here’s the short version: Essay 7 is about pride, but not the kind most of us were warned about. It asks whether pride might be a gift—not the hubristic drive to stand above others, but the courage to contribute from what we’ve received.

What I learned in writing this is unsettling: my formation misunderstood both shame and pride in ways that still shape me. This essay goes back to Augustine, the Cappadocians, Aquinas, Luther, and the hidden curriculum of my own life to see what the tradition actually taught—and what we turned it into.

If you’ve ever felt torn between the desire to offer something meaningful and the fear of being seen, this may help name that tension. The fuller exploration begins below.

A Phone Call Home

I called my mother from Duke to confess unfaithfulness.

Not the kind she might have expected. I had fallen in love with Augustine of Hippo—a Catholic saint. In my tribal imagination, this bordered on betrayal. The boundaries had been clear since childhood: Marianne from St. Joseph’s Academy was gorgeous, could waterski like a dream, but Mom forbade dating her. “She’s Catholic,” she said, as if that settled everything. It did. Like St. Joseph’s, “St. Augustine” meant one of theirs, not one of ours.

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Yet here I was, a grown man at divinity school, calling to confess that a fourth-century North African bishop had rocked my world. That I had found in his Confessions what I couldn’t find in the Christianity of my youth: permission to be restless. Permission to not have it all figured out. Permission to approach God with something other than achievement.

I knew there was no going back.

Mom laughed. She always did have more grace than her tribal language suggested. But the phone call marked something real: I was beginning to discover that the Christianity I’d inherited might not be the Christianity. That what I’d been taught about pride and shame and how to become a worthy self might represent a mutation rather than the tradition itself.

The Question

The previous essay left me with a problem. If shame operates as biological firmware—an ancient alarm system that can’t be quieted through achievement—then what do I do with the Christianity that formed me? The one that taught me to “be the gift” through heroic service? The one that measured spiritual maturity by how much I could contribute, how little I needed to receive, how completely I could transcend dependence on others?

But as I sat with that question, another one emerged underneath it. What if the problem wasn’t pride itself but what we’d done with it?

In the fourth essay, I argued that shame is a gift—biological firmware designed to call us back to communion when we drift. What if pride is also a gift? Not the hubristic kind that needs to dominate, but something else entirely—the courage to contribute, the capacity to recognize that what we’ve received is worth offering back?

If that’s true, then my formation didn’t just misunderstand shame. It also distorted pride—turned a gift into a grasping, made contribution into competition, replaced the courage to offer with the compulsion to prove.

Was my faith itself at odds with what I was learning about shame and pride? Or had I inherited something else entirely—a mutation that wore Christian clothes but operated by different logic?

I needed to go back to the sources. To find out whether the tradition itself understood what my formation had missed.

Augustine: The Restlessness That Won’t Quit

I expected Augustine to pile on the guilt. He has that reputation—the architect of original sin, the man who supposedly invented Western sexual shame. I braced myself for more of what I’d grown up with: the problem is you, try harder, do better.

Instead, I found the most famous line in Christian autobiography: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”

Not: “Our hearts are wicked until we fix them.” Not: “Our hearts are deficient until we achieve enough.” Restless. A word that describes a condition, not a crime. Something in me recognized it immediately—that constant hum beneath all my accomplishments, the nagging sense that more was never enough.

Augustine knew that restlessness couldn’t be quieted by achievement. He had tried. Professor of rhetoric in Milan, climbing the imperial ladder, succeeding by every measure that mattered—and the restlessness only intensified. He was experiencing what I would later recognize as the firmware problem: disordered shame operating below the level where accomplishment could reach it.

What struck me most was his distinction between two kinds of self-love. There’s amor sui—the curved-inward love that makes the self its own ultimate reference point. And there’s caritas sui—proper self-care that flows from first being loved by God. The first generates what we’d now call hubristic pride: defensive, comparative, needing to outperform others to feel secure. The second generates authentic pride: grounded in reception, capable of genuine contribution precisely because it isn’t scrambling for worth.

But here’s what haunted me: Augustine saw something that my formation had missed entirely. He noticed that consciousness of your own moral effort could itself become a subtle form of that curved-inward love. You could be so focused on your own spiritual achievement that even your humility became a source of pride. Even your service became about you—about what you were accomplishing, what you were contributing, who you were becoming.

Augustine’s diagnostic marker was gratitude—or rather, its absence. Amor sui can’t really receive because receiving threatens its self-sufficiency. It can take, acquire, even accept—but it can’t receive in the way that acknowledges dependence.

I saw this at my parish every Maundy Thursday after I implemented the foot-washing rite. Each person would arrive at the basin, wash the feet of the one seated, then sit to have their own feet washed. Many enjoyed washing their friends’ feet—generous, serving, in control. But when they sat and someone knelt before them, I watched them grow agitated. They could give but not receive. The Eucharist that followed asked the same thing of them: come with empty hands, receive bread and wine, be fed before you serve. Some found it easier to wash feet than to be fed.

Peter’s protest to Jesus—You shall never wash my feet!—wasn’t humility. It was pride dressed as deference, the self-sufficient self, so threatened by grace that it would refuse communion rather than receive it.

Self-sufficiency all the way down.

I recognized myself in that description. All those years of heroic service, and I was terrible at receiving help. Terrible at being served. Terrible at the genuine gratitude that acknowledges: I needed that, and I couldn’t have provided it for myself.

Augustine showed me the curvature. The Cappadocians showed me what we were curving away from.

The Cappadocians: From Dependence to Coinherence

Nobody taught me about the Cappadocians in Sunday school. Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus—fourth-century bishops who hammered out what Christians actually mean when they say “Trinity.” I discovered them at divinity school and they began to upend everything I thought I knew about dependence and identity.

My formation had taught me that dependence was weakness. The goal was to need less—less from others, less from circumstances, less from God except in appropriately spiritual ways. Maturity meant self-sufficiency. The “gift” I was supposed to become was defined precisely by its independence: not needing, only giving. The truly strong person stood alone.

Gregory of Nyssa shattered this with a single metaphor. To explain how Father, Word, and Spirit relate, he made an analogy to human thought and speech. The mind frames its thoughts in words; the content is identical, but thought and word are different realities. And a thought, even when formed into words, remains unexpressed until spoken—until breath transforms the inner word into the reality of sound. Gregory played creatively with the Greek pneuma, which means breath, wind, prophecy, and Spirit all at once. The Spirit is the breath that transforms God’s Word into the concrete reality of creation.

Sitting in the Duke Divinity library, I felt something crack open. Here was a framework where the persons of the Trinity were distinguished not by competitive self-sufficiency but by their relationships to one another. Thought needs word needs breath. Each one is what it is only in relation to the others. This wasn’t the self-sufficient isolation I’d been trained toward. It was a vision where identity came through relationship, where “dependence” on another wasn’t weakness but the very structure of divine life.

Sam Wells helped me see how far this goes. The tradition calls it “coinherence”: each person of the Trinity constituted by relationship to the others. Not a chain of command. Not one person existing first and then producing the others. Each one wholly containing and being contained by the others while remaining distinct.

Think of it this way: the Father is not the Father before or apart from having the Son. The Son is not the Son apart from the Father. There’s no protected core of autonomous selfhood hiding behind the communion—no private self that exists first and then chooses to relate.

Barth said it plainest: God is “never-to-be-except-to-be-with-us.”

The relating is the being. Relationship all the way down.

The Cappadocians weren’t naive about disordered dependence—the kind that manipulates, that refuses to grow, that burdens others unfairly, that makes another person responsible for our whole sense of self. But they distinguished this from the mutual indwelling that constitutes love itself. You can’t love without being with. You can’t be in genuine relationship without the kind of porosity that lets another in. The self-sufficient self, needing nothing from anyone, isn’t the goal of spiritual maturity. It’s a theological impossibility—a fiction we construct to protect ourselves from the vulnerability that is love’s basic grammar.

What my formation had celebrated, I was learning, was what I’ve come to call disordered pride—the hubristic kind that needs to stand alone, that can’t receive without feeling diminished, that measures worth by independence. The competitive self, the self that must be the source of its own significance, the self that experiences every gift as a threat to its autonomy. The Cappadocians—and the tradition that flows from them—offered something different: an imagination where being-with is glory, not shame. Where the persons of the Trinity find “exultant joy” in each other, not anxiety about their status. Where receiving doesn’t diminish but constitutes.

I didn’t learn this in Sunday school because it would have been incomprehensible to the imaginative world I was being formed into. How do you explain coinherence to someone trained to think that selves must be either autonomous or determined by another? How do you describe mutual indwelling to someone whose imagination can only conceive agency as competing or cooperating, never as participating? The Cappadocians weren’t just teaching a doctrine about God. They were proposing an alternative imagination of what it means to be a person at all—one where relationship isn’t something added to pre-existing selves but is the very ground of selfhood. Where receiving isn’t weakness but the structure of divine life itself.

The Cappadocians showed me what we were made for. Aquinas showed me how it works—and why my formation had gotten it backwards.

Aquinas: The Grammar I Knew But Didn’t Inhabit

He looks at the human person standing in that field of divine generosity and asks: What does agency look like when it grows from secure belonging rather than fear? His answer is the unlikely pairing of humility and magnanimity.

Magnanimity, in Aquinas’s hands, is not the modern virtue of being big-hearted; it is the greatness of soul that dares to attempt things worthy of the gifts God has given. Humility is not self-negation; it is the clarity that those gifts are received rather than manufactured—that the factory I’d been running all my life could finally close.

For Aquinas, these two belong together the way roots belong to branches. Humility holds the self in truth; magnanimity lets the self stretch toward its vocation. One grounds; the other rises.

Aquinas believed the virtuous person was the one whose life unfolded from this integration—who acted from a foundation already given. And modern psychology, for all its different vocabulary, recognizes the same pattern: secure belonging allows for non-defensive agency. The child steadied by love becomes the adult who can take risks without the terror of exposure—perfect love casting out fear.

Here’s the strange thing: I knew this. I could have passed an exam on Aquinas’s virtue theory. I understood, at least intellectually, that magnanimity and humility were compatible rather than opposing—that they “proceed according to different considerations,” as Aquinas put it. Magnanimity looks at what God has given; humility looks at our own weakness. You need both. I could recite the formula: magnanimity works “in consideration of the gifts he holds from God.”

But the operating system running underneath was something else entirely.

What my formation actually practiced, without ever naming it, was a layperson’s version of what David Hume celebrated in the eighteenth century. Hume was explicit about rehabilitating pride as the engine of moral motivation. He called “love of glory” and “magnanimity” the “shining virtues” and dismissed humility as a “monkish virtue” worthy of the column of vices. For Hume, pride wasn’t dangerous—it was indispensable.

We would never have said that. But we practiced it.

The difference between Aquinas and Hume isn’t obvious on the surface. Both affirm genuine excellence. Both reject false humility. Both value greatness of soul. The difference is where the pleasure lands.

For Aquinas, magnanimity is oriented toward action—toward contributing from what’s been given. The focus is outward: What is there to do? What does my vocation demand? Gratitude isn’t a threat to this agency; it’s the ground of it.

For Hume, pride is oriented toward self-survey—toward the pleasure that arises from contemplating your own excellent character. The virtuous Humean is sustained by the pleasure she takes in being the kind of person she admires. The focus is reflexive: How do I look when I look at myself?

My formation said Aquinas but practiced something else entirely—a folk philosophy of self-sufficiency that I’ve only recently learned to name. From Hume (or his descendants): the proud self taking pleasure in its own excellence, virtue as the engine of agreeable self-regard. From Kant (or his descendants): the autonomous self anxious that reception would compromise agency, dependence as a threat to dignity. From the American air we breathed: the self-made self, measured by achievement, owing nothing to anyone. These don’t cohere philosophically—Hume and Kant would have despised each other’s systems—but they cohered in practice. They all pointed the same direction: away from receiving, away from dependence, away from the gratitude that admits you needed something you couldn’t provide for yourself.

The church should have been the community that formed me into a different story. That’s the indictment. We didn’t absorb this folk philosophy despite our Christian formation. We absorbed it through our Christian formation—in Sunday school, in sermons, in the unspoken curriculum of who got honored and why. We affirmed that gifts come from God while running on these other engines entirely. We knew the right answers about humility while privately keeping score. Appear humble—that’s good manners. But the pride is the engine. The humility is performance.

And gratitude? Gratitude exposed the counterfeit most clearly. For Aquinas, gratitude fits seamlessly with magnanimity because both grow from the same root: the truth that excellence is received. But in the folk philosophy I was actually formed in, gratitude was a subtle threat. If my worth comes from received gifts, I can’t take the same reflexive pleasure in surveying my own achievement. Gratitude disrupts the mechanism. So we performed gratitude—we said the right words, we muttered praise toward God at the appropriate moments—while something underneath quietly registered the achievement as ours.

Aquinas called gratitude “a debt of love from which no man should wish to be free.” That phrase stopped me when I first encountered it. In my formation, debt was precisely what we wished to escape. The self-sufficient self needs no debt, owes nothing, stands free. We were being trained to resent the very debt that Aquinas said no one should wish to escape.

I was beginning to see my formation clearly. We had the grammar of Aquinas in our mouths and the mechanism of Hume in our hearts. We could mouth soli Deo gloria while the self-survey hummed along underneath, registering our excellence, building the character we could admire upon reflection. No wonder the restlessness never quieted. Pleasurable self-regard is a hungry god that never stays fed.

Aquinas showed me the counterfeit I’d been running. Luther diagnosed how deeply it had curved me.

Luther: The Curve You Can’t Uncurve

I discovered Luther’s phrase incurvatus in se years ago, but I didn’t feel it until recently. The self curved inward on itself. Everything bending toward self-reference. I knew it as doctrine. I didn’t recognize it as autobiography.

A beloved church history professor at Duke, Warren Smith, had a way of making Augustine unforgettable. When he taught us about pride—Augustine’s superbia—he didn’t just explain it. He demonstrated it. He bent over in his chair, curled his shoulders forward, and stared down at his own belly button. “Navel-gazing,” he said. “When your eyes are on your navel, they can’t be on God.”

The room laughed. But the image stuck. I’ve used it in parishes ever since, and it’s never failed to land. There’s something immediately recognizable about it—the posture of someone so absorbed in examining themselves that they’ve lost sight of everything else. The anxious self-scrutiny that crowds out wonder. The endless internal inventory that leaves no room for the Other.

That was Augustine’s insight, Professor Smith explained. And Luther extended it. Even our best efforts curve back toward the question we can’t stop asking: How am I doing? Am I enough yet?

John Bradshaw taught me to notice toxic shame’s disguises. I started seeing them everywhere—including in a parishioner reporting with evident satisfaction after her recovery meeting: “I was the worst perfectionist there.” Even her confession had become a competition. The curvature had bent her humility into another form of self-display. Every achievement, every service, every theological insight—all of it curving back toward self-concern. The performance of humility that is its own subtle pride. The confession that secretly expects applause. The spiritual discipline undertaken to prove something about myself rather than to encounter God.

For years I credited Luther with the core insight. My professors taught me that Luther recovered Augustine’s diagnosis after centuries of Dominican scholastic optimism had softened it. The Thomistic synthesis, the story went, had domesticated the radical Augustinian critique of human capacity—and Luther called us back to the uncomfortable truth of our self-curved condition.

There’s truth in that narrative. But it’s not the whole truth. And the part it leaves out matters enormously for understanding how we got where we are.

The diagnostic does originate with Augustine. In City of God, Augustine identifies superbia—pride as fundamental disorder—as the root corruption pervading even pagan virtue. The magnanimous person’s refusal of gratitude, denial of dependency, aspiration to godlike self-sufficiency: this is the curvature Luther would later name. Even virtues “reckoned by some people to be genuine and honourable,” Augustine writes, “when they are related only to themselves and are sought for no other end... are puffed up and proud, and so are to be accounted vices rather than virtues.” Everything curves back toward the self.

So Luther was right to recover this. Luther wasn’t inventing; he was remembering.

What I Couldn’t Hear

Here’s the embarrassing part. My professors at Duke included Hauerwas, Wells, Campbell, Carter, Smith, Kavin Rowe—the very scholars whose insights now finally germinate were planting seeds in well-prepared soil. Except the soil wasn’t prepared. It was concrete. They handed me the cure and I took careful notes, passed my exams, and walked away with the disease intact.

They told me. I couldn’t hear it. The operating system was already running, and it had no category for what they were offering. I could write papers on participatory righteousness while still trying to earn my place in the seminar. I could recite Campbell’s critique of the courtroom gospel and then preach it anyway. The self-curved self is remarkably efficient: it can curve even its own theological education back toward self-improvement.

So let me be precise about what I couldn’t receive: Augustine himself was not “hyper-Augustinian.” He diagnosed the self-curved condition, yes. But he also prescribed a cure—and the cure wasn’t simply staring harder at oneself while feeling bad about it.

Augustine left ample room for gradual process and transformation. He absorbed pagan spiritual exercises into Christian life, chastened by humble recognition of dependency. Through scripture, Eucharist, prayer, confession, Christians are renewed in God’s image. Eyes that had been fixed inward slowly learn to lift. This is habituation, even if Augustine rarely used the term. Augustine knew the therapy, not just the diagnosis.

And Aquinas—far from softening Augustine’s insight into comfortable accommodation—actually preserved what Augustine practiced while adding crucial conceptual architecture. Bowlin has shown me that Aquinas already understood what Porges and Siegel would need laboratories to confirm: virtue requires the soil of friendship and community; the soul can only act freely when its identity is not at stake in its own action. Secure belonging enables our gaze to lift. When you’re not anxiously wondering whether you measure up, you can finally look at something—someone—other than yourself.

Aquinas called it “pious magnanimity”—greatness of soul that knows its greatness is gift. You can attempt great things precisely because you’re not trying to prove anything. And his vision of how God works in us isn’t a zero-sum game where every point for God is a point taken from you. Grace doesn’t replace your action; it enables it. God’s hand doesn’t shove yours aside—it steadies it, the way a parent steadies a child learning to draw. The child is still drawing. More freely than before, because she’s no longer afraid of getting it wrong.

How the Well Got Poisoned

This is where I need to be careful. David Steinmetz—who taught me Luther and Calvin at Duke—spent his career distinguishing reformers from their receptions. He would not let me get away with blaming Luther for what Luther’s heirs made of him.

But let me be honest: I think the seed was in the soil. Luther’s formal theological architecture—crystallized in his polemical writings and systematized by subsequent generations—created a framework where divine and human action appeared to compete. The more God does, the less we do. If God saves us, we contribute nothing. If we contribute anything, we’re trying to save ourselves. His heirs didn’t betray Luther. They found what was already there and built a system out of it.

And the climate grew more anxious after Luther, not less. By the late seventeenth century, the Quietist controversy had crystallized a question that would have puzzled Augustine: Can you truly love God if you get anything out of it—peace, joy, meaning, eternal life? The demand for pur amour—pure, disinterested love—meant you should love God even if God damned you for it. Anything less was just dressed-up self-interest.

You can feel how this poisons the well. If genuine love requires wanting nothing for yourself, then any happiness in faith becomes suspect. The very things Augustine celebrated—finding rest in God, delighting in divine goodness—now looked like spiritual selfishness. And if your good works might secretly be self-serving, how could you ever be sure you weren’t a hypocrite? The fear of hidden self-interest became a self-scrutiny that could never rest.

I know this fear from the inside. I’ve examined my own faith for hidden self-interest the way a surgeon examines a CT scan for tumors—certain something malignant must be lurking, unable to stop looking.

In this anxious climate—which Luther’s heirs inherited and intensified—Aquinas’s solution no longer made sense. If your desires were involved, how could it be grace? If it felt good, how could it be genuine? Grace working through your natural desires to gently lift your gaze? That sounded like the comfortable accommodation the Reformation had rejected.

Luther saw with devastating clarity that we’re bent over, curved inward. What he couldn’t systematically develop, his heirs made sure we’d never find. With the efficiency of good Protestants, they codified the diagnosis into a system—and the cure vanished somewhere between Wittenberg and the Westminster Confession.

A Verdict That Doesn’t Change You

If the cure vanished, what took its place? A courtroom. Campbell argues that this way of reading Paul—salvation as verdict rather than transformation—has held the gospel in “Babylonian captivity” for five hundred years. Melanchthon built the system. Here’s how it works: you’re guilty, you deserve condemnation, but God the Judge declares you “not guilty” because Christ’s righteousness has been credited to your account. A legal transfer of funds—Christ’s moral perfection deposited into your ledger, covering your debt.

The problem? It’s a courtroom verdict that doesn’t actually change you. You’re still curved inward—you’ve just been officially pardoned for it. The declaration is real, but the transformation is optional. The posture doesn’t change; we’re just told it’s been legally excused.

The irony cuts deep. A framework meant to resolve anxiety about salvation produces two equal and opposite pathologies—and both curve inward.

The first is endless self-scrutiny: Did I really believe? Was my decision sincere enough? Is my faith real? The self examines its own faith to see if it’s really faith, and the examination itself becomes another performance requiring examination. Incurvatus in se, all the way down.

The second is triumphalist permission. If the verdict is in—if Christ’s righteousness has been credited to my account and the case is closed—then what need is there for transformation? I’m on the winning team. Jesus is Lord, which means I’m covered. This is the MAGA Christianism move: a gospel that baptizes us in place, declares victory, and asks nothing of us but loyalty to the winning side. Hauerwas calls it practical atheism—Christianity that functions as if God makes no difference to how we actually live. The verdict replaces the cure. Incurvatus in se wearing a flag pin.

Herdt describes “Luther’s insistence that active moral aspiration be displaced by honest confession of sin and incapacity.” The implication is stark: the honest sinner stands closer to righteousness than the aspirant to virtue. The aspirant is in danger because aspiration can curve inward. The honest sinner, by contrast, has stopped performing. For one moment, the curvature relaxes.

And yet—there must be something beyond honest confession. Confession alone doesn’t uncurve the self; it can simply become another form of curvature. The cure remained buried.

But it wasn’t lost.

Another Picture Entirely

What if grace is less like a transaction where God does the work instead of us, and more like a relationship where God’s presence enables us to do what we couldn’t do alone? A child learning to ride a bike isn’t diminished by her parent’s steadying hand—she’s enabled by it. The parent’s help makes her riding more real, not less. When she finally pedals on her own, she doesn’t say, “That wasn’t really me—my parent was helping.” She says, “I did it!”—and she’s right, even though she couldn’t have done it alone.

But Paul goes further still. “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Notice the preposition: with. Paul doesn’t say Christ died for him so his old self could be replaced with a new model. He says he was crucified with Christ—drawn into Christ’s own story so completely that Paul’s story and Christ’s story become inseparable.

This isn’t a transaction where Jesus fixes the curvature problem. It’s an invitation into a relationship so intimate that the curved self discovers it has been living in the wrong story altogether. The self doesn’t get repaired; it gets relocated—found within Christ’s life rather than trapped in its own anxious narrative. The curvature relaxes not because it’s been surgically removed but because there’s nothing left to prove. When your life is “hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3), identity is no longer at stake.

This is what Augustine actually practiced and Aquinas articulated—a framework where God’s grace and human effort aren’t opponents fighting over credit. Grace creates the conditions where genuine human contribution becomes possible. The self doesn’t have to curve inward because identity isn’t at stake. Effort doesn’t have to perform because belonging isn’t conditional. Our eyes can finally lift—not because we’ve tried hard enough to stop the self-scrutiny, but because we’ve been given something worth looking at.

I met Douglas Campbell at Duke. I read him deeply. And for years I preached the courtroom gospel anyway—the standard account I’d received and mastered—because I couldn’t hear what he was offering. I knew something was wrong. Or did I? Maybe I couldn’t name it because naming it would have cost me the sermon I’d already prepared, the theology I’d built my ministry on, the self I’d constructed out of all that right thinking. Ignorance is easier to confess than complicity.

It’s only as I dove into research on Christian Nationalism for the Episcopal House of Bishops that I began to recognize how the standard account had mutated in the ways Campbell had diagnosed fifteen years earlier.

The companions gave me the theology. What I still couldn’t understand was why it hadn’t taken.

The Question I Can’t Escape

I know this theology in my bones now. Receive, rest, contribute. Be a channel, not a source. Let love flow through without obstruction.

And I still obstruct it every day.

My wife sees it before I do. There’s a moment—she’s told me about it—when my face shifts. I go from present to performing. The channel closes and the factory machinery starts. Data takes over: analyzing, solving, explaining. Or Beast emerges: defending, deflecting, counterattacking. Either way, what should flow through me—God’s love finding her through my presence—gets blocked.

I’ve written elsewhere about these parts of me—the cast of characters that Chris Charleton helped me name. Data is my hyper-competent controller, the one who manages vulnerability by mastering everything. Beast is the warrior who attacks when shame gets too close. Sadness holds what I couldn’t grieve; Gollum hoards what I’m afraid to lose. They’re all survival strategies from childhood. They all obstruct the channel.

Here’s what haunts me: I learned the theology that should have prevented this. I read Augustine on restlessness and rest. I absorbed the Cappadocians on divine relationality. I studied Aquinas on magnanimity and Luther on curved-in-ness. The companions gave me everything I needed.

So why didn’t it take?

I keep coming back to what I was actually taught—not in books but in the air of my formation. The water I swam in. And that water carried a different theology entirely.

Your outer-being feeds your inner-being. That was the lie, delivered through a thousand sermons and examples: serve heroically, achieve excellently, and eventually you’ll become the person worth being. Contribute your way to identity. The channel was supposed to run backward—output producing input, giving generating receiving. It looked Christian. It quoted Scripture. But it was Stoic self-sufficiency dressed in vestments.

And underneath it ran the racial imagination of Louisiana—the walls I grew up with, the ones that determined who counted as fully human and who didn’t. Marie crossed those walls every morning to hold me while her own son Gary waited at home. She received me; the system told her she wasn’t worth receiving. This was not a secular system that Christianity should have opposed. It was a Christian system—built by Christian theology, justified from Christian pulpits, maintained by Christian families who saw no contradiction between Sunday worship and Monday segregation. A whole system built on constructed rather than received identity, on disordered pride that had nothing to do with gift and everything to do with position.

That system needed people at the bottom to secure those at the top. And it produced shame everywhere it touched—not the rightly ordered kind that calls you back to communion, but the toxic kind that whispers you don’t belong, you have nothing to offer, stay in your place.

I internalized both sides. The hubristic pride that says I must be the source—that’s Data, performing competence to earn my place. And the disordered shame that says I’ll contaminate whatever flows through me—that’s Beast, attacking before anyone can see the defect.

I’m only now seeing how they fit together. The system’s hubristic pride didn’t just float above me; it landed in me as disordered shame. Data and Beast aren’t accidents. They’re what you get when a community’s pride needs somewhere to go. The theology I absorbed didn’t just fail to make me a channel. It made me a factory—manufacturing instead of receiving, performing instead of resting, obstructing instead of flowing.

So where did the mutation happen? How did a tradition that understood the movement—receive, then rest, then contribute—become a machine for producing Data and Beast?

The Genealogy I Need

That’s the question driving the next essay.

The companions gave me the theology. What I need now is the genealogy—how the Stoic mutation kept sneaking back into Christian formation, how the racial imagination needed a theology that justified hierarchy, how the beautiful sequence—receive, rest, contribute—got twisted into its counterfeit: perform, achieve, earn.

The gift of pride—rightly ordered—is the courage to be a channel. To trust that what you’ve received can flow through you. To rest in God’s embrace rather than scramble to earn it. To embody the imago Dei as co-creator, offering back what was first given.

But that gift got buried. The channel got obstructed. And I want to know how.

Coda

Several of you have told me that these essays ask something of you — not just attention, but emotional space. I feel that too. So as a reminder, I’m keeping to a gentle rhythm: a new movement every other Friday morning in the Jazz, Shame, and Being With series. My hope is simply to give each essay room to breathe. I’m grateful to be walking this long arc with you.

If you’re joining this journey midstream and want a sense of the whole arc, the series guide is pinned at the top of my Substack.

With affection and steady presence,

Craig

If this resonates: biweekly Friday essays developing incarnational alternatives to dominative Christianity—integrating embodied psychology, constructive theology, and jazz. Presence, not opposition.

Endnotes

Dear friends,

Here’s the short version: achievement can’t heal shame because they operate at different levels of the nervous system. You’re trying to update software when the firmware is corrupted.

This essay traces how the body tells the truth about shame long before the mind can make sense of it, and why the kind of pride that actually heals can only grow once safety returns. If you’ve ever wondered why decades of achievement never quieted the shame, or why some pride feels generous while other pride feels brittle and defensive, this is the grammar beneath it.

The vocabulary gets technical in places—neuroscience carries its own jargon. But what matters isn’t whether you can decode every term. What matters is whether this names something your body already knows.

If this resonates: Friday essays developing incarnational alternatives to dominative Christianity—integrating embodied psychology, constructive theology, and jazz. Presence, not opposition.

Two essays ago, I claimed shame was gift—the body’s way of calling us back toward communion we’ve disrupted. Last week, I confessed how my family taught me to construct identity through heroic service disguised as Christian virtue. Both essays were preamble to the claim I’ve been circling: achievement can’t heal shame because they operate at different levels of the nervous system. You’re trying to update software when the firmware is corrupted. It’s like debugging your email client when the motherboard is fried—technically impressive effort directed at the wrong level of the system entirely.

This is going to require some vocabulary—neuroscience has its lexicon, after all. But Stanley Hauerwas drilled this into me at Duke: what matters isn’t comprehension (can you decode the terms?) but intelligibility (does this make sense within the Christian grammar you already inhabit?). If you can’t translate neuroscience back into the language of creation, fall, and redemption, it’s just expensive trivia. (And if your theology can’t account for what neuroscientists have discovered about how shame actually works in bodies, it’s not theology—it’s spiritual fantasy poorly disguised as doctrine.)

I’m not a neuroscientist—which is precisely the point. Theology doesn’t master other disciplines; it locates them inside larger stories, bringing theological wisdom to bear without pretending expertise it lacks. What follows is theological interpretation, not scientific discovery: listening to what researchers have learned about shame and pride in actual bodies, then asking what it means if those bodies were designed for connection, know the pain of rupture, and can be restored through sustained presence. The neuroscience names mechanisms. Theology names meanings. My hope is that you’ll find yourself thinking not “This is too technical” but “Oh—this names something I’ve lived but never had words for.

Story Follows State

Nobody told you the truth about feelings—that they arrive in sequence, body-to-mind, not mind-to-body. We treated ‘feelings’ like spiritual weather, something character determines: strong people feel less, weak people feel more. The whole edifice was moralized ignorance.

When someone says “you’re overreacting,” they’re committing a category error so fundamental it would be funny if it weren’t tragic. They’re treating your body’s involuntary threat response as if it were a seminar paper you could have revised. As if the fire alarm screaming in your chest were subject to parliamentary procedure. The phrase “you’re being too sensitive” is theological malpractice dressed up as pastoral care—demanding that bodies pretend they’re not bodies, then blaming them when biology refuses to comply.

Here’s what nobody told you: story follows state. The mind arrives last—always.

Which means every time you’ve tried to think your way out of shame, you were attempting the neuroscientific equivalent of time travel. The body had already decided, the nervous system had already arranged itself, and consciousness was just arriving with its interpretive commentary, fashioning explanations for events already underway. You can’t narrate yourself out of what fired before narrative existed.

The sequence is hardwired: affect (biological flash in milliseconds), emotion (body’s arrangement—breath rhythm, muscle tension, facial expression), feeling (awareness of that arrangement), story (mind’s attempt to explain what already happened). Tomkins called affect the “biological portion of emotion”—the hardwired response that precedes everything else. Affect fires instantly. Story constructs slowly. And most of Christian formation operates at the story level, trying to narrate people into different nervous systems.

This is why that micro-expression in someone’s face can hit you before either of you has a thought. Their body registers a break in connection. Yours registers that registration. Two nervous systems answer one another long before either person knows what they are answering. You interpret the shift as an indictment—a moral failure in you or in them. But the story you tell is simply the narrative your mind constructs to match the physiological state you’ve already entered.

Once you see this order, you understand how often we treat a body’s reflex as a character issue. We call it “overreacting,” “being too sensitive,” “not handling things well,” when the body was simply signaling, “Something between us cracked—come closer.”

It wasn’t character. It wasn’t intention. It wasn’t even “emotion” in the way we were taught to think of emotion. It was state. And the story we attach to that state—our defensiveness, our assumptions, the courtroom we build in our heads—is downstream of a biological sequence no one chose.

The mind is not the captain steering the ship. It is the breathless narrator sprinting after the body, trying to explain whatever direction the organism has already turned.

This is what it means to say story follows state: not that story is unimportant, but that it is never the beginning of the truth about us. It is the last arrival at a scene the body has already entered.

A few weeks ago, I explored how shame itself functions this way—not as a moral verdict but as the body’s first punctuation mark when connection cracks. Rightly ordered shame is a signal: “Something between us broke—come closer.” Disordered shame is what happens when that signal metastasizes into identity: “I am the break. I am defective. I am the problem.” This distinction matters because when shame is a semaphore it calls us into true stories from which rightly ordered pride emerges, but when shame becomes a verdict it enmeshes us in false stories from which hubristic pride grows.

Safety, Unsafety, and the Body’s Silent Radar

Neuroscientists have a word for what your body is doing long before you have a thought about a situation: neuroception—the nervous system’s silent radar.

It is always scanning for three basic conditions: Am I safe? Am I in danger? Am I under threat? And it answers before emotion and long before thought.

This is why a tiny change in someone’s tone, or a sudden quiet in a meeting, can feel larger than the moment itself. The body isn’t asking, “How should I interpret this?” It’s asking the more primal human question: “Are we okay?”

When the nervous system senses yes—when the relational field feels intact—the face is open, the voice warm, the breath steady. Safety shows up as accessibility, responsiveness, and ease. When the nervous system senses no—even slightly—everything tightens. Unsafety is felt as: I might be excluded, I might be in the wrong, I might be too much, I might be alone in this moment.

You see this in ordinary places: a coworker’s expression goes flat in a meeting, a friend replies with a brief text after a long exchange, someone’s tone shifts on a call, a group falls quiet when you walk into the room. No one chose a reaction. No one chose a story. The body registered something first and prepared itself.

And because we grew up with the wrong map, we often treat these reflexes as evaluations—as if someone were judging us, or as if we had failed in some way—when the nervous system is simply alerting us that something in the relational field needs attention. The body wasn’t declaring a verdict. It was raising a small signal: “Something shifted—check the connection.”

This is the safety/unsafety axis. Not a moral scale, not an emotional scale, but an attachment-detection system trying, beneath awareness, to answer the oldest human question: Are we okay?

The Nervous System as an Ensemble

The human nervous system didn’t arrive all at once. It evolved in layers, each repurposing older circuitry for newer forms of life. Stephen Porges gave us a way to hear this architecture beneath our reactions—but not as floors we move between. Instead, think of it as an ensemble where three sections are always playing simultaneously, competing for dominance. This isn’t sequential activation—all three broadcasts run constantly. What changes is which signal achieves hierarchical dominance in that moment, modulating the others’ influence without silencing them.

Two weeks ago, I described the jazz musician who drops the beat. Face flushes. Chest tightens. The shame affect triggers. And in that micromoment, three responses fire at once:

Stop playing altogether—freeze, withdraw, disappear from the ensemble. This is the dorsal vagal response: the ancient reptile circuitry that shuts down when overwhelmed.

Blast louder, drown everyone else out—Attack-Other disguised as confidence, make sure no one can ignore the mistake by covering it with volume. This is the sympathetic response: the early-mammal circuitry mobilizing to fight, flee, defend.

Stay with the band, listen harder, find the downbeat—adjust, breathe, return to the groove. This is the ventral vagal response: the advanced-mammal circuitry that lets us connect, co-regulate, and stay present.

All three are active. All three are broadcasting. The question isn’t which circuit you’re “in”—it’s which one wins dominance in that moment. Under strain, the sympathetic or dorsal broadcasts drown out the ventral signal. Under safety, the ventral broadcast becomes clear enough to stay in the ensemble. But all three are always playing, competing for control—not taking turns.

This is the architecture beneath shame and pride. When shame fires—that instant biological flash signaling broken connection—the competition intensifies. The dorsal impulse says disappear. The sympathetic impulse says dominate. The ventral impulse says listen, adjust, return. Which one dominates determines whether shame does its healing work or becomes toxic.

Healing pride requires the ventral signal to stay strong enough that the nervous system can interpret agency truthfully. Authentic pride can only grow when the ensemble holds—when shame can be received as semaphore rather than sentence, when we can participate freely without performing our worth.

This is why achievement can’t heal shame. Achievement operates at the cognitive level—building new pride through effort and validation. Shame operates at the pre-cognitive level—registering rupture before thought. You’re trying to solve a firmware problem with software updates.

I spent decades attempting this impossible project. Naval Academy. Nuclear submariner. High-tech company president. Duke and Durham theological degrees. Published books and essays. The achievement was real. The validation was real. But the healing? That never came. Because I was working at the wrong level of the system entirely. You can’t think your way out of what fired before thought existed.

This is what I couldn’t see in the “be the gift” formation I described last week—the Christianized Stoicism that taught me to construct worth through performance. That entire system operated from sympathetic circuit dominance dressed up as virtue. No amount of achieving could restore the ventral circuitry that would have let me receive love in the first place. I was trying to heal connection wounds with achievement tools, blasting louder to cover the shame instead of listening my way back to the ensemble.

And here’s what makes hubristic pride so insidious: it’s what happens when the sympathetic broadcast dominates and the mind mistakes that arousal for confidence, for certainty, for righteousness. You’re still in the band, technically—but you’re drowning everyone else out. Authentic pride is what happens when the ventral signal holds clearly enough that you can play your part without silencing the others.

This ensemble is the backdrop for everything that follows.

What Sadie Knows That We Forgot

My wife and I often remark on how Sadie, our Goldendoodle, reads us. She knows when one of us is sad—not by what we say, but by what our bodies broadcast. She’ll watch from across the room, head tilted, and then pad over quietly, pressing her body against a leg or resting her chin on a knee. She doesn’t fix anything. She doesn’t solve anything. She just offers her presence, her warmth, her steady breath. My wife calls it Sadie’s ministry. I call it uncanny.

Here’s what makes it uncanny: Sadie can read me even when I’m working hard to hide what I’m feeling. My Stoic training runs deep—I can keep my face neutral, my voice even, my posture controlled. I can fool my wife on a bad day. But I can’t fool the dog.

Sadie doesn’t read thoughts. She reads bodies—and specifically, she reads right-hemisphere signals that bypass conscious awareness. This is the original language of attachment, operational before words and deeper than words. Emotion is not primarily happening in the mind. It’s happening in the body—in breath rhythm, muscle tension, micro-expressions, the barely perceptible shift in how you hold yourself. The mind narrates what the body has already broadcast. Sadie knows this because dogs live closer to the truth than we do. They haven’t learned to ignore what the body says.

What Sadie is reading—what all mammals read in each other—is the nervous system’s state. And that state is wired through structures most of us have never seen but that shape our daily lives more than anything happening in the brain. This is not metaphor; it is anatomy—the actual wiring through which human beings feel safe, threatened, connected, or alone.

The facial nerve (typically shown in orange in anatomical diagrams) governs the muscles around the eyes, mouth, and voice. This is why safety shows up in soft eyes, warm tone, relaxed facial expression—and why threat appears in tightened mouths, sharpened eyes, clipped voices. Your face is not decoration; it is your nervous system’s front porch. Sadie reads that porch before I know I’ve changed the welcome mat.

The vagus nerve (typically shown in yellow) runs even deeper. It stretches from the brainstem through the throat, heart, lungs, diaphragm, and into the gut. When people say “my heart sank,” “my stomach dropped,” “I felt it in my chest,” they are not speaking symbolically. They are describing neurobiology.

The upper branch of the vagus links to the face, voice, and hearing—tuning you to another person’s presence. The lower branch runs through the chest and abdomen—carrying signals that tell you whether to settle or brace. This is why relational rupture feels bodily: chest constriction, shallow breath, a knot in the stomach. The system contracts because it has sensed a change in the relational field.

And this is why connection feels bodily too: a loosening in the chest, a widening in the breath, a gentler voice, a felt sense of being able to stay. Sadie knows when those signals shift—when the chest loosens, when the breath deepens—and she stays until they do.

Stephen Porges calls this whole network the Social Engagement System—the integrated organ of face, voice, breath, and heart that allows two nervous systems to meet each other. When this system is online, co-regulation becomes possible. When it drops offline, the older survival circuits take over. Sadie is a co-regulation specialist. She lends her steadiness until ours returns.

Here is the key: your nervous system experiences your relationships before your mind can name them. Your face reacts before your feelings. Your gut reacts before your thoughts. Your heart reacts before your story. Sadie taught me this before any neuroscientist did.

This is why the Christian tradition has always insisted that we are embodied creatures, not minds floating above our flesh. “Heart” and “gut” were not metaphors for the ancient world; they were wise descriptions of where truth is actually felt.

Neuroscience now shows what the tradition intuited—and what Sadie practices daily: grace is something the body recognizes before the mind understands. The gentle pressure of steadiness. The widening of breath. The slow discovery that we have been found. Grace is God’s act. The body feels that act in its own language. Sometimes that language is a Goldendoodle pressing her warmth against your leg until the ventral circuitry comes back online and you remember you’re not alone.

The River That Widens and Narrows

One of the most illuminating ideas in the last twenty years of psychology is what Dan Siegel calls the window of tolerance—the range in which the nervous system can stay present, flexible, and connected under stress. Inside this window, we can think and feel at the same time. We can tolerate difference. We can repair ruptures. We can stay in the room. This isn’t just metaphor—it’s physiologically trackable. We measure its correlates through heart rate variability, respiratory patterns, vagal tone, and other autonomic markers that show when the system is regulated versus dysregulated.

I started tracking this personally when I was training for marathons—strapping on my Polar heart monitor each morning to check whether my parasympathetic nervous system was recovering from training stress or still depleted. The numbers told me when to push and when to rest. Now I use the same metrics as a window-of-tolerance monitor. When my HRV drops, I know I’m vulnerable to responding as a reptile or lower-order mammal rather than the homo sapiens my wife married. Sympathetic hijack is one bad meeting away. The river has narrowed, and I need practices that widen it again before attempting anything requiring nuance, empathy, or staying in the room during conflict.

But the “window” behaves more like a river than a rectangle. A river widens when conditions are good: rest, connection, predictability, repair, attuned presence. In a wide river, disturbances are absorbed gently. We have room for nuance, patience, curiosity.

The river narrows when the weather changes: fatigue, chronic stress, accumulated emotional labor, unprocessed shame, relational strain, loss. When the river is narrow, even minor disruptions feel overwhelming. It isn’t fragility; it’s biology under strain. A narrow river can overflow fast.

You see this every day. A parent operating on broken sleep, their window already narrow before the day begins. A clinician, pastor, or teacher carrying the weight of others’ crises, metabolizing trauma that isn’t theirs to carry. A colleague stretched thin after weeks of unresolved pressure, smiling through meetings while the river shrinks. Anyone living with ongoing grief or shame, where yesterday’s losses narrow today’s capacity. People managing hidden emotional labor in family systems or workplaces—the ones who smooth everyone else’s rough edges while their own margin disappears. Each of these people begins the day with a river already low. Their capacity hasn’t vanished; their margin has.

Outside the river—above it in sympathetic mobilization or below it in dorsal collapse—everything changes. We stop hearing nuance. We lose access to empathy. We misread neutral faces as threat. We speak sharply or withdraw suddenly. We interpret our body’s distress as personal failure or someone else’s fault. What looks like “overreaction” from the outside is often just the nervous system slipping out of its river.

This is why exhortations like “try harder,” “calm down,” or “just let it go” rarely help. Exertion cannot widen the river. Only co-regulation and renewed safety can.

When someone lends us steadiness—a calm presence, a grounded voice, a furry head, a non-judging face—the river widens again. Breath deepens. Muscles release. Perspective returns. We become capable of connection. This is the river at the heart of human life: the flowing range within which communion is possible.

What narrows it? The burdens we carry in our bodies. What widens it? Presence, safety, repair, and love.

How the River Widens

When the nervous system slips out of its river—upward into agitation or downward into collapse—most of us try to “handle it” on our own. We grit our teeth, brace our bodies, tighten our breath, push through. But biology is stubborn: exertion does not widen the river. Regulation does, and regulation is almost always relational.

Humans developed an entire network for this—the system Stephen Porges calls the Social Engagement System. It links the muscles of the face, the tone of the voice, the rhythm of the breath, the steadiness of the heart, even the small muscles of the middle ear that tune us to another person’s voice. These are not poetic images; they are anatomical pathways built for one purpose: to help nervous systems find one another.

When that system is online—when someone near us is steady, open-faced, warm-voiced—our own body begins to match it. Breath slows. Shoulders drop. The jaw releases. Our chest loosens. Attention returns. We regain access to nuance, empathy, curiosity. The river widens.

This happens in ordinary moments: a friend stays grounded while we are overwhelmed, and our breath settles; a colleague speaks gently in a tense meeting, and the room softens; someone listens without rushing to fix, and our body begins to unclench; a caregiver kneels to meet a child’s eyes, and the child’s panic melts. No one solves anything in those moments; they simply lend their regulation, and our nervous system receives it—often before we realize anything has changed.

Co-regulation works through neural synchrony—when one mammal’s nervous system maintains regulated state, it literally entrains another mammal’s autonomic rhythms through shared gaze, vocal prosody, and physical proximity. This happens primarily through right-hemisphere-to-right-hemisphere communication—nonverbal, subcortical, body-to-body. Before words can help, bodies must find each other.

This is why co-regulation is not a sentimental idea but a biological reality: your nervous system was designed to borrow steadiness from another mammal until your own can come back online. The older Christian grammar has always intuited this. “Presence,” “withness,” “abiding”—these are not abstractions but describe the creaturely way grace is mediated: one person staying present enough that another can find safe ground again.

This is why the river widens not through self-rescue but through received presence. And once the river widens, we can tell the truth about what is happening in us. We can reconnect. We can choose differently. We can return to one another. Co-regulation is not a technique; it is how communion begins again.

Grace as Neuroception

There is a reason the Christian tradition has always spoken of grace as something we receive before we understand it. The body knows what the mind is slow to name. Grace arrives first as a change in state—a softening, a widening, a settling—long before it becomes a doctrine or a story.

This is what neuroscience makes newly visible. When the nervous system feels safe enough to stay open—when the ventral circuitry holds—the body can tell the truth about itself again. Fear loosens. Breath deepens. The jaw unclenches. The chest releases. The field between us feels less dangerous, more spacious. The body recognizes something before the mind can narrate it:

“I am held.I am not alone.I can stay.”

The First Letter of John says it like this: “Perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18).

For most of my life, I heard that as a metaphor. Only recently have I seen that it also names a physiological event.

Fear belongs to the early-mammal circuitry—the sympathetic engine built for threat vigilance (phobos). Love belongs to the late-mammal circuitry—the ventral network built for connection, attunement, and co-regulation (agapē). When love holds, the threat circuits loosen their grip. The body comes back into the room. We regain access to presence, empathy, curiosity. The window widens.

Grace, in this light, is not a disembodied idea. Grace is what God’s presence feels like at the level of state. It is the body’s recognition that the bond holds. It is the slow discovery—often before we have words for it—that we have been found.

And because grace restores safety where safety was lost, it becomes the only ground on which authentic pride can grow. Grace loosens fear; love widens the river; safety allows us to interpret our own agency truthfully.

Grace makes rightly ordered shame possible. Rightly ordered shame makes authentic pride possible.

This is how theology and biology converge: grace is the restored safety in which communion becomes possible again.

The Asymmetry of Shame and Pride

Before we can speak accurately about shame and pride, we need to understand shame’s unique biological function: it’s the only innate affect whose purpose is to inhibit positive affects already underway. You can’t be shamed by someone you don’t care about being seen by. Shame fires when interest or joy is active and then gets interrupted—which is why it feels like sudden exposure, like falling. This is why shame always signals desire for connection, even when it feels like pure mortification. You only feel shame in relationships that matter.

Now we can speak of shame and pride with something like accuracy—not as abstractions floating in the mind, not as moral labels, but as embodied strategies the nervous system deploys in the wake of connection and rupture.

Here’s the asymmetry that changes everything: shame is instant; pride takes decades.

You can trigger shame in seconds—recall your most humiliating moment and watch your face flush, your chest tighten, your gaze drop. But try to manufacture pride on demand. Can’t be done. Pride requires years of formation in communities that teach you how to interpret your agency truthfully. Which is why therapeutic determinism (you’re just neurologically damaged”) and prosperity gospel (”speak your breakthrough into existence”) are mirror-image heresies—both trying to shortcut what can only be grown slowly, communally, rhythmically, in the width of the river.

Both promise transformation without formation, achievement without attunement, reconstruction without community. Both fail for the same reason: they’re trying to 3D-print pride when what’s needed is old-growth forestry.

Hart and Matsuba’s developmental research shows that in early childhood, pride functions as basic positive affect responding to achievement. But in adolescence and adulthood, pride becomes something more: it integrates into identity as a “highly prized end,” sustaining voluntary moral action across years of practice. This explains why virtue formation takes time—authentic pride doesn’t just reward single acts but becomes the stable motivational ground for a life of sustained contribution.

Shame is a biological flash—a micromoment of “something between us cracked”—arriving as rupture, a break in connection the body feels before the mind understands. Pride arrives slowly, only when the nervous system has regained enough safety to interpret its own agency truthfully, arriving as reconnection: “something in me is held in the bond.”

This asymmetry doesn’t just organize your therapy sessions. It organizes your church, your politics, your entire civilization. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. The same neurobiological dynamics that organize personal shame and pride also organize how groups understand themselves, their mission, their relationship to others. But first, we need to understand what happens when pride itself breaks down.

How the nervous system interprets agency matters crucially—and the pattern is precise.

Paul demonstrates the formula for authentic pride in 1 Corinthians 15:10: “I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I but the grace of God.” That’s internal effort (I worked) made unstable through grace attribution (not I, but grace), sustaining controllable agency (I can continue working). Authentic pride claims genuine effort while refusing to claim credit. Hubristic pride, by contrast, attributes success to stable superiority: “I accomplished this because I am inherently better than others.”

How the nervous system interprets agency matters crucially. Tracy and Robins’ research reveals pride’s three-dimensional attribution structure:

* Internal vs. External: Did I accomplish this, or was it circumstances/others?

* Stable vs. Unstable: Is this who I am (fixed trait) or what I did (effortful action)?

* Controllable vs. Uncontrollable: Can I influence future outcomes, or was this luck/fate?

Authentic pride emerges from internal-unstable-controllable attribution: “I accomplished this through effort I can repeat.” Hubristic pride emerges from internal-stable-uncontrollable attribution: “I accomplished this because I am inherently superior.”

Paul casually demolishes the entire framework of Stoic virtue formation in one sentence: “I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I but the grace of God” (1 Cor 15:10).

Watch what he does: claims genuine agency (I worked harder), attributes success to grace (not I, but grace), sustains future effort (I can continue working). That’s internal-unstable-controllable attribution—the precise structure Tracy and Robins identify as authentic pride. Paul was doing neuroscience before neuroscience existed, because he was doing theology.

The genius is in the “though”—not “I worked and then grace helped” or “grace worked through me passively.” Paul’s claiming real effort and real dependence in the same breath. Which is exactly what the Stoics couldn’t imagine (autarkeia requires autonomous self-sufficiency) and exactly what Dominative Christianism keeps forgetting.

If your theology can’t hold genuine human agency and utter dependence on grace in the same sentence without one devouring the other, you’re not doing Christian theology—you’re smuggling Stoicism in sacramental drag.

And what we call “pride” is not one thing. The nervous system fashions two entirely different versions depending on whether shame has been healed or left festering.

Authentic pride is the embodied stance of confident belonging. It emerges only when the ventral circuitry is online, shame is rightly ordered (a semaphore, not a sentence), effort and participation are interpreted truthfully, and connection is possible. This kind of pride feels like grounded joy—not puffing up, but widening.

By contrast, hubristic pride is not the opposite of authentic pride but the nervous system’s attempt to survive disordered shame. When shame metastasizes into identity—”I am defective,” “I am unworthy,” “I am the problem”—the body recruits sympathetic broadcast energy to protect the self. Heart racing, chest tightening, jaw clenching, attention narrowing: dorsal shame covered in sympathetic armor. The mind, arriving last, misreads all this arousal as certainty, superiority, righteousness, clarity. Hubristic pride is brittle, comparative, allergic to vulnerability. It cannot be corrected with argument but can only be healed by healing the disordered shame beneath it and restoring access to the ventral circuitry where connection becomes possible again.

This is the asymmetry: pride that grows without safety is always defensive, while pride that grows within communion becomes offering—rooted, participatory, free.

This is why Christian virtue cannot be reduced to willpower. We’ve been treating pride as if willpower could manufacture what only communion produces—you might as well try to produce photosynthesis through sheer determination. Authentic pride must be formed—slowly, communally, rhythmically—in environments where the nervous system is held online by grace, truth, and presence. This is how communities keep the river wide. This is how people learn to tell the truth about themselves again. And this is why the next essay turns to the older grammar—not to escape the biology, but because the biology has finally made the wisdom visible.

Why Pride Breaks (and Why It Can Be Healed)

Tracy and Robins’ research reveals a devastating correlation: hubristic pride tracks with narcissism (r = .42-.48), while authentic pride shows no relationship with narcissism when controlling for genuine self-esteem. More tellingly, hubristic pride correlates positively with shame-proneness even while claiming superiority—the grandiose narrative defends against unhealed shame underneath.

Jessica Tracy uses Lance Armstrong as her case study in hubristic pride—and the choice is perfect. Armstrong didn’t just cheat; he constructed an entire moral universe where his cheating became heroic. He sued people who told the truth. He destroyed careers to protect the lie. And when it all collapsed, his defense was essentially: “Everyone was doing it, so my superiority was still real.”

That’s not confidence gone wrong. That’s hubristic pride in its naked form: shame wearing sympathetic armor, misread by consciousness as moral clarity. The more grandiose the claims, the more fragile the foundation. Tracy’s research shows hubristic pride tracking with narcissism while correlating positively with shame-proneness. Translation: the people who can’t stop telling you how superior they are? They’re drowning in unhealed shame, and the inflation is a life raft.

Which means when you encounter someone whose pride feels brittle, defensive, allergic to vulnerability—your first question shouldn’t be “why are they so arrogant?” but “what shame is this performance desperately covering?” The body armored in sympathetic arousal. The mind misreading survival as strength. The story constructing superiority from terror.

And here’s what makes this pattern so stubborn: you can’t argue someone out of hubristic pride any more than you can shame someone out of shame. Both operate at the level of nervous system state, not narrative content. The only thing that heals disordered shame is the slow work of co-regulation in communities where grace, truth, and presence hold people online long enough for new patterns to form.

Which is why it matters that most churches are organized around maintaining disordered shame disguised as humility. We’ve baptized Stoic self-sufficiency, called it sanctification, and wonder why people can’t form authentic pride. You can’t produce ventral safety in communities organized around sympathetic threat. You can’t form rightly-ordered pride in environments that weaponize shame into moral leverage. The body knows the difference between incarnational presence and domination dressed up in theological language.

This explains why Dominative Christianity appears simultaneously arrogant and fragile. The superiority claims (”real America,” “God’s chosen people”) aren’t grounded in genuine contribution but function as defensive shields against terror of inadequacy. Any challenge threatens the entire structure because shame remains unmetabolized beneath the inflation.

The body knows what the mind denies. Hubristic pride activates sympathetic defense systems—heart racing, chest tightening, threat vigilance—not the ventral safety of authentic pride. The nervous system treats superiority claims as ongoing emergency requiring constant maintenance. This is why Dominative Christianist communities cannot rest, cannot celebrate others’ flourishing, cannot tolerate complexity or failure. The defensive structure demands total vigilance.

The Determinism Trap

I spent years believing that damage done early enough was damage done for good. The formation patterns I absorbed—the codependent caretaking, the hypervigilance around others’ dysregulation, the belief that my worth depended on successfully managing other people’s nervous systems—felt like grooves carved too deep to escape. If shame got in at the firmware level, if the nervous system learned its patterns in infancy, what hope was there for those of us who spent decades building lives on faulty foundations?

Here’s what makes shame so devastating: it’s the only innate affect whose biological function is to inhibit positive affects already underway. You can’t be shamed by someone you don’t care about being seen by. Shame fires when interest or joy is active and then gets interrupted. This is why shame feels like sudden exposure, like falling—because neurobiologically, that’s exactly what’s happening. Which means shame always signals desire for connection, even when it feels like pure mortification. You only feel shame in relationships that matter.

Then I discovered neuroplasticity. Not as technique or self-help strategy, but as scientific ground for something I couldn’t have believed otherwise: we’re not permanently stuck with the patterns formed in our childhood. The brain retains capacity for change throughout life. Adult attachment relationships can literally enable healing of childhood attachment wounds—not by erasing what happened, but by providing the relational safety that allows new neural pathways to form alongside old ones, gradually shifting default patterns from threat-based to connection-based.

But here’s what stopped me: neuroplastic change requires exactly what Wells describes—sustained “being with” across years, not breakthrough moments. The timeline matters. Acute stress responses can normalize within months of consistent safety. But deeply embedded attachment patterns formed in the first three years typically require three to five years of sustained secure attachment to significantly reorganize. The prosperity gospel wants instant transformation. Therapeutic culture wants weekend breakthroughs. Both miss what the biology reveals: healing damaged neural networks takes years of sustained safe presence, not moments of insight.

Which brings me to something I’ve been seeing more clearly the longer I stay in this work. The therapeutic determinism that settled into our culture over the last few decades—the belief that certain patterns represent permanent, unfixable conditions—creates a tragic bind for those living with shame-based attachment disorders.

The spectrum is broader than most realize: substance addiction and alcoholism, certainly, but also perfectionism, eating disorders, relationship addiction, workaholism, compulsive spending. Borderline personality disorder, complex PTSD, narcissistic patterns—these emerge most directly from shame-based attachment trauma. Obsessive-compulsive disorders, generalized anxiety, some depressions—these may develop through different pathways but become entangled with shame secondarily.

What they share: nervous systems that learned early that safety requires constant vigilance, that attachment threatens annihilation, that shame signals permanent defect rather than temporary rupture requiring repair.

When these patterns get framed as ontological defects rather than adaptive responses to early relational trauma, the diagnosis itself becomes a shame trigger. And Nathanson’s research predicts what happens next: the Compass of Shame activates.

Some respond through Attack Other—but not against distant clinicians or abstract frameworks. The attack turns toward those closest, toward the very people offering sustained presence. Family members who stay. Friends who keep showing up. Communities attempting to embody Being With. Because when you’ve internalized the belief that presence means eventual abandonment, when every attachment experience has taught that connection will turn to contempt, the offering of presence itself registers as threat. The nervous system reads sustained care as the prelude to betrayal and activates defense preemptively—pushing away precisely what it most needs.

Others turn to Attack Self—spiraling into self-loathing that confirms their worst fears about being fundamentally defective. Still others choose Withdrawal—disappearing from families, from friendships, from ecclesial communities, protecting themselves through distance from the very bonds of affection that could enable healing. Or Avoidance—remaining physically present while refusing genuine participation, performing connection while patterns continue unchanged beneath the surface.

Each response makes neurobiological sense. When accepting reality about your patterns feels like consenting to permanent broken status—when diagnosis carries the implicit message “you are ontologically defective and should be cast aside”—the nervous system does what nervous systems do when faced with existential threat: it activates defense. And communities formed to practice Being With become the very sites where the compass spins most dangerously, not because these communities are failing but because sustained presence feels unbearable to those who have learned that presence always ends in abandonment.

This is where the reframing matters: Toxic shame says, “I am fundamentally flawed; something about my essential being is wrong; I should be cast aside.” Rightly-ordered shame says, “I developed protective patterns in unsafe environments; these patterns made sense given what I faced; they’re not who I am but how I learned to survive; and they can change through sustained safe connection.”

The difference isn’t semantic. It’s the difference between “I am broken” and “I am hurt.” One demands hiding; the other invites healing. One locates the problem in your essence; the other locates it in your early environment and your nervous system’s brilliant adaptation to danger. One makes change impossible; the other makes change creaturely—slow, embodied, relational, real.

This is perhaps the cruelest consequence of therapeutic determinism. It prevents participation in the very communities where neuroplastic healing could occur. Because what the neuroscience reveals is that authentic pride—the kind rooted in genuine effort rather than comparative superiority—requires specific communal conditions: Environments where effort is celebrated without exploitation. Where agency is interpreted truthfully. Where shame can be received without contempt. Where people are held in sustained bonds of affection that widen windows of tolerance rather than narrowing them.

These are not clinical conditions. These are ecclesial conditions. Family conditions. The conditions of ordinary communities that practice incarnational presence. And here’s what Cozolino’s research demonstrates: these same communal conditions literally enable the reorganization of traumatized nervous systems. The patterns formed in early relational danger are not ontological defects but adaptive formations—nervous systems that organized themselves around survival when attachment meant threat. Which means the patterns are not identity. And patterns, unlike identity, can change.

But change requires what Wells calls Being With—not working for, not strategic intervention, but sustained incarnational presence. The kind that lends regulated steadiness without demanding reciprocal performance. The kind that stays through dysregulation without absorbing it or fleeing from it. The kind that says, through a thousand ordinary interactions across years: You’re not permanently broken. You’re hurt. And hurt can heal.

This is where Paul’s word cuts through the therapeutic determinism: “See, I am making all things new.” Not erasing what was. Not pretending the damage didn’t happen. But making new—transformation that respects the reality of formation while refusing to grant it permanent ontological status.

You are not your nervous system’s early adaptations. You are not your shame’s diagnosis of your identity. You are not the patterns that once kept you alive when genuine connection threatened survival. Those patterns made sense. They may have saved you. But they’re not ultimate. They’re not ontological. They’re not you.

And in communities that practice Being With—communities where grace, truth, and presence hold people online long enough for neuroplastic change to occur—those patterns can gradually give way to something closer to what you were always meant to be.

This is gospel. Not spiritual technique layered over unchanged biology, but the biology itself revealing the shape of redemption. Hurt can heal. Patterns can change. Pride can form rightly. And the river can widen again.

Where Pride Actually Grows

If shame is firmware and pride is software, then the question of identity shifts: who am I when my patterns are responses to formation rather than expressions of essence? This is where neuroscience and theology converge in ways that make each discipline more intelligible.

Here’s what makes this research theologically profound: the attribution structure that produces authentic pride maps almost perfectly onto what Douglas Campbell calls “participatory righteousness”—the apocalyptic Pauline framework where genuine human agency operates within grace-enabled participation in creative fellowship with God and the created order. You contribute genuinely (internal) through received capacity (unstable) that you can exercise but didn’t create (controllable participation in gift).

The contractual theology that Campbell critiques produces exactly the hubristic attribution pattern: righteousness as achieved status (internal-stable) secured through correct belief or performance (autonomous control). This is why contractual frameworks, despite condemning pride, create its conditions. When salvation depends on securing permanent status through correct performance, some respond with chronic anxiety about adequacy—while others respond with defensive inflation to mask that same anxiety. Both are symptoms of the same diseased framework.

In contrast, participatory frameworks enable authentic pride: you genuinely contribute to God’s redemptive work (internal), but the capacity to contribute is gifted rather than inherent (unstable), and you can exercise this capacity through practices that form you (controllable participation). This is Aquinas’s magnanimity—rightly ordered pride in participating in divinely enabled goods. This is Aristotle’s proper self-love—the grounded confidence that comes from being rightly ordered toward the good.

And this is why authentic pride requires formation in communities of character—contexts where agency is interpreted truthfully. You can’t will yourself into authentic pride any more than you can will your nervous system out of defense activation. Both require environments that hold you truthfully while your patterns reorganize.

MacIntyre’s account of practices illuminates this: virtues like authentic pride are formed through participation in communities whose traditions maintain coherent narratives about what constitutes genuine contribution. You learn authentic pride the way jazz musicians learn improvisation—through years of practice within communities that celebrate genuine effort while maintaining standards, that welcome failure as material for learning, that honor individual contribution while serving the ensemble’s flourishing.

This is formation, not construction. You don’t build pride; you’re formed into it through participation in communities that practice truthful interpretation of agency. And formation, Bowlin demonstrates, is deeply contingent—dependent on communities, practices, and providential circumstances beyond individual control. Which means authentic pride is simultaneously genuine achievement and received gift.

The jazz ensemble offers a fitting image: musicians take authentic pride in individual development (hours of practice, technical mastery) while that pride emerges from and serves the communal performance. No one claims superiority; everyone celebrates contribution. The pride that sustains practice is the same pride that enables generous participation.

This is why Christian virtue cannot be reduced to willpower. Authentic pride must be formed—slowly, communally, rhythmically—in environments where the nervous system is held online by grace, truth, and presence.

Being With: The Incarnational Horizon

Theologians sometimes talk as if communion were an idea, a doctrine to be affirmed. But the nervous system tells a simpler truth: connection is creaturely. It has a physiology. It has a posture. It has a feel.

When the church speaks of incarnation, of God choosing to be with us in Jesus, it is naming something that is not merely spiritual but bodily. Presence is not an abstraction. It is what happens when the ventral circuitry stays online long enough for two lives to meet without fear.

This is what Sam Wells means by Being With. It is not heroic activism or strategic influence. It is the practice of staying present—of lending our regulated selves so that others can find safety again. Being With is what happens when grace, truth, and presence hold a community’s nervous system online.

The Johannine language is precise: Jesus came “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Not grace or truth, as if we must choose between acceptance and honesty. Not grace then truth, as if we earn confrontation after proving our loyalty. Grace and truth, integrated—the capacity to provide regulated presence (grace as safety signal) joined with truthful interpretation (truth as coherent narrative).

This is theological co-regulation: Jesus’s presence signals safety strongly enough that truthful confrontation doesn’t trigger defensive collapse. Grace isn’t permission to ignore truth, and truth isn’t condemnation that forecloses grace. They’re integrated in incarnate presence—the same integration the nervous system requires for healing.

Wells distinguishes Being With from four alternatives that modern Christianity often confuses with incarnational presence:

* Working For: Solving others’ problems while maintaining power differential

* Working With: Strategic partnership that remains instrumental

* Being For: Advocacy from distance

* Being Alongside: Companionship that avoids hard truth

Being With combines presence (entering another’s reality) and truthfulness (maintaining honest speech) in ways that require surrendering control without abandoning responsibility. This posture mirrors Jesus’s own ministry: he doesn’t fix people’s problems from above but enters their conditions—table fellowship with sinners, touching lepers, weeping at tombs—while speaking truth that invites transformation rather than shaming into compliance.

Neurobiologically, Being With describes what Porges would call maintaining ventral vagal presence through sustained connection: the regulated person lending their regulation to the dysregulated person through embodied proximity, calm tone, soft face, and patient presence that signals safety strongly enough for the other’s defensive circuits to gradually stand down.

This isn’t technique but theological commitment: we practice Being With because God first practiced it with us in Jesus, entering our dysregulated existence and remaining present until co-regulation could occur—incarnation, ministry, cross, resurrection, ongoing presence through Spirit and Body.

But here’s where the eschatological horizon opens: Being With is not merely therapeutic intervention aimed at individual healing. It’s participation in the new creation already breaking into this age. When Paul writes “See, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5), he’s not describing distant future but present reality—the kingdom invading history through communities that embody incarnational presence.

This is Zizioulas’s insight: being itself is communion. We don’t have stable “selves” that then enter relationships; we become persons through relationships in which we participate. The divine Persons—Father, Son, Spirit—are constituted as persons through their mutual relations. Created persons image this Trinitarian structure: we exist not as isolated egos but as ec-static reality, existing outside ourselves in communion with God and others.

Which means authentic pride—rightly ordered self-regard—can only emerge through participation in truthful relationships. Hubristic pride attempts the impossible: autonomous self-constitution through achieved superiority. But since being is communion, the attempt to exist autonomously produces not selfhood but dissolution.

This is why communities that practice Being With are not merely therapeutic spaces but eschatological signs—glimpses of what human existence looks like when organized around communion rather than domination. When shame is received without contempt. When failure becomes material for further formation. When agency is interpreted truthfully—genuine contribution enabled by grace. When the river stays wide.

Campbell’s participatory righteousness finds its proper horizon here: participation isn’t instrumental (doing things to achieve status) but ontological (existing in communion). And within this participatory existence, authentic pride becomes possible—not pride in autonomous achievement but pride in genuine contribution to the communal work God is doing.

The neuroscience and the theology speak the same truth from different angles: healing happens in relationship. Formation happens in community. Pride forms rightly in environments where grace and truth hold people online long enough for patterns to reorganize around connection rather than defense.

Communities that practice Being With aren’t therapeutic programs optimizing neuroplasticity. They’re participating in what God is already doing: making all things new. The convergence of neuroplastic healing and spiritual formation isn’t happy accident—it’s how incarnation works. God didn’t create nervous systems that could theoretically heal under ideal conditions. God created nervous systems designed for co-regulation, brains wired for attachment, affects that fire to call us back toward communion. This is the design.

Which means the prosperity gospel and therapeutic determinism aren’t just pastorally unhelpful or scientifically naive. (Offering theological Photoshop when bodies require actual healing—performance spirituality for people allergic to embodiment.) They’re theological heresies that deny creation’s goodness. Prosperity gospel says bodies don’t matter (just achieve through faith). Therapeutic determinism says bodies are all that matter (you’re just your neurology). Both deny that bodies can be redeemed—one through spiritual bypass, one through biological fatalism.

Against both, the older Christian claim: bodies that learned threat can learn safety. Nervous systems that organized around defense can reorganize around connection. Hurt can heal. Patterns can change. Pride can form rightly. Not because we’re strong enough to change ourselves, but because we’re held in bonds of affection strong enough to bear the weight of our formation while new patterns grow.

This isn’t wishful spirituality imposed on resistant biology. This is the biology—nervous systems designed for co-regulation, brains that reorganize through sustained safe attachment, affects that fire to call us back toward communion. And this is the gospel—not escape from embodied existence but its redemption. Not transcendence of our creaturely limits but their transformation. Not freedom from our biology but freedom through it, as the body that learned threat becomes the body that learns safety.

A God who meets us not above our biology but within it. A salvation that doesn’t bypass the body but heals it. A pride that doesn’t escape embodiment but finally arrives in it, grateful.

And this is where the next essays turn—to see how these patterns play out in the specific formations and deformations of contemporary Christianity. Because once you see the asymmetry, once you understand how shame operates at the firmware level while pride functions as constructed software, once you recognize that healing requires sustained Being With rather than heroic intervention or instant transformation...

Then you can’t unsee the ways both MAGA Christianism and Providential Identitarianism have built their entire edifices on faulty foundations, trying to construct pride over unmetabolized shame, demanding performance from nervous systems organized around defense, narrowing the river when what’s needed is its widening.

But that reckoning comes later. For now, this: You are not your patterns. Your patterns are not your identity. And in communities that practice Being With, those patterns can gradually give way to something closer to what you were always meant to be.

The river can widen. The body can learn safety. Pride can form rightly. All things can be made new.

Coda: A Note on Rhythm

Several of you have shared that these essays ask something of you — not just attention, but emotional space. I feel that too. This work isn’t light; it’s slow, layered, the kind of writing we metabolize rather than skim.

To honor that, and to make this journey companionable rather than rushed, I’m shifting to a gentle, sustainable cadence: every other Friday morning, you’ll receive the next movement in the Jazz, Shame, and Being With series.

My hope is that this gives each essay room to breathe — for you to sit with it, return to it, and let it do its work without pressure. I’m grateful to be walking this long arc with you.

With affection and steady presence,

Craig

If this resonates: Friday essays developing incarnational alternatives to dominative Christianity—integrating embodied psychology, constructive theology, and jazz. Presence, not opposition.

ENDNOTES

A NOTE ON THESE NOTES

If you’re the kind of person (like me) who reads endnotes (and bless you if you are), these are the research sources and technical explanations you’ll actually find useful. I’ve kept only the citations that directly support the essay’s main claims and the concepts that genuinely need clarification.

For the full scholarly apparatus (71 citations), there’s a complete version available—but that’s for people writing dissertations, not for reading on your phone.

In response to reactions to On the Strange Beauty of Ugly Legislation.

The House just passed the legislation I analyzed in today's and yesterday’s essays by a narrow margin—making this theological critique of 'fiscal fundamentalism' more urgent than ever.

I. The New Beatitudes™

Available exclusively from Trump Brand Theology, alongside the Trump Bible, Fight Fight Fight cologne, and other premium spiritual products

Blessed are the tax cutters,for they shall inherit the deficit.

Blessed are those who detention centers build,for they shall be called peacemakers.

Blessed are the prosperity theologians,for theirs is the kingdom of statistical manipulation.

(Matthew 5:3-12)

Now available in gold-plated verse format! Each beatitude personally endorsed by the man who never met a product he couldn't slap his name on, from steaks to universities to sacred scripture. Coming soon: Trump Brand Holy Water ("The wettest water you've ever seen, from the standpoint of water") and the MAGA Communion Set ("Make the Eucharist Great Again").

I've been receiving the most fascinating correspondence lately—letters that reveal the full flowering of what we might call "Fiscal Fundamentalism," a theological mutation that treats Republican budget proposals as if they were divinely revealed scripture. The arguments are so remarkably consistent across different writers that I suspect there's either a shared talking points memo or the Holy Spirit has begun communicating exclusively through Heritage Foundation policy briefs.

These letters invariably follow a predictable pattern: personal testimony about economic struggle, statistics that would make even a casino operator blush, immigration rhetoric that would have puzzled the Magi (Matthew 2:1-12), and theological arguments that manage to make the prosperity gospel look sophisticated by comparison. It's rather like watching someone perform theological gymnastics while claiming they're simply walking in a straight line.

What's particularly fascinating is not merely the content of these defenses, but their systematic deployment of what classical rhetoric calls ignoratio elenchi—the art of missing the point so skillfully that it appears intentional. This represents Tribal Epistemology in action: truth-seeking systematically subordinated to group identity maintenance, where the goal isn't understanding but tribal boundary preservation. When confronted with arguments about mass family detention, they respond with questions about tourism visa requirements. When pressed about healthcare cuts affecting millions, they pivot to abstract discussions about work requirements. This isn't accidental confusion—it's strategic misdirection, the rhetorical equivalent of a magician's sleight of hand.

On Method and Approach

Before proceeding to specific analysis, a brief word about methodology. This essay focuses primarily on theological rather than purely economic critique—not because economic analysis is unimportant, but because the defenders of these policies consistently invoke Christian authority for their positions. When people claim divine endorsement for human policies, theological evaluation becomes not just appropriate but necessary.

The approach here follows what we might call "immanent critique"—taking seriously the Christian commitments that fiscal fundamentalists claim while examining whether their policy preferences actually align with those commitments. This isn't about imposing external religious standards on secular policy debates, but about evaluating whether policies advocated in Christ's name actually reflect Christ's character (John 14:9).

The economic data matters because truth matters, and because false claims about policy effects can't be baptized into righteousness through religious rhetoric. But the deeper question remains theological: what does it mean to follow Jesus in the realm of public policy, and how do we distinguish authentic discipleship from Christianism—the use of Christian symbols to legitimize fundamentally unchristian content?

§

II. The Alchemy of Austerity

The most remarkable rhetorical achievement in these defenses is the transformation of taking from the poor to give to the rich into a form of Christian charity. This requires what medieval alchemists could never accomplish: turning base metals into gold through pure force of will and statistical sleight of hand.

Consider the curious mathematics at work. When pressed about cutting healthcare for 8.6 million people while providing $3.8 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthy, our fiscal theologians deploy what we might call "Prosperity Materialism Accounting." They cite revenue increases of 48% (a figure from House Budget Committee Republicans comparing nominal 2022 revenues of $4.9 trillion to 2017 baseline without adjusting for inflation, population growth, or economic expansion—precisely the statistical sleight of hand that would make casino operators blush)¹, unemployment decreases (without acknowledging trends that began years before their preferred policies), and wage growth (without noting that real wages adjusted for inflation tell a rather different story).²

It's rather like claiming credit for the sunrise because you happened to be facing east when dawn broke. The roosters of the world have been making this argument for millennia, yet somehow the sun continues to rise even when roosters sleep in. When you compare $4.9 trillion in 2022 dollars to $3.3 trillion in 2017 dollars without adjusting for five years of inflation (approximately 20% cumulative), population growth (about 3%), and normal economic expansion, you're not demonstrating fiscal success—you're demonstrating why statistics without context can prove anything, including that bread is more expensive now than in 1950, therefore proving economic decline.

The actual data tells a rather different story: the Congressional Budget Office, Tax Policy Center, and Center for American Progress all confirm that the Trump tax cuts reduced federal revenue by approximately $1.7 trillion through 2023.³ The claimed "48% increase" compares nominal dollars without adjusting for inflation, population growth, or economic expansion—the same logical error as claiming bread costs more now than in 1950, therefore proving economic decline.

But the true genius lies in the theological framework that makes this economic alchemy appear Christian. By invoking "work requirements" and "fiscal responsibility," they've managed to baptize social Darwinism in the River Jordan (Matthew 3:13-17)—a perfect example of Christianism, the use of Christian symbols and language to legitimize fundamentally unchristian content. The resulting theology suggests that Jesus's real message was not "blessed are the poor" (Luke 6:20) but "blessed are those who can navigate complex bureaucratic requirements while working multiple jobs without healthcare."

This represents textbook Practical Atheism—maintaining Christian language while systematically contradicting Christian substance. The profound disconnect between claimed faith and actual policy preferences reveals a theology that has made peace with Caesar while claiming allegiance to Christ.

The Medicaid Reality Check

Here's where the rhetorical sophistication meets empirical embarrassment. When defenders invoke "work requirements" for Medicaid, they're operating from assumptions that dissolve faster than their statistical claims under scrutiny.

Now, defenders of work requirements often invoke their strongest argument: that meaningful work provides dignity, purpose, and pathways out of poverty—claims that deserve serious engagement rather than dismissive rejection. If Medicaid recipients were predominantly able-bodied individuals choosing dependency over employment, work requirements might indeed serve both fiscal responsibility and human flourishing.

But here's where the data becomes truly devastating to their narrative, because it reveals this compelling theoretical framework rests on empirical quicksand. The reality that should give any honest conservative pause: Medicaid enjoys overwhelming public support, with 83% approval among all Americans and 74% approval among Republicans.⁴ Even within their own political tribe, three-quarters of people support the program they're advocating to cut. This suggests their opposition isn't based on careful policy analysis or even Republican political consensus—it's based on ideological assumptions disconnected from both empirical reality and popular opinion.

But here's where the data becomes truly devastating to their narrative. Census Bureau data reveals the stunning reality about who actually receives Medicaid: among working-age recipients, 48% worked that year, 27% were disabled, and only 6% were not working long-term—representing just 3% of all Medicaid recipients.⁵ The "able-bodied freeloaders" that justify work requirements essentially don't exist. We're talking about targeting a virtually phantom population that represents three percent of program beneficiaries.

This means work requirements aren't addressing a real problem—they're creating bureaucratic barriers to punish a population so small it's essentially statistical noise, while harming people who are already working or genuinely cannot work. It's rather like requiring background checks to prevent unicorn attacks: bureaucratically burdensome, morally questionable, and solving a problem that exists primarily in the imagination of those proposing the solution.

Meanwhile, empirical research consistently demonstrates that imposing work requirements fails to boost employment rates—it simply creates administrative obstacles that exclude people from healthcare without achieving the stated policy goal.⁶ This isn't promoting employment—it's punishing vulnerability while claiming moral justification based on a population that largely doesn't exist.

Perhaps most ironically, when economists adjust for the relatively poor health status of Medicaid recipients, the program delivers healthcare more efficiently than private insurance.⁷ This mirrors the cost-effective healthcare systems of other advanced nations that achieve superior outcomes at lower costs. This isn't government waste—it's government efficiency that should make fiscal conservatives celebrate, not condemn.

So when our fiscal theologians support cutting a program that efficiently serves working families, enjoys broad bipartisan support, and targets a virtually non-existent "freeloader" population, they're not demonstrating fiscal conservatism. They're demonstrating how ideological commitment can override both empirical evidence and Christian principles about caring for the vulnerable (Matthew 25:35-40).

The Stranger at the Gate

Perhaps nowhere is this theological creativity more evident than in immigration policy, where our correspondents have discovered that Jesus's command to "welcome the stranger" (Hebrews 13:2) actually meant "welcome the stranger, but only after they've completed extensive paperwork, submitted to indefinite detention, and proven they won't compete for jobs with people who were strangers themselves just a few generations ago."

To be fair, the strongest version of this argument deserves acknowledgment: nations do have legitimate rights to control borders, immigration systems require some form of enforcement, and chaotic policy implementation can indeed harm both immigrants and receiving communities. These are not unreasonable concerns, and dismissing them entirely would be both intellectually dishonest and politically counterproductive.

The rhetorical sophistication becomes apparent, however, when these legitimate concerns get deployed to justify policies that bear no proportional relationship to the problems they claim to address. They invoke Mexico's immigration laws as if tourist visa enforcement were equivalent to industrial-scale family detention camps. It's rather like defending gladiatorial combat by noting that boxing is also a sport—technically true, but missing certain rather important distinctions about intent, scale, and humanity.

Here we see another masterclass in ignoratio elenchi. When confronted with arguments about mass detention infrastructure designed to cage families indefinitely, they respond with questions about whether "requiring a legal and orderly immigration process" is "contrary to the gospel." This is like responding to criticism of concentration camps by asking whether nations have the right to control their borders—technically relevant, but systematically avoiding the actual argument.

The bill they defend allocates $75 billion for detention facilities capable of holding 100,000+ people daily—more capacity than our entire federal prison system. Yet somehow this massive expansion of state power over human bodies becomes, in their telling, simply "requiring a legal and orderly immigration process." One wonders what they would call it if we were actually trying to create a police state. Perhaps "enhanced civic engagement opportunities"?

Most tellingly, these defenses consistently frame the choice as binary: either we support this legislation or we support "chaos." This represents textbook Binary Apocalypticism—the reduction of complex political and moral choices to simple either/or categories that eliminate the possibility of faithful alternatives. This is the rhetorical equivalent of offering someone a choice between stale bread and poison, then claiming they're ungrateful when they ask why fresh bread isn't an option. The inability to imagine alternatives to both chaos and cruelty reveals the poverty of imagination that characterizes what we might call Dominative Christianism—the use of Christian language to justify systems of domination that contradict Christ's teaching.

The Gospel According to Supply-Side Jesus

But the crown jewel of this theological creativity is the transformation of tax policy into soteriology. To be entirely fair, concerns about fiscal responsibility, economic growth, and the proper size of government represent legitimate policy debates that reasonable Christians can approach differently. The argument that lower taxes might stimulate economic activity, create jobs, and ultimately benefit everyone—including the poor—deserves serious consideration rather than reflexive dismissal.

The theological problem emerges not from holding these economic views, but from the systematic baptism of supply-side economics as gospel truth. Our fiscal fundamentalists have discovered that the path to salvation runs not through the cross but through the Laffer Curve—a complete rejection of the Cruciform Pattern that defines Christian discipleship. In this theology, trickle-down economics becomes the mechanism of divine grace, and those who oppose tax cuts for the wealthy are guilty not merely of bad policy but of practical atheism.

This represents the logical conclusion of what happens when the prosperity gospel meets political power—the theological foundation of contemporary Christian Nationalism. If God wants faithful Christians to be wealthy, and if faithful Christians should control government, then government policies that make some people wealthier must be expressions of divine will. The syllogism is bulletproof, provided you ignore both Christian history and basic logic.

The theological sophistication required to read Jesus's words about rich men, camels, and needle eyes (Matthew 19:24) as an endorsement of tax cuts for millionaires is truly impressive. It requires what we might call "hermeneutical parkour"—the ability to leap from text to interpretation with such acrobatic skill that the landing bears no resemblance to the starting point. This represents Primitive Biblicism at its most sophisticated: abandoning careful interpretation while claiming biblical authority.

Consider the exegetical gymnastics involved in interpreting "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's" (Matthew 22:21) as "Caesar should demand as little as possible from those who have the most to give." Or the theological creativity required to transform "from everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required" (Luke 12:48) into "from everyone to whom much has been given, much should be given back through preferential tax treatment."

This represents the full flowering of MAGA Christianism—the fusion of Christian identity with political ideology that systematically inverts gospel priorities while maintaining Christian vocabulary.

§

III. The Hermeneutics of Empire

The Sacrament of Statistical Manipulation

What makes these fiscal theology arguments particularly fascinating is their deployment of numbers as sacred objects rather than analytical tools. Statistics become sacramental—their power lies not in their accuracy but in their ability to transform the conscience of the believer. Like the medieval practice of selling indulgences (1 Timothy 6:10), the exact mathematics matter less than the psychological comfort they provide.

This explains why the same statistical claims appear with such religious devotion across different defenders, repeated with the confidence usually reserved for reciting the Apostles' Creed. The numbers have become articles of faith, immune to empirical challenge because they serve spiritual rather than analytical purposes.

The Politics of Pharisaic Comparison

Perhaps most tellingly, these defenses consistently operate through what we might call "Pharisaic Comparison"—justifying current policies by pointing to worse examples elsewhere or in the past. "At least we're not as bad as..." becomes the gold standard for moral evaluation.

This is the logic of the Pharisee in Jesus's parable (Luke 18:11): "God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector." But Jesus's response suggests that divine evaluation operates on rather different principles than comparative righteousness.

The theological problem with this approach isn't merely that it sets the bar laughably low—though creating policy by asking "how can we be slightly less terrible than the worst historical examples?" does seem like an odd interpretive principle for a movement whose founder proclaimed the Kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 5:3). The deeper problem is that it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how moral reasoning works in Christian theology.

But notice again the rhetorical misdirection at work. When challenged about supporting policies that systematically advantage the wealthy while stripping healthcare from millions, the response often becomes: "Well, at least it's not socialism!" This is rather like responding to criticism of poisoning the well by pointing out that at least you're not burning down the entire village.

Christian ethics doesn't operate through comparative analysis but through conformity to Christ's character—what we might call Cruciform Imitation. The question isn't "are we better than Pharaoh?" but "do our policies reflect the character of the God revealed in Jesus?" (John 14:9) This represents the heart of Counter-Imperial theology: rejecting empire logic in favor of Cruciform Authority—authority patterned after Christ's self-giving rather than imperial domination. By this standard—which is the only standard that matters for people claiming Christian identity—policies that systematically advantage the wealthy while harming the vulnerable fail spectacularly.

The Imperial Hermeneutic

What unifies all these arguments is a consistent hermeneutical approach that reads both Scripture and statistics through the lens of empire rather than the cross (1 Corinthians 1:18)—the precise opposite of Cruciform Epistemology, which grounds all knowing in the pattern of the cross. This imperial hermeneutic is precisely what Analogical Reading prevents by maintaining proper relationship between transcendence and immanence. This produces what we might call Dominative Christianism—a theology that uses Christian language to baptize fundamentally unchristian commitments.

The hermeneutical key is the systematic reversal of biblical priorities. Where Scripture speaks of God's preferential option for the poor (Luke 4:18), Dominative Christianism discovers preferential options for the wealthy. Where Scripture commands welcome for the stranger (Deuteronomy 10:19), Dominative Christianism finds biblical support for mass detention. Where Scripture warns about the dangers of wealth and power (1 Timothy 6:10), Dominative Christianism finds divine endorsement for policies that concentrate both.

This isn't merely bad exegesis—though it certainly is that. It's a systematic inversion of the gospel that maintains Christian vocabulary while emptying it of Christian content. It's theological transubstantiation in reverse: taking the substance of Christ and leaving only the accidents of religious language.

The psychological appeal is obvious. Dominative Christianism allows people to maintain Christian identity while supporting policies that serve their immediate tribal interests. It provides theological legitimation for what would otherwise require honest acknowledgment of moral compromise. It transforms vice into virtue through the alchemy of religious rhetoric.

But perhaps most insidiously, it provides sophisticated rhetorical techniques for avoiding direct engagement with actual arguments. When confronted with data showing that tax cuts primarily benefit the wealthy, pivot to anecdotes about personal economic struggle. When pressed about mass detention of immigrant families, redirect to abstract discussions about border security. When challenged about healthcare cuts affecting millions, shift to philosophical questions about the proper role of government. These aren't accidental confusions—they're strategic deflections designed to avoid the theological reckoning that direct engagement would require.

The Irony of Practical Atheism

The supreme irony in these defenses is their frequent accusation that opposing such policies constitutes atheism, secularism, socialism, or communism—labels deployed with the theological precision of a shotgun blast at a barn door. Like the Pharisees who labeled anyone failing to observe their rigid interpretations as "godless," "faithless," or "unclean" (Luke 11:37-44), these defenders create purity tests that have nothing to do with following Christ and everything to do with maintaining tribal boundaries—the defining characteristic of Tribal Epistemology.

The accusation reveals the complete inversion of moral reasoning that characterizes Dominative Christianism. In this theological universe, opposing tax cuts for millionaires while supporting healthcare for the poor becomes evidence of godless secularism, while supporting tax cuts for millionaires while stripping healthcare from the poor becomes faithful Christian stewardship. It's rather like accusing the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) of being a godless liberal for helping the beaten traveler instead of walking on by to protect his own financial interests—while claiming the priest and Levite who passed by were the truly faithful ones.

Yet what we actually witness is textbook Practical Atheism—not the theoretical godlessness they project onto their opponents, but the lived contradiction between claimed Christian beliefs and actual practice. True Practical Atheism is claiming to follow Jesus while supporting policies that systematically contradict his explicit teaching. It's invoking Christian authority while advocating for the systematic advantage of the wealthy over the poor—exactly what the Hebrew prophets called injustice (Isaiah 10:1-2) and what Jesus called serving mammon rather than God (Matthew 6:24).

§

IV. A Closing Word

What these correspondences reveal is the final form of the prosperity gospel: a theology that has moved beyond promising material blessing for individual faith to promising divine endorsement for policies that systematically redistribute resources upward while maintaining the language of Christian concern for the poor.

The tragedy here isn't that people hold different views about fiscal policy, immigration enforcement, or healthcare delivery—reasonable Christians have always disagreed about the best means to promote human flourishing. Many who defend these policies genuinely believe they serve the common good: that work requirements promote dignity, that strict immigration enforcement protects both citizens and immigrants, that lower taxes create prosperity that benefits everyone. These aren't inherently malicious motivations.

The tragedy is rather that these often well-intentioned policy preferences have been transformed into theological litmus tests, as if Jesus had delivered the Sermon on the Mount with detailed appendices on tax rates and immigration quotas (Matthew 5-7). This represents a theological achievement of stunning audacity: the complete reversal of the gospel while maintaining its vocabulary. It's as if someone had rewritten the Sermon on the Mount to read "Blessed are the rich, for they have already received their reward; woe to you who are poor, for you have failed to demonstrate sufficient faith for divine blessing."

The deeper tragedy is not merely that this theology serves the interests of Caesar while claiming the authority of Christ—though it certainly does that. The deeper tragedy is that it deprives people of the actual gospel, which offers genuine hope for a world transformed by divine love rather than the false hope of a world where injustice becomes justice through theological sleight of hand.

Perhaps that's why Jesus warned so explicitly about the dangers of wealth and power (Luke 12:15), and why the Hebrew prophets spent so much time condemning kings who made laws that favored the rich at the expense of the poor (Isaiah 10:1-2). They understood that the greatest threat to faith often comes not from those who openly oppose God but from those who invoke God's name while systematically contradicting God's character.

The choice before us remains what it has always been: the narrow way that leads to life, or the broad way that leads to destruction (Matthew 7:13-14). No amount of theological creativity can transform the broad way into the narrow way, any more than statistical manipulation can transform injustice into justice.

But the good news—the actual good news—is that there is indeed a narrow way. There is a path that leads to life. And it's still marked by the footprints of the One who said "I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me" (Matthew 25:35).

That way remains open, even now. Especially now.

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References

For those interested in exploring theological alternatives to the mutations analyzed in this essay, see our Political Theology Lexicon for in-depth analysis of concepts including:

Theological Mutations:

* Practical Atheism - maintaining Christian language while contradicting Christian substance

* Prosperity Materialism - conflating divine blessing with material success

* Binary Apocalypticism - reducing complex moral choices to simple either/or categories

* Primitive Biblicism - abandoning careful interpretation while claiming biblical authority

* Tribal Epistemology - subordinating truth-seeking to group identity maintenance

Theological Alternatives:

* Counter-Imperial - rejecting empire logic in favor of cruciform faithfulness

* Analogical Reading - maintaining proper relationship between transcendence and immanence in interpretation

* Cruciform Authority - authority patterned after Christ's self-giving rather than imperial domination

* Cruciform Imitation - conformity to Christ's character as ethical foundation

* Cruciform Epistemology - grounding all knowing in the pattern of the cross

Theological Genealogies:

* Cruciform Pattern - the cross as the defining pattern of Christian discipleship

Primary Concepts:

* Dominative Christianism - using Christian language to justify systems of domination

* MAGA Christianism - fusing Christian identity with political ideology

* Christianism - using Christian symbols to legitimize unchristian content

Contemporary Movements:

* Christian Nationalism - the political manifestation of prosperity theology

Footnotes

¹ House Budget Committee Republicans, "Despite CBO's Predictions, Trump Tax Cuts Were a Boon for America's Economy and Working Families," U.S. House Committee on the Budget, accessed January 3, 2025, https://budget.house.gov/press-release/despite-cbos-predictions-trump-tax-cuts-were-a-boon-for-americas-economy-and-working-families. The document claims "federal tax revenues reached a record-high of $4.9 trillion – $1.6 trillion or 48 percent higher than when the Trump tax cuts were passed," comparing nominal dollars across five years without adjusting for inflation, population growth, or economic expansion. ↩

² FactCheck.org, "Trump's Final Numbers," July 26, 2024, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics data on real wage growth and compositional effects during pandemic. ↩

³ Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "The 2017 Trump Tax Law Was Skewed to the Rich, Expensive, and Failed to Deliver on Its Promises," June 13, 2024. ↩

⁴ Paul Krugman, "Republicans beware: Medicaid is not what you think it is," Substack, accessed January 3, 2025,

. ↩

⁵ Ibid., citing Census Bureau data showing 48% of working-age Medicaid recipients worked, 27% were disabled, and only 6% were not working long-term (3% of all recipients). ↩

⁶ Editorial Board, "Medicaid work requirements are pointless," The New York Times, May 16, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/16/opinion/medicaid-work-requirements-pointless.html. ↩

⁷ Paul Krugman, "Republicans beware: Medicaid is not what you think it is," Substack, accessed January 3, 2025,

, citing Everything Policy, "Medicaid Cost and Efficiency," https://www.everythingpolicy.org/policy-briefs/medicaid-cost-and-efficiency. ↩

Behold, the Senate has spoken with one voice—well, almost one voice, requiring the casting vote of the Vice President himself—and declared that beauty consists in transferring wealth from the widow's mite to Caesar's coffers. How the mighty have fallen, and how the self-proclaimed followers of the crucified Galilean have managed to craft legislation that would make Pontius Pilate blush with envy.

The architects of this "Big Beautiful Bill" have performed a miraculous feat: they have made the rich richer while making the poor poorer, all while claiming to follow the One who proclaimed "blessed are the poor." It takes a particular kind of theological gymnastics to read the Sermon on the Mount and conclude that Jesus was actually advocating for $3.8 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthy while stripping healthcare from 8.6 million of the least of these. This represents a textbook case of Practical Atheism—the profound disconnect between claimed Christian belief and actual practice.

The Preferential Option for Mammon

When our Lord spoke of serving two masters, warning that "No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth" (Matthew 6:24), the authors of this legislation apparently heard a challenge rather than a prohibition. For what else can we call a bill that systematically transfers resources from the bottom 10% of households to the top 10%? This is not governance; this is organized theft, sanctified by the false piety of those who invoke the name of Christ while practicing the economics of Pharaoh.

The prophets had a word for rulers who make such legislation. Isaiah declared: "Ah, you who make iniquitous decrees, who write oppressive statutes, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be your spoil, and that you may make the orphans your prey!" (Isaiah 10:1-2). Amos thundered against those who "trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain" (Amos 5:11). Yet here we have legislation that would make the merchants condemned in Amos 8:4-6 seem like paragons of social justice by comparison.

This systematic advantaging of the wealthy reveals the theological mutation of Prosperity Materialism—the false gospel that equates divine blessing with material success and treats wealth accumulation as a sign of God's favor rather than a responsibility to the vulnerable.

The Great Deportation Machine

But perhaps most revealing of the demonic character of this legislation is its establishment of what can only be described as a paramilitary deportation apparatus. The bill allocates $75 billion to expand ICE into an unaccountable force capable of detaining over 100,000 people daily—more capacity than the entire federal prison system. This is the creation of Caesar's Praetorian Guard, aimed not at external enemies but at the vulnerable within our own borders.

The echoes of history are deafening. When a nation creates specialized forces accountable only to executive power, designed to identify, detain, and expel residents based on the ruler's discretion, we have crossed the Rubicon from republic to authoritarianism. This represents Dominative Christianism in its most brutal form—the use of Christian language and identity to justify systems of domination that contradict everything Jesus taught about welcoming the stranger.

The bill's provision for "family residential centers" where children can be detained indefinitely with their parents represents the institutionalization of what can only be called concentration camps—a term we use not hyperbolically but descriptively. This directly violates the Hebrew Scriptures' repeated command: "You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Deuteronomy 10:19) and the Apostolic Scriptures' reminder: "Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it" (Hebrews 13:2).

This is what Samuel warned would happen when the people demanded a king: "He will take your sons and daughters... he will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers" (1 Samuel 8:11, 14). But even Samuel's warnings pale before the reality of a system designed to tear families apart and cast out the sojourner whom we are commanded to welcome.

The False Gospel of Scarcity

The supporters of this legislation practice a theology of scarcity that would be foreign to the One who multiplied loaves and fishes. They preach that there is not enough healthcare for all, not enough food assistance for the hungry, not enough compassion for the stranger. Yet somehow, miraculously, there is always enough for tax cuts that benefit those who need them least and enough for weapons of war that never bring peace.

This is the lie of empire: that God's creation is insufficient for God's children, that we must choose between caring for our own and caring for the stranger, between prosperity and justice. But the God revealed in Jesus Christ is the God of abundance, the God who sets a table in the wilderness and invites all to come and eat without money and without price. The Counter-Imperial witness of the gospel stands in direct opposition to this scarcity-based politics that pits the vulnerable against each other while protecting the privileged.

Jesus himself proclaimed his mission in terms that would be anathema to the architects of this legislation: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free" (Luke 4:18). How do we reconcile this mission with legislation that systematically oppresses the poor, captivates the immigrant, blinds us to injustice, and binds the vulnerable in new forms of bondage?

A Closing Word of Truth

To those who call themselves Christians yet support this legislation, hear this word from the prophet Micah: "He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6:8).

The "Big Beautiful Bill" fails every element of this test. It perpetuates injustice by systematically advantaging the wealthy at the expense of the poor. It shows no kindness to the vulnerable, instead criminalizing their very presence. And it demonstrates not humility but the ultimate hubris: the belief that we can build God's kingdom through Caesar's methods.

As followers of the Way, we are called to a different path. We are called to embody what Samuel Wells calls Being With—the practice of presence over productivity, relationship over results. We are called to be the community that leaves the 99 in the wilderness to search for the one who is lost, not the community that builds walls to keep the lost at bay. We are called to be those who embody the preferential option for the poor, not those who make preferential options for the wealthy.

The "Big Beautiful Bill" may be many things, but it is not beautiful, and it is certainly not Christian. It is, in the deepest sense, anti-gospel—a systematic rejection of everything Jesus taught about money, power, and the treatment of the vulnerable. It represents the full flowering of MAGA Christianism, where Christian identity becomes the vehicle for policies that contradict the very heart of Christian teaching.

May God forgive us for what we are about to do, and may God grant us the courage to choose a different way.

Related Concepts

This essay references concepts from the Political Theology Lexicon, accessible to subscribers.

* Practical Atheism: The profound disconnect between claimed Christian belief and actual embodied practice, especially evident when Christian identity is maintained while actions contradict core Christian teachings about care for the vulnerable.

* Prosperity Materialism: The theological mutation that equates divine blessing with material success and treats wealth accumulation as a sign of God's favor rather than a responsibility to serve the vulnerable.

* Dominative Christianism: The use of Christian language and identity to justify systems of domination that contradict Jesus's teachings about power, authority, and treatment of the marginalized.

* Counter-Imperial: The gospel witness that stands in direct opposition to imperial systems of power, revealing God's preferential option for the poor and marginalized over the wealthy and powerful.

* Being With: Samuel Wells's theological framework emphasizing the practice of presence over productivity, relationship over results, and accompaniment over instrumental action.

* MAGA Christianism: The fusion of Christian identity with Make America Great Again political ideology, often using Christian language to justify policies that contradict core Christian teachings about welcoming the stranger and caring for the vulnerable.

View the complete Political Theology Lexicon →

Christianity in America has long been suspiciously muscular. While Christ hangs naked, we clothe ourselves in certainty. While God becomes vulnerable, we worship invulnerability. While the Spirit moves across boundaries, we fortify them. This persistent inversion of divine revelation betrays something deeper than mere theological confusion—it reveals our collective flight from shame.

The theological mutations that now dominate American Christianity—from primitive biblicism to prosperity materialism, from binary apocalypticism to tribal ecclesiology—do not represent mere intellectual errors awaiting correction. They function as sophisticated emotional architectures designed to shield believers from the unbearable vulnerability that authentic faith demands. To understand these mutations, we must first understand shame.

The Genesis of Shame: Creation, Judgment, and the Original Child

The Genesis narrative provides our foundational understanding of shame. In the garden, the first humans live without shame despite their nakedness—a state of unself-conscious authenticity before their Creator (Genesis 2:25). Shame enters not as punishment but as consequence when they usurp the divine prerogative to judge "good and evil" (Genesis 3:5-7). This primordial scene reveals shame's dual nature: in reaching for the knowledge that belongs to God alone, humans distort the gift of shame into a burden.

Drawing on John Bradshaw's insights in "Healing the Shame That Binds You," yet viewing them through an Augustinian lens, we can recognize that shame, like all created gifts, exists in both ordered and disordered forms. Ordered shame—what we might call appropriate vulnerability or humility—acknowledges our creaturely limitations without despair. It allows God to remain the judge of what constitutes authentic humanity. Such ordered shame makes genuine encounter with divine grace possible by maintaining the proper relationship between Creator and creature.

Disordered shame emerges when we usurp God's role as judge, attempting to establish our own criteria for authentic humanity. Unable to bear the weight of this impossible task, we create what Bradshaw calls a "false self"—a persona that requires constant validation according to our usurped standards. We become, in Augustine's terms, "curved in upon ourselves" (incurvatus in se), establishing our own judgment as ultimate while living in constant fear of exposure.

The "original child"—our authentic self bearing God's image—becomes buried beneath these false constructions. Our disordered shame binds us to these fabrications, rendering us unable to recognize the divine image reflected in what we've rejected and hidden. God's judgment, far from being punitive, would actually liberate us by restoring the proper order where the Creator, not the creature, defines authentic humanity.

America's Theological Mutations as Judgment Usurpation

The theological mutations plaguing American Christianity represent sophisticated variations of this primordial judgment usurpation. Each provides a distinct mechanism for managing the disordered shame that results from claiming God's prerogative as judge:

Primitive biblicism usurps divine authority as scripture's interpreter, claiming unmediated access to biblical meaning without the vulnerability of interpretive humility. This isn't merely intellectual error but emotional necessity—the certainty shields believers from the shame of limitation, the anxiety of ambiguity. When one declares, "God said it, I believe it, that settles it," one has effectively claimed God's judgment seat, determining which interpretations count as authentic while avoiding the shame of uncertainty.

Practical atheism usurps divine judgment by establishing human effectiveness criteria over faithful witness. This enables the strange performance where believers invoke Christ's name while systematically ignoring his example. This isn't mere hypocrisy—it's a sophisticated defense against the unbearable shame that would come from allowing God's judgment, rather than pragmatic outcomes, to determine authentic faithfulness.

Binary apocalypticism usurps divine judgment by creating simplified human categories of good and evil, friend and enemy. This Manichaean framework doesn't arise from careful eschatological reflection but from desperate need to locate shame entirely in the demonized other. By claiming the divine prerogative to separate wheat from tares (Matthew 13:24-30)—a separation Jesus explicitly reserves for the final judgment—believers shield themselves from the shame of moral complexity and the vulnerability of seeing themselves in the enemy.

Disordered nationalism constructs a collective false self against the shame of American moral failure, elevating national identity as criterion for God's approval. By sacralizing American history and identity, this mutation usurps God's judgment concerning what communities are blessed. The ritual invocation of "God Bless America" functions not as prayer but as declaration—a claim to divine judgment that shields believers from the shame that honest historical reckoning would trigger.

Prosperity materialism establishes material success as evidence of divine approval, usurping God's judgment concerning human value. By equating blessing with wealth, this mutation shields believers from the shame of economic vulnerability by creating an alternate judgment system where financial metrics replace faithfulness. The prosperity preacher declaring "God wants you to be rich" has usurped divine judgment, replacing cruciform values with market values.

Authoritarian spirituality transfers judgment authority to human leadership, shielding believers from the shame of autonomous moral responsibility. By creating unaccountable power structures claimed to represent divine authority, this mutation allows followers to surrender the burden of judgment to leaders who promise protection from shame through compliance. The demand for unquestioning obedience represents not faithful submission but abdication of the vulnerable task of moral discernment.

Tribal ecclesiology establishes group identity markers as criteria for authentic faith, usurping God's judgment concerning who belongs to the body of Christ. By creating rigid boundaries defined by cultural and political litmus tests, this mutation shields believers from the shame of potential rejection by controlling who can belong. The constant questioning of others' salvation based on partisan alignment reveals not theological precision but emotional insecurity.

Collectively, these mutations form not just a theological system but an emotional fortress. They shield believers from the vulnerability authentic faith requires by providing alternative judgment systems where human criteria replace divine judgment. The tragic irony is that in fleeing shame, these mutations actually bind us more tightly to it—for our disordered shame can only be healed when we surrender our role as judge.

Nietzschean Ressentiment and Political Theology

This framework illuminates why these theological mutations prove particularly susceptible to political manipulation. Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment—that toxic mixture of powerlessness, envy, and repressed vengeance that transforms into moral indignation—perfectly describes the emotional engine of politicized Christianity in America. In Nietzschean terms, Dominative Christianism represents a sophisticated "slave morality" that transforms perceived victimhood into moral superiority while simultaneously worshipping power.

The mutations provide religious justification for what is ultimately a secular emotion—the resentment of those who feel judged by changing cultural standards and who respond by creating alternative standards where they can claim superiority. The appeal of the shameless political leader becomes clear in this light. Those bound by disordered shame are naturally drawn to figures who appear unburdened by it—who never apologize, who project invulnerability, who claim divine mandate while violating divine example.

This explains why logical contradictions don't undermine the system—because the system's primary function is emotional regulation through judgment usurpation, not logical coherence. It explains why facts don't change minds—because presenting contradicting facts threatens the alternative judgment system that shields believers from shame. It explains why appeals to the Gospel fall on deaf ears—because the Gospel would require surrendering the very judgment prerogative that protects against vulnerability.

The Incarnation as Judgment Restoration

The tragic irony is that Christianity already contains the perfect antidote to shame, not in avoiding vulnerability but in embracing it. Samuel Wells helps us understand that Christ does not come with the merely instrumental purpose of delivering us from sin or conquering evil. Rather, as Karl Barth insists, God chooses "never-to-be-except-to-be-with" creation. The incarnation represents God's radical embrace of human vulnerability—not despite our shame but precisely because of it.

Fleming Rutledge, in "The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ," illuminates how the cross represents not simply Christ taking our place as the judged, but more profoundly, God actively reclaiming God's proper role as Judge. The divine exchange on the cross is not merely substitutionary but restorative—God reassumes the role of Judge that we in our false selves had seized. As Rutledge notes, evil arises when humans declare themselves judge, supplanting the Creator's role as judge of creation.

Christ's presence accomplishes what no instrumental intervention could—it restores the proper role of judgment to the Creator while liberating creatures from the impossible burden of self-judgment. By entering human experience fully, Christ demonstrates that God's judgment is not punitive but restorative, not condemning but liberating. The incarnation reveals a God who judges not to destroy but to restore the "original child" bearing the divine image.

On the cross, Christ experiences the ultimate shame—naked, rejected, publicly humiliated—not to validate our shame-avoidance strategies but to transform shame itself. The resurrection doesn't negate this vulnerability but transfigures it. The risen Christ still bears the wounds. The marks of shame become the marks of glory. The very things we flee—limitation, vulnerability, weakness—become in Christ the pathway to authentic life.

The Holy Spirit's work is precisely to restore shame to its creative purpose, enabling us to recognize that we are not the judge of what it means to be human after all. Only when we surrender that usurped role and allow God to be the judge of authentic humanity can we see our original self—the divine image beneath our false constructions. God does not eliminate evil with a magic spell because evil arises from our choice to be our own judge. Our healing comes through being drawn into divine embrace, where disordered shame yields to the ordered shame that acknowledges creaturely limitation while celebrating divine image.

Walter Wink's analysis in his Powers trilogy helps us understand how the "principalities and powers" sustain us in our false selves, systematically separating us from our original child created in God's image. These powers—institutional, cultural, and spiritual—must be "unmasked" before true transformation can occur.

The Powers That Promise to Cover Our Shame

What Wink's analysis makes painfully clear is that Dominative Christianism represents not a theological position but a powerful emotional covenant with what biblical language calls "the principalities and powers." The deal is devastatingly simple: these powers promise to shield us from our unbearable shame if we will only surrender our judgment to them.

This is why intellectual arguments prove so futile against Dominative Christianism—because no one develops a taste for red hats by reading policy papers. The movement offers something far more potent than ideas: it offers emotional sanctuary. When the political rally crowd chants together, when the congregation rallies around cultural grievances, when the prosperity preacher promises divine favor, what's being exchanged isn't ideas but emotional rescue. The content matters less than the promise: "Join us and you need never feel shame again."

The tragedy of American Christianity is that we've surrendered our birthright—the transformative vulnerability of authentic faith—for a mess of political pottage. We've traded the liberating judgment of a Creator who knows and loves us for the smothering judgment of principalities and powers who use and discard us. We've exchanged the holy shame that acknowledges creaturely limitation for the toxic shame that demands false perfection.

We might call this the Devil's bargain, but that would be too dignified. The principalities don't even deliver on their core promise; they merely redirect our shame toward enemies while intensifying its grip on our souls. The political zealot screaming about immigrants, the prosperity believer blaming the poor for their poverty, the apocalyptic warrior demonizing cultural enemies—all remain firmly in shame's grasp while believing themselves liberated.

The dark comedy of Dominative Christianism is that it preaches freedom while forging chains, celebrates strength while cultivating weakness, proclaims truth while requiring lies, and above all, promises shamelessness while deepening shame. Nietzsche would appreciate the irony: those most loudly proclaiming their will to power are precisely those most thoroughly in bondage to ressentiment.

The Pastoral Path Forward

If theological mutations function as judgment usurpation strategies, then addressing them requires more than intellectual correction. It demands creating contexts where believers can surrender the burden of judgment without unbearable vulnerability—what we might call communities of restored judgment.

Such communities would combine unflinching theological clarity with tender pastoral awareness. They would speak truth about the distortions of American Christianity without triggering the very shame reactions that make these distortions necessary. They would model vulnerable strength rather than invulnerability, creating spaces where believers could gradually surrender their usurped judgment role to the Creator who judges justly.

The liturgical practices of such communities would become powerful shame-transformation technologies. Confession would acknowledge sin without shame's paralysis by accepting divine rather than human judgment. Communion would celebrate difference without demanding conformity by acknowledging Christ rather than culture as the source of unity. Preaching would proclaim truth without using shame as motivator by pointing to divine rather than human criteria for authenticity.

The sacraments themselves would become visible enactments of judgment restored—the naked vulnerability of baptism where we are judged "beloved," the broken vulnerability of eucharist where we are judged "worthy of communion." These practices would gradually enable believers to surrender their false selves by revealing the divine image in what they've rejected and hidden.

America's Opportunity

The current crisis of American Christianity represents not just danger but opportunity—a chance to rediscover the vulnerability at the heart of authentic faith. The very shame that drives our theological mutations could, if surrendered rather than defended against, become the pathway to transformation.

Imagine churches where certainty is no longer necessary because divine judgment has replaced human judgment. Imagine political engagement where national sins can be acknowledged without threatening national identity because God rather than America defines our worth. Imagine theological discourse where complexity doesn't trigger binary thinking because divine mystery replaces human categorization. Imagine economic systems where vulnerability isn't equated with failure because divine values replace market values.

Such transformation would require us to abandon our theological certainties, our political alliances, our cultural power—all the judgments we've usurped to shield ourselves from shame. It would require us to embrace the vulnerability we've spent generations avoiding. But this is precisely what Christ did—embracing vulnerability to transform it. This is what the incarnation reveals—a God willing to risk everything, even divine dignity, to be with us in our shame.

As Samuel Wells so powerfully articulates in "Constructing an Incarnational Theology," God's means and purpose are identical—God chooses to be with us, not as instrumental solution to our problems but as the very expression of divine nature. This non-instrumental understanding of incarnation challenges the entire framework of American Christianity, which has largely reduced God to a solution provider rather than communion-maker.

The question facing American Christianity is not whether we have the correct theology but whether we have the courage to surrender our usurped judgment and accept divine judgment instead. The future of our faith depends not on winning the culture wars but on rediscovering the "original child" beneath our false constructions—the divine image our shame has hidden but Christ came to reveal.

This, ultimately, is the invitation of Christ—not to flee shame but to bring it to him, to discover in his wounds the healing of our own, to find in divine judgment the liberation our self-judgment could never provide. Such an invitation requires no theological genius to understand—only the courage to stand, in all our vulnerability, before the one who bore our shame that we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Key Terms

Ordered Shame: The appropriate recognition of human limitation that maintains proper Creator-creature relationship. Full entry →

Judgment Usurpation: The human attempt to establish our own criteria for authentic humanity rather than accepting God's. Full entry →

Dominative Christianism: A theological system that transforms Christianity into a structure of cultural and political power. Full entry →

Works Cited

Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics IV/1. Edited by G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956.

Bradshaw, John. Healing the Shame That Binds You. Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 1988.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

Rutledge, Fleming. The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015.

Wells, Samuel. Constructing an Incarnational Theology: A Christocentric View of God's Purpose. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.

Wink, Walter. Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984.

Wink, Walter. Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986.

Wink, Walter. Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992.

Further Reading

Campbell, Douglas, Jon DePue, and Brian Zahnd. Beyond Justification: Liberating Paul's Gospel. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2024.

Hart, David Bentley. The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003.

Hauerwas, Stanley. With the Grain of the Universe: The Church's Witness and Natural Theology. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001.

Pettit, Philip. Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

Williams, Rowan. On Christian Theology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.

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💬 Join the conversation in the comments below. How have you experienced the tension between vulnerability and certainty in your own faith journey?

Recently I made an error that led to an important correction. In discussing blasphemy and political power, I mistakenly referenced "Gott ist gut" on Nazi military insignia. Several thoughtful friends correctly pointed out that the actual phrase was "Gott mit uns" ("God with us") – a slogan with roots in Prussian military tradition dating back to the early 19th century.

I'm grateful for the historical correction. It actually strengthens the theological argument I was making while revealing something more disturbing: how religious language gets weaponized not just by obviously bad actors, but through centuries of slow theological drift that most of us miss entirely.

The problem with "Gott mit uns" isn't that evil people misused religious language. The problem is that good people prepared the way for such misuse by gradually forgetting what it means to speak carefully about God.

When Prayer Becomes Propaganda

The conventional narrative treats "Gott mit uns" as a cautionary tale about cynical political manipulation of religion. This interpretation conveniently locates the problem in obviously bad actors—Prussian militarists, Nazi propagandists—while leaving contemporary religious-military entanglements comfortably unexamined.

But this misses the deeper theological corruption. The phrase began as something like a prayer: "Lord, be with us in this difficult task." Somewhere along the way, it became a presumption: "God is with us in what we're doing." The shift from supplication to authorization marks the moment when humility before God transforms into speaking for God.

Historical Insight: The phrase appeared on Prussian military belt buckles for over a century before the Nazis adopted it. This reveals how theological corruption operates not through dramatic apostasy but through gradual drift from prayer to presumption, from "Help us, God" to "God helps us."

The theological error here predates Hitler by generations. When Friedrich Wilhelm III first authorized the phrase for Prussian military insignia in 1813, he was already transforming personal prayer into public proclamation. The belt buckle became a talisman. The prayer became a slogan. And "God with us" evolved from desperate supplication into confident authorization.

Most Americans reading this are probably thinking, "Well, yes, that's obviously problematic." But then we might ask: What's the theological difference between "Gott mit uns" on a German belt buckle and "God Bless America" sung at the seventh-inning stretch?

The Theological Problem We're All Missing

Here's what makes this theologically interesting rather than just historically cautionary: the corruption of religious language happens not through obvious apostasy but through the gradual erosion of theological precision. Most people involved in this drift were probably sincere believers who would have been horrified to think they were speaking presumptuously about God's will.

The Hebrew Scriptures are relentlessly clear about this danger. When Isaiah warns against those who "call evil good and good evil" (Isaiah 5:20), he's not primarily addressing obviously immoral people. He's addressing religious leaders who have gradually lost the ability to distinguish between their political preferences and God's justice. The prophetic tradition consistently challenges rulers who claim divine sanction for policies that contradict divine character.

Consider how Jesus handles this precise temptation in Mark 12:13-17. When political leaders try to trap him into choosing between religious and political authority, Jesus refuses to grant political authority religious legitimacy. He doesn't say politics doesn't matter—he says political authority cannot claim divine authorization.

This is a different kind of political engagement than most American Christians practice. We tend to think faithful political engagement means identifying God's will with our political positions. Jesus demonstrates faithful political engagement by maintaining theological boundaries around political claims.

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The tragedy of German Christianity in the 1930s wasn't primarily that evil people manipulated religion. The tragedy was that sincere Christians had gradually lost the theological tools to distinguish between political necessity and divine command. By the time "Gott mit uns" appeared on Nazi belt buckles, German Protestant churches had spent generations accepting the state's authority to speak definitively about God's will.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw this clearly. His participation in plots against Hitler never claimed divine authorization for political violence. Instead, he understood such actions as accepting guilt for the sake of others—a theological framework that preserves moral agency while acknowledging moral complexity. Bonhoeffer acted decisively without claiming to speak for God.

This is what Practical Atheism looks like in religious clothing: when faith becomes a tool for political purposes rather than a source of political critique. The theological language remains intact, but it has been quietly evacuated of the transcendent authority that might challenge our political calculations.

Personal Confession: How I Learned to Stop Blessing Violence

I must confess my own complicity in the patterns I'm critiquing. As a former naval officer, I participated in military institutions that routinely invoke divine blessing on actions that cause suffering. I repeated phrases like "God bless America" and "God bless our troops" without adequately considering what I was asking God to bless.

The comfort of believing "God is with us" in our defensive actions protected me from the harder theological work of distinguishing between moral necessity and divine authorization. It's much easier to assume divine approval than to maintain the humility appropriate to creatures making tragic choices in a broken world.

Looking back, I can see how this theological laziness prepared the ground for more explicit forms of religious nationalism. When we casually claim divine blessing on our violence—even defensive violence we believe morally necessary—we create conceptual space for more systematic theological presumption. The line between "God help us do what's necessary" and "God blesses what we're doing" becomes increasingly blurred.

This doesn't mean faithful Christians cannot participate in just defense of the innocent. It means we must do so without claiming divine authorization for our political calculations. We can act decisively to protect the vulnerable while acknowledging the tragic nature of violence and refusing to baptize our necessary actions as God's perfect will.

Bonhoeffer's example provides a better model: accept responsibility for difficult moral choices without claiming to speak for God about them.

When America Says "Gott Mit Uns"

Understanding this pattern challenges how contemporary religious and political leaders invoke divine blessing on military action. When politicians bless cruise missiles or claim divine guidance for foreign policy, they repeat the theological error that "Gott mit uns" represents: presuming to speak for God about matters requiring human moral reasoning.

The theological problem isn't whether defensive violence is sometimes necessary—faithful Christians have long debated just war theory with legitimate disagreement. The problem emerges when we move from "this tragic action may be necessary" to "God is with us in this action."

Contemporary American Christianity often treats military chaplains blessing weapons systems or political leaders claiming divine guidance for war as normal rather than recognizing these as theological boundary violations. We've normalized what should scandalize us: speaking for God about matters requiring human moral judgment.

Consider the theological difference between these statements:

* "Lord, help us protect the innocent, even through tragic means"

* "God blesses our military action because it protects the innocent"

The first maintains appropriate humility before God while acknowledging moral responsibility. The second claims divine authorization for human political calculations. The first is prayer; the second is presumption.

Theological Precision: The difference between acknowledging God's presence in difficult circumstances and claiming God's authorization for our actions marks the boundary between faithful political engagement and theological presumption.

The Cross as Political Theology

The Cross offers a radically different understanding of divine power than "Gott mit uns" represents. Rather than God sanctioning human violence, we see God's power working through vulnerable love. Instead of divine authorization for inflicting suffering, we see God bearing suffering for others' sake.

This doesn't lead to political paralysis but to theological precision: distinguishing between our best moral reasoning under tragic circumstances and God's perfect will revealed in Christ's cruciform love. We can act to protect the innocent while maintaining humility about the tragic nature of such action.

The cruciform pattern suggests that when violence becomes necessary to protect the vulnerable, faithful people bear such action as a burden rather than claiming it as a blessing. We act decisively while acknowledging the brokenness that makes such action necessary. We take responsibility without claiming divine sanction.

This creates space for political engagement that neither withdraws from difficult moral choices nor presumes to speak for God about them. It maintains what I call Cruciform Authority: evaluating all political claims according to Christ's teaching and example rather than blessing our political preferences with divine approval.

Conclusion: Learning to Pray Instead of Presuming

The phrase "Gott mit uns" reveals how religious language gets corrupted when political power claims divine authorization rather than seeking divine guidance. This pattern persists across political systems because it addresses the deep human desire to believe our necessary actions carry transcendent approval.

But faithful political engagement requires maintaining the theological humility appropriate to finite creatures making difficult moral choices. We can act decisively to protect the innocent while acknowledging the tragic nature of violence and refusing to claim divine authorization for our political calculations.

The alternative isn't political withdrawal but theological precision. Instead of "God with us" as we inflict suffering, we pray "God help us" as we bear the moral burden of protecting others. Instead of claiming divine blessing on our military actions, we ask divine forgiveness for the brokenness that makes such actions necessary.

This kind of theological honesty doesn't make political choices easier—it makes them more difficult by requiring us to act without the comfort of presumed divine approval. But it preserves the transcendent authority that might actually challenge our political calculations rather than simply blessing them.

Perhaps most importantly, it allows us to distinguish between German belt buckles and American bumper stickers not because we're obviously more righteous than previous generations, but because we've learned to pray instead of presume when speaking about God's will.

The question isn't whether God is with us in our political struggles. The question is whether we're humble enough to seek God's will rather than claiming it.

Key Terms

Cruciform Authority: The principle that all religious and political claims must be evaluated according to Christ's teaching and example rather than blessing our political preferences with divine approval. Full entry →

Practical Atheism: The functional removal of Jesus as moral exemplar while maintaining Christian language and identity—faith as a tool for political purposes rather than a source of political critique. Full entry →

Theological Presumption: The sin of claiming to speak for God or know God's will in matters requiring human moral reasoning rather than divine revelation. Full entry →

Notes

[1] Friedrich Wilhelm III authorized "Gott mit uns" for Prussian military belt buckles in 1813 during the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon.[2] For analysis of German church accommodation to state authority, see Klaus Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988).[3] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. Clifford Green (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 275-289.

Introduction

In October 2024, just before the presidential election, prominent figures in the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) stood before crowds of followers and declared the upcoming vote as "a critical moment of spiritual warfare where the forces of God defeat the forces of evil" in what they described as a battle against "satanic forces" for America's soul. This wasn't merely political rhetoric—it represented a profound theological framework that divides the world into absolute categories of good and evil, with political opponents portrayed not just as wrong, but as literally demonic.

This stark binary worldview exemplifies the third theological mutation of Dominative Christianism: Binary Apocalypticism. This mutation takes Christianity's beautifully nuanced "already but not yet" eschatology—a delicate theological ballet that has challenged the finest minds for two millennia—and transforms it into something more akin to a professional wrestling match, with clearly designated heroes and villains, and a predetermined outcome that somehow always favors those making the designations. It replaces the Christian's complex dance of moral clarity and eschatological humility with a rigid march toward final judgment—a judgment we've helpfully sorted out in advance, at least regarding who belongs on which side.

Like all the mutations we're exploring, Binary Apocalypticism distorts genuine theological concerns. The Christian faith indeed includes an apocalyptic dimension—a belief that history has direction and purpose, that evil will not have the final word, that God's justice will ultimately prevail. But Binary Apocalypticism commits the cardinal theological error of collapsing the "analogical interval" between divine and human judgment. It forgets the infinite qualitative distinction between God's perfect knowledge and our partial perspectives, between the City of God and the City of Man, claiming for itself a certainty about final things that belongs to God alone. It's rather like a toddler attempting to direct symphonic performances at Carnegie Hall—adorable in its ambition, but fundamentally confused about the limits of its expertise.

The Schmittian Revolution: Politics as Friend-Enemy Distinction

At the heart of Binary Apocalypticism lies what political philosopher Carl Schmitt identified as the essence of the political: the friend-enemy distinction. For Schmitt, politics isn't primarily about governance or the common good, but about identifying who belongs to "us" and who constitutes "them"—the existential other against whom we define ourselves. It's politics reduced to its most primitive form: tribal affiliation writ large.

Richard Hooker confronted a similar binary framework in the 16th century, what I've called "Ramist realism" - a method that divided knowledge into opposing binaries and claimed to extract from Scripture "universal rules... discovered as refractions of the mind of God." Hooker recognized that such methods offered the seductive appeal of "marvelous quick dispatch," revealing "as much almost in three days, as if it dwell threescore years with them." The parallels to our contemporary apocalyptic frameworks are striking - both promise certainty without the messy work of discernment, both claim divine authority for human judgments, and both collapse the necessary distance between God's perfect knowledge and our partial perspectives.

Where Binary Apocalypticism sees clear categories of friend and enemy, Hooker saw "manifold secret exceptions" hidden within even the most seemingly straightforward rules. Against those who reduced Scripture to a catalog of absolute principles, Hooker insisted that "general rules, till their limits be fully known... are, by reason of the manifold secret exceptions which lie hidden in them, no other to the eye of man's understanding than cloudy mists cast before the eye of common sense." This insight applies perfectly to apocalyptic frameworks that cast political conflicts as cosmic battles between absolute good and absolute evil.

This framework has profound theological implications. When Christianity adopts this friend-enemy paradigm, it transforms Jesus's command to "love your enemies" (Matthew 5:44) from the radical centerpiece of Christian ethics into a quaint moral afterthought—a lovely sentiment for greeting cards, perhaps, but hardly practical for the serious business of apocalyptic struggle. After all, if politics is fundamentally about defeating enemies rather than seeking reconciliation, then Christian political engagement becomes less about witnessing to God's reconciling love and more about ensuring victory for "our side."

Key Insight: Binary Apocalypticism doesn't merely predict the end times; it attempts to stage-manage them, casting ourselves as the righteous and our opponents as the forces of darkness—a theological version of reality television where we conveniently control both the script and the judging panel.

The consequences are readily apparent in our current moment. The New Apostolic Reformation exemplifies this approach, with its leaders framing political contests in explicitly spiritual warfare terms. One prominent NAR leader described a vice-presidential candidate as possessing a "Jezebel spirit"—a term laden with both theological and racial overtones that casts political opposition as literally demonic. This rhetoric transforms policy disagreements into cosmic battles, elections into Armageddon, and compromise into betrayal of divine purpose.

Political opponents aren't merely people with different policy preferences but "forces of darkness"—a phrase that manages to be simultaneously melodramatic and devoid of actual content. Elections aren't simply democratic exercises but "spiritual warfare"—as though the Holy Spirit were particularly invested in tax policy or zoning regulations. Compromise isn't prudent governance but "betrayal of absolute truth"—truth that coincidentally aligns perfectly with our preexisting political commitments. Complex policy disagreements become simplified battles between good and evil, with all the cosmic urgency that framework implies.

The irony of Binary Apocalypticism lies in its claim to biblical fidelity while abandoning the very hermeneutic Jesus himself employed. When presented with binary frameworks - "Should we pay taxes to Caesar or not?" (Matthew 22:17-22) "Should we stone this woman or not?" (John 8:1-11) - Jesus consistently refused the terms of the question, offering instead responses that transcended the false dichotomies presented to him. As Hooker might observe, those most eager to divide humanity into sheep and goats seem remarkably uninterested in the Shepherd's own resistance to binary categorization.

There's a certain comedic quality to apocalyptic certainty, rather like watching a child confidently explain quantum physics based on a half-remembered conversation with an older sibling. The gap between the confidence and the competence creates an irony that would be merely amusing if it weren't so consequential. As Hooker noted regarding his own apocalyptically-minded opponents, they speak with absolute certainty about matters where even "pillars" with "great and rare skill" acknowledge complexity and uncertainty. Perhaps apocalyptic certainty is less a sign of spiritual maturity than of theological adolescence - characterized by the peculiar combination of partial knowledge and absolute confidence that typically accompanies that developmental stage.

As Philip Gorski observes in his analysis of religious nationalism, apocalyptic thinking leads inevitably to "hubris" and "demonization." It seduces followers "into claiming to know things that no human being can possibly know" while transforming opponents into "physical embodiments of evil." This transformation of political opponents into cosmic enemies creates the conditions for justifying extraordinary measures—after all, when facing ultimate evil, ordinary ethical constraints might seem like dangerous naivete. The banal logic of apocalypse always seems to conclude that the end justifies the means—a principle notably absent from the teachings of Jesus.

The 1978 Inflection Point: When Everything Changed

This binary framework didn't emerge from nowhere, like Athena springing fully formed from the head of Zeus. Historical analysis reveals a crucial inflection point around 1978, when multiple disruptions converged to create profound cultural anxiety. This moment saw:

* Racial Restructuring: School integration moving from legal mandate to lived reality, challenging generational hierarchies

* Gender Reconfiguration: Shifting family patterns and women's increasing economic independence

* Technological Disruption: Microcomputer revolution beginning to transform information access

These simultaneous disruptions created what Sarah Churchwell has documented as "power anxiety"—a profound sense of uncertainty about established social hierarchies. This anxiety created fertile ground for apocalyptic frameworks that promised clarity and certainty amid disorienting change. Binary Apocalypticism offered a compelling response: a framework that simplified complexity into good versus evil, a narrative that identified clear heroes and villains, and a promise that "our side" would ultimately triumph. It's a bit like replacing the magnificent complexity of Bach's fugues with the percussive simplicity of a military march—less demanding intellectually but more immediately gratifying.

Binary Apocalypticism typically includes what Hooker recognized as appeals to a "golden era" - claims that "the first state of things was best, that in the prime of Christian religion faith was soundest, the scriptures of God were then best understood by all men, all parts of godliness did then most abound." This nostalgia functions ideologically, shutting down conversation by establishing boundaries on what questions can be asked and what answers are permissible.

Against such thinking, Hooker insisted that "Are we bound while the world standeth to put nothing in practice but only that which was the very first?" He recognized that "Our end ought always to be the same, our ways and means thereunto not so." This insight challenges apocalyptic frameworks that seek to restore an imagined past rather than faithfully responding to present realities. The Christian calling is not to restore Eden but to anticipate the New Jerusalem - not regression to an idealized past but participation in God's creative future.

The historical connection between binary frameworks and racial exclusion is particularly significant. Churchwell documents how "America First" rhetoric had explicit connections to the KKK and white nationalism, demonstrating how binaries often function to reinforce racial hierarchies. This historical entanglement should give pause to Christians who uncritically embrace binary political frameworks while claiming to transcend racial divisions. The genealogy of our theological frameworks matters; ideas have histories, and those histories often reveal uncomfortable truths about their present functions.

The New Apostolic Reformation exemplifies this historical trajectory, emerging in the late 1990s but gaining significant political influence in the 21st century. NAR promotes what scholars call "dominion theology"—the belief that Christians should take control of government, media, education, business, arts and entertainment, religion, and family (the "seven mountains" of influence) to transform society according to their interpretation of Christian values. This framework divides the world into those aligned with God's purposes and those opposing them, creating a stark binary that justifies extraordinary political measures in the name of spiritual warfare. The movement's rhetoric around "taking dominion" and engaging in "spiritual warfare" against "demonic forces" in politics embodies the apocalyptic binary thinking that characterizes this theological mutation.

Beyond Justification: God's True Purpose

Douglas Campbell's recent work "Beyond Justification" provides crucial insight into the theological roots of Binary Apocalypticism. The problem runs deeper than specific misreadings of Scripture; it stems from what Campbell calls "justification theory"—a framework that fundamentally misconstrues God's purpose, rather like mistaking the magnificent architecture of a cathedral for an elaborate system of plumbing repairs. In this view, God's primary concern becomes our moral failure, with Christ serving essentially as the solution to a problem—the divine equivalent of a cosmic handyman called in to fix our leaky salvation.

Yet as Campbell reminds us, this framework captures only about 10% of Paul's writings, while the remaining 90% proclaims a different message entirely. In Paul's actual gospel, God isn't merely responding to human sin but enacting a purpose that would have unfolded regardless—to be with us in covenantal relationship rather than contractual transaction. "While we were announcing a conditional gospel, God loved us unconditionally. The repair of the gospel is to simply lay hold of what has been the good news from the beginning."

Binary Apocalypticism flows naturally from justification theory because when salvation becomes conditional upon correct belief, humanity is easily divided into saved and unsaved, friends and enemies. This binary framework enables Dominative Christianism's apocalyptic worldview that divides the political landscape into good and evil, rather like sorting laundry into light and dark—except with eternal consequences.

The alternative—a participatory understanding of divine purpose—emphasizes:

* Divine purpose as communion rather than merely problem-solving

* Reconciliation rather than division as God's fundamental intention

* Evil and sin as obstacles to God's purpose, not its motivation

* Resurrection rather than mere atonement as the center of Christian hope

This participatory framework fundamentally challenges binary thinking by emphasizing God's universal reconciling work in Christ rather than division and judgment. It replaces the friend-enemy distinction with a vision of humanity united in Christ while still journeying toward full redemption. It's rather like the difference between viewing marriage as a contractual arrangement to avoid loneliness and viewing it as a covenantal relationship that fulfills our deepest nature as beings made for communion.

Special Equity: A Theological Alternative to Binary Thinking

Richard Hooker's concept of "special equity" provides a powerful theological alternative to Binary Apocalypticism. Where binary thinking reduces complex reality to friend-enemy distinctions, special equity attends carefully to the particularity of each situation. Hooker defined this approach as the "patient endurance of objectionable difference" that seeks justice in specific circumstances rather than mechanically applying universal rules.

"Not without singular wisdom therefore it hath been provided," Hooker wrote, "that as the ordinary course of common affairs is disposed of by general laws, so likewise men's rarer incident necessities and utilities should be with special equity considered." This wisdom recognizes that good laws are necessarily expressed in general language, but their application requires attention to "material circumstances" that abstract principles might miss.

This approach doesn't abandon moral clarity or theological conviction. Rather, it grounds them in the rich particularity of human experience rather than abstract categories. It recognizes, with Augustine, that we are bound together in a "society of souls" whose differences are not obstacles to overcome but gifts to be received. Special equity seeks the good the natural law intends by attending to the complex reality of concrete situations rather than imposing pre-determined binary judgments.

In our polarized age, this approach offers a way forward that maintains both moral conviction and humble recognition of our limited perspective. It replaces the friend-enemy distinction with what John Bowlin calls "the patient endurance of objectionable difference" - not out of moral indifference but out of commitment to the common good. It's rather like the difference between playing a complex jazz composition and striking a single, insistent note - one requires careful attention to context and relationship, while the other requires merely the ability to make noise.

Being With: God's Incarnational Purpose

Samuel Wells' incarnational theology of "being with" provides another powerful antidote to Binary Apocalypticism. He challenges the conventional understanding that Jesus came primarily to solve the problem of sin—a notion that reduces the glory of incarnation to a rather pedestrian exercise in cosmic problem-solving, as though the eternal Word became flesh merely to perform some metaphysical maintenance. Instead, Wells proposes that the incarnation was always God's purpose—not merely a response to human failure. In his most recent work, Wells "articulates a truly Christocentric theology in which God's means and God's ends are identical," arguing that centering human deficit rather than divine abundance has long been unsatisfactory.

Wells' framework of "being with" includes eight dimensions: presence, attention, mystery, delight, participation, partnership, enjoyment, and glory. Each dimension reveals how God's fundamental purpose is communion rather than correction or condemnation. Reflecting on Jesus' example, Wells notes that Jesus "spent a week in Jerusalem working for us, three years in Galilee working with us, and 30 years in Nazareth being with us. If God spent 90% of the incarnation being with, why should we be different?" One might say that God appears considerably less obsessed with productivity metrics than many of our churches.

This understanding transforms our approach to those we might consider "enemies." Instead of opposition, we're called to presence—showing up in the messy reality of human difference. Instead of condemnation, we're called to attention—actually seeing the other rather than merely the category we've assigned them. Instead of certainty, we're called to mystery—acknowledging the depths of others that exceed our understanding. Instead of severity, we're called to delight—finding joy in the beauty of others created in God's image. Binary Apocalypticism, with its rigid categories and cosmic urgency, has no place for these practices of "being with." It prioritizes division over communion, certainty over mystery, working against over being with—rather like preferring the sterile clarity of a prison yard to the creative chaos of a family dinner.

The incarnation reveals that God's primary purpose isn't judgment but presence. This insight dramatically reframes how we understand theological concepts like "end times" and "final judgment." If God's purpose is communion rather than condemnation, then the culmination of history isn't the sorting of humanity into opposing camps but the fullness of divine-human communion—what the Scriptures call "the marriage supper of the Lamb" (Revelation 19:9). It's less a final exam and more a wedding feast. (Though perhaps I'm biased, having always preferred feasts to exams.)

The Beauty of Theological Complexity

Binary thinking fails not only morally but aesthetically. It reduces the wondrous complexity of divine-human relationship to a crude dualism that neither illuminates scripture nor satisfies the soul. The Christian tradition offers a far more beautiful account through what David Bentley Hart calls "analogical metaphysics"—understanding reality as neither univocally identical with God nor equivocally disconnected from God, but analogically related to God through the divine attributes reflected in creation.

This analogical understanding finds expression in what Richard Hooker would recognize as dialectical rather than divisive thinking. Where Binary Apocalypticism proceeds by dividing reality into opposing categories, dialectic moves toward "mediating synthesis" - not merely splitting differences but elevating discourse to a new level that "inherits the strengths of predecessor/competitor theories and practices while overcoming their weaknesses." It's the difference between a debate where the goal is to win and a conversation where the goal is to understand - a distinction I fear is increasingly lost in our apocalyptic age.

Dialectical thinking reflects a world understood as dynamic rather than static, as open to God's continuing creative acts rather than fixed in predetermined patterns. As David Congden reflects on Karl Barth’s insights, "election is 'new every morning'" - God meets us always in our irreducible particularity, not through abstract universal principles. This means there are no timeless absolutes upon which to ground our ethics, "no original created human nature to which we can point," but only the concrete reality of Christ himself, "the contingent event that is universally significant in that it includes all other people and events within its singular reality."

This analogical understanding recognizes that all truth participates in Truth itself—that partial glimpses of beauty, goodness, and justice appear even among those with whom we profoundly disagree. Binary apocalypticism can't accommodate this aesthetic complexity; it requires stark oppositions and absolute divisions where Christian tradition has typically recognized subtle gradations and partial apprehensions.

Perhaps the most powerful counter to Binary Apocalypticism is Hooker's recognition of the "beautiful variety of things" and the "manifold and yet harmonious dissimilitude of those ways, whereby his Church upon earth is guided from age to age." Where Binary Apocalypticism demands uniformity and certainty, Hooker saw diversity as reflecting divine creativity. The "manifold and yet harmonious dissimilitude" he celebrated stands in stark contrast to the monotonous certainty of apocalyptic frameworks.

This aesthetic critique is not merely superficial but goes to the heart of how we understand God's relationship with creation. A God who delights in "beautiful variety" and "harmonious dissimilitude" seems unlikely to be impressed by rigid frameworks that reduce complex reality to simplistic categories. There's something deeply unimaginative about Binary Apocalypticism - a failure not just of ethics but of theological imagination. It lacks the creative capacity to envision reconciliation beyond victory, community beyond uniformity, truth beyond certainty. In the end, Binary Apocalypticism fails not because it's too radical but because it's not nearly radical enough - too constrained by the world's friend-enemy distinctions to imagine the revolutionary communion toward which all creation moves.

The result is a theological framework devoid of beauty—and as Hans Urs von Balthasar reminds us, without beauty, goodness loses its attractiveness and truth loses its persuasiveness. Put simply, binary apocalypticism isn't just wrong; it's ugly. It lacks the harmonious integration of diversity that characterizes truly beautiful things. It prefers the monotonous uniformity of ideological certainty to the symphonic complexity of theological wisdom.

The analogical interval—that space of both similarity and difference between Creator and creation—is precisely where genuine theological thinking happens. Binary apocalypticism collapses this interval into either univocal identification (where our judgments are identical with God's) or equivocal separation (where our enemies are wholly other than ourselves). Both moves destroy the analogical relationship that makes theological thinking possible at all.

The Psychological Mechanism: Identity Through Opposition

Paul Kahn's analysis of political theology illuminates how binary frameworks generate meaning and identity. Binary Apocalypticism doesn't merely provide a worldview; it offers adherents a secure identity forged through opposition to enemies. This process works through four interconnected mechanisms:

* Identity Through Opposition: Creating stable identity through contrast with enemies—rather like defining yourself primarily as "not a Yankees fan" rather than by any positive commitments

* Meaning Through Conflict: Generating purpose and significance through struggle—as though our lives only matter insofar as we're engaged in cosmic battle

* Evil Projection: Unifying "our side" by projecting evil onto external others—allowing us to maintain a pristine self-image by locating all darkness elsewhere

* Sacrificial Mobilization: Motivating sacrifice through narratives of existential threat—because nothing motivates quite like apocalyptic emergency

These mechanisms explain the peculiar persistence of apocalyptic thinking despite repeatedly failed predictions. The function of Binary Apocalypticism isn't primarily predictive but identity-forming. It tells adherents who they are by telling them who they're against, providing psychological security amid disorienting social change. As Blaise Pascal might observe, it fills the God-shaped void in our hearts with the considerably less satisfying but more immediately available alternative of enemy-contempt.

This understanding helps explain why attempts to correct apocalyptic predictions with facts often fail. The appeal isn't primarily intellectual but existential. Binary Apocalypticism offers a secure identity and a meaningful narrative when both seem increasingly elusive. It's rather like treating existential anxiety with apocalyptic Red Bull energy drinks—providing an immediate sense of purpose but typically resulting in a crash, followed by the need for increasingly potent formulations.

The New Apostolic Reformation exemplifies this identity-forming function, with its rhetoric of "prayer warrior networks" and "spiritual battle" providing adherents a clear identity and purpose. What scholars describe as a "religio-political movement" creates meaning by positioning followers as God's agents in a cosmic battle to "take dominion" over cultural and political institutions. This frame promises significance, security, and clarity in an increasingly complex world—psychological benefits that help explain the movement's growing influence despite its theological contradictions with historic Christianity.

The Ecosystem: Information Closed Loops

Binary Apocalypticism never operates in isolation, like some rugged individualist of theological error. It creates and requires what we might call "epistemic bunkers"—closed information ecosystems that reinforce binary worldviews while excluding contrary evidence. We see this in:

* Media platforms that present political opponents as fundamentally evil rather than merely misguided—rather like episode descriptions for particularly melodramatic soap operas

* Church communities that treat political alignment as a test of Christian authenticity—turning communion into a partisan membership card

* Social networks segregated by political viewpoint that prevent meaningful encounter with difference—creating digital ghettoes of self-congratulation

* Online environments where the most extreme expressions of binary thinking receive the most engagement—rewarding rhetorical pyrotechnics over thoughtful engagement

These closed ecosystems create what philosopher Charles Taylor calls "mutual fragilization"—when isolated communities increasingly view competing perspectives not merely as wrong but as existentially threatening. This dynamic transforms political disagreement from democratic debate into perceived spiritual warfare. The result isn't civic discourse but mutual incomprehension across hardening boundaries—a theological Tower of Babel where we speak increasingly distinct languages while imagining ourselves perfectly clear.

The jazz band metaphor illuminates what's lost in this binary framework. Where true Christian community might resemble a jazz ensemble—diverse instruments creating harmony through responsive listening—Binary Apocalypticism creates a rigid marching band, demanding conformity to a single militant rhythm. The rich complexity of improvisation gives way to the reductive simplicity of combat. The question is whether we're called to march in formation or to make music together—and the biblical images of heavenly worship suggest the latter.

The New Apostolic Reformation exemplifies this ecosystem development through what researchers describe as "prayer warrior networks" in all fifty states and around the world, creating parallel information structures that reinforce binary apocalyptic frameworks. By positioning adherents as spiritual warriors engaged in cosmic battle against demonic forces in politics, business, and culture, these networks create closed epistemological communities where skepticism toward the movement's claims is itself evidence of demonic influence—a perfect epistemic trap that resists correction.

The Alternative: Eschatological Realism

Christianity need not choose between moral clarity and humble patience. The theological tradition offers robust alternatives to Binary Apocalypticism, alternatives that unite the true, the good, and the beautiful rather than sacrificing any for partisan advantage:

Hospitality as Theological Practice

Luke Bretherton's concept of hospitality offers a theological framework for encountering difference without either erasing it (liberalism) or treating it as an absolute barrier (nationalism). Hospitality "hallows bare life" by recognizing the irreducible worth of the other without requiring their assimilation. It creates "tent-like places" for meaningful encounter across difference while maintaining distinctive identities.

This approach doesn't abandon truth claims or moral clarity. Rather, it practices truth through relationship rather than imposition. It makes space for the other while maintaining faithful witness. It recognizes difference without making it ultimate. It's less like building walls to keep others out and more like setting a table where all can be fed—which happens to align rather nicely with Jesus's preferred social activity.

Tolerance as Moral Virtue

John Bowlin's understanding of tolerance challenges the assumption that tolerance means moral weakness. True tolerance isn't indifference but "the patient endurance of objectionable difference" rooted in commitment to justice and the common good. It requires moral conviction rather than abandoning it.

Bowlin distinguishes between tolerance (a natural virtue related to justice) and forbearance (a specifically Christian virtue related to love). Where tolerance patiently endures objectionable differences for the sake of justice, forbearance does so for the sake of love, mirroring Christ's endurance of sin for the sake of reconciliation. There's nothing weak about this patience; it requires considerably more strength than the immediate gratification of righteous condemnation.

Eschatological Patience

Perhaps most fundamentally, Christian tradition offers eschatological patience—maintaining hope in God's ultimate redemption while accepting present ambiguity. This patience:

* Distinguishes between penultimate political concerns and ultimate theological concerns—avoiding the idolatry of treating politics as final

* Recognizes the partial and provisional nature of all human political projects—neither demonizing nor deifying our political arrangements

* Maintains moral clarity without claiming divine certainty about final judgments—acknowledging that we see through a glass darkly (1 Corinthians 13:12)

* Practices enemy love as central Christian discipline rather than optional extra—recognizing that if Jesus meant what he said about loving enemies (Matthew 5:44), our political engagements might require significant reconfiguration

This eschatological patience doesn't abandon moral judgment or political engagement. It engages precisely because it believes God's redemptive purpose encompasses all creation, including political life. But it engages without the triumphalism that characterizes Binary Apocalypticism, recognizing that "our struggle is not against flesh and blood" (Ephesians 6:12) but against powers and principalities that distort all human systems, including our own. It's less like storming the barricades of enemy territory and more like tending a garden amid the ruins—a garden that prefigures the renewed creation toward which all history moves.

Conclusion

Binary Apocalypticism offers a tempting simplicity in complex times. Like all the mutations we're examining, it addresses legitimate needs—for moral clarity, cosmic meaning, and secure identity. But it addresses these needs by collapsing distinctions that Christian theology insists on maintaining—between divine and human judgment, between enemy and evil, between righteous anger and self-righteous certainty. It's rather like addressing hunger by consuming not bread but stones—a solution that satisfies immediate cravings while providing no actual nourishment.

The alternative isn't moral relativism or political disengagement. It's a more faithful witness that maintains both the "already" of moral clarity and the "not yet" of eschatological humility. It's a politics shaped by cruciform love rather than the friend-enemy distinction. It's a witness that speaks truth to power while recognizing our own complicity in systems of domination. It's a bit like the difference between a teenager's black-and-white certainties and a parent's more nuanced wisdom—not less committed to truth, but more aware of truth's complexity.

In practical terms, this means:

* Maintaining moral clarity without demonizing opponents—recognizing the image of God even in those with whom we profoundly disagree

* Pursuing justice without claiming perfect righteousness—acknowledging our own partial vision and mixed motives

* Speaking truth without claiming infallibility—holding our convictions with both confidence and humility

* Building communities of witness that transcend political binaries—prefiguring the reconciliation toward which all history moves

* Practicing reconciliation as central to Christian witness—not as an optional extra but as the heart of the gospel

As we navigate polarized times, Christians need not choose between prophetic critique and humble patience. The cruciform pattern of Jesus offers a different way—neither the binary certainty of apocalypticism nor the moral confusion of relativism, but the difficult, beautiful path of truth spoken in love, of justice pursued with mercy, of communities that witness to God's reconciling purpose for all creation. It's a path that requires both courage and humility, both conviction and openness—a narrow way that leads to life precisely because it refuses the broad highways of ideological certainty that lead only to mutual destruction.

In the end, perhaps the most damning critique of Binary Apocalypticism is aesthetic: it's simply too boring. The God revealed in Jesus Christ is infinitely more creative, more surprising, and more delightful than our binary categories can accommodate. The final triumph of divine love will almost certainly confound all our expectations and transcend all our categories. And in that surprise—that divine joke that upends all our certainties while fulfilling our deepest hopes—we might finally learn to laugh at ourselves, to hold our judgments lightly, and to trust the One whose judgments alone are true, good, and beautiful.

Key Terms

Binary Apocalypticism: Divides the world into absolute categories of good and evil, friends and enemies, creating a framework where political opponents become cosmic enemies. Full entry →

Participatory Freedom: Understanding freedom as capacity for love and non-domination rather than absence of constraint, grounding political engagement in cruciform love rather than friend-enemy distinction. Full entry →

Being With: A theological framework that understands God's purpose as communion rather than merely problem-solving, emphasizing presence, attention, mystery, and delight as divine attributes revealed in Christ. Full entry →

Special Equity: Hooker's concept of attending to the particularity of each situation rather than mechanically applying universal rules, seeking justice in specific circumstances rather than enforcing abstract principles. Full entry →

Related Content

* Sermon: Mark 4:35-41 (Jesus Calms the Storm) →

* Lexicon: Binary Apocalypticism →

Notes

[1] Philip Gorski, American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2017), 224.

[2] Sarah Churchwell, Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "the American Dream" (Basic Books, 2018), 128-134.

[3] Douglas Campbell and Jon DePue, Beyond Justification: Liberating Paul's Gospel (Cascade Books, 2024), 16.

[4] Samuel Wells, Constructing an Incarnational Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2025), 42.

[5] Paul Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Columbia University Press, 2011), 156-159.

[6] Luke Bretherton, Hospitality as Holiness: Christian Witness Amid Moral Diversity (Ashgate, 2006), 121-127.

[7] John Bowlin, Tolerance Among the Virtues (Princeton University Press, 2016), 45-52.

[8] David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdmans, 2003), 124-151.

[9] Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book V.9.2-3.

[10] David Congden, "Creatio Continue Ex Electione: A Post-Barthian Revision of the Doctrine of Creatio Ex Nihilo," Koinonia XXII, (2010), 49.

Picture this scene from Mark's Gospel: Three terrified disciples on a mountain, watching their teacher transformed before their eyes, glowing with unearthly radiance while conversing with Moses and Elijah—figures from centuries past who suddenly appear in brilliant splendor. Peter, in that profoundly human way of responding to divine mystery with mundane practicality, suggests building three commemorative shelters. Then a cloud envelops them (because apparently transfiguration wasn't dramatic enough), and a voice thunders: "This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!" (Mark 9:7)

And they are, as Mark carefully notes, "terrified." (Mark 9:6)

Not mildly concerned. Not reverently awed. Terrified. This wasn't the pleasant warmth of a worship service or the gentle affirmation of a prayer meeting. This was pure, primal fear—the kind that arises when finite creatures encounter the infinite, when human categories collapse before divine reality. This was what Rudolf Otto called the mysterium tremendum et fascinans—the overwhelming mystery that simultaneously attracts and repels, that draws us close while making us acutely aware of our radical otherness.

Now consider how we speak of religious experience today:

* "God told me to vote for Senator So-and-So"

* "The Holy Spirit confirmed that my identity group represents authentic divine concern"

* "Jesus clearly endorses our specific political platform"

Something profound has been lost in translation. The divine mystery that made Peter babble incoherently and left the disciples speechless has been reduced to a kind of supernatural polling service, validating our predetermined positions and affirming our existing commitments.

When Divine Presence Becomes Political Property

Here's what authentic religious experience looks like in scripture:

* Moses encounters the burning bush and must remove his sandals, overwhelmed by holy ground (Exodus 3:1-6)

* Isaiah sees the Lord "high and lifted up" and cries out in recognition of his unworthiness (Isaiah 6:1-5)

* The disciples witness the transfigured Christ and lose all coherent speech (Mark 9:2-6)

Notice the pattern? Divine encounters consistently produce:

* Recognition of radical inadequacy before transcendent reality

* Simultaneous attraction and fear that defies rationalization

* Transformation beyond human planning or control

* Redirection toward previously unimagined purposes

Nowhere in scripture does God appear to affirm political platforms, validate identity categories, or endorse cultural preferences. Instead, divine presence consistently disrupts human agendas, transcends political divisions, and reorients human desire toward divine purposes that exceed partisan imagination.

The Collapse of Transcendence: How God Becomes Our Political Mascot

Modern American Christianity has accomplished something remarkable—perhaps even unprecedented in religious history. We've managed to reduce the Creator of the universe to a mascot for our political teams, transforming divine transcendence into a kind of supernatural endorsement service for cultural warfare.

David Bentley Hart describes this collapse with devastating precision: "The analogical interval between God and creatures is what makes possible both genuine divine transcendence and authentic divine immanence. When this interval collapses into univocal identity of being, God becomes either a being among beings (and thus not God) or an absence that leaves the world to its own devices."¹

Let me translate that from theologian to everyday English: When we forget that God exists on a fundamentally different plane than creation, we inevitably turn God into either a bigger version of ourselves or a meaningless abstraction. Either way, we lose authentic divine encounter.

Gods of Legitimation: The Quest for Ultimate Authority

What's particularly fascinating is how our society keeps searching for sources of ultimate authority, even as traditional religious frameworks recede from public life. As political philosopher Ivan Krastev observes, "Science was as important for the modern state as God was for the monarchical states of the past. The legitimacy of the state was coming from science."¹³

This insight reveals a pattern: human communities consistently seek transcendent sources of legitimacy. When traditional religious authority wanes, scientific authority often takes its place—not merely as practical guidance but as a source of ultimate validation. The COVID pandemic revealed the limitations of this arrangement, as Krastev notes: "Science functions because scientists disagree with each other... science—even though it was successful... delegitimized the state by the very way it works: through disagreement and constantly-changing hypotheses."¹³

The result? A society increasingly skeptical of all sources of transcendent authority, whether religious or scientific. This vacuum of trusted authority creates fertile ground for both political mutations we'll explore.

Dominative Christianism: Divine Power as Political Control

In Dominative Christianism, divine presence mutates into a display of power—the spiritual equivalent of revving motorcycle engines at traffic lights. God becomes the ultimate enforcer for nationalist dreams, the cosmic guarantor of American exceptionalism. Consider how this mutation transforms religious practice:

Worship services increasingly resemble political rallies, complete with nationalist symbols and partisan rhetoric. The cross transforms from a symbol of self-sacrificial love into a weapon for cultural dominance. Prayer shifts from vulnerable dialogue with the divine to declarations of spiritual warfare against political opponents. The eucharist—that profound mystery of divine presence—becomes a boundary marker between political allies and enemies.

As Timothy Cunningham observes in his analysis of Christian nationalism: "Christian nationalists often interpret patriotic texts in ways that sacralize American identity, much as they approach sacred scripture." The divine mystery that should expand our vision becomes confined to national boundaries, serving political agendas rather than transcending them.

This represents what Charles Taylor calls "excarnation"—the disembodiment of spiritual reality into abstract principles.³ Rather than encountering the living God who transcends our categories, worshippers experience a domesticated deity who confirms their political convictions.

What's particularly intriguing about the Trump-era expression of this tendency is its profound shift away from American exceptionalism itself. As Krastev notes: "Trump was the last one to say that American exceptionalism is not America's strength—it's America's vulnerability... America is the victim of its exceptionalism. America is the victim of its idealism. America is the victim of the American Dream."¹³

This creates a strange paradox: a religious nationalism that increasingly defines itself against traditional American ideals rather than through them. The result is what Yascha Mounk characterizes as a movement where "the least based thing is to have a kind of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington naïve view of American ideals."¹⁴ The sacred story no longer points toward fulfilling America's promise, but toward rejecting the very idea that America has a universal promise to fulfill.

Providential Identitarianism: Divine Presence as Therapeutic Validation

Providential Identitarianism commits the same fundamental error from the opposite direction. Here, God becomes the cosmic therapist who exists primarily to validate our feelings and affirm our chosen identities. Divine presence gets reduced to whatever makes us feel comfortable and confirmed in our existing commitments.

This mutation manifests in parallel distortions:

* Emotional comfort becomes equated with divine presence—if it feels affirming, it must be of God

* Personal validation becomes the primary mode of spiritual experience

* Prophetic challenge that might disturb our sensibilities gets eliminated

* The God who wounds in order to heal becomes the therapist who only soothes

As Christian Smith notes in his research on American religious life: "The therapeutic model transforms God from the transcendent Lord who calls us to transformation into the cosmic therapist who validates our existing desires."⁶ The divine otherness that should expand our horizons instead becomes a mirror reflecting our own preferences.

This pattern parallels what Krastev identifies as a fundamental shift in state legitimation: "The classical trusted state of the 1930s in America under Roosevelt—or of the 1950s and 60s in Europe—was based on the idea that it responded to and took care of human needs. But today, it must take care of human desires."¹³ The state can no longer merely provide universal necessities; it must validate individual uniqueness.

The result? A theology that mirrors this consumerist logic: "I want the state to treat me as a very specific personality—but the state, in order to be fair, must treat me like everybody else. We're no longer ready to live with that."¹³ Similarly, the God of Providential Identitarianism must validate everyone's unique identity while somehow maintaining universality—an impossible theological demand that inevitably collapses into incoherence.

The Shared Metaphysical Disaster: Flattening the Infinite

Despite their political opposition, both mutations share a common metaphysical framework—what philosophers call "univocity." This technical term describes the assumption that God exists on the same ontological plane as everything else, just bigger and better. It's like thinking the Pacific Ocean is merely a very large bathtub, missing the qualitative difference that makes it an ocean rather than just big bath water.

Stanley Hauerwas captures this problem with characteristic clarity: "The God of Christian faith is not a 'meaning' that we can control through our theological systems or political projects. Rather, this God is the disruptive presence who continually calls into question our attempts to secure our own existence through our religiosity."⁶

Both Dominative Christianism and Providential Identitarianism fail precisely because they try to harness divine power for their predetermined projects. They share what Hauerwas calls "the desperate need to have a god that underwrites our causes rather than a God who judges them."

This shared framework produces characteristic distortions across the political spectrum:

* Divine action becomes reduced to natural causation, whether political power or social progress

* Mystery gets eliminated in favor of ideological certainty

* Revelation collapses into confirmation of existing beliefs

* Grace transforms from gift into technique for achieving partisan goals

Digital Idolatry: When the Algorithm Becomes Divine

Social media accelerates these mutations by transforming religious experience into commodified content. Marshall McLuhan's insight that "the medium is the message" helps explain how digital mediation fundamentally alters religious encounter:

Algorithmic curation creates echo chambers where we encounter only views that reinforce existing commitments. Instant feedback loops reward performative spirituality designed for maximum engagement rather than genuine encounter. Disembodied interaction enables ideological extremism by removing the moderating influence of face-to-face community. Visual dominance replaces contemplative depth, reducing religious experience to shareable moments.

Byung-Chul Han calls this "the digital swarm"—isolated individuals who experience pseudo-community through technological mediation.¹⁰ Religious experience becomes content to be consumed rather than mystery to be encountered. God's voice gets filtered through our carefully curated feeds, speaking only what we already want to hear.

This algorithmic curation parallels what Krastev identifies as a fundamental challenge of modern democracy: "Suddenly, you're being asked to have opinions about things you've never experienced and cannot experience. And this created a kind of trust–mistrust game. As a result, democracy became the management of mistrust."¹³ Similarly, algorithmic religion asks us to have confident positions on divine matters far beyond our experience, substituting digital certainty for lived encounter.

Recovering the Analogical Interval: A Path Beyond Political Idolatry

The way forward requires recovering what classical theology calls the "analogical interval"—the metaphysical space that enables genuine relationship between Creator and creation precisely by maintaining their fundamental difference.

Hauerwas helps us understand why this matters for contemporary discipleship: "To be a disciple is to learn to be dispossessed, to be freed from the presumption that we can secure our lives against God's lordship through our theological systems or political arrangements."¹¹ The analogical interval teaches us that God is not simply a bigger version of what we already know, but the One who transforms our knowing itself.

This recovery begins with several crucial recognitions:

First, we must acknowledge divine transcendence not as distance but as the condition for genuine intimacy. Just as human relationships require distinct persons to achieve true communion, divine-human relationship requires the analogical difference that enables authentic encounter without collapse into identity.

Second, we must embrace mystery without surrendering clarity. The God who reveals is the same God who remains hidden. This isn't contradiction but the necessary structure of infinite-finite relationship. We can know truly without knowing exhaustively.

Third, we must cultivate patience before divine hiddenness. As Samuel Wells wisely notes: "The Church does not make things happen; it invites people to allow things to happen to them—to have their feet washed, to realize they are hungry, to find food in unlikely forms, to be transformed and consumed."² The compulsion to manufacture religious experience through political validation or therapeutic affirmation betrays a refusal to wait upon God's self-revelation in God's own time and manner.

Finally, we must resist premature closure of theological questions. The divine mystery invites ongoing exploration rather than ideological certainty. Authentic faith remains open to being surprised by grace.

Liturgical Resistance: Practices Beyond Political Capture

Recovery requires liturgical practices that resist ideological capture and create space for authentic divine encounter. These aren't techniques for manufacturing religious experience but disciplines that open us to transformative presence:

Eucharistic celebration transcends political division by gathering diverse people around Christ's table. Here, we don't merely remember but participate in divine self-giving that refuses partisan categories. The bread broken and shared becomes a sign of unity that precedes and exceeds political alignment.

Contemplative prayer embraces divine mystery rather than seeking to control divine power. In silence, we learn to wait upon God's initiative rather than projecting our agendas onto divine reality. This creates what Sarah Coakley calls "practices of un-mastery"—spiritual disciplines that open us to divine transformation rather than confirming our existing commitments.¹²

Scriptural meditation allows texts to challenge our preconceptions rather than confirming our biases. Rather than mining scripture for proof-texts, we allow sacred words to interrogate our assumptions, expose our limitations, and redirect our desires toward divine purposes that exceed partisan imagination.

Corporate confession acknowledges shared brokenness rather than projecting evil onto others. Here we recognize that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart, preventing the demonization of political opponents that characterizes both mutations.

Prophetic Presence: Neither Red Nor Blue but Kingdom-Shaped

Authentic religious experience enables prophetic witness that transcends partisan alignment. Like the Hebrew prophets who challenged both royal power and popular religion, contemporary prophetic presence refuses conscription into ideological armies while maintaining fierce commitment to divine justice.

The prophetic voice emerges from genuine encounter with divine presence that refuses domestication. It speaks truth to all forms of power, whether political or religious, conservative or progressive. It maintains critical distance from all ideologies while embracing solidarity with the marginalized regardless of political categorization. Most importantly, it witnesses to transcendent hope that cannot be reduced to any political program or social movement.

Willie James Jennings captures this dynamic: "When the nation becomes the primary site of divine revelation, the church loses its capacity to witness against national idolatry. The prophetic voice is silenced by the siren song of civil religion."⁴ True prophetic witness recovers this capacity by grounding itself in divine otherness rather than partisan identity.

The Comedy of Divine Freedom: God Who Refuses to Be Contained

Here's the profound irony that both mutations fail to grasp: The God we've been trying to recruit for our culture wars refuses to stay in the boxes we build. While Dominative Christianism seeks a deity who blesses nationalist dreams and Providential Identitarianism desires a God who validates progressive credentials, the actual divine presence keeps showing up in unexpected places—among the poor and marginalized, within communities that defy political categorization, through encounters that transform rather than confirm.

The divine comedy plays out when our carefully constructed religious systems encounter the living God who transcends them all. It's like watching someone try to capture the ocean in a fishbowl—the categories we construct for divine presence consistently prove inadequate to the reality we encounter.

This isn't merely theological abstraction. Consider how often scripture shows God working through unexpected people: Gentile widows rather than Israelite priests (1 Kings 17:8-24), tax collectors rather than Pharisees (Luke 18:9-14), crucified criminals rather than religious authorities (Luke 23:39-43). The divine pattern consistently subverts our expectations of where and how God appears.

Transfiguration Revisited: The Model of Authentic Encounter

Returning to the Transfiguration narrative, we see how authentic divine encounter resists both mutations we've examined. The disciples experience overwhelming presence that disrupts their agendas rather than confirming them. They encounter mystery that exceeds their comprehension rather than validating their understanding. They receive a command to listen rather than speak, to be transformed rather than to transform. Most significantly, their experience precedes understanding rather than confirming preexisting categories.

The voice from the cloud—"This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!" (Mark 9:7)—redirects attention from human projects to divine revelation. It doesn't endorse their political preferences or validate their social identities. Instead, it invites participation in divine life that transcends all partisan divisions. This divine word reveals a presence that transforms rather than affirms, challenges rather than comforts, and calls beyond rather than confirms.

Conclusion: Beyond Political Idolatry

Recovery of authentic religious experience requires a profound shift in how we approach divine presence. We must allow the God of biblical revelation to interrupt our ideological certainties, whether they lean right or left. Only then can we experience the God who is truly Other yet intimately present—the God who transforms rather than merely affirms, who calls us beyond ourselves rather than confirming our existing commitments.

This God cannot be reduced to a weapon in our culture wars or a validator of our identities. This God remains free, sovereign, and loving—inviting us into relationship that transforms rather than possession that controls. The prophet Hosea captures this divine freedom: "I am God and not a human being, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath." (Hosea 11:9) The God who refuses political domestication remains the God of transforming love.

The path forward isn't about finding better ways to enlist God in our causes. It's about recovering the capacity for authentic divine encounter that transforms our causes themselves. As we allow divine presence to disrupt our partisan certainties and challenge our tribal loyalties, we may discover that the God we've been trying to recruit has been seeking to transform us all along.

The voice from the cloud still speaks: "This is my Son. Listen to him!"

Perhaps our most faithful response is neither to explain nor to translate but simply to obey: to listen, to be transformed, and to follow wherever divine presence leads—even when it disrupts our carefully maintained political categories and theological systems.

Key Terms

Dominative Christianism: A theological mutation that transforms Christianity from a faith centered on cruciform love into a system for exercising social and political control. Full entry →

Providential Identitarianism: A theological mutation that secularizes reformed protestant frameworks while maintaining structural logic through identity-based categories. Full entry →

Analogical Interval: The metaphysical space between Creator and creation that enables genuine relationship without collapsing difference. Full entry →(Coming Soon)

Univocity: The modern metaphysical assumption that being is predicated in the same way of God and creatures. Full entry →(Coming soon)

Participatory Presence: Understanding divine presence as participation in divine life rather than possession of divine power. Full entry →(Coming soon)

Related Content

* Monday: Introduction to Dominative Christianism (Part 1) →

* Monday: The Trinitarian Foundation of Christian Identity →

* Wednesday: B******t: Truth as Foundation →

* Thursday: Four Migrations, Four Worlds →

Notes

[1] David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 127.[2] Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1973), 26.[3] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 554.[4] Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 289.[5] Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 246.[6] Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 44.[7] Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 121.[8] Oliver O'Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 198.[9] Stanley Hauerwas, Dispatches from the Front: Theological Engagements with the Secular (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 157.[10] Byung-Chul Han, In the Swarm: Digital Prospects, trans. Erik Butler (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 12.[11] Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 259.[12] Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), xv.[13] Ivan Krastev, interviewed by Yascha Mounk, "Ivan Krastev on American Decline," The Good Fight podcast, Persuasion, April 23, 2025.[14] Yascha Mounk, conversation with Ivan Krastev, "Ivan Krastev on American Decline," The Good Fight podcast, Persuasion, April 23, 2025.

Based on Mark 4:35-41 (Jesus Calms the Storm)

My dear friends in Christ,

"Peace! Be still!" These words of Jesus echo across the centuries to us today, in a time when many of us feel tossed about by storms of anxiety, division, and uncertainty. In today's gospel, we find the disciples crossing the Sea of Galilee when a sudden storm threatens to overwhelm their boat. Jesus, asleep in the stern, is awakened by his terrified disciples, who cry out, "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?"

How familiar that cry sounds to many of us today. "Do you not care that we are perishing?" As markets tumble, as retirement accounts shrink, as policies driven by fear rather than compassion take shape, many among us feel exactly as those disciples did – tossed about by forces beyond our control, wondering if anyone cares about our well-being.

The Storm Around Us

Let's be honest with one another. We are living through a frightening time. Many of you have shared your anxieties with me – worries about economic security as markets react to proposed tariffs, concerns about the erosion of democratic norms, fears about what the future holds for your children and grandchildren. These fears are real, and I would never dismiss them.

But notice something crucial in our gospel story: Jesus doesn't rebuke the disciples for being in the storm. Storms happen. Jesus doesn't blame them for their boat taking on water. That's what happens in storms. Instead, he questions their fear: "Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?"

Fear vs. Faith

This isn't a condemnation but an invitation – an invitation to a different way of being in the storm. Jesus doesn't promise his followers they'll never face storms. In fact, it was Jesus himself who directed them to "go across to the other side" – to cross boundaries, to move from familiar territory into the unknown. And when storms arose during that crossing, he didn't abandon them.

The forces that create fear in our society today are real. Economic uncertainty, political division, the erosion of shared values – these are like waves battering our collective boat. But Jesus's question echoes to us today: "Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?"

This isn't a glib dismissal of our concerns. It's a profound invitation to a different way of being in the storm – not controlled by fear, but anchored in the presence of the One who commands even the wind and the sea.

Finding Our Navigational Fix

When I served on submarines, we would periodically come to "periscope depth" to get what we called a "navigational fix" – checking our position against fixed points of reference. In times of societal storm, we too need to come to periscope depth and check our position against fixed points of reference.

What are those fixed points? Jesus provides them: "You have heard it was said... but I say to you..." Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Blessed are the peacemakers. Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me. Turn the other cheek. These teachings aren't conditional. They don't change with political winds or economic indicators.

When we find ourselves caught in storms of fear – fear about markets, fear about politics, fear about the future – we need to get a navigational fix from these fixed points of Jesus's teaching. And let's be honest: many who claim the name Christian today have drifted far off course, using faith to justify policies and attitudes that bear little resemblance to the way of Jesus.

Being With, Not Doing To

Here I want to speak with particular love and concern to those who find their faith aligned with political movements that promote fear of the other, that prioritize power over service, that seek dominance rather than justice. I understand the anxieties that drive these alignments – worries about cultural change, economic uncertainty, loss of familiar traditions.

But Jesus never calls us to respond to our anxieties by seeking dominance over others. He never endorses using power to protect ourselves at others' expense. Instead, he shows us through his incarnation that God's way is not doing things to others or even for others, but being with others in loving solidarity.

When Jesus calms the storm, he doesn't do so from the safety of the shore. He's in the boat with the disciples, experiencing the same battering waves, the same howling winds. This is our model – not retreating to safety while others suffer, not imposing our will on others from a position of power, but being with those who suffer, standing alongside the vulnerable, even when it means facing the storm ourselves.

The Courage to Cross Boundaries

Notice that this whole episode begins with Jesus saying, "Let us go across to the other side." Jesus was constantly compelling his disciples to cross boundaries – geographical boundaries, social boundaries, religious boundaries. He sent them from familiar Jewish territory into Gentile lands, from places of cultural comfort to regions deemed unclean.

Today, Jesus continues to call us to cross boundaries – to move beyond our comfort zones, to encounter those different from ourselves, to build bridges rather than walls. This crossing requires courage, especially in times when powerful voices encourage us to retreat into tribal enclaves of sameness and safety.

Here I want to speak directly to those who have aligned their faith with movements that demonize immigrants, that view religious or ethnic differences as threats, that seek to maintain cultural dominance rather than embrace diversity. I understand the fear of change, the anxiety about losing what feels familiar and safe. But Jesus consistently calls his followers not to safety but to courage – the courage to cross boundaries, to welcome strangers, to expand rather than contract our circle of concern.

"Take Heart, It Is I; Do Not Be Afraid"

In another storm story from the gospels, Jesus walks on water toward his frightened disciples, calling out, "Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid." This is his message to us today – not that the storms aren't real, not that the waves aren't high, but that he is present with us in the midst of them.

When financial markets tumble, when political rhetoric grows hateful, when the future seems uncertain – "Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid."

When we're tempted to secure our own safety at others' expense, when we're drawn to leaders who promise protection through domination – "Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid."

The antidote to fear is not certainty or security but presence – the presence of the One who travels in our boat, who experiences our storms, who sometimes seems to be sleeping but is never absent.

Conclusion: Called to Courage

My friends, we are called to courage in these troubled times – not the false courage that puffs itself up through domination or protects itself through exclusion, but the true courage that comes from knowing we are not alone in the storm.

We are called to be people of courage who stand against dehumanizing policies and rhetoric, who refuse to sacrifice the vulnerable for our own security, who insist on seeing the image of God in every human being regardless of nationality, religion, or politics.

We are called to be people of courage who, even as markets fluctuate and politics divide, maintain our navigational fix on Jesus's teachings about love, justice, mercy, and peacemaking.

We are called to be people of courage who, when we hear the frightened cry "Do you not care that we are perishing?", respond not with indifference or self-protection but with the same loving presence that Jesus offers us.

In the days ahead, as we face whatever storms may come, may we remember that we do not face them alone. The One who commanded the wind and the waves travels in our boat. The One who crossed boundaries to bring healing and hope walks alongside us. The One who chose vulnerability over dominance continues to show us the way of courage over fear.

May we have ears to hear when he says to us, as he said to those wind-whipped waves: "Peace! Be still!"

Amen.