I’m sorry to break it to you, MAGA Christians, but America isn’t a Christian nation.

In fact, God doesn’t bless it, either.

That’s not how this works.

Now, I know this blows up the convenient narrative you’ve been selling for the past 250 years (and pretty violently the last year or so), but honestly, that nasty bit of heresy is straight-up of the devil, and it needs to go.

I’m not sure where you’re getting your information from, but I know it isn’t from the Bible.

Your beloved John 3:16, which you always have ready to throw out like a grenade, is pretty darn clear.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

God loves the world.The planet.Like, everyone here.Everyone.God is in the world-loving business, not the America-blessing business.

You remember the world, don’t you? That massive, spinning sphere of 8 billion beautiful, disparate human beings: white Christian people, sure, but brown people, Muslims, LGBTQ folks, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, humanists, agnostics, atheists, and lots and lots of non-English speaking, non-Americans?

Check out the Old and New Testaments again.Read through any of the Gospels.Put your finger down randomly at any Jesus teaching.Use any translation you’d like.No America First.No Making America Great Again (or at all.)No flags to pledge allegiance to.

And a few other annoying bits of news from the Scriptures:Jesus was born in the Middle East.He didn’t speak English.He wasn’t white.He wasn’t Evangelical.He wasn’t a Republican.He wasn’t American.Heck, he wasn’t even Christian.

Jesus was a Palestinian Jewish Rabbi who spent his days as an itinerant street preacher, living off the generosity of strangers and speaking in parables about a new “Kingdom of God,” a radical way of living where the poor were cared for, the oppressed freed, and the outcasts welcomed in.

Jesus came to usher in a countercultural kind of interdependent community, directly confronting the oppressive Roman Empire he stepped into. It was a diverse, barrier-breaking, border-transcending, nation-defying movement of generosity and mutual affection. It had nothing to do with blessing a Government or building an army, or creating a gated community of white folks in North America two thousand years in the future.

To claim that America was at all the point of the Gospels is to prove you’ve never read them or want to disregard them for your own gain.To assume any God-ordained supremacy based on religion, nation of origin, pigmentation, orientation, or native tongue is a perversion of the work of Jesus and idolatry of the worst kind.

There’s no way America could be a Christian nation, and that’s really good news for you.

You wouldn’t want America to be a Christian nation anyway (if such a thing were even possible). That would mean you’d be living in a country that embodied Jesus’ teachings; a country where the hungry would be fed and not shamed or starved; where the sick would be made well without needing to earn it or justify themselves.If America were a Christian nation, that would mean that the assailed would receive rest and refuge, that the foreigner would be warmly welcomed, that every human being would be treated like a treasured neighbor made in the image of God, and that you would be compelled by your faith to make sure this all happened.

Kinda glad you don’t have to do that, huh?

Loving the least of these, well, that just ain’t your M.O.

In fact, if this nation were truly rooted in Jesus’ teachings, you couldn’t call yourself a Christian while allowing genocide, celebrating the harassment of immigrants, or worshipping a serial predator.

A nation cannot be Christian; only individual people can be, but they actually need to be inconvenienced with Jesus’ teachings. Bummer, I know.

I’m sorry to break all this bad news to you.

I understand the actual words of the Gospel are problematic, given the story you’re selling to those whose fears and phobias you’re leveraging in America right now.

I’m sorry to tell you that it’s impossible to be devoted to the Jesus of the Scriptures while refusing refugees, expelling immigrants, demonizing Muslims, vilifying people of color, worshiping political power, and neglecting the poor.

And most of all, I’m sorry to have to remind you that your Christian Nationalism is a sin of the worst kind.

As long as you continue to conflate God and America, you’re going to be whitewashing the Good News, shrinking God into your own image, and bastardizing the message of Jesus in ways that can only be described as fully and violently heretical.

No one needs America to be a Christian nation, but it would be pretty cool if you American Christians, like you tried to be Jesus Christians.

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I can understand why Conservative men support a serial predator like Donald Trump.

He embodies the fragile masculinity that so many are afflicted with. He validates their misogyny, giving voice to the antiquated, knuckle-dragging sexist garbage they save for mindless locker room monologues and man-cave hangs with other neighborhood Neanderthals.

Trump is the unsurprising idol of teen and college-aged young men whose distorted view of manhood has been shaped in Conservative churches, incel message boards, and dudebro podcast episodes.

They are predatory birds of a feather, and their advocacy, though sickening, almost makes sense. It is an act of self-preservation, a propping up of one of their own. He is a monstrous avatar who can represent them in the places of power they can never hope to enter.

And it’s completely expected that Republican men in Congress would fiercely obstruct the release of the Epstein files, as many of them risk exposure themselves, as well as the crumbling of the brutal empire they sit atop and benefit from.

All in all, knowing that over eighty percent of women have experienced sexual assault or harassment in their lifetimes, it’s understandable that tens of millions of men in this country would be among the rabid, cultic base of a serial scumbag like the sitting President.

As pathetic and sad as that is, there is still a perverse logic to it.

What I can’t fathom are women who have seen all they have seen over the last decade: the “genitalia-grabbing” bravado, the incestuous remarks about his daughter, his extensive adultery, his porn star affairs, and his ubiquitous presence in the Jeffrey Epstein files, and who remain unwavering.

It’s impossible to make sense of mothers with daughters who’ve witnessed him being found liable in court for sexual assault, watched him gleefully take away women’s body autonomy under the law, and work tirelessly to prevent the release of evidence that would expose decades of his pedophilia, rape, and child trafficking—and who’ve chosen to double down.

But perhaps most stomach-turning of all are women like Karoline Leavitt, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Megyn Kelly, Tulsi Gabbard, Maria Bartiromo, and Laura Ingraham; women with the power and platform that few are given, and are using them to perpetuate the pain of other women.

Their willingness to serve as a mouthpiece, a cheerleader, a proxy, and an instrument of injury for him boggles the mind of anyone still capable of compassion and critical thinking.

These women surely know damn well that Donald Trump is a rapist and a pedophile. They’re fully aware of the absolute horrors he and his Epstein collaborators have put hundreds, perhaps thousands of girls and young women through.They have both the knowledge of the prolific evil this man is responsible for and the ability to make him accountable.Yet, they are willing to deny those survivors justice, to exacerbate their trauma, and stand in the way of justice, all to line their own pockets, and build their brands, and keep their party in power.

When the full, unredacted truth of the Epstein files and Trump’s complete resume of abuse is finally dragged into the raking light of public access, so will the degree of their obstruction and the gravity of their gaslighting of the American people.

History will declare them shameful mothers, betrayers of victims of violence, and disgraces to our nation. They broke through the glass ceiling and are wounding other women with the jagged shards.

The Jesus of the scriptures that nearly all Conservatives loudly claim to treasure asks the question, “What can it profit a man if he gains the world but loses his soul?”

Rest assured, that he is asking that of these women, too.

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There is no shortage of people to be enraged about right now.

I’m angry at this vile, repugnant, cognitively-addled despot urinating on our Constitution and driving our nation into the moral abyss.

I’m furious with his complicit collaborators in Congress who could have so easily prevented this at any time, including this one.

I’m sickened by genuflecting media members, gutless public servants, and God-forsaking pastors who’ve trafficked in fear on his behalf.

I’m disgusted by a legion of strangers who’ve spent the last decade in sycophantic, cultic adoration to a slithering, spray-tanned pile of excrement whose contempt for this nation and its people is complete.

But do you know the people who piss me off the most?

The people I know who voted for him, and who still don’t have the courage to admit they made a horrible mistake, who will not publicly voice any dissent.

The people who are turning off the news, looking away from the horrors, and muting people like me who refuse to stop reminding them where we are and where we’re headed as a nation.

There are literally hundreds of people following me on social media who are extended family, former friends, and people in the churches where I served, who haven’t said one critical thing about this Administration.

Not a peep.

Children kidnapped and thrown into detention camps.

Young men blinded by rubber bullets.

Thousands of people terrorized, beaten, left bloodied, and traumatized.

Entire cities thrown into chaos for nothing.

Reporters arrested for documenting war crimes.

Thousands arrested, detained, and deported without due process.

Ministers tear-gassed and arrested for bearing witness to bloodshed.

Mothers and nurses executed in the damn street.

Politicians slandering their names.

A daily nightmare reel of chaos and bloodshed.

And from them, from these self-identified lovers of God and country, complete f*ckin’ silence.

People who never shut up about their faith and patriotism are nowhere to be seen.

And I’m never going to forget what they’ve done and what they are failing to do.

As heartbreaking as these days have been, they have also been emancipating.

I used to feel guilty about my confrontational nature and the directness of my words, but that was usually because these very same people convinced me that I should feel guilty.

I was told that I was the problem, that I was overreacting, that I was too emotional and too angry, that I was stoking division.

On many days, I allowed myself to be gaslighted into believing them.

And yet here we are, in the throes of the kind of brutality at the hands of our government that we have not seen in my lifetime, and these people, many of whom have the audacity to call themselves Christians, are silent and invisible.

They’re either brokenhearted and too cowardly to speak out or they agree with what is happening. Either option is disgraceful.

One day, this nightmare will be over, at least in its current form.

Trump will soon be gone, his regime will fall, and I’ll be left knowing that I learned about all of these people.

That I can’t ever forget.

That my heart will never be free from.

That will never get fixed.

And that really pisses me off.

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It’s exhausting to give a damn, isn’t it?

To be a person of compassion in a time and place when compassion is in such great demand?

To wake up every day in days like these, and push back against predatory politicians, toxic systems, human rights atrocities, acts of treason, and spiritual leadership failures?

The volume and the relentlessness of the threats can be wearying.

You may have noticed.

But it’s more than that.

You’re not only burdened with these sprawling systemic sicknesses and political realities, but the people within them.

You’re carrying the names and the faces and the lives of specific human beings who are in peril right now; people whose stories you read, listen to, know, and live inside; people you fiercely love, even if you have never met them.

And day after day, these legions of sorrows begin to take up residence in your body. They accumulate upon your shoulders, in your clenched jaw, in your elevated heart rate, in the headache that never goes away, and in the knot in your stomach that returns every morning when you check your phone, turn on the news, step out into your community, or walk into the kitchen, and are reminded again of how sideways it’s all gone.

And perhaps worst of all, is how many people, both at a distance and very close to you, just don’t seem to give a damn; how the pain of other people simply doesn’t register within them anymore.It seems like fewer and fewer people are capable of even a base-level empathy for the suffering around them, and you’re seriously considering joining their ranks, because of how f*****g tired you are of feeling it all.

And though I don’t have any business doing so, I’m asking you to keep feeling it all.

I’m not sure why you’re reading this, but it’s probably because you’re a damn-giver; because the wounds of the world cause you injury. As a result, these words likely find you pissed off, disconnected, isolated, worn out, and on the verge of a breakdown because of how few people are as addled by the need around them as you are.

Whether you’re an activist or a minister or a parent or a caregiver, or just a citizen of the planet who is moved by other people’s suffering, you likely feel the immeasurable heaviness of these days. Sure, speed and activity can mask it for a while, but if you stop long enough, the reality of the fatigue catches up to you, and you can measure the toll it’s all taken on you.

I want you to measure it. I want you to reckon with how tired you are. I want you to hear yourself exhale with the heavy sighs of someone who feels the full weight of this broken, jagged place.

Notice the bruises and the sores, and give them your attention.Extend some of that compassion you’re so willing to extend to the world to yourself.Take time to step away from the fray and the fight. They will still be there when you return, and you’ll be better able to face them.

Friend, I know you’re exhausted. If you’re not exhausted right now, your empathy is busted.But I also know that you aren’t alone.Tens of millions of people are as tired as you are right now.We, too, live in disbelief at how callous so many people around us have become.We, too, are incredulous, witnessing our elected leaders and parents and neighbors and favorite aunts abandon any semblance of gentleness toward their neighbors.And we, too, feel the fatigue of believing we’re doing this damn-giving alone.

You are in good company, so be encouraged.Fight like hell to keep your heart soft, even while so many people have become hardened.Yes, the world is upside-down right now, but we can make it right, one beautiful act of decency at a time.Get some rest and keep going.The world needs people like you.

Blessed are the damn-givers, for they will right-side the world.

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“You shouldn’t let politics get in the way of your relationships.”

You’ve probably seen these sentiments pop up on social media, come across them in eloquent think pieces, or heard them in daily conversations: the idea that family members and friends are too important to lose over something as benign as a political position or a ballot choice.

That idea made philosophical sense before 2016, back when we had reasonably functioning parties and candidates with actual platforms; when we were just debating methodological or economic approaches to problems that we all agreed were problems. Choosing people over politics was a logical position in the days when we believed that our fathers, cousins, coworkers, neighbors, and lifelong friends cared about diversity, justice, personal freedoms, and helping people as much as we did.

We are way past that, friends..

The fate of the America we are seeing on our phones and outside our windows, this nation besieged by senseless violence and battered by a wanton disregard for the law and human life, is no longer a political conversation; it’s a moral one.

This is not about a policy difference, not a simple disagreement on the responsible way to deal with collective national challenges; it isn’t a matter of agreeing to disagree on less-than-critical subjects where a stalemate is acceptable.This moment is about whether we will reject or embrace legislated racism, the dehumanization of vulnerable human beings, the erasure of civil rights, and a lawless, merciless, State-sanctioned brutality.

It’s about 5-year-old children used as bait, families terrorized in their homes, young men accosted in their workplaces, bystanders executed in their cars, and entire communities living in fear simply because of the color of their skin or their place of birth.

And these things are worth cutting people off, severing ties, and social media blocking.

The lives of hundreds of millions of flesh-and-blood human beings now hang in the balance of the choices we make right now: their freedom to make healthcare decisions for themselves, their access to fundamental liberties promised in the Constitution, their agency to govern their own destinies, and their basic sense of safety from harassment and harm.

If there was ever something that justified a deleted contact number or an empty chair at the Thanksgiving table or an exodus from a church or the termination of a friendship, it’s this.

A guy I grew up with who supports Trump texted me recently, saying, “We’ve been friends a long time. I’d hate to see politics get in the way of our friendship.”I assured him that politics hasn’t. I told him that his acceptance of genocide has gotten in the way of our friendship, that his minimizing of the covering up of pedophilia has, that his justification of insurrection has, that his support of murderous masked thugs has, that his turning away from a relentless and senseless violence against the Latino and immigrant communities has.

At some point, we as adult human beings whose time here is finite, need to choose whether we will lean into our deepest convictions or into relationships with people whose presence increasingly causes us to compromise those convictions.

We need to decide whether we will keep a tenuous peace with those we share blood or history with, but little else, or whether we will step out into the raking light of full authenticity and fight for the things that break our hearts and boil our blood. Will we choose people we know but who we realize we are morally incompatible with, or the strangers whose lives are upended and threatened by them?

The tangible, terrifying impact of this Administration on people of color, on LGBTQ human beings, on the sick and the poor and the elderly, on our immigrant communities (let alone the rest of the world) is beyond what we can comprehend right now.

And this kind of inhumanity demands a response that affirms our humanity.

I’m not telling you to disconnect from everyone you know who supports this mad despot and his willing collaborators, but as we slide swiftly into a Police State, as we step further into authoritarianism, and as we see the bloodshed and chaos increase, many of us may decide that we cannot forgive or align ourselves with those who not only allowed it to happen, but did so with perverse joy and unrepentant cruelty.

If that isn’t a reason to end a relationship, nothing is.

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I’m not sure Americans really understand what we’re facing right now.

I do.

I’ve spent most of the last thirty years as a local church pastor, much of that in megachurches in the Bible Belt. I’ve been shoulder to shoulder in ministry and in life with white Evangelicals; I’ve sat in Bible studies with them, served alongside them in staff meetings, attended hundreds of pastoral gatherings, eavesdropped on their conversations, and heard how they think and what drives them.

I need you to understand something:

Conservative white Evangelicals need to be stopped.

You might agree with me as a simple emotional reflex, but I want you to know precisely why; to comprehend the specific danger they present and the historic urgency of the moment.

The wholesale moral failure white Evangelicals have been guilty of over the past decades has been alarming, but you haven’t seen anything yet. It will get exponentially worse now that they have this unprecedented opportunity. As far as religious extremists go, they’re unmatched in their fervor, ferocity, and organization.

In vast numbers, in churches all over the country, these people have gradually but now completely lost the plot of their faith tradition, to the point that they now pose a human rights emergency to the rest of us.

They’ve long ago abandoned Jesus, discarded his compassion, and feel no obligation whatsoever to love their neighbors. Their Jesus-less Christianity runs entirely on malice, exclusion, and cruelty.

If allowed to continue to hold their death grip on all three branches of Government, Conservative Christians will render this nation unrecognizable. LGBTQ people, Muslims, women, people of color, immigrants, and non-Christians will never have equality under the law again.

This is not alarmist, sky-is-falling histrionics, or hyperbolic exaggeration; it is the clear and sober forecast from someone who knows these people better than anyone because he’s been on the inside.

Full-blown theocracy is the plan, and trust me when I tell you that we won’t recover from it if they are given greater power or prolonged influence. If we fail in opposing their Christo-fascist agenda both in the streets and at the polls, they will have a political power that will render every election null and void, and we will never have a voice again in our lifetimes.

Women will permanently lose autonomy over their own bodies and the right to vote.LGBTQ people will have the right to marry and adopt taken away for good.People of color will be fully squeezed out of the electoral process.Immigrants will be denied access to opportunity and refuge here.These are not creative projections; they are precisely what Evangelicals have repeatedly stated as their intentions, and they’re closer than they’ve ever been to having a rubber stamp.

We can still stop it, though.We just need a unity and coordination that transcends theirs.We need a sustained, passionate, dedicated defense of humanity that rivals their relentless assaults on it.

The sole option we have to save ourselves and generations of human beings is for all of us to move in concert, locally, on a state level, and nationally: Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, progressive Christians and humanists and Muslims and Atheists and Jews and Agnostics. We need to stop staying in our silos of individual activism and isolated impact and to nurture creative partnerships, build broad coalitions, and link arms with our disparate neighbors.

We’ve seen this play out throughout history, and we know how it ends. We know the horrors unchecked religious extremism can birth, and we know the cost of the silence and inaction of good people. We also know what human beings are capable of when they refuse to accept fascism and white supremacy cloaked in the Bible and wrapped in the flag, when they move en masse.

As someone who knows just how much these Christians have veered from their religion’s namesake, believe me when I tell you that they cannot be allowed to steer this nation any longer. It will not end well for the people who call it home or who one day wish to. It is unsustainable.

I wish more decent people in America remembered they are among the vast majority instead of acting as if they are helpless victims of Republican Christians. We could defeat them, we need to defeat them, and we will defeat them. We just need to stop lamenting how much damage they are doing and do something together to oppose them.

This is about the country we leave our children. It’s about our Constitution. It’s about the health of the planet. It’s about every cause you hold dear. It’s about the most elemental freedoms we have and deserve to keep.

These days are a pivot point in our history, and the Religious Right cannot be allowed to determine the path we take forward. These cultists are sold out for their hateful messiah of imagined grievance. They are experts at consolidating their power, and they will not allow morality or decency to restrict them.

As a former pastor and a father and a Christian and a citizen of the planet and a lover of humanity, I can’t make this any clearer:

White Evangelical Christians are the source of everything afflicting our nation: all of this violence, chaos, dehumanization, and suffering.

If you want the beautiful, expansive humanity of this world to be equally protected, respected, and cared for, they need to be stopped.

And we can stop them, together.

They must be confronted, opposed, resisted, shouted down, outworked, outnumbered, and outvoted.America is not in a Civil War; we’re in White Christian Nationalists’ grim and loveless holy war.All people of faith, morality, and conscience need to stand together and push them back into the hell they came from.

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Transcript:

Hey my friends,

I wanted to come on here and just share a few thoughts about the days in which we find ourselves.

You’re obviously heartbroken right now. You’re grieving. You’re frustrated. You’re angry. And all of that can lead you into a place of despair, hopelessness, resignation.

Now, I know that because I’m in the same boat. I’m feeling all the same stuff that you’re feeling.

I wake up on many days and don’t recognize the country that I live in anymore. And yet, the heartbreak that you’re experiencing, that I’m experiencing, I want you to remember that that’s actually a good and really beautiful thing.

Because the fact that you are so deeply disturbed by what is going ont means that your empathy is still working. It means that you still are a human being doing what a human being is supposed to do.

Be aware of the pain around you and to move toward that pain. You know, I tell people all the time, are you frustrated? Are you pissed off? Are you scared? Are you worried?Well, congratulations. That’s actually good news. Because right now, what we’re seeing is a movement of tremendous cruelty, a disregard for other people, a refusal to love someone’s neighbor. And while we feel all that, that’s a reminder that we are here to do exactly what we’d see not being done by so many.

And so as difficult as it is to watch the news and to be aware of what’s happening and to feel that deeply, I don’t want you to turn away from it.

Sure you need some time to protect yourself to get rest to recalibrate those times of solitude those times of community being in nature and prayer and meditation and rest and all of those things they’re critical however i want you to keep coming back to what’s in front of you and to let it break your heart.

Peeople ask me about, “What do I do right now, John?”

Well, the what we should be doing first is feeling deeply and then it’s following that burden. This isn’t a mystery. It isn’t as nebulous as we think it is. Solving the problems right now are about getting up every day and paying attention and hearing people’s stories and knowing what’s going on and then feeling all of that. And then doing what I ask people to do all the time, follow the burden. Whatever it is that breaks your heart and boils your blood, whatever keeps you up at night, whatever people groups you are drawn to, whatever causes you feel deeply, that should instruct you.

And then, begin to figure out where and how in my local community, right where I am, maybe without even leaving my home, where and how can I do something to be a help, to be a caregiver, to be a reassuring voice?

So I just wanted to take a couple seconds and acknowledge how heavy these days are, the reality that it is terrible, and yet to not tire of feeling as deeply as you do because that is the greatest asset you have in a world where cruelty is trending.

So please hold on to that burden in the center of your chest because it is the antidote to all that afflicts us. So, thanks for spending some time with me tonight.

And just, just be encouraged.

Keep going.

Peace.

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Denial is a powerful drug.

In the wake of the unthinkable images and footage coming out of Minneapolis over the last weeks, it’s easy to feel insulated from the chaos if we happen to reside somewhere else in the country, as if our geography protects us, as if Minnesota is some distant land we are separated from and can view from insulated safety.

As we witness masked, heavily-armed, untethered, and untrained State-sponsored goon squads indiscriminately kidnapping, beating, and executing human beings, as we watch in disbelief as they terrorize of people working in local businesses, sitting in traffic, dropping off their kids at school, and showing up for their legal immigration appointments, we must remember something:

This isn’t about Minneapolis.It’s not about the bluest of the blue cities receiving the wrath of a vindictive Republican president.It’s not about an outspoken Democrat Governor being intentionally targeted by a leader who resents him.This is about the future of our Republic.

Minneapolis is a test by this corrupt Administration of how much illegality the American people will tolerate, how willing we will be to abide authoritarianism, and how easily ordinary people will allow an arm of the government to be weaponized against us. It is a barometer of the intestinal fortitude of our citizenry.

Trump is always looking for his Reichstag Fire; his reason to bring the hammer of the Military down upon the nation.

Declaring Martial Law has always been his endgame, and his strategy has been transparent: create an emergency where one did not exist and propose to bring Law and Order to a lawlessness and disorder of which he is the sole author.

As California Governor Gavin Newsom correctly declared on his X account last year when the illegal occupation of Los Angeles began: 1) Local law enforcement didn’t need help. 2) Trump sent troops anyway — to manufacture chaos and violence. 3) Trump succeeded. 4) Now things are destabilized, and we need to send in more law enforcement just to clean up Trump’s mess.

Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper has discussed that during his first term, Trump sought to turn the Military on citizens by shooting Black Lives Matter protestors, but was dissuaded from doing so by him and other leaders. Now, with a far more willing sycophant in Pete Hegseth, and with a Cabinet filled with shameless, soulless genuflecting disciples like Kristi Noem and Greg Bovino, there is almost nothing standing in his way, other than We the People.

What’s happened and is happening in Minneapolis is a personal question to all of us, regardless of where we live, asking how much we’re willing to do to preserve the America we call home and claim to love.

Is our patriotism real enough, our morality sturdy enough, is our faith true enough to move us into the fray? The people in Minnesota don’t just have answers in the abstract. They know in the certainty of their bruises, broken bones, lost eyes, and dead children.

The ordinary people in those neighborhoods, business owners, Uber drivers, retirees, school teachers, and college students, have shown us the very best of what humanity aspires to by standing up for family members, friends, and strangers whose humanity was disregarded. They braved rubber bullets and tear gas and beatings by armed soldiers, and in doing so, showed more devotion to this nation and its Constitution than those very soldiers.

America, we are all Minneapolis.

Its streets are the streets we traverse each day. Its restaurant workers and business owners are those we know and work alongside. Its families are those we find our identity and meaning in. Its murdered sons and daughters can easily be ours.

In fact, they are ours.

Our destinies are tethered together.

There is no border between us when it comes to the fascist aspirations of this president. No geography will keep us safe, no political affiliation will exempt us from harm, and nothing will prevent us from having our neighborhoods and communities invaded by complicit agencies and willing foot soldiers, unless we decide that we, too, dare to stand in the gap between power and assailed human beings.

I don’t know where in this nation you call home, what you do for a living, or what the story in your head is about the violence in Minneapolis this week. What I do know is that you are in this now, just as I am. We all need to choose whether we will be numbed into apathy, terrified into silence, or propelled into the trenches of the war for this nation, regardless of the cost.

Like so many of our fellow Americans in Minnesota, I pray we choose the latter.

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Alex Pretti was murdered by ICE, in cold blood, without cause, and with giddy joy from his assassins.

For simply bearing witness to a neighbor’s abuse, for being the kind of person we all say we aspire to be, for being present to an imperiled stranger, he was executed in the street by our government.

It is as tragic and frightening as any day in my lifetime:

The complete disregard for his life by those thugs cosplaying as soldiers is beyond comprehension.The utter contempt for his memory by this Administration is unrepentantly evil.

And what soon followed by supposedly patriotic, Jesus-following Conservative Americans is sadly predictable.

Like you, I’m finding words difficult for the waste of it all, the sickening deja vu of what’s unfolded, and the feeling that we’re slipping into something more dark than our minds can fathom.

One of the saddest things about Alex Pretti’s murder is that I can imagine the conversations right now by my former friends, distant family members, neighbors, and people I used to pastor:"Oh, he was threatening them!""He came at them with a gun. They were just defending themselves.""He was another Leftist extremist!""That's what you get when you attack officers."

This is the mass delusion being curated again.They will believe Donald Trump, JD Vance, Kristi Noem, Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, and Karoline Leavitt, and not their own eyes. They will convince themselves that the truth is not the truth, because otherwise they will need to come to terms with the reality that they are complicit in this, that they have created this monster, that they have failed their nation and their faith, that everything we've warned them about for ten years is now here.

To avoid accountability, and the courage and change that would require of them, they will willfully choose a comfortable fiction; a fantasy that declares them patriotic and righteous, and anyone whose presence disturbs that story, the enemy.And they will dig in their heels, double down, and descend further into cultic tribalism while trying to bury the cognitive dissonance they have authored.

Actual, real, walking-around, business-owning, church-going, school board-attending Americans will choose to vilify slaughtered human beings instead of admitting they were wrong.And they will look at the decent people across this nation, those with a conscience, those who refuse to deny reality, and they will say that we are the problem. They will dehumanize us to the point that when we are beaten or kidnapped or executed, it will not elicit anything but the belief that we got what we deserved.

This is what Trump has done to a sizable portion of this nation, and it’s something the rest of us need to face with sober, unflinching clarity.

It’s not enough to grieve the loss of Renee Good and Alex Pretti; we must defend their memories.

We must not allow them to be slandered, mischaracterized, and dehumanized.

We must walk into our days and into every space in which we find ourselves, and we must speak truth about what is happening.

That is our responsibility as good people bearing witness to violence, just as they did.

This is the statement from Alex Pretti’s distraught family:

ICE killed him.

The Trump Administration slandered him.

Conservative Americans have joined them.

This has happened to Alex Pretti and his family.

It happened to Renee Good and her family.

It will happen to thousands and thousands of families, unless we decide that we not tolerate it another day.

I know you’d like me to tell you what you should do in response, but I’m unable to.

I’m still working through what my response will be.

These are matters of conscience, and they cannot be made from a distance, but within the cavernous places of our own hearts.

I can only tell you that we are all tethered together, that every one of us has a life to leverage, and that we will rise or fall together.

May we meet this moment with the best of ourselves.

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Dear President Trump,

It’s taken me a while to realize and admit this, but I’m grateful to you.

I’ve spent a decade openly lamenting your presence and the poison it has so effortlessly released into our nation’s blood system.

Today, I find myself horrified at a second term that is doing even greater damage than I ever imagined it could. My heart has been hourly broken as I’ve watched our country imploding, our public discourse become polluted, our daily existence grow ever more corrosive, and I’ve wrongly assumed you were to blame.

Yet, I’ve come to understand that you haven’t manufactured our current national ugliness; you’ve simply revealed it and leveraged it.

By generating a limitless torrent of hateful, mean-spirited ignorance, you’ve given other like-minded people license to do the same. You’ve opened up the floodgates for their collective moral sewage to flow fully. People no longer hide their malevolence behind feigned politeness and phony civility; they now revel in it, they broadcast it, and they celebrate it.

You’ve made bigotry, misogyny, and racism socially acceptable again, and that has been a kind of twisted gift because it’s allowed me to really see people, not as they pretend to be on the surface, but in the very depths of their closed and calloused hearts.

Over and over throughout the last decade, your supporters would always tell me that they liked you because you “speak your mind,” yet I realized a long time ago that it is because you speak their minds. You’ve given credence to their phobias, sanctioned their prejudices, and normalized their contempt for their neighbors.

Thanks to the terrible ground you’ve broken, politicians, pastors, friends, and strangers, both in person and on social media, now regularly out themselves as cruel, intolerant, and malicious. They remind me just how close they are to me, just how deep the sickness in us runs, and just how far a nation we have to go to become worthy of our songs and anthems.

You’ve emboldened people to be open about things they used to conceal for the sake of decorum, and though it turns my stomach, I know that this is the only way we can move forward; to have that cancerous stuff exposed fully so that it can be dealt with. Our progress as a nation is predicated on authentic dialogue, no matter how brutal and disheartening that dialogue is.

In other words, you’ve let us know what we’re really dealing with here and while it’s been rightly disturbing, it’s also been revelatory. That’s the thing about that kind of harsh light: you’re forced to see everything; beauty and monstrosity equally illuminated.

Now, please don’t misunderstand me: I think you are the most malignant President in our nation’s history, and I fear gravely for the world my children will inherit, should America survive your Presidency at all. I believe you’re a soulless, loveless, irredeemably hateful bottom-feeder; the very worst of what humanity has produced.

But regardless of what happens now, you’ve already allowed me the blessing of discovering the truth: about me, about my neighbors, about my friends and family members, and about our country.

And in the process, you’ve also shown me that I am not alone in resisting you and the sickening, grievous things you’ve revealed about us.

You’ve generated an equally loud, equally passionate response to it, and this is where I find my hope these days.

I find it in those for whom equality, freedom, and justice aren’t just cheap buzzwords or hollow sentiments; they are the most precious of hills to die on.

I find it in those people who refuse to be silent in the face of our moral regression.

I find it in those who are willing to be more bold in defending the inherent value of all people.

I find it in the growing army of those true patriots who will not tolerate hatred as a core American value.

I find it in human beings who fiercely reject white supremacy in every form.

I find it in those who reject violence as a default response to dissension.

I find it in the ever-rising voice of people who will not let your malice and bitterness represent them in the world.

I find it in the ordinary activists who will not allow us to repeat the worst of history here.

Today I find my hope in those who, like me, will not be complicit in allowing exclusion to become a source of national pride, who will not tolerate an America that is bereft of empathy and drained of diversity, because we’ve seen where that leads.

Yes, President Trump, you’ve unearthed our hidden afflictions, and you’ve paraded them unapologetically in the light of day.

You brought every awful thing about us out into the open so that we can face it without myth or misunderstanding.

You’ve shown me that America is greater than you and your sycophantic disciples’ repugnant plans for it, and that it is worth fighting for with everything I have.

And for all of this, I thank you.

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