A full decade into one of the darkest chapters in our nation’s history, white people in this country need to be honest about something: White Christians ruined everything.

Over the last ten years, self-identified followers of Jesus have almost singlehandedly destroyed all that was good and decent and beautiful in America by hitching themselves to a monster and refusing to let go, no matter how unrepentantly evil he has proven himself to be.

I mean, think about it:

If not for them, his vile Access Hollywood video confession of assault is a deal breaker in 2016.If not for them, his ridiculing of a disabled reporter is a bridge too far.If not for them, he isn’t declared a Christian.If not for them, he isn’t elected or reelected.If not for them, there are no stomach-turning photo ops of opportunistic religious sycophants laying hands on him.If not for them, thousands of brown-skinned families aren’t violated, terrorized, and treated like animals.If not for them, no one breaches the Capitol on January 6th and throws our electoral process into chaos.

We are living in a completely different timeline, now, because of them.

If not for white, alleged Christians in our government, sick people aren’t creating GoFundMe pages to get routine medical care,our elections aren’t polluted by techbro oligarchs.women aren’t losing their fundamental liberties,and ICE isn’t murdering people in cold blood and without accountability.If not for White Evangelicals, his unhinged, racist vanity rallies are empty.If not for them, climate change isn’t dismissed, science isn’t opposed, expertise isn’t mocked, and sound medicine isn’t disregarded,If not for them, gun violence victims get more than #thoughtsandprayers platitudes.If not for them, every pedophile and rapist in the Epstein Files is facing a legal reckoning right now.If not for these Christians, MAGA is the extremist fringe movement it should always have been.

Talk about losing the plot. Talk about mission drift. Talk about gaining the world and losing your soul. Talk about effing everything up for this monster... for this human garbage… for this loveless, joyless, empty, vacant nothing.

If not for the professed followers of Jesus, throughout this country, bigots aren’t emboldened to proudly parade their hatred in the light of day.Sexual assault survivors aren’t belittled and traumatized anew.Every one of his lies is named and condemned.He is held accountable for his crimes and his immorality and his trampling of the Constitution.If not for them, this planet is safer, more compassionate, and more just—period.

As a white person who grew up in the Church and pastored for decades, that’s a tough pill to force down.

Ironically, despite all their sanctimonious sermonizing, finger-wagging condemnation, and sky-is-falling histrionics, the white Evangelical Church has enabled, nurtured, and championed more inequity and more misery in these days than any other entity, and there is no close second.

For the disparate masses of the world, American Christians have become a barrier to belonging, a sanctuary for supremacy, and a hostile presence for the least of these.By its marriage to a politics of exclusion, the Conservative Church has failed the poor, women, people of color, gender fluid human beings, the disabled, and non-heteronormative people.It’s failed immigrants and refugees and foreigners; vulnerable and marginalized communities; non-religious and non-Christian human people.It has failed everyone outside the tiny gated community of the white and the wealthy.This is indeed a tragedy.

But more than anyone, the White Evangelical Church has failed Jesus.

They have misappropriated his likeness, hijacked his name, and weaponized his message into something grotesque and oppressive—and it is rightfully repelling good people.

As someone still aspiring to a life of faith and still trying to speak into my religious tradition, it’s sobering to admit that we’re not here as a nation in this brutal battle for our existential life, we’re not at the precipice of authoritarianism, and we’re not steeped in this unapologetic supremacy, if not for people claiming to be devoted to the same Jesus I’ve grown up trying to emulate.

There are tens of millions of white people here, both Christian and non-Christian, who wake up every day working to be agents of kindness and generosity in this world, who are driven to sickness by the irreparable harm being done to this nation, to humanity, to the planet in the name of God.

And we, not people of color, not immigrants, we white people, are going to need to be the ones to make our presence felt in our neighborhoods, on social media, in school board meetings, and at the polls, and drive these charlatans and frauds out of power and influence, and into the places of irrelevance and shame they so richly deserve.

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“So, this is what it’s like to feel normal.”

As I sat in a small cafe overlooking a sun-dappled Florentine piazza, that thought floated in with the evening breeze, bringing a protracted exhale that surprised me, as if I’d suddenly remembered how to breathe again.

It had taken me nearly five full days away from America to begin to realize how very unwell I’d been, how physically and emotionally depleted the past eighteen months had left me, and most alarming of all—how normal that exhaustion had become. It was as if someone interrupted the ubiquitous chaos I’d grown accustomed to and softly said, “Yeah, you don’t have to live like that.”

Little by little, with 4,500 miles and nearly a week now separating me from my beleagured home, all my recent symptoms had suddenly become clear: the jagged irritability bubbling always beneath the surface, the ever-present knot in the pit of my stomach, the low-grade dread hovering in the periphery of my thoughts, the pervasive hopelessness I’d gotten used to, the slow but certain attrition to my joy that no longer alarmed me.

Leaving America showed me how sick America has made me.

But it wasn’t just the change of scenery that had revealed the maladies afflicting me, afflicting us; it was the dozens of human beings I’d shared conversations with, people who reminded me that there are other ways to exist that I’d forgotten about.

Everywhere I went, shop owners, servers, Uber drivers, and other travelers from the disparate corners of this planet routinely verified how abnormal our daily life actually is:

Not everyone wakes up each day feeling they need to marshal every available resource to protect themselves from their elected officials.

Not everyone fears a routine surgery will bankrupt them.

Not everyone has masked, Government-funded goons murdering innocent people in their streets.

Not everyone has a career criminal and serial predator as a Head of State.

Not everyone is helmed by theocratic, conspiratorial Christian zealots.

Not everyone is watching every fundamental liberty evaporating.

Not everyone is feeling as though their nation’s best days are behind them.

And honestly, that all felt a bit shocking.

That’s how insidious the sickness of living in this iteration of America is, how commonplace the brutality now is, how the monstrous now seems normal. We have been immersed for so long in a state of sustained urgency and unrelenting suffering that it no longer occurs to us that these are not the default settings of a civilized nation, that we are not supposed to be this deprived of optimism. We are gradually becoming acclimated to nightmarish realities that no decent human beings should ever make peace with.

My profound privilege is not lost on me. I know that many people here don’t have the good fortune of a respite from the horrors for 10 minutes, let alone 10 days. Most Americans can’t place geographic space between themselves and this country and have the precious white space of mental rest it yields, yet that doesn’t make the reckoning of the toll this place has taken on me, on all of us, any easier to accept.

I’m now back in the country I call home, and I’m trying like hell not to forget what I learned while I was away; the terrible afflictions that come from living here inside this unfettered epidemic of corruption and hatred. I want to remember how heartsick I’ve been, so that I can keep from sliding further into the abyss, so that I do not allow America to render me devoid of joy or bereft of hope.

If there’s anything I can give you as a memento of my travels, it’s confirmation that none of this is normal, that we deserve something more than this dystopian bigot fever dream we’ve grown ever more comfortable with, that this leaden nihilism does not have to be our destiny, unless we allow it to be.

Maybe you’ve started to accept the unacceptable, maybe you’ve been emotionally numbed by the unrelenting atrocities, or maybe you’ve grown so weary from fighting that you’ve stopped remembering what it’s like to breathe. If so, may you be reminded that these are symptoms of illness, but they do not need to be a death sentence.

The only way we can help retain our sanity and stay tethered to our humanity is to not succumb to the sickness surrounding us, to not let this parasitic regime destroy us, to refuse to be swallowed up by the cancer of cruelty our leadership has released into our bloodstream.

To every American who is being sickened by America: take heart, keep going. We can get well together. We will.

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Recently, I was on a Zoom call with some of my Substack subscribers. We were processing the state of our nation, which we all agreed was somewhere between sky-is-falling and Armageddon.

The conversation turned toward the alleged bright spot found in the reality of many of Trump's supporters joining the Leaving MAGA movement; finally being roused from the ten-year stupor of cultic adoration enough to see with lucid assessment that they have tethered themselves to a monster.

Some suggested with tentative optimism that after a confounding, infuriating decade of sycophantic devotion, they might finally be putting aside their fierce tribalism and joining the rest of the reasonable people in opposing this rapidly unfolding coup.

At first, I co-signed such a possibility as a sign of hope, but quickly realized that it was misplaced optimism. That’s probably not what we’re seeing at all right now.

The fact of the matter is, with very few exceptions, people who voted for Trump in 2024 (many for the third time) and who are beginning to come around enough to move them to action, have not had their humanity awakened watching his and his Administration’s violent, illegal weaponizing of I.C.E. against immigrants, both documented and undocumented.

They have not tapped into heretofore unaccessed reservoirs of compassion for LGBTQ people facing unlawful and unprovoked legislative and personal attacks by his surrogates in Congress, school board meetings, and in the streets.

They aren’t having their once-stone hearts broken by the abject horrors of the Epstein Files and moved to demand the unredacted contents be revealed, so that accountability for every monster and justice for every survivor would come.

They haven’t experienced a miraculous, biblical Road to Emmaus spiritual awakening, realizing how many ways Trump has already violated the poor, withheld food from the hungry, visited injury on already suffering people, or urinated on the teachings of Jesus.

They aren’t being overtaken by some newfound responsibility as global citizens, feeling a sudden rush of affinity for the persecuted people of Ukraine, or Gaza, or Iran, or Lebanon.

No, the only reason Trump supporters are forming any kind of oppositional response to Trump is that the pain has become personal.

As they abruptly lose their jobs, see their companies move overseas, watch their 401(k)s evaporate, reckon with the skyrocketing grocery and gas prices, find their own voices silenced, and see their healthcare options dissolve, they are magically finding themselves becoming the resistance that decent human beings have been for a decade now.

Their rebellion is not born out of true contrition for their damaging alliances, genuine regret for being complicit in empowering a fascist, or a sincere desire to partner with the disparate human beings already united in saving our Republic and our planet.

As MAGA Americans realize that they, too, are victims of the criminality and predation they initially hoped would only be for those despised others (the immigrant, the gay, the brown, the black, the woke, the blue staters), it is finally becoming a bridge too far. As their feet are finally put to the fire they wished upon so many others, suddenly immorality and overreach are becoming objectionable.

And this will continue to happen in the coming weeks and months with the people around us. We will see more and more conversions of convenience.

The moment members of Trump’s genuflecting multitude are jarred awake by the sobering truth that their whiteness and their party affiliation and their church attendance and their red hats won’t save them from the disaster they have helped create, then and only then will they care in the slightest bit.

I’d like to be wrong, but sadly, I don’t believe I will be.

And though it will still be a small consolation to see a larger swath of this nation find out that this president’s sociopathy will spare no one, it would have been nice if they’d been internally transformed by love for their fellow human beings instead of just for themselves.

The real victory would have been if they’d been moved by self-examination and not just self-preservation.

I could have celebrated their empathy, but I can’t celebrate their selfishness.

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“I never wished for someone to die before. I’ve been suicidal many times in my life—but I’ve never been homicidal.”

So began the tearful confession of a middle-aged woman who approached me after an event in Lincoln, Nebraska. She paused for a second, exhaled loudly, and then continued, her voice shaking:

“I’m ashamed to say that I find myself wishing these terrible people would just... disappear, so that they can’t hurt us anymore.” She said, “I just feel like I’m waiting for them to get old and die off. What do I do with this anger?”

I knew what I was supposed to tell her, what I was expected to tell her, what I wanted to tell her.

I wanted to tell her that these impulses were wrong, that such feelings were unhealthy, that this kind of consuming hatred toward another human being was dangerously toxic.I wanted to remind her that this level of contempt for a stranger was the very thing she abhorred in the people she feels this way toward.I wanted to steer her from such negative energy… but I couldn’t do any of these things.I understood her.Her desperation and hopelessness made perfect sense.Her terrifying headspace hit home.This is a natural human response to unchecked brutality and unrelenting cruelty: wanting it all to end.You don’t actually wish harm to people; you just wish harmful people would stop harming other people, and there seems to be nothing in them that will move them to stop, other than expiring.

When we see powerful human beings willfully doing damage to other people or to the planet, this rage is our heart’s alarm; it is our very humanity protesting against unspeakable violence that we feel powerless to do anything about. Imagining a world without predators and bullies and malevolent people is a way to stay tethered to our sanity; a defense mechanism against complete emotional collapse. Of course, we don’t desire violence or wish catastrophe, but we understand our past enough to know that sometimes injustice and hatred are generational: bigotry experiences a Renaissance, has a brief prolific period, and then passes. It seems like we are in the middle of that kind of brutal rebirth right now, and we want it to end.

Throughout the history of the planet, when the powerful have viciously assailed mankind, there have been good people whose stomachs have been turned and whose blood has boiled in response, people who loved and cared and healed and prayed and worked, and who knew they might have to wait for change to fully come, through young people who rejected such hatred wholesale.

And that’s the pivot that needs to happen in our hearts when we feel that scalding anger at people who are presently evil: we look forward to what might be born on the horizon of history. We pour ourselves into the lives of young people, we work to change the hearts we can, we seek compromise and common ground with those who disagree with us, and we do everything in our power to prep the ground for the equality, diversity, and justice that will inevitably grow.

Of course, I’d never wish physical harm on another human being or ever rejoice in anyone’s early demise, but I confess that in these days I take some solace in the reality that we are all temporary: that everything shifts, that all tyrants pass away, that all evil empires fall, that all hateful movements die out, that all monuments to inequity eventually crumble.

I rest in the knowledge that the people here who seem singularly burdened to injure others will one day naturally cease to be. I don’t hope for that day, and I don’t hasten that day. I simply pray that when it does come, when the hateful people doing such unrestrained damage finally depart this place, that compassionate, kindhearted, loving people are born to occupy the space they leave.

I pray for a new Renaissance of empathy for this place, and trust that it will come.

No, I am not waiting for bad people to die; I’m doing all the good that I can while I live.

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America is dying.

I’m not referring to the systemic collapse of our Republic or the slow suffocation of Democracy here, though these are certainly not unlikely outcomes at this point.

This is far deeper than the seats of power or a congressional alignment, more than the structural implosion of this nation.

The greatest, most grievous failure of America in this moment isn’t legislative but moral.

The soul of this place is dying in screams and silences.

The brown-skinned screams rise from our collective home:

The anguished cries of a young mother being violently torn from her children on their front lawn.

The frantic pleas of a father of four dragged from his worksite by lawless masked mercenaries.

The inconsolable sobs of a woman whose husband will never see his daughter grow up.

The weary moans of devoted fathers, loving spouses, beloved uncles, and cherished nieces shackled in a stifling death camp.

The screams rise from half a world away:The desperate, terrified wails of a Palestinian toddler left buried in the rubble of what seconds ago was the only home she’s ever known.The guttural howl of an Iranian father, holding the unrecognizable body of his teenage daughter.The unheeded shrieks of a young couple assassinated in front of their children. The tortured shouts of a Gazan family slowly being starved to death.

This horrific noise is the soundtrack of waking nightmares; the raw-throated echoing of the vilest of history repeating. They are sounds that shake decent human beings to their core.

But those screams are only half of this tragedy.

Equally devastating is the white-skinned silence; the contagious moral laryngitis afflicting people of profound privilege who avert their eyes and cover their ears.

It is the breathtaking quiet of human beings who have retreated into the cloistered places of temporary comfort and imagined safety; those who quickly scroll away from the videos because they do not want to hear the screams, because that would leave them culpable for their inaction and their stilled voices.

White America, we need to lean into the screams of brown-skinned people, to invite them inside, to let them break our hearts and boil our blood, until the fury within us rises and erupts in a fierce and sustained roar that violently disrupts the inhumanity that will not stop unless we make it stop.

White friends, what exactly are you waiting for?How much suffering do you need to see?What terrible sounds will finally awaken your voices?What line still needs to be crossed for you to declare it unacceptable?

What good is it if you claim morality or conscience, if these result in you saying nothing while our neighbors are brutalized?

How real is your professed faith if it yields no measurable opposition to the greatest violations of human life?

How much is your patriotism worth if the disregard for the elemental liberties of this nation leaves you speechless?

If ethnic cleansing and genocide do not stir your fury and your vocal cords, what is the point of you being here?

Your silence won’t save you, anyway; it will only postpone your suffering as you abdicate the elemental parts of your humanity during the interim. That is a coward’s path and one I refuse to take.

The only way we can endure as a nation is if we all find the courage to speak with clarity, if we allow ourselves to be heard here and now.

White friends, the cost of using your voice is nothing compared to the price of your silence.

Let your life say something before it’s too late.

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All over America, MAGA Republicans will stream into churches this Sunday.

They will do so joyously.

They will do so confidently.

They will do so believing they are righteous.

It will be another hollow procession of fervent disciples of a felon-predator who have again spent the past week applauding the abuse and degradation of the poorest and most vulnerable among us.

They will proudly carry their Bibles, while evangelizing for a man, a party, and a movement that are antithetical to its contents regarding what it means to love people as God does.

Without a hint of self-awareness, they will take their seats in front of a cross symbolizing sacrifice, after another seven days amplifying a greed that will drive millions of people further into illness, food scarcity, and despair.

They will feign love for their neighbors, while breathlessly supporting a regime doing all it can to make sure those neighbors will experience poverty, have reduced access to education, and lives that will be far more painful and far shorter than they needed to be.

They will try and pretend they give a damn about Jesus, while celebrating the relentless violent persecution of immigrants, refugees, and anyone with brown skin who their repugnant cult leader’s goon squad decides to round up from worksites, graduation ceremonies, and church services.

They will have the God-mocking audacity to sing songs about a Creator who sets the captives free, even as they pump their chests and post social media taunts about concentration camps that will be a blazing, miserable final destination for human beings whose lives and stories they will never care to know.

They will imagine themselves faithful soldiers in the Army of the Lord, while rejoicing in the protection of human traffickers and rapists, among whom is likely the man they claim is anointed by God to lead them.

These are the hypocrites and pretenders Jesus warned about. They are the fraudulent, performative predators he spent his entire life and ministry rejecting.

The only reason they should be entering a church at all is to fall to their knees in repentance, asking for forgiveness for so perverting Jesus’ love your neighbor message into something that dehumanizes the human beings in their path, something that only wounds and expels, something that is the very embodiment of evil.

As a former pastor, I wish I could be in these buildings this Sunday, so I could look these people in the eyes and hold the compassionate, gentle, generous words of Jesus up to them like a mirror in a way their spiritual leaders won’t, because they, too, are morally compromised.

I’d love to shove Jesus’ commands to love the least, to care for the most vulnerable, to welcome the stranger in their faces and watch them squirm and rationalize and desperately engage in theological gymnastics to try and avoid accountability for urinating on the loving, healing, helping, immigrant Christ.

I wish I could confront them with the truth, that if Jesus were to show up in the flesh in their midst, they’d have him cast out for his woke theology, removed from their gatherings for daring to preach an empathy they now find detestable, and capriciously tossed into some prison for no other reason than the color of his skin or his nation of origin.

Every decent human being, whether they claim faith or not, sees what a gross and empty Sunday parade these self-identified Christians are making into buildings where they will surround themselves with the trappings of goodness and faithfulness, all the while making life for so many outside the building a living hell.

I don’t expect a single one of these MAGA acolytes to step into their churches and actually hear the words of Jesus in a way that softens their hearts, moves them to repentance, and sends them out into a nation they have done such irreparable harm to in order to bring any kind of healing or equity or restoration. This is mostly because they no longer have any need for Jesus.

In fact, I’m really hoping Jesus doesn’t show up in their gatherings.

He wouldn’t be safe.

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I’m just gonna come right out and say it: I’ve had it with people right now.

OK, it’s probably not particularly healthy to have a grievance with an entire species, so let me narrow that down a bit…

I’m angry with everyone who isn’t angry.

I’m having a really hard time with the unbothered people, the “everything is gonna be fine” people, the people who are acting as though they are above those of us who are blowing gaskets, breaking down, and freaking out.

You know who I’m talking about: those friends, family members, coworkers, classmates, and social media acquaintances who tone-police us for surveying the monumental destruction being inflicted upon our fragile Republic and its people and being livid. Those people.

I’ve arrived at my breaking point with human beings around me who are still averting their eyes, avoiding the news, and anesthetizing themselves on a mind-numbing cocktail of wishful thinking, retail therapy, self-preservation, and American exceptionalism.

I’ve reached the limit of my tolerance for people who have seemingly spent the past year poo-pooing hundreds of atrocities and illegalities, any one of which would be an alarm-tripping red flag for a nation sliding swiftly into fascism.

And I’ve really had it with people who are still criticizing the emotionality of those of us who’ve been told for a decade that we’re overreacting, while we’ve watched every single supposedly impossible prediction come to pass.

I don’t think laissez-faire wait-and-seers who are banking on a simple November midterm resurrection are particularly helpful right now.

Look, I believe in being rational and level-headed whenever possible, in offering a measured response to most kinds of adversity, to being strategic and sober of mind in the face of many struggles.

But right now, circumstances are such that we could use a lot more furious human beings. We need people who have seen, heard, and have had enough: enough injustice, enough lawlessness, enough dehumanization, and who aren’t afraid to be labeled too loud, too pissed off, and too passionate.

There is a time and place for self-control, for tolerance, for listening and bearing with people, for breathing and being still. But there is also a time and place when the gravity of the moment calls for something fierce and unwieldy; a wildness of heart that isn’t interested in decorum or social norms. I suggest that now is such a time, and here is precisely the place.

Authoritarianism has overtaken America.Our president is a sociopath.His Cabinet is sycophantic.His party is complicit.They are at war with the world.They are ignoring law and morality.They are building concentration camps.They are murdering protestors.They are silencing journalists.The media are bending the knee.

This Congress is neutered.The Supreme Court is compromised.The checks and balances are disappearing.The systems are failing.People are being arrested for existing.People are being targeted for who they love.

These are not hyperbolic rantings of overly emotional crepe-hangers; they are the clear-headed conclusions of those of us who are paying attention, who’ve read the files, who’ve waded into the minutiae of the legislation, and who don’t scroll away from things that turn our stomachs and break our hearts.

I’m not advocating for an aimless, reckless assembly of panicked people running around like headless chickens, but some urgency and a little ferocity from a lot more people would be a good start. Ignorance is bliss until it’s deadly.

If you’re already furious, fed up, and losing your filters and your f***s, celebrate that. We need a lot more fire and a lot less chill.

Right now, it’s a sign of your humanity, of your sanity, and of your soul, to look around at it all and say, “I’ve had it… I’m furious.”

Note: If you’ve had it and want to know how to productively and strategically wield your exasperation with other similarly pissed-off people, start by contacting your local Indivisible group, connecting with the ACLU, and partnering with Remove Coalition or Red, Wine, & Blue. You can also research progressive faith communities, nonprofits, and candidates, and ask them where they can use your help.

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Hey.

I may not know you but I know what you’re thinking.

I know you feel something breaking inside lately; an invisible fracture that only you’re fully aware of.

I know the way you walk away from conversations with people you once relied on for wisdom and clarity and compassion, doubting your own sanity because you no longer recognize those things in them and worry you may be overreacting.

I know the way you feel internally estranged from the friends, coworkers, family members, and neighbors you used to find affinity with, and you wonder if you’re losing your mind.

I understand how you stare at the perpetual parade of horrible scrolling past you, from the second you wake up prematurely in the early morning until the stretched out nighttime moments you try unsuccessfully to fall asleep, and how you question the grip you have on reality.

I know the disbelief you feel in the presence of loved ones and ministers and leaders who now seem to be speaking some strange foreign tongue that you can’t make any sense of anymore.

I hear the nagging question you ask inside your head a few hundred times a day: “Is it me, or has a huge portion of this country lost its mind?”

It isn’t you.

You’re quite fine, and this is of course both good and terrible news—because of what it says about you and about the place you find yourself.

The fact that you see how wrong this all is, means your faculties are intact, your mind is fully right, and your heart is working properly. It’s all confirmation that you still have a soul doing what souls are supposed to do: keep you deeply human in profoundly inhumane times.

This is why you need to hold tightly to that soul, because it is more rare and valuable than ever.It’s why you need to embrace this holy unrest in the center of your belly; because it is the greatest weapon against the present epidemic of apathy.It’s why you can’t allow your right mind to make peace with such abject madness.

If enough time passes, an otherwise healthy person can start to get used to sickness. They can slowly begin to convince themselves that almost any horrifying, toxic, painful, twisted reality is acceptable.Little by little they can gradually allow themselves to acclimate to the nightmare, to come to see it as normal.Either that, or they determine that they’re actually out of their minds and they collapse inside.

This is a reminder that what is happening in America right now is not at all normal and that you are right to feel this disorientation.

I need you to hear this, friend:You’re okay.You’re not crazy.You’re also in good company.

Right now, there is a massive army of similarly walking wounded sharing this place with you; fellow exhausted souls who realize that none of this makes any sense—people concluding that for their health, they will need to create distance from people they once allowed proximity.There are millions of good people out here still looking to be the kind of people the world needs; those committed to doing no harm, burdened to bring something decent where it is missing.

Many of us who see what you see:We can see that this movement in our nation is a bastardization of humanity, a rebellion against goodness, a mutiny against sanity.We can see that those sanctioning and defending and co-signing it are similarly unwell, equally disconnected from anything benevolent, similarly propelled by fear and greed and bitterness.

And that’s why we need to keep resisting it.

You need to push back against the surrounding insanity that tries to convince you that you’ve gone mad.

You need to refuse to be gaslit by people when they try to diminish your worries, mock your anxiety, or tell you you’re being overly emotional—even when that person is the one staring back at you in the mirror.

You need to press on, because in days when evil is normalized, goodness matters most.

Right now, work to find your people, those who are as heartbroken and furious as you are, and begin find ways to care for human beings in duress, to organize against the legislative assaults, and to be strengthened by loving community.

In times when truth and news are pliable, truth-tellers are worth more than gold.

You’re not crazy, but these days surely are.

You’re not upside down right now, friend—a good portion of this place is.

Loving resistance is a world-turner.

People of faith, morality, and conscience together, from every corner of this nation, will right-side it.

Be encouraged.

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This President has been many things since descending an escalator a decade ago: a national embarrassment, a global punchline, an environmental disaster, a divider of people, a prolific murderer of the English language, not to mention countless human beings.

But he’s also been a floodlight.

He’s fully exposed millions of people who’d kept themselves carefully concealed, many of whom I thought I knew. I can see them now in ways I never could previously. It’s all out in the open.

Intellectually, I always knew that racism was deeply embedded into the fabric of our nation. Still, I’d convinced myself that it had slowly but certainly begun to unravel, that we weren’t as hopelessly bound by it as our ancestors had been. As a pastor in largely white churches in the South over the past two decades, I told myself the story that the Church, like this nation, was changing. It may have been a combination of privilege, ignorance, and wishful thinking, but I truly thought that we were getting better, that the arc of the moral universe was again bending toward justice

I surely never imagined that so many people I loved, lived with, worshipped alongside, or worked next to were as afflicted with supremacy as they have revealed themselves to be. I never fathomed that so many people claiming to love Jesus would so resent foreigners, so worship America, and so abhor diverse humanity. The people around me were either really good at pretending, or, in my naivety, I was just willing to believe the lie.

I saw the cracks in their facades begin to show when Barack Obama was elected; their carefully coded hate speech, their ever more antagonistic social media posts from fringe sources, their incessant, desperate search for something to be outraged about, their inability to give him any credit or acknowledge his goodness. They grew more entrenched in their positions, more tribal in their tone.

But even then, they kept their prejudices and phobias close to the vest, never really tipping their hand, always dancing around the words without really saying them. The mask was splitting and sliding off, but they would not fully show themselves because it was socially unacceptable (they would call it “politically correct.”)

Then he arrived a decade ago: someone who gave them what they needed to abandon the performance completely: permission to be horrible; someone who erased any semblance of decorum, any expectation of decency, any level of accountability. After so many years of pretending, they finally received white Presidential consent to be outwardly racist—and now, in his second coming, the dam of their suppressed bigotry has burst, and they are letting the toxic hatred flow freely.

White pastors now lob it through incendiary sermons into their congregations, white politicians plaster it upon campaign billboards, white police officers send it out in group emails, white teachers wave it in front of their students, white civilians spit it out in viral videos at coffee shops and public parks, white terrorists parade it unmasked through city streets.

And my white friends, family members, and neighbors are rejoicing in this Renaissance of open ugliness—and I never saw it coming, even if I should have.

And this has been the most disorienting, stomach-turning, sickening part of this terrible season in America: the realization that I have lived near, worked alongside, and ministered around people who claimed to believe in Jesus while harboring such corrosive hearts—and that I was oblivious to it all. I am both angry at them and disappointed in myself.

But now, their open contempt for immigrants, their apathy in the face of his corruption, and their callousness toward suffering people all testify to their hearts.

And I suppose that is the small bit of gratitude I have for this malignancy of a movement here; the way it has fully revealed people—and this is an unwelcome but invaluable gift.

I know what I didn’t know before.I can’t excuse the truth away.I no longer give them the benefit of a doubt that they have fully removed.My eyes are clear and open widely, and now I’m responsible for what I do and say in response to who they are.We all are.

Regardless of what happens in the future or how the political landscape may change or who we have helming our nation, what has been revealed about us as is going to remain, and we’re going to have to deal with the unmasked, unearthed, illuminated hatred that we are this violently afflicted with.

That might be this President’s only worthy legacy.

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It feels like a good portion of this nation is on death watch right now.

My social media feed is filled with photos and videos gleefully documenting the markers of his physical deterioration, with rising hope as his public appearances grow more sporadic, with almost giddy prognostications of his departure date from this place. People are posting their plans as if preparing for New Year’s Eve or a World Series Championship.

I am not exactly one of those people.

Yes, he has been an odious blight upon this planet and a cancerous presence to this nation. He is, without question, one of the single most objectively horrible human beings our species has produced.

Setting aside the reality that his passing would elevate a successor who is smarter, shrewder, less impulsive, and potentially far more effective in accelerating this country’s slide into theocracy, authoritarianism, and economic devastation for everyone but the billionaire cadre of amoral tech bro vampires who elevated him to the platform to begin with.

But I don’t wish for his death.

I wish he’d never been born.

If he departs this mortal sphere as I type this, it will do nothing to undo all the evil that his now bruised hands have wrought, to erase every vile thing his presence has exposed as he ascended politically.

It will not rewind the years of those who lived in squalor and poverty in New York City, on whose backs he built his jittery, hollow empire.

His death will not bring financial restitution to the thousands of workers and contractors left abandoned by the many bankruptcies that emancipated him from responsibility.

It won’t give back wholeness and healing to the girls and women he violated in secret or maligned in public.

It will not reverse the irreparable damage he has done to a political party whose members individually and collectively abandoned every legal and moral expectation to fall prostrate before him.

It will not elicit repentance in a white Evangelical Church that parted ways with the compassionate, loving namesake of its faith tradition and fashioned a vicious, sneering, profane, God-mocking idol out of his antithesis and bowed down before it.

His passing now could not allow us to unsee the repugnant grievance cult he unleashed here; the historically hateful movement of miserable people who’ve spent the last decade reveling in an unrepentant ugliness because he gave them consent.

It will not remove the legion of incompetent, predatory, corrupt sycophants he poisoned our government with; people who have and will continue to dismantle and pervert our systems of care and legal oversight.

And his death, as much as it would feel like an initial reprieve from the chaos he has engineered and the unfathomable suffering he has spearheaded, would do nothing to conceal the vile sickness he exposed within the people around us: the long-simmering racism, the scalding contempt for foreigners, the phobic hatred of human beings for their gender identity or sexual orientation.

Long after he is gone, we will be left with what we now know about our family members and friends and neighbors; about the people in our churches, about the parents of our children’s friends; about the pillars of our communities, about those we trust to govern us, protect, and serve us.

These atrocities, sadly, will all long outlive him.

He lived, and his life has done its brutal, irreversible damage.

And with that being true, I do not wish for his death; not yet.

I hope and pray that he lives long enough to face legal accountability for his crimes; that he will not depart this place before escaping consequences for the willful disregard he has spent 80 years showing for the laws of our land, for the disparate humanity that has called this place home, and for the sacred and powerful platform he never deserved to begin with.

I want him to be humiliated, to be broken, to see his vile empire crumbled, to see his name erased from the places he disfigured with it.

I want him to live long enough to face a cell before he faces his maker; to rot in prison before he rots in the ground.

And I want to live long enough to see it.

That will be cause for true celebration.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe