These are not good people.

2/Biblically, we're told we're told appearances are deceiving, a person's core values are defined by what they say & do.

Iow, what comes out of them. No need to read in (or out) anything they say or do.

Arent they just as amoral when they pragmatically allow immorality to achieve their goals?

"..., make it make sense."

Assuming you're not doing advanced calculus and talking about why so many seemingly moral people support an amoral president, or how there is zero moral accountability in the GOP.

The answer is their core values allow it.

How can we learn their values?

+

Denial is proving to be a powerful tool.

People may not view it as denial, but what else do we call the ability not to accept the truth of what historical events tell us about ourselves.

Legitimacy. That is what 81% of self identifying white evangelicals gave to Trump when they said thei moral conscience demanded they vote for him.

Without their vote, he's still a washed up developer who can only sell his name for a buck.

IT'S STARTING ... state by state. Also in Hawaii (civilbeat.org/2026/04/can-hawaii-deliver-all-of-america-from-citizens-united/)
prospect.org/2025/10/27/m...

I like the way Peter Enns puts it below. I was always skeptical of any stream of faith which did not hinge on humility. I tolerated the other streams until I could no longer tell myself the bad theology they do is harmless. My reconstruction is finding god's 'line in the sand'.

Lily and Finlay are growing up, having fun leading each other side by side with this small rope we found on the beach!

2/ Here's their problem. What does God say matters?

The Bible from cover to cover insists that good faith looks like providing security (food, clothing, shelter, medical care) to four special groups: widow/orphan/foreigner/poor.

All the policies in item1 (snap...) are here.

Where is Roe?

I'll give you two two things the Christian Right has accomplished

Ending federal SNAP benefits, ending USAID abroad, separating children at the border from their travelling guardian or parent, banning refugees from Muslim speaking countries, defunding the ACA subsidies.

Ending Roe.

Here's their +

{nodding} melding them destroys both. No one can satisfy both 'masters'; imo, better not to put ourselves in that position.

And by doing so, by relying on politics to do what we think is good we expose that God hasn't done it. He's not interested in it.

Americans love everything served to them their way.

Spiritually speaking, it means Jesus looks like them, spiritually, the Bible is the Word, and the Spirit convicts them when they stray to 'liberal'.

I can't fault nonchristians for blasphemy–It's a cultural tool to them. Harm plays in as well.

The people of America are known globally as arrogant people, this arrogance comes from a history of success triaging a problem, mobilizing the resources to solve it, and "saving" the predicted doom which should have happened.

It can do this over and over, but it's allowed to touch Race.

no matter how many ways I try to parse this movement I keep coming up with Race.

It is incredibly sad, and condemning, of the way this country was raised.

Bonhoeffer, radical that he is, wrote that christians can only address each other in & through Jesus.

If we add properties of ourselves, add another identity, or value, we create hierarchy, we begin to address each other directly and Jesus is a secondary concern.

have opposing goals: a liberal democracy seeks to hear everyone's concerns and try to address them; Christianity is just the opposite, it's exclusive, there is no moderate, compromise of many values. Melding the two breaks both. No one can do both and survive uncompromised. But that's the norm.

But see, that was an adaptation (post Jesus) they felt was necessary. Christianity is designed to be accessed in & by good faith actors; we're at the place where bad faith represents authentic faith.

I don't know a single christian who would say christians should stay out of politics, but the two..

Palantir manifesto, Project 2025, MAGA, this vein of libertarianish individualism that places itself above laws that inhibits its movement while building something that locks in others goes way back in America.

It's what made America what it is – great if you can ignore the trail of broken lives.

What this means functionally for christians is that God needs us.

You say that's not true, he exists and is true outside time and space.

No. No one would know God is real unless christians were different: unhumanly humane.

We can hug the trees, admire our thumbs, warm to our pets love, w/o God.

Religion reinforces what we already believe.

Religion reinforces what we already believe.

It's "goodness" depends on whether it changes us to be more humane than we otherwise would like to be.

170 versions of 'love your neighbor as yourself' exist; Man is checking himself; 'religion' lets you go.

I think about a throw away paragraph in Elie Wiesel's tortuous book on human depravity, Night.

Towards the end he condemns apartheid in SA as genocide and says all Jews must speak out against it; and in the same paragraph hopes the Zionists restore Palestine Israel.

Religion + Power becomes warped

Another of my 2016 thoughts was 'christianity' does not scale up well. The early Church was known for 'worshipping the one true God' in a polytheistic world *and* 'out of their poverty, caring for the needy, Roman as well.'

But as it grew, it became more and more corrupted, self centered.

+

One of my naive conclusions in 2016 was that 81% of white evangelicals voting for Trump would set the Church back: 'no one will ever trust us again, it's back to 1:1 evangelism, the corporate name is dirt.

What I didn't realize at the time was how 'dirt' sells. The Church of Whiteness will grow.

I left one out. Between the first and third Klan the second rose in reaction to

"...a wild motley throng—
Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes,
Featureless figures of the Hoang-Ho,
Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav"

and they built immigration quotas which hadn't existed before

From my reading, there have been milestones in civil rights and reactions

The civil war ended explicit racism: being black=being inferior—the reaction built Separate but Equal

The classic civil rights era ended SbE—the reaction was colorblindness

Obama showed CB was soft—The reaction was Trump

Thank you for your courage to publicly address abusive language.

The Revival White Christians Are Missing Black Christians in the U.S. have historically understood spiritual awakenings to be of one piece with social justice movements.

"Moses and Tubman’s dedication to freeing God’s people demonstrates that revival is best understood when justice and worship are combined."
sojo.net/articles/opi...

www.project2025.observer/en

Oh no, it is well on its way.

I appreciated your book. I appreciate your rabbinical perspective. I subscribe to your substack...

And I was replying to someone's thought that a person should delete their post because Jesus was in fact a Pharisee as if that's commonly understood. It's def. not.

Early Morning - Alexandre Jacob (1876–1972) #realism #landscape