He described his process as obsessive: long stretches in near isolation, vocal coaching to nail the Elvis sound, martial arts training to get the swagger right. He committed so aggressively to Elvis’s mannerisms that he was rushed to the hospital shortly after production wrapped, treated for what he called extreme exhaustion.

Butler has spoken candidly about losing his own voice in the process. Journalists and friends kept telling him he was still talking like Elvis months after filming ended. Finding his way back to his own speech patterns, his own identity, took deliberate effort.

It’s a striking story on its own, but this morning as I perused the resources available on Pastor Josh McPherson’s “Stronger Man Nation” website, I realized that it’s also something of a parable.

Butler had a script, a director, a wardrobe department, and millions of dollars behind him, and the role nearly swallowed him whole. Now imagine handing that same task of inhabiting a persona not your own, to a generation with no script worth trusting, no director, and no budget for recovery.

That seems to be what’s happening inside much of the evangelical church’s conversation about “biblical” manhood and womanhood.

Broken homes and a culture at war with both sexes have left a void where identity used to form. Into that void steps a parade of would-be role models, some sincere, most grifting, all promising the same thing Hollywood promised Butler: Lose yourself completely enough, and you’ll finally become who you’re supposed to be. We will provide you with a script for how to be a man.

Only in the heavily marketed evangelical version, there’s a gender norm casting call, and the menfolk arrive first on the set. They take the roles that interest them: soldier, athlete, conqueror, lead. Whatever’s left over is for the women: the table scraps, the bits and pieces of personality the men don’t want to be bothered to cultivate. Nurture, patience, the quiet work of binding wounds, all of it gets handed to women and labeled “created order” or “original design.” Any resistance to the casting is immediately written off as feminist rebellion.

As a self-appointed women’s advocate, I’ve often scratched my head at how often my advocacy compels me to weigh in on men’s conferences and leadership events. It’s not where I would prefer to spend my focus, but I’m increasingly realizing that whatever happens in these spaces is incredibly consequential for the womenfolk, too. If repeatedly disgraced abusers like Mark Driscoll are the ones tasked with leading today’s Christian men, how is that going to pan out for today’s Christian women?

Scroll through the Stronger Man Nation’s resource page and the script becomes explicit. There’s a “Biblical Manhood Series”: Soldier, built to protect. Athlete, called to lead. Farmer, made to provide. Son, set free to love. Four archetypes, four covers, sold as the menu of acceptable masculinity.

Is there anything wrong with developing any of these archetypes? Of course not. The world needs healthy men operating in these capacities. If men are going to be physically stronger than women, let them use that physical strength for the greater good. The good Lord gave men more testosterone for a reason; it stands to reason that we ought to cultivate healthy uses and outlets for it. I have no problem with that.

My problem is that the script never ventures much farther than the performative masculinity stereotype, and it leaves men with a stunted, truncated understanding of how they are to appear in a world that needs all their giftings, not just the ones that look like strength.

Am I complaining that there’s no category for women? No. That would be like going to Safeway and complaining that they don’t sell furniture. An organization designed to equip men does not owe women a category. But they do owe the men a category for something besides conquest. The only available options presented (soldier, athlete, farmer, etc) are marked by conquest. The animating verb across all categories is some version of “overcome,” “conquer,” or “provide” by force of will.

There’s no archetype for the man who listens well, who tends the sick, who stays quiet and steady in a crisis that doesn’t require a sword. Where is the category for the foot washer? The wound binder? The gentle negotiator?

Scripture also celebrates men who make peace, lament openly, show mercy, exercise wisdom, care for the weak, and quietly shoulder burdens that earn no applause. Those virtues aren’t soft. In fact, they’re the very qualities that defined the strongest man who ever lived.

Godly manhood, as packaged here, though, has been reduced to a single register: aggression aimed at something, anything, that can be killed, trampled, or fought.

To be fair, one archetype does gesture toward tenderness: Son, set free to love. But notice that love appears here as the finish line, not the foundation. It’s something a man earns his way into after he’s soldiered and competed and conquered his way through the other three.

That reduction has a quiet cost for women, and it isn’t the absence of a parallel curriculum. It’s the role women get assigned inside the man’s curriculum. If a man’s entire purpose is combat, then the obvious conclusion is that someone has to be the territory he protects, the audience he provides for, the soft place his swagger is allowed to return to.

The problem isn’t that women get written out of the script. The problem is that we get written into it as the thing the soldier is fighting for, never as a fellow combatant, a fellow soldier, a fellow drawer of the sword for the kingdom.

What are we to do with the ferocity of Jael? The intellect of Abigail? The righteous defiance of the Hebrew midwives? What of the Proverbs 31 woman who Scripture explicitly compares to a soldier? She girds herself with strength, the same militaristic language used for men prepared for battle. But the modern version waters her down into a domesticated cheerleader.

That’s a more dangerous architecture than mere exclusion, because it doesn’t look like exclusion. In fact, it’s repeatedly framed as honor. She’s protected. She’s provided for. Who could object to that?

But a woman permanently cast as the prize never has to be consulted as a peer, and a man taught his worth is measured by what he conquers will eventually need something, or someone, to conquer. Just ask Doug Wilson about this. He’s hardly subtle. The woman’s role is a passive one. Our job, in his words, is to sit in the passenger seat looking cute and leave the thinking and negotiating to the men.

He’s hardly the only one. I’ve written about this rather extensively before.

History, and no small number of church abuse cases, suggest where that road tends to lead when the only available verbs are “fight,” “win,” “dominate,” and the only available noun for a woman is the thing being fought for.

Scripture does call men and women to distinct things, but distinct is not the same as opposite, and complementary is not the same as conqueror and conquest. An identity built entirely on combat language inevitably pushes women into supporting roles, valued primarily for how they advance a man's mission rather than for the unique gifts and callings God has entrusted to them.

If the options on the table are Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, and Josh McPherson, I’m obviously picking McPherson every time, and I’m grateful he exists. The void is real. Fatherlessness is real. The hunger young men have for someone to show them how to be is real, and it deserves a serious response. These men are attempting one. I don’t want to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. I have no doubt that God will be glorified in much of what they seek to accomplish.

But attempting a serious response to a serious problem is not the same as getting it right. And an identity built on four archetypes, three of which reduce manhood to some version of conquest, doesn’t solve the identity crisis. It hands men a more sanctified version of the same reductive script the culture has been peddling all along, a script that excludes and alienates people who don’t fit the narrow descriptions and, worse, invites them to view their gifts as liabilities instead of assets. The categories are cleaner. The vocabulary sounds biblical. But the testosterone is still doing most of the heavy lifting.

And when testosterone does the heavy lifting in a theology of gender, women don’t get liberated. We get steamrolled. We get sidelined. We get decorated. We get relegated to the hospitality table, and disinvited from leadership meetings that desperately need our insight.

Austin Butler spent years in obsessive study of one man, and it nearly cost him himself. The church’s answer to a generation starving for identity has been to hand them different men to imitate, with Spartan shields and warrior imagery on the cover.

But the invitation of Scripture was never to study manhood or womanhood with this kind of ferocity. It was to study Jesus. To gaze upon the beauty of His face and conform our image to His likeness. To immerse ourselves in Him with the kind of obsession Butler brought to Graceland, and trust that the fruit of that labor will work out the rest.

The person formed by Christ doesn't emerge from a template. He knit us together one at a time, and the image of God is large enough to look a little different on every person who bears it.

A person formed by Christ doesn’t need four archetypes to tell them who to be. They need One, and He already accomplished that work.

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I’ve come to think of the current moment as two extremes locked in a feedback loop, each one’s excess justifying the other’s overcorrection. On one side, a strain of white liberal feminism that has made performative kindness into an identity, the kind of “be nice” politics that, in practice, asks women to go quiet, marvel at men who don’t deserve it, and treat the women willing to hold an unpopular line as the real threat.

On the Christian right, this diagnosis has spawned a predictable prescription: performative manliness to the rescue. From Owen Strachan’s “The Warrior Savior” to Richard Phillips’ “The Masculine Mandate,” the cure du jour is the belief that a feminized culture will only be reclaimed by chest-thumping warrior men who ride into town and take things back by force, with or without the consent of the women they must bulldoze in the process.

Albert Mohler does not exactly fit the mold of the typical theobro prescribing this solution. He doesn’t show up for photo shoots in flannel shirts, swinging an axe around to broadcast his manliness, or saying bombastic things about how happy his wife is now that he’s curated a list of her approved reading materials a la Joel Webbon. He’s not the stereotype.

He is a seminary president in a sport coat, not a man trying to sell you a beard oil subscription on a podcast he’s hosting in lieu of a real job. But maybe that’s what makes him a better case study. It’s a mistake to believe that chestlessness only shows up on the left as insanity or on the right with pomp and antagonistic arrogance. Sometimes it shows up in a calm, well-modulated voice explaining why biblical obedience required this or permitted that, with no apparent awareness of the inevitable harm that follows the prescribed cure.

Last week, under Mohler’s leadership, the Southern Baptist Convention passed the Truth and Unity Amendment, formalizing what was already practice into doctrine: no women in the pastorate, in title or in function. The justification offered was simple and repeated like a mantra: “We are committing to biblical faithfulness. We want to be obedient to Scripture. We will not deviate from it. If the Bible says no women pastors, we will obey.”

Fine. Take that at face value for a moment. How can you argue with obedience? Martin Luther himself once stated that “It is neither right nor safe to act against conscience,” and I don’t think he’s wrong about that. So even if I ultimately disagree with Mohler’s conclusions about the Bible’s roles for women, I can’t really begrudge him for trying to act in obedience, can I? God is known for rewarding obedience, even if we don’t get it entirely right. I want to hold space for the possibility that it really is a commitment to faithfulness that’s driving this ship.

But that’s becoming increasingly hard to do because it’s a faithfulness that’s incredibly lopsided in its application.

As previously expressed, the amendment, however well-intended, inadvertently functions as something of a gag order with far reaching implications for females. And just days later, while women across the American evangelical divide were still licking their wounds, Mohler did something either completely tone deaf or overtly diabolical. He appeared on a podcast with Doug Wilson, the Moscow, Idaho pastor whose record includes defending American slavery as “mutually beneficial” to both slave owners and the enslaved, opposing the 19th Amendment, shielding known abusers within his own church and school system, and referring to women in terms like “harpie” and “cunt” and “small-breasted biddies” and “lumberjack dykes.”

If you know that women under your care are struggling to believe you value them, you don’t team up with a man who disparages women every other sentence. This is not rocket surgery.

They were there to promote a forthcoming Canon Press volume on Christian nationalism to which they are both contributors. The conversation was friendly. Collegial. The kind of conversation you have with someone you consider a peer in good standing.

I’ve spent no shortage of energy documenting Doug Wilson’s litany of disqualifying offenses. At this point, the evidence is so extensive that the debate is no longer whether the record exists but whether people are willing to acknowledge it.

For those unfamiliar with Wilson, here is the abbreviated version: He is the self-appointed leader of a denomination he effectively built around himself. He has promoted Federal Vision theology, defended American slavery as beneficial in some respects, repeatedly used degrading and misogynistic language toward women, and spent decades entangled in scandals involving the protection of abusers and the mistreatment of victims.

Most notoriously, Wilson wrote to the court on behalf of convicted child abuser Steven Sitler, supported Sitler’s marriage despite expert warnings, officiated the wedding himself, and has since maintained that he would make the same decisions again. In another case, when a young woman reported that her father had been watching her shower, church leadership minimized the behavior and failed to provide meaningful protection.

The concerns are not merely theological or pastoral. They span doctrine, leadership, treatment of women, abuse response, financial ethics, and professional integrity. Former church members have brought extensive ecclesiastical charges against him alleging patterns of abuse, manipulation, dishonesty, and pastoral tyranny. Questions have also followed him into the financial and professional spheres. According to reports, Canon Press lost its tax-exempt status after the Idaho State Tax Commission determined royalties had been improperly routed to Wilson personally, and multiple instances of plagiarism were later documented in curriculum materials published under his editorial oversight.

Reasonable people can disagree about many things. They can disagree about church polity, eschatology, worship styles, denominational structures, and even the role of women in ministry. What should not be controversial is that a pastor’s repeated pattern of protecting predators, minimizing abuse, maintaining crooked business and financial practices, and degrading women raises serious questions about whether he meets the biblical qualification of being “above reproach.”

Any one of those categories would be enough to warrant scrutiny. Taken together, they reveal a pattern. Doug Wilson is not a difficult case. He is the easiest case in existence, which is precisely why Mohler's willingness to treat him as a respected colleague is so revealing.

If you are willing to platform a man like that, a man whose theology has produced documented, repeated harm to actual women and actual children, but you are not willing to platform a righteous woman because she is a woman, I have to ask: is it really biblical faithfulness you’re after? Or is it something else entirely? Something that smells more like political or religious power?

Here is what I keep coming back to. Lewis borrowed an old way of understanding human beings, one that divided a person into three parts: the head (reason), the belly (appetite), and the chest (sentiment). The chest sits in the middle, connecting the other two. Without it, the head and the belly have no mediator. The head can rationalize anything you point it at, and the belly just wants what it wants, so the chest is the thing that's supposed to keep them honest with each other.

Lewis’ chest was never about bravado. It was about trained sentiment, the part of us that registers things at their actual moral weight rather than the weight we’d prefer them to have. The chest is what lets you feel the right amount of alarm at the right things. It’s the mechanism that should make wildly different moral situations feel like wildly different moral situations.

A rightly ordered chest does not produce a man who can hold “No woman may teach a man Scripture. Full stop, no exceptions. This is a hill to die on” and “Let's go laugh it up with a guy whose idea of a sexy woman is one who looks like she's just been hit in the mouth with a brick” in the same week without one of those positions buckling under the weight of the other. Something in the middle should short-circuit. Something should say, “Hold the phone. Something in this equation is awry.”

That nothing did is the tell.

It’s not that Mohler is loud or aggressive or chest-thumping. He is none of those things. It’s that his head, which can produce a doctrinal justification for nearly anything, is running uncontested errands for something else entirely, something that has nothing to do with Scripture and everything to do with where the gravity in his world currently sits. The belly is still driving. The chest, if it ever weighed in, neglected to do so here.

This is the same failure Lewis diagnosed. It just doesn’t look like the caricature we’ve grown to expect. We assume chestlessness mostly wears Birkenstocks, man buns, and pronoun buttons, and that, in the rare event it should escape its leftist captors to drift over into our own camp, that it will look like some roided-out fraud on the interwebs hawking a carnivore diet and creatine supplements while warning about the new world order and chemtrails. It’s easier to recognize when it resides on the fringes. It’s easier to digest when it lives there, too. We can convince ourselves we’re safely secluded from its influence. It won’t rub up against our own lives or actions.

But sometimes it’s a lot more subversive than that. Sometimes it wears a Mr. Rogers sweater, comes with a doctorate, and tells you, with total sincerity, that obedience required exactly this and nothing more, while making room at the table for a man obedience should have disqualified outright.

I say all this as someone who understands the courage deficit personally and on a visceral level. If you’ve followed my page for any length of time, you know that I got fired from a job I’d held for seventeen years for opposing men in women’s locker rooms at the YMCA. I watched the Christian men around me, men who would have described themselves as exactly the kind of conviction-driven, truth-telling believers these institutions claim to be forming, go quiet when it cost them something. Not one of them stood with me. I learned what it feels like to hold a line alone, and it is not an experience I would recommend.

So I am not dismissing the impulse to sound the alarm about a courage deficit. I lived it. We need people of actual conviction who will stand for truth when it costs them something real, and we need to stop treating that as somebody else’s job.

I can even hear my male friends when they tell me men need role models, that in a culture increasingly hostile to stereotypical masculinity, sometimes men need someone to say out loud that it’s okay. I can hold that. I appreciate men who are genuinely, uncomplicatedly masculine. I married one. Excellent decision on my part.

The problem isn’t the call to manliness. It’s the overcorrection. It’s the reverse chestlessness. The same failure Lewis diagnosed, just running in the opposite direction. Instead of men too passive to feel anything, you get men too certain of their own righteousness to examine what they’ve actually allied themselves with. They want the feeling of fidelity without the discomfort fidelity should sometimes produce. The belly is still running the show. It has just learned to masquerade as sound theology and principle and to convince itself that any opposition to it is the shrieking of Marxist feminist Jezebels rather than righteous lament at its spiritual blindness.

What would Lewis say? Probably not much that hasn’t already been said by the question itself. If we’re too busy hyperfocusing on answering the question, “Are these men strong and courageous enough?” we can run the risk of neglecting the more important question: “Have their loves been rightly ordered?”

If you can sit comfortably on a stage with a man like Doug Wilson while simultaneously treating faithful, orthodox women as the greater threat to the church, then a courage deficit is not the only or even the primary problem in front of you. It may be men who believe they possess courage in abundance while lacking the moral imagination to feel outrage where outrage is due. Men whose convictions are strong enough to exclude the righteous but strangely insufficient to confront the wicked when it presents itself in your own camp.

When you fail to love the right things in the right order, even the language of faithfulness can be leveraged as a weapon of unfaithfulness.

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The amendment, if it passes a second required vote next year, will add a new standard for cooperating churches to the denominational Constitution:

“...does not act to affirm, appoint, or endorse a woman serving in the office or function of a pastor/elder/overseer, specifically preaching to the assembled congregation.”

As SBC laity, I have concerns about what this means for our churches.

Personal and Public Faith

Since 2012, I have been a member of SBC churches. Local cooperating churches like mine must have a “faith and practice which closely identifies with the SBC’s current statement of faith, the Baptist Faith and Message 2000.”

I don’t necessarily agree with every word of the BFM 2000 (and as a church member, I am not required to); however, I am closely aligned with it. While Baptists are notoriously non-credal, I affirm the ancient creeds of Nicea and the Apostles Creed, as well as the more recent Lausanne Covenant, which unites most Protestants.

I’ve never been a messenger at an annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, but as a church member and something of a theology nerd, I follow the convention closely every year. Recently, I have wrestled with the direction of the convention, while also appreciating many beautiful aspects of how it supports our Baptist faith and public witness. This year, for example, a number of the resolutions that passed were remarkably sound and well-written.

Still, I am troubled by the trajectory of the convention on what it means to be in cooperation. I hear the rhetoric from certain Baptist leaders and Mohler amendment supporters, who do not hesitate to say they want people like me gone or invisible, and walking away begins to be a real option. I want to be part of a Bible-believing, Bible-teaching, Bible-living church. And I am. I love my local church. Our leaders are faithful, my children are thriving, and we have good friends. Also, the nearest doctrinally aligned Baptist church that is not SBC-affiliated would add ten to fifteen minutes to our already 25-minute commute. A drive of that length makes regular participation in body life difficult, at best.

And so, for now, I stay.

Why the Mohler Amendment Should Not Pass Again

​The Mohler amendment is vague to the point of intentionality. As written, it is practically guaranteed to engender confusion, chaos, divisive arguments, and broken fellowship.

The inclusion of words like “function,” “affirm,” “endorse,” and “specifically” (which replaced “such as” in the original draft) will be debated endlessly. These debates will create friction for sisters using their gifts to benefit the entire body, which appears to be the intention.

​If the goal were simply to align the constitution with our existing confession, a tighter, cleaner amendment could have been pulled directly from the BFM 2000:

​”Appoints only men qualified by Scripture to the office of pastor/elder/overseer.”

A statement like that would have passed with little controversy. But that isn’t what was proposed. And because floor debate was shut down when it had barely begun, no such substitute could be offered.

The convention should not pass it again next year, and here are just a few reasons why.

​The Great Commission, the Church, and its Elders

Christ gave his church the Great Commission:

Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28:16-20, NIV)

Most Protestants agree this mission is given to the church both individually and collectively (BFM 2000, Lausanne Covenant). All believers, women and men together, are commanded to go evangelize, make disciples, and teach them to obey everything Jesus commanded. Not a single word of Holy Writ divides women from their brothers in executing that mission. As the Lausanne Covenant puts it: “World evangelization requires the whole Church to take the whole gospel to the whole world.”

​Making disciples is the big why of the church. Scripturally, the role of elders is to set an example in character and behavior, guard the flock against predators, and help the church mature, equipping every member for ministry as God has gifted them (I Timothy 4:12, Titus 2:7, Hebrews 12:1-2, Ephesians 4:11-13, Colossians 1:27, Acts 20:28, I Peter 4:7-11 & 5:2.) While the governing authority of the office belongs to the elders, the call to minister, or to “function” in ministry belongs to all the saints. No one needs to hold the official title of elder to be a minister of the gospel.

Preaching isn’t an elite, office-limited function. It is simply an aspect of the biblical call to:

• ​Go and evangelize

• ​Baptize converts

• Make disciples

• ​Teach them to follow Christ’s commands (Matthew 28)

• Proclaim (preach) the good news

• Pray and prophesy (Acts 2:17)

• ​Pastor as an undershepherd (this refers to faith-nurturing care, not the office of elder) (Ephesians 4:11-16)

• Encourage one another (John 13:34)

Scripture instructs:

Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith. Hebrews 13:7 (NIV)

Yet, the Mohler amendment goes further than the BFM 2000. Women in cooperating churches don’t hold the office of elder. That isn’t new, but now they also must avoid doing “elder kinds of stuff.”

And what is this elder-function stuff? It’s Christ-following as all believers should, lived at an exemplary level, guarding God’s people against wolves, serving hospitably, praying for the sick, and reminding the flock of what the Good Shepherd said (I Timothy 3:1-7, Titus 1:5-9; James 1:14, I Peter 5:1-3).

Going beyond scripture to keep people from doing good, so they don’t get too close to a boundary is known as “fencing.”

Fencing as Dangerous Disobedience

The religious leaders of Jesus’ day were fencing experts! Some things haven’t changed.

The teachers insisted on hand-washing routines and precise tithing, and sought status-based recognition, but they neglected justice and mercy, which was far more important (Luke 11:39-44)

Jesus rebuked them:

“And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.” Luke 11:46 (NIV)

At the SBC this year, we may have gotten another example of this approach, as (doubtless well-intentioned) church leadership experts cautioned against spontaneous baptism, lest we inadvertently baptize someone whose faith isn’t genuine. Yet the biblical examples are weighted toward spontaneity in baptism (Acts 8:36).

We would be wise to remember that Jesus was criticized for failing to “fence” – for eating with sinners and letting a woman with a bad reputation wash his feet with her tears and dry them with her hair. (Luke 7:36-50)

​Many Southern Baptists include women in the diaconate, where biblically qualified sisters and brothers serve the church as co-laborers. This does not conflict with our confession. The BFM 2000 distinguishes only two offices: (1) pastor-elder/overseer and (2) deacon. It recognizes the first office as male-only, intentionally leaving recognition of deaconing women to local churches.

​The Mohler Amendment overreaches the BFM 2000 by “fencing” the eldership. If Southern Baptists affirm a male-only eldership, then that office is the proper boundary line.

When we erect fences beyond Scripture, those guardrails separate people from the good God intends to do through them. When God’s people hesitate to serve because they fear being judged or their church disfellowshipped, the whole body suffers (I Corinthians 14:26, James 4:17). Further damage is done when brothers begin to look at sisters with suspicion when they serve the body in visible ways, as Phoebe, Lydia, Junia, and Priscilla did.

Elders are to set an example in speech, conduct, love, faith, and purity. If they are faithful in teaching, undershepherding, praying publicly, and proclaiming the good news, then following their example should not be forbidden. The fence would stop women from imitating the very behaviors elders are told to model.

Confusion in Application

​Because the language of the Mohler amendment assigns the heavy lifting to undefined terms like “function” and “endorse,” questions and controversies will multiply exponentially.

Consider how these common ministry scenarios would earn scrutiny:

• ​Media: If a lead pastor hosts a church podcast and discusses sermon applications with his staff, does featuring a female staff member constitute “affirming a woman in the function of a pastor”? Mohler’s own commentary suggests it might.

• Exhortation & Testimonies: If a pastor invites a woman to address the gathered church to exposit Scripture or testify to biblical truth, she would definitely be ruled out.

• Worship Leaders: What happens when a church calls a woman as a worship leader or director? She chooses songs, leads the worship team, prays publicly, reads Scripture, and exhorts the congregation from the stage. Under this amendment, she would most likely be removed, never given the opportunity, or her church disfellowshipped.

• ​Sermon Citations: When a pastor quotes a woman’s biblical insight from her book or sermon when he is preaching, and does so positively and respectfully, is he endorsing her service in a pastoral function, or merely sharing a good idea?

​This ambiguity is not accidental. Some proponents of the amendment have been entirely transparent about their ultimate goal: they don’t want a woman with a microphone at church under any circumstance. Some view a woman teaching a mixed-adult Sunday school class as unacceptably “elder-adjacent.” Others admit that once this amendment is finalized next year, they intend to target churches with female deacons next.

Yet less public pastoral-function ministry will not face the same scrutiny. Women who visit the homebound, sit in a hospital room with a grieving family, or counsel a hurting parent are performing tender shepherding functions. But if they minister quietly, no one will object. What does this reveal about our priorities? What fundamental misunderstandings are embedded in our communion regarding the office of elder and the work of ministry?

Is this how God’s people should live? Constantly fencing half the body over work we’ve decided is male only, although Scripture calls women to minister with their brothers as the whole church sent to the whole community?

SBC siblings who respect the authority of God’s Word, we must guard against keeping people in places God says to avoid. We must equally guard against avoiding the places where God calls us to go boldly. SBC women should obey the Lord quickly, just like the women who were commissioned, first by the angel and then by Jesus himself to go preach the good news of the resurrection (Matthew 28:5-10, NIV).

Our partnership in the gospel requires humility. Not one of us, male or female, is the main character of this story. We are not the hero or the high priest -- that is Jesus! We are but humble servants carrying out the mission. We are at our best when we do it together.

Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.” (Matthew 28:10)

It’s not necessarily that I’m allergic to authority; it’s that I’ve learned it’s inherently dangerous to blindly trust it, and the kicking helps me test the legitimacy of whatever is trying to steer me.

It’s easy for me to follow rules that make sense. Speed limits, for example. I kinda get it. I value my life and don’t particularly want to find myself upside-down in a ravine somewhere because of a fleeting urge to hug a tight corner at 85 mph. Speed limits make sense. Other societal rules designed to police my thoughts, gender performance, friendships, etc? Not so much.

I recently saw a trusted conservative Christian influencer warn her audience that divorce was contagious. She basically declared that if a bunch of your friends are getting divorced, you’re probably going to be in the danger zone, too, so you should really reconsider cultivating deep friendships with divorced people if you want your own marriage to succeed.

I wasn’t subtle in the disagreement I expressed. To me, it read as an invitation to shun the broken, to treat them as lepers when they’re already hurting, to brand them with a scarlet A.

Here’s where I pause to insert the obligatory disclaimer that of course there is wisdom in the biblical warning that bad company corrupts good character. Human beings are profoundly shaped by the people around them. We absorb values, habits, assumptions, and behaviors from our communities, often without realizing it, and yes, we are commanded to guard our hearts. None of this is at odds with the rest of what I’m about to say.

But I think we need to be a little more discerning about what actually constitutes “bad company.”

If I’m playing by the unwritten but very clearly understood rules of my tribe, there are a lot of people who should be off limits. I shouldn’t want meaningful relationships with Democrats, pro-choice advocates, people in same-sex relationships, public school parents, or anyone who has Taylor Swift on their Spotify playlist. I’m exaggerating, of course. Mostly.

But if I’m being truly honest, those are often the people who interest me the most.

It’s not because I’m looking for someone to persuade me to abandon my convictions. It’s because convictions that are never invited to withstand scrutiny aren’t worth much. I need mine tested against real people and real experiences so I can discover where they’re incomplete, shallow, or simply wrong. People outside my tribe expose blind spots I didn’t know I had. They force me to sharpen my arguments and wrestle with realities that are often far more complicated than the tidy narratives we construct about them from a distance.

In April, I began getting a tattoo from a local apprentice artist. As one of her first official clients, I’ve spent a lot of hours in her chair while she painstakingly works her way through the piece. She’s extraordinarily talented, committed to excellence, and meticulous to a fault, which means this tattoo is taking a pretty long time to finish, and as such, I’m getting a lot of one-on-one time with this really cool woman I would not otherwise know.

We do not share the same religious or political values. In fact, we disagree about quite a few things.

But as I’ve listened to her stories (stories that are not mine to tell) I’ve found myself face-to-face with the lived realities that exist on the edges of some of our culture’s most contentious debates. Her life forces me to wrestle in the gray and examine what I really believe and why I believe it. Her experiences aren’t theoretical; they’re real and consequential.

And I’ve been reminded how easy it is to reduce complicated people to talking points when you’ve never sat across from them long enough to hear how they got where they are.

The truth is that many of the issues Christians care deeply about cannot be understood from a safe distance. How can we meaningfully speak into the dynamics of divorce if we avoid divorced people? How can we address questions surrounding sexuality if we refuse to know anyone whose experiences differ from our own? How can we minister to a culture we don’t understand because we’ve deliberately isolated ourselves from it?

If we want to influence the culture, we first have to understand it. And understanding requires proximity.

That doesn’t mean abandoning discernment. It doesn’t mean every relationship is equally wise or every influence equally healthy. But there is a difference between exercising discernment and treating people as though their brokenness might somehow infect us.

Jesus certainly didn’t seem afraid of proximity.

Obviously, none of this is a free pass to treat Scripture like it’s optional. Every idea, every friendship, every story I hear still has to be weighed against Scripture as the final authority. There’s genuine wisdom in being careful about who you let into your inner circle, people of deep conviction who are actually pursuing godliness, whose standards and daily rhythms line up with biblical truth. Those relationships sharpen you and keep you grounded.

But beyond that core group, we aren’t commanded to huddle up in insular little communities of self-protection, treating everyone outside the tribe like a potential virus. We’re commanded to go out into the world and be salt and light. To bind up wounds, to listen well, to show up in the messy places, and to carry hope to people who need it most, precisely because we believe the gospel is powerful enough to meet them there.

The people most concerned about guilt by association were usually the Pharisees. Jesus, meanwhile, kept showing up at tables everyone else considered inappropriate.

Maybe the question isn’t whether other people’s messiness will rub off on us. Maybe the question is whether we actually believe the light we’re carrying is capable of illuminating anything at all. Ultimately, if our faith is real, our light should be strong enough to shine into darkness rather than hiding from it.

It’s easy to love humanity in the abstract. It’s much harder to love actual humans. But that’s where Jesus spent His time, and I suspect that’s where we’ll find Him still—in tattoo chairs and divorce courts and messy places full of broken people who are still image bearers. The longer I live, the more convinced I become that working to understand people is not a threat to the gospel. It’s often the first step toward faithfully living it.

And if that means occasionally kicking against the goads of fear, tribalism, and self-protection, so be it.

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Call me judgmental, but Snow White is, without question, my least favorite Disney princess. The shrill singing voice is the least of it. What I could never stomach was the philosophy baked into her signature song “Someday my prince will come.” Five words that subtly encouraged a generation of little girls to believe that happiness was not something you built or even chose, but something you waited for—patient, passive, and pretty. Just around the corner, just out of reach, always someday, and always co-dependently attached to something you could not personally control— a man’s affection.

Is there anything wrong with desiring a happy fruitful marriage or romance in general? Well of course not. And I have to shake my head and chuckle at the realization that the Lord, in His infinite wisdom, decided to bless me with a daughter who possesses every ounce of romantic whimsy I seem to have lacked myself. Some days I catch her staring off into space at the kitchen table when she’s supposed to be completing her math homework, and I don’t even have to ask; I know she’s thinking about cute boys.

And there’s nothing wrong with this. It’s hardwiring. Humans were created for connection. I would not stomp that out of her. But I will do my darndest to guide the longing and help her understand that she is a complete and purposeful human being right now, not a rough draft waiting to be finished by someone else’s love. I need her to know that her life has weight and meaning and momentum independent of whether a man ever notices her across a crowded room. I need her to know that “someday” is a lovely hope, but it is a terrible permanent address.

Unfortunately, there are corners of evangelicalism that have spent decades teaching girls to live there. I know because I was raised in that milieu.

To be fair, not everyone was like this. It was not present in every family. But it was present enough that the message became familiar: your highest calling as a female is to be a wife and mother. Your future is not something you build so much as something you wait for. Your story begins when a man chooses you, or, in the Doug Wilson sphere of influence, when your father chooses a husband for you.

For some of my friends, this wasn’t merely implied; it was quite explicit. For example, the family college budget was reserved for their brothers because the boys would need careers. The girls would need husbands.

And while most evangelicals today would reject that level of bluntness, the underlying assumptions have never entirely disappeared. In fact, they seem to be experiencing something of a revival.

As birth rates decline and conversations about demographic collapse dominate certain corners of the internet, a growing chorus is insisting that society’s problems can be solved if we simply return to a romanticized version of 1954. The ideal woman, we’re told, is a wife, a mother, a homemaker. Career ambitions are viewed with suspicion. Childless women are treated as cautionary tales. Single women are pitied, scolded, or regarded as unfinished projects waiting for their real lives to begin. They’re “feminists.” They’re “boss babes.” They’re victims of a culture that has lied to them, and now they’re obviously going to die alone with the twelve cats they acquired to temper their loneliness.

Never mind that a lot of them would genuinely love to be married to good men and just haven’t met the right person. My best friend is a brilliant, gorgeous woman who wrote pointedly about her experience as a single woman in the church, and I think everyone ought to really consider her perspective.

Husbands don’t grow on trees, and selecting a spouse isn’t like picking a flavor of ice cream. It’s actually pretty consequential. We aren’t talking about a situation where any old husband will do. There are some pretty disastrous implications for getting this wrong. Ask me how I know.

And yet, many women, indoctrinated from youth to believe their entire identity hinges on marriage and motherhood, end up getting really desperate when neither option presents itself before their biological clocks start ticking. I think of the poor young woman in Doug Wilson’s church who, eager for a mate, approached her church elders to help her find one, only to have them match her with a level 3 serial pedophile who was ultimately aroused by the child born of their union. Bad things happen when desperation is the inevitable byproduct of a theology that has convinced a woman she is incomplete, when the alternative to marriage isn’t a full and meaningful life; it’s failure. It’s pity. It’s the cats.

The pressure to “just get married” doesn’t produce wise, discerning women who know their own worth and choose accordingly. It produces desperate, panicked would-be-brides who convince themselves that ANY port in storm is better than being caught out at sea alone. I’ve known way too many women who chose the first port they could find. I myself was once one of these women.

What’s needed in this gap are the voices of mature, seasoned women who speak wisdom to the younger generations about how to hold the longing loosely. Women who can say, with hard-won authority, “Your desire for love is good, but your life right now is not a waiting room.” What’s needed are women who refuse to peddle either the progressive lie that marriage is a patriarchal trap or the conservative lie that you are nothing without one.

So I was pleased to see such a voice amplified by Ligonier Ministries this week when they shared a video interview with Rebecca Van Doodewaard, specifically offering encouragement to single women. Her message was refreshingly simple, and I’ll paraphrase: “Don’t make an idol of marriage. Bloom where God has planted you. Be fruitful in the season you’re in. Serve God, pursue meaningful work, invest in ministry, contribute to the world around you. Don’t sit around waiting for your life to start someday. Live the life you’ve been given today.”

It was a much-needed message full of wisdom and maternal love. It was the sort of advice that should have been entirely uncontroversial.

The reaction was anything but.

The theobro Twitterverse went postal. I’ll let the replies speak for themselves.

One man, a self-described Ligonier devotee, complained that “we simply do not need any more mature married women telling younger single women to go get graduate degrees and careers.” The content of the video, apparently, was less offensive than the audacity of a woman having opinions about other women’s lives.

Another declared it “absolute feminist garbage.”

A third helpfully informed us that “we should be encouraging single women in the church to find a good Christian man and get married, actually,” which, again, is precisely the mentality Van Doodewaard was gently pushing back against, apparently to this man’s great distress.

One account called her a witch. A literal witch. For telling women to live fruitfully.

And then, my personal favorite, delivered with the kind of self-awareness one typically associates with an ironing board, “At some point, we just need to stop letting women on podcasts.”

Reformed & Confessional stated, “You really should delete this and spare yourself the embarrassment. This is terrible advice from an obviously unqualified counselor. Marriage is an idol? Are you kidding me? A husband is Christ to his wife? A woman is saved through bearing children. Idolatry?! Are you serious?”

The consensus among these folks seems to be that, if something is inherently good, it’s impossible to make it an idol. But that’s not how idolatry works. In fact, idolatry almost always begins with something good.

Children are good. Families are good. Marriage is good. Ministry is good. Church is good. Patriotism is good. Work is good. The problem isn’t the thing itself. The problem is what happens when a good thing is elevated into an ultimate thing.

Scripture is full of examples of this. God asked Abraham to place Isaac on the altar because Isaac was a good and cherished gift. Similarly, God actually commanded Moses to make a bronze serpent. In its intended function, it was a good thing. But then the people began to cling too tightly to it, to give it reverence and importance that belonged exclusively to God.

In Luke, Jesus expressly warns against idolatry of family when He says, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”

Does this mean Jesus wants us to actually hate our families? No. It means He demands our loyalty to Him first and above our affections for the gifts He gives us. Idols are rarely obvious acts of rebellion. More often, they are gifts we clutch too tightly, blessings we cannot imagine living without, and desires that begin to dictate our decisions, fears, and sense of worth.

This includes the desire for marriage. But it also includes something uglier that was on full display in the literally hundreds of those replies, such as the demand that other people fix your civilizational anxieties for you. When a man logs onto the internet to rage at a woman he’s never met for not being married with children, he is revealing that he has placed his hopes for the survival of everything he cares about on the biological output of women who owe him nothing. That hope should be anchored to Jesus, not strange women’s wombs. That is an idol, and other people’s bodies are its altar.

And idols make people cruel. A man who is genuinely trusting God with the future does not panic when a single woman gets a graduate degree. That panic is diagnostic. It tells you where his faith actually lives.

I could write pages and pages about why, ironically, no self-respecting woman should want to go anywhere near the types of men that behave as viciously as the theobros responding to the Ligonier post, but I’m not convinced that would actually help anyone, so I’ll leave it at this:

The message Rebecca Van Doodewaard delivered was not radical or feminist or heretical in the slightest. It was, at its core, the same thing Jesus said to Martha when she was so consumed with what was lacking that she couldn’t be present to what was right in front of her: “This moment matters. You are here now. Live here. Drink it in.”

For women whose princes never come gallivanting along to bequeath upon them a sense of purpose, the relevant question to be asking is, “What else did God make me for, and am I busy doing it?”

Marriage is a beautiful gift, but it was never intended to carry the weight of a woman’s entire identity. Husbands make terrible messiahs. They age. They get sick. They disappoint us. Sometimes they leave. Sometimes they die. They were never meant to be the source of our purpose. It ought to be something of a relief to have that burden lifted off their shoulders.

The truth is that not every woman will marry. Some will be widowed. Some will be abandoned. Some will spend years hoping for a husband who never arrives. And some will discover that God has equipped them with gifts, talents, and opportunities that bear extraordinary fruit in the world beyond their own front door.

None of that is failure. None of that is sin. None of that is a betrayal of anything worth protecting. There is simply too much worth doing to spend your one life staring down the road, waiting for a prince who may never come.

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The battle lines are drawn between complementarians and egalitarians, and if you’re not a member of the Protestant church, that might sound like Greek to you.

Simply put: complementarians believe men and women are equal before God but that He assigns them different leadership roles in family and church. Egalitarians believe those roles should be based on gifts and calling, not sex. In the context of this particular argument, it’s a debate about whether or not women in the church are allowed to teach or pastor men and about how far the restriction on that teaching ought to extend.

Hardcore complementarians are often accused of trending toward legalism and being loveless to the lost. Hardcore egalitarians, on the other hand, are often accused of being way too permissive and playing footsie with heresy, especially when it comes to embracing LGBT theology. There are enough extremists in either camp to justify the caricatures to some degree. There are genuinely cruel and loveless people in leadership in complementarian circles, and way too many prominent egalitarians do preach an altered gospel that promises salvation without surrender to the lordship of Christ.

It’s something of a hot mess, and the faithful thousands caught in the middle are often left frustrated, not by the theology itself, but by the loudest voices claiming to represent it.

I’m blissfully egalitarian. I think doctrine that silences women is derived from poorly exegeted Scripture, and I think it’s far too consequential to stay quiet about. But that argument has been made ad infinitum by minds more brilliant and learned than mine. Marg Mowczko, Philip Barton Payne, Craig Keener, Ben Witherington, Michael Bird, and others have already done a stellar job of illuminating it.

So I want to set the debate aside for a moment.

Because even if you’re thoroughly convinced that complementarianism is what Scripture demands, even if you’re certain that God has forbidden women from becoming pastors or teaching Scripture to men, some of what gets taught and practiced under that banner should trouble you too. It’s not just that the theology is wrong (though I believe it is), but that even if you think it’s right, we have to acknowledge that the application has drifted somewhere that plain logic, basic dignity, and even the complementarian framework itself can’t justify.

That’s a conversation we need to have if we are ever going to get anywhere at all.

I can force myself to stomach (not subscribe to) the belief that God forbids women from teaching the Bible to men in churches. But I won’t ignore the litany of wonky places prominent hardcore complementarians have taken this belief. Let me give you a few examples of what I’m talking about.

Let’s start with the now infamous directions example from John Piper’s widely read book “Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.” Piper describes a man who stops to ask a housewife for directions. She knows the answer. Simple enough. But Piper takes a detour to instruct his readers on the careful way a godly woman ought to deliver that information, warning that “there is a way for that housewife to direct the man that neither of them feels their mature femininity or masculinity compromised.”

A man’s masculinity, apparently, is fragile enough to be threatened by a woman knowing more about an arbitrary subject than he does.

Piper’s concern here isn’t about Scripture, or the church, or the office of pastor. It’s about a woman knowing which way is north. Whatever one believes about the limits of female authority in a worship service, nothing in the complementarian framework, not a single proof text, has anything to say about directions to the Piggly Wiggly.

And how, pray tell, is a deferential woman supposed to alter the directions in order to communicate proper deference anyway? Must she sacrifice clarity and confidence in order to protect his ego from the mortifying reality that she knows more about this than he does? Should she raise the inflection at the end of each sentence as if to indicate that she might not know what the heck she’s talking about? Does she preface the instructions with, “I could be wrong, but…”? Does she gesture vaguely northward and let him figure out the rest so he can feel he arrived there on his own?

What kind of tomfoolery is this?

And Piper didn’t stop at directions. When asked whether women could serve as police officers, he argued that if a woman’s job involves a good deal of directives toward men, “men and women won’t flourish in the long run in that relationship without compromising profound biblical and psychological issues.” He stopped short of producing a list of disqualifying careers, though he acknowledged he’d be seen as an “absolute dinosaur” for saying so. One blogger noted the logical conclusion: where exactly could a woman work where she’d never be in the position of giving instructions to a man?

So we’re not talking about who can hold the office of pastor. We’re talking about whether a woman can pull someone over for speeding.

Then along comes John MacArthur, who dispensed with the nuance entirely.

In a sermon titled “The Subordination and Equality of Women,” he stated, “A woman, whether she is married or single, must recognize that in general, as a woman, she must have a spirit of submission to all men.”

Um what? Citation please? Is this what Scripture teaches? I have to submit to ALL men because of my sex? Andrew Tate? Nick Fuentes? Aggressively unworthy monsters who haven’t earned an ounce of my respect? Are we sure this is the right religion here?

These two men are hardly alone. Tim Bayly, Senior Pastor of Trinity Reformed Church stated, “I used to think it was progressive to promote women into authority over men. Now I see women judges, mayors, cops, prison guards, and I feel shame.”

But why? We need women in these fields. Female rape victims benefit from interviews from female cops. Female inmates shouldn’t have to shower in front of men. Wisdom is personified in the feminine in the Bible. Deborah served as a judge over all Israel. Huldah advised kings. Anna prophesied in the temple. Phoebe served as a deacon in the church at Cenchreae. Priscilla taught Apollos. Eudoia and Syntyche co-labored with Paul. Junia was outstanding among the apostles.

Where in heaven’s name did we get this ridiculous idea that men will be emasculated if forced to endure instruction from a woman? It certainly isn’t the Bible. What kind of masculinity is that aggressively fragile in the first place?

It reminds me of a comical scene from the old movie “The King and I” where Yul Brynner’s character barks, “No one’s head shall be higher than the king’s!”

It’s played for laughs in the movie. In the church, we call it “biblical manhood and womanhood.” But it’s not particularly biblical, nor is it very funny when played out in the real world.

Can we also talk about what this does to men? A theology that tells a man his masculine identity depends on his ability to keep women beneath him isn’t producing strength in anybody. It’s producing a guy who needs a guaranteed subordinate just to feel okay about himself. A man who falls apart when a woman knows more than he does, leads better than he does, or outranks him at work was never actually given the tools to become secure in the first place. He just inherited a system that kept the threat at bay. And by “threat,” I mean competent women who, in reality, ought to be viewed as assets, co-laborers in the kingdom with gifts to contribute to the greater good.

And where are we drawing the lines here to protect the menfolk from the errant female opinion? I know of a female worship leader who was the most qualified candidate to lead Thursday night worship and was passed over anyway because of her sex. The church got lower quality music, which was apparently deemed preferable to a hierarchy violation.

Al Mohler, the man proposing the amendment that started this whole conversation, was asked last week about a woman on her church’s podcast who answers questions about the previous Sunday’s sermon. His verdict? She’s teaching. And if she’s functioning as a pastor, the title doesn’t matter. According to Mohler, the podcast itself presents a problem.

These are the types of nuances with which the SBC must wrestle this week.

If a woman speaks to a crowd of pastors, is it evidence of her teaching men? Or is it only “teaching” if she uses Scripture? Or is it only wrong if she explains Scripture, and in that case, does it suddenly become “preaching” regardless of the setting? Or is it only preaching if there’s a pulpit involved? A Sunday morning service? A title?

If women shouldn’t be teaching men, what happens when homeschool moms have sons who hit puberty? Should she shift their instruction to a qualified male?

If a female missionary preaches the gospel in a foreign land, and a man happens to hear her message, is she in sin?

If a female podcaster communicates her understanding of a biblical perspective on cultural issues, and men happen to be listening, is she coloring outside the lines?

The questions pile up fast once you start pulling the thread. I once attended a church that required a male chaperone to be present any time a woman addressed the congregation. It wasn’t that she was necessarily saying anything wrong or that she lacked wisdom or credibility. It was good old fashioned legalism that insisted on believing that her voice, unaccompanied by male oversight, should be treated as inherently suspect.

What does it communicate to a woman, to her daughters sitting in those pews, when the institutional message is that her words cannot be trusted to stand on their own?

And don’t get me started on what is, perhaps, the most intellectually embarrassing argument in the complementarian arsenal: the claim that because Eve was deceived in the garden, women as a category are more susceptible to deception than men. Set aside for a moment that Adam was standing right there and ate the fruit anyway. Set aside that the biblical record is absolutely littered with men who were catastrophically, spectacularly deceived by false prophets, by their own pride, by power, by lust, by greed. We are asked to accept that the lesson of Genesis 3 is that women can’t be trusted to think clearly, and we are asked to accept this without laughing.

It is careless Bible handling, and we should say so. But I’m beginning to wonder if it’s a little more insidious than carelessness because it’s increasingly beginning to feel a little more intentional and a lot less accidental. It feels a lot more like a power hoard than a movement shaped by the God who chose to announce the resurrection to women first, in a culture that wouldn’t even allow them to testify in court.

What kind of army sends half their soldiers home so they can hoard the work for themselves? Maybe not one that fully understands the mission or the heart of the One who commanded it.

If you are a complementarian who genuinely believes Scripture requires this, I’m not asking you to abandon your convictions. I’m asking you to hold them honestly. Scrutinize them. Wrestle with their big picture. Refuse to let them be weaponized beyond what you actually believe they mean. Push back when the men in your tradition use the Bible to protect their egos instead of shepherd their people. Ask yourself, with some regularity, whether the framework you’re defending still looks anything like the Jesus you’re defending it for.

Because the women in your churches are watching. And I promise you a lot of them are more than capable of telling the difference.

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Several months ago, I had a most humbling experience, what you might call the epitome of a come-to-Jesus moment. I’ll never be the same. It was a turning point in my life.

For various reasons, and through a set of trying circumstances that all converged in the span of a few weeks, I hit a wall. In the weeks prior, I’d been managing well enough, but struggling from time to time. Yet I was mostly gung-ho, making gains and moving forward in my job, and being my usual Energizer Bunny self.

But then something strange started pulling me deep into an emotional abyss, and I suddenly found myself unable to deal with it. A few weeks later, the despair intensified even more, and many layers of grief, exhaustion, terrible psychological strain and stress, and long-term heartache enveloped me. I cracked under the pressure, and I wound up weeping profusely, ugly-crying for about an entire hour.

My whole face was buzzing and shaking. Was I being delivered of something? It almost felt like it. It was intense. Through heaving, guttural sobs, I vocalized things that I had long been stifling. I could no longer keep a stiff upper lip, grit my teeth, tap into the strength reserves in my gut, and hold in the anguish. It all came spilling out of me. My body started convulsing as I mentally cratered, and it had probably been a decade since I’d wept like this. I’ll never forget it. In the week before this happened, I had this haunting premonition, thinking that I might be on the brink of a nervous breakdown, as low-grade panic attacks were becoming a semi-regular occurrence, frequently simmering in my abdomen. My body was seizing up, telling me to stop and listen, and I couldn’t ignore it. On some days, I woke up in the morning in such a desolate state the first thing I thought of was: “Ugh, I can’t wait to go to sleep tonight.”

Letting it all out was awful, but it was freeing in a way, too. I had forgotten how good it felt to unburden the soul.

This life-changing ugly-crying episode was weird, too, because while I felt better afterward (I probably lost a pound of weight in snot alone), I also felt worse and have been fighting a gnarly depression ever since. I don’t remember everything that came out of my mouth while crying so hard, but I distinctly recall my voice warbling, punctuated by sobs and gasps for breath: “My heart can’t hope anymore. I’ve got nothing left. Nothing.” There was no point in pretending I was OK. I wasn’t. I hadn’t turned my back on God, but faith? What’s that? And then I wailed some more.

Theologically rich and robust orthodoxy didn’t comfort me a lick during those dreadful moments in the pit as I fell apart. For about an hour, I was just sitting on the floor next to my bed, despondent with a red face, lots of snot bubbles, and probably a quart of hot tears. A good friend was by my side, listening and consoling me, and then he prayed for me. Man, I love that guy fiercely.

I would tell him about a month later, after another much shorter bout of crying: “My testimony is that I believe in the cross of Jesus Christ and his resurrection. I’ll stake my life on it. Anymore? That’s basically it. That’s all I know.”

He replied: “Amen. I’m with you.” And then he hugged me and wiped away my tears.

I’ve written repeatedly on this blog about what I call the “perfect theology idol,” and I came to realize that, to some degree, I was beholden to it myself, even as I was critical of it because of how I saw it in particularly pronounced ways in other people. I’ve heard it said that while it’s easy to point the finger, remember that when you do, there are three pointing back at you. Ooof, yes. So true. And as I wrote in the last blog on this subject, I was spiritually defaulting to “facts are not determined by your feelings, and the fact is that you don’t see the whole picture. God is doing things you can’t see.”

I think I was defaulting to that so much because, in addition to the fact that it’s biblical, I’ve watched people firsthand who allow their feelings to rule them, as though deeply felt emotions and impulses are the supreme authority in their lives. If they feel it, it’s real, and they’re not going to question it, and they should yield to it. Suppressing them is unhealthy, they think. Those who do this will say things like “I must be true to myself, and I’m going to be true to myself.”

I just can’t and won’t roll with that because it echoes of selfishness and narcissism. Governing one’s life by feelings and emotions, particularly given that they can be fleeting, is not wise. Often, it’s terribly destructive and can even lead to grave evil. Feelings may point us to real things, but they themselves aren’t the hallmarks of truth. It’s a distinction that matters.

And yet, especially within theologically orthodox evangelical Christianity, in my experience, it’s as though the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction as to deny the importance of feelings altogether, or that they be diminished to the point of an afterthought. Maybe we can feel them, but if they bring you to say uncomfortable, unbiblical things out loud, that’s a no-no, a danger zone. Many evangelicals feel compelled to resist the theological progressives and liberals (rightly so, on many matters), who are all about all the feelz. So, naturally, evangelicals are psychologically predisposed to frown on them in light of the spiritual deception that can enter the picture, because sometimes it does. Feelings can be deceptive and misleading.

But in my come-to-Jesus moment last fall, I was…a miserable mess of all kinds of feelings. While I didn’t feel the pressure to put on a shiny-happy-people plastic Christian smile, I did think I could just keep going and plow ahead, believing in the same manner I had been. But I couldn’t. And I wasn’t going to pretend I didn’t feel what I did.

The problems I was facing and continue to face? I still can’t fix them. I had no idea what to do other than to seek more help, which I’m getting. But progress is pretty slow. Barring some mind-blowing supernatural miracle (which I’d more than welcome!), at the moment, I still don’t see a way out of some of the situations I’m in, given certain circumstances. Previously, I was going on the Christian-ese “Just wait, better days are coming. Just have faith.” And yeah, I was reading my Bible daily, going to church, praying hard, confessing sin when the Holy Spirit convicts me, staying devoted and faithful as I can. Doing all the stuff.

But my heart was (and is) horribly sore and tired, and I even told God not long ago, processing some of this grinding sorrow: “STOP jerking me around! Clearly, you could intervene, but you’re not, and I’ve STILL got nothing left.” I said this at the invitation of a new counselor I’m now seeing. As those words exited my mouth, my heart quaked and shivered violently in my chest. It felt like I was giving voice to something real, but it also felt…wrong. Though conflicted, I finally gave myself permission to articulate the innermost stirrings of my depths.

I’m well aware that God’s ways are not my ways, his thoughts are not my thoughts, and his ways are higher, but my nervous system was about to give out. I wanted to keep believing and just say “no” to the grief, thinking that if I allowed myself to grieve too much, it was somehow proof that I was allowing my feelings to govern me and not God, that I was somehow trusting Him less.

It’s such silly thinking when I actually ponder it, but I convinced myself that if I didn’t cry, I could demonstrate to God that I have a stronger faith and that His Word had taken firm root in me. I could suck it up and be strong. If I need therapy, I’ll do the dude thing and pump iron in the gym. (That does help, for the record.)

For why should I be upset more than the usual ups and downs, if I have the Word hidden in my heart? And so, if I refuse to be discouraged and ever get to a place where I’m wailing in a puddle of snot, maybe then I’d finally break through whatever temporal mess I’m in, and life will get even better! In the Kingdom, there’s only one direction: from strength to strength, right? From one degree of glory to the next, no? Maybe if I were anchored in the Word even more, I’d prevail against this funk. Heck, maybe I won’t even have to deal with it at all! Victory in Jesus, right? Gimme some of that!

If you’d have asked me last year, “Do you think your theology is water-tight and perfectly pristine? Do you fully believe everything God says in His Word down to the letter? Do you apply it to every area of your life with exact, 100% accurate precision?” I’d of course have told you no to all three questions. In fact, I don’t think there has ever been a single follower of Jesus in history who has ever done so, even if they can quote the Bible like the back of their hand and skillfully exposit Scripture.

Yet when I consider that the early church didn’t even have a completed Bible? And that for most of Christian history, the average Christian didn’t even possess a copy? I realize that it has only been since the Gutenberg press and with the widespread biblical literacy (which is a good thing) that these quandaries I’m speaking of can exist.

Devout Evangelical Christians read and study their Bibles obsessively. That’s a strength. It’s good to pore over and absorb God’s Word. I don’t know how many times I’ve read it cover to cover, but many times. None of that study was wasted.

And indeed, we live in a time when false teachers have gone out into the world. We are also living through a time when many such wolves (and churches, to their great embarrassment, that have platformed them) are being exposed. Perhaps this was contributing to my distress, but I’ve determined in my heart to remain faithful to God in every way. But therein is more self-imposed pressure from the perfect theology idol.

I sometimes wonder if, in my Western, heavily propositional mindset, I haven’t functionally started believing that, because of the sophistication and bookish knowledge we have in a post-Gutenberg world, I could have it all figured out? That this perfect theological interpretation and application of Scripture exists out there, and that I just have to get there, and I’ll have this well-ordered, good life free from major problems. If I can pack my head and fill my heart with perfect theology and sound doctrine, I’ll have found the keys to the Kingdom. And if I can get there and absorb God’s Word, I can also avoid ever getting to the point where I’m saying things out loud that aren’t biblical, and I can overcome all the crap without winding up in a puddle of snot. Maybe I can be so theologically astute that I can mostly avoid negative emotions and always focus on the positive ones. Or some such sh*t.

All of this…it’s such a deception. It’s a different deception than those who embrace the feelings-as-supreme-truth deception, but a deception nonetheless. In fact, I know this perfect theology idol contributed to my humbling meltdown last fall. All the pressure it put on me sure didn’t help.

Truth is, God sees me and loves me, unsightly snot bubbles and all. I’m leaning on other people in this season while I process. This professional counselor I’ve engaged lately says a few things that sound progressive-liberal (though he’s not one) to me about “holding space,” and it’s not language I’d ever use. But I can’t tell you how liberating it is for him to push me to give voice to things I do feel, to hear him say, “It’s OK to not have hope and hate your life right now. I’ll hold hope for you.”

How does that work, exactly? I can’t say I know. But I’m going with it, even if it’s imperfect theology. Because Lord knows, my theology isn’t perfect, even as I’ll affix what granules of hope germinating in the snot of my life on the One who knew no sin yet was acquainted with grief.

Selah.

Some famous author once said (and I paraphrase), “I write to find out what I think.”

I offer this piece in that spirit.

Somewhere along the journey of my last failed attempt to give up sugar, I discovered that my body (specifically my digestive system) cannot really tolerate artificial sweeteners. Sweeten my coffee with Splenda, and I may very well lose weight, but it won’t be because of my newfound self-control; it will be because I’m curled up on the bathroom floor with severe stomach cramps and everything else unpleasant that follows.

It’s as if the rest of my body has joined forces with my brain to guard my addiction to real sugar by saying, “Nope, imposters! You shall not pass!”

It’s happened to me enough times that I’ve just written off artificial sweeteners altogether. There’s no place for them in my life. I’d rather just not have to deal with the consequences of trying.

This morning, while scrolling through Instagram, I had this kind of earth shattering realization that sweeteners are not the only casualty of this approach to pain in my life.

A high school friend had shared a video of the annual high school choir concert at my alma mater, a Reformed Presbyterian high school back in Tacoma where I myself was once a big time choir geek. If I’m not mistaken, every year since its inception in 1992, the spring choir concert has concluded with a beautiful choral piece sung in Latin called “Non Nobis Domine,” which, translated, means “Not unto us, O Lord, but to Thy name give glory.”

The song was prominently featured in Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 depiction of Henry V, and honestly, it’s just a gorgeous, emotionally evocative piece to sing. Over time, it became something of an anchoring ritual for the school. Year after year, decade after decade, each new wave of students stepped into the same tradition, lending their voices to the same soaring chorus their parents, teachers, and alumni had sung before them. There was always something strangely moving about that moment. For a few minutes, the performance ceased to belong to any one graduating class and instead became part of a much larger continuum of memory, reverence, and shared identity.

I had largely forgotten about the song until my friend shared a video of this year’s performance of it, directed by a godly woman whose present battle with terminal cancer made it something of a miracle she was even strong enough to stand for its duration. As I watched the video and heard the familiar notes ring out, I realized that, included in the choir, were the children of some of my former classmates, and I was equal parts bewildered, irritated, and humbled to discover the stream of tears cascading down my blotchy face. “Well this is interesting,” I thought. “Wasn’t expecting this.”

In fact, I had spent the previous night fuming over the discovery that my high school English teacher, the man who taught me to write and who carefully sculpted so much of my thinking as a teenager, was routinely sharing aggressively misogynistic content on social media and presenting it as God’s honest truth. One of the first stories this man assigned us to read as incoming freshman was a short piece called “Sunrise on the Veld,” and the moral he extracted from it was this: “Children are foolish. If you think you know what you’re talking about, you don’t. Empty your mind. Outsource your critical thinking to adults like me, and I will fill you with my wisdom.”

So he filled our minds for the next four years, and I’ve spent a major part of the decades since trying to disentangle the good things spiritual authority figures like him placed in there from the loads of crap woven into it. It has been a particularly long and frustrating row to hoe, like taking a badly tangled ball of jewelry and trying to identify where the ends of the individual pieces are within the mess or if the effort is even worth it in the end.

This week he shared a post from Lori Alexander (one of the most ridiculous women on the entire worldwide web) that demonized women for working outside the home and essentially blamed the entirety of feminism (even the good stuff) for the collapse of western civilization.

I encounter this crap and grieve for the generations of bright young women who, like me, were brainwashed to believe our holiness was best achieved by staying small and compliant and invisible. I grieve for the generations of stunted young men who were influenced into embracing a stunted, controlling, insecure version of masculinity that ultimately looks very little like Jesus.

This whole struggle has featured so prominently in the everyday reality of my own life, presenting in everything from the kind of men I chose to date to the types of abuse I chose to enable to the hardcore belief that if I just stayed longer and prayed harder, everything would be okay.

And I know I’m not alone in this. On the other side of my own brutal wrestling match, I’ve become something of an accidental confessor—fielding calls and messages from women in that church school’s orbit who are desperate for permission to leave abusive husbands, validation that their husband’s porn addiction counts as betrayal, and reassurance that Jesus loves them too much to require them to stay small and suffer for the sake of someone else’s theology.

It all got to be a bit too much. For a long time, my strategy with all of it has looked a lot like my strategy with artificial sweeteners: just write it off entirely. If engaging with any part of my Reformed upbringing means risking the stomach cramps (the grief, the rage, the identity crisis), then maybe there’s just no place for it in my life. It’s easier to not have to deal with the consequences of trying. Like Splenda, this system might very well be a good fit for someone else’s life, but for mine? Hard pass.

I do this with people. I do this with places. I do this with entire chapters of my own story. If the cost of keeping something good means risking contact with the pain attached to it, I have a very practiced reflex: burn it down and walk away.

In life, I’ve had to just quit a lot of things, ideas, and even people cold turkey. Self-protection and survival have required it. Hope can be a really heavy burden — hope that a community could be reclaimed, that a theology could be untangled, that a relationship could survive its complications, that a thing you loved could be loved again safely. It’s so much easier to slay it entirely than to drag it around behind you like a ball and chain.

But I’m starting to think that wisdom, the kind that only comes after the dust has settled, requires me to go back in and do the harder thing.

I don’t have to subscribe to Reformed theology to name that there is goodness in the people who do. I don’t have to deny the real harm it has caused to also hold space for the sincerity of the faithful who inhabited those pews, who were genuinely giving their best efforts to love God and love their neighbors well. I’m not betraying myself or lying when I give myself permission to reflect on the good parts of my experience and think, “This part was beautiful. This part was righteous. And it still is.”

It’s not all-or-nothing. When we torch every painful experience to the ground, we’re not just destroying the bad; we’re losing the goodness that, I think, God always intended us to reclaim from the fire.

It reminds me of watching the old reality show called Yukon Gold about people who spend their lives driving excavators out in the diddysticks, risking thousands and thousands of dollars for the hope that they might strike gold. In order to even hope at being successful, the gold miners have to sluice through bucket after bucket of sludge and debris in search of what looks like little more than gold-colored dust. It’s tiny, easily overlooked, almost indistinguishable from the muck surrounding it. But it’s there. And it’s absolutely worth the sifting.

In my natural process, I don’t want to create space for the possibility that this is a worthwhile endeavor, but every once in a while, I’ll catch a hint of gold in the distance, and I’ll begrudgingly roll up my sleeves and say, “Okay. Maybe I’ll spend a few minutes excavating today.”

This week, in my own sifting process, “Non Nobis Domine” was in the bucket. I almost missed it.

To God be the glory that I didn’t.

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I cringed inside and thought, “Oh for heaven’s sake.”

For some context, the Rededicate 250 conference was organized around the approaching 250th anniversary of American independence, structured as a call to national prayer, repentance, worship, and thanksgiving. Eric Metaxas, Christian author, speaker, and syndicated radio host, was a part of the event’s speaker lineup.

I have no doubt the majority of people in attendance were sincere believers earnestly seeking God’s face. Some drove hundreds of miles simply to worship alongside other Christians and pray for their country. I have friends who attended and spoke movingly about the presence of the Holy Spirit there. Nothing I’m saying in this essay is intended to mock or diminish the faithfulness of ordinary believers who showed up hungry for God.

I also want to clarify that I have zero problem with elected officials being open about their faith or inviting God into their work. And I think it’s either naive or self-deluding to believe that anyone actually separates their deepest convictions from their political action. We all vote for the laws that reflect what we believe is true and right and just. Christians who opt out don’t get a more neutral world; they get a world shaped entirely by everyone else’s convictions, which, as it often turns out, are aggressively hostile to their own.

But the “how” and the “who” matter quite a lot. So when influential Christian leaders like Metaxas publicly align themselves with leaders whose repeated conduct has deeply dishonored the name of Jesus, someone has to be willing to say, “Hold up. What exactly are you inviting us to build? And what kind of offering are you expecting God to bless?”

Scripture is not exactly vague about what qualifies someone to spiritually lead God’s people. Shall we review the biblical standards for pastoral ministry? Above reproach. Faithful to spouse. Temperate and self-controlled. Respectable. Hospitable. Able to teach. Not given to drunkenness. Not violent, but gentle. Not quarrelsome. Not a lover of money. Manages his household. Not a recent convert. Has a good reputation with outsiders. (1 Timothy 3:1-7)

Titus 1:6-9 echoes the importance of these qualities and adds “not overbearing or quick-tempered” to the list.

Then take 1 Peter 5:1-3 into account, which requires a pastor to be a shepherd, not for financial gain, and especially not lording authority over those entrusted to them. So how do these guys measure up against those standards?

This is the point in the essay where I inevitably get called some combination of divisive or judgmental or self-righteous, which is fine. It’s not the first time, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. But come on, church. What are we doing here?

Greg Locke is the guy who divorced his wife of 21 years to marry his secretary shortly thereafter. According to the biblical standard, that is in and of itself disqualifying. If that weren’t enough, his pathologically dysfunctional relationship with the truth ought to be enough to give people pause.

For example, he repeatedly denied being arrested for a suspended license, even after the mugshot was released. This defies logic. It’s like listening to my 4-year-old deny having eaten the Oreos through a face full of chocolate crumbs. Sorry, buddy. Gig is up.

Another example of erratic, spiritually manipulative behavior came in one of Locke’s public sermons, where he announced that demons told him some of the women in his wife’s Bible study were full blown spell-casting witches who needed to be exorcised. “We got first and last names of six witches that are in our church. And you know what’s strange, three of you are in this room right now.”

Can you imagine being in this woman’s Bible study? Would you ever feel safe contributing any opinion about anything again?

It doesn’t stop there, though.

When someone shot more than 60 bullets into Locke’s home, he claimed he was being persecuted for righteousness, that someone was trying to intimidate him to give up preaching. He shared security footage of the event far and wide, claiming, “This is what happens when you’re bold for Jesus.” Authorities later indicated the attack was tied to Locke’s stepson and his associates, not to Locke’s preaching ministry.

He declared from the pulpit that he had photo evidence of Kenneth Copeland being a “sex-trafficking rapist” and made similar claims about Joel Osteen, Oprah, and Tom Hanks. “I’ll stop preaching if what I’m telling you is not true,” he swore. Of course that promise was just another one of his many lies.

Is this the kind of ministry upon which America’s faith leaders should be inviting the masses to build our foundation? Really?

Or let’s talk about Sean Feucht, who is currently embroiled in a federal lawsuit where a donor alleges he took a $250,000 donation intended to fund worship tour stops and used it to buy personal property.

Nine former workers (not random critics, but national and regional directors of his own ministries) signed a public statement accusing him of longstanding misconduct including embezzlement, wire fraud, and failure to report income to the IRS. They allege he repeatedly used ministry credit cards for personal expenses, diverted donations to personal accounts, and used ministry funds to rent his own Montana cabin for a board meeting.

His real estate portfolio, which he accumulated almost entirely during his years leading nonprofits, runs into the millions across California, Washington D.C., Montana, and Pennsylvania. Sean Feucht Ministries last filed tax records in 2020, then reregistered as a church, conveniently eliminating its obligation to disclose financial information. MinistryWatch now gives the ministry an “F” for transparency and recommends donors withhold giving.

When these allegations went public, Feucht’s response was to call them spiritual warfare. Literally. He opened his video statement by announcing he had been writing a book on spiritual warfare and had “no clue” he’d be living it in real time. He did not address a single specific allegation. He dismissed his accusers, people who had given years of their lives to his ministries, as “embittered, angry, upset former volunteers” who “know nothing about nothing.”

That is not the response of a man submitted to accountability. It is the response of a man who has learned that performing martyrdom is more immediately effective than repentance.

And the martyrdom playbook runs deep. When eight Canadian cities declined to issue him standard public gathering permits, he declared it a war on Christianity, even as fellow Canadian Christian artists noted they tour the country regularly without incident. After smoke bombs were set off during a Montreal worship event, Sean Feucht repeatedly described them as being thrown ‘at my face’ by Antifa, while critics later argued that available footage did not match the dramatic framing. Real persecution exists; conflating garden variety opposition with actual martyrdom cheapens the suffering of Christians who actually endure it.

At an Australian tour stop, a woman in the audience responded to something he said onstage with the words, “Hey, only when they spread hate.” Feucht posted that he had been attacked by a witch who was “cursing at the top of her lungs” and “nonstop cursing us the whole time.” Video of the incident showed a woman making a single calm remark.

Perhaps most damning of all: according to Mike Winger, Feucht served on Shawn Bolz’s ministry board for six years, was informed of Bolz’s misconduct and false prophecies, and said nothing. Bolz has since been credibly accused by multiple former staff members of nonconsensual sexual exposure, harassment, and abuse, allegations corroborated by Bethel Church leadership, who publicly admitted they knew as early as 2019. Feucht has publicly urged his followers to exercise discernment. It seems, perhaps, that his own discernment was lacking.

The third man in that photo is Mark Driscoll, about whom I’ve already written extensively — the charisma and the manipulation, the angry tyrannical outbursts and misogyny, the formal charges filed by 21 former elders. The man who called women “penis homes.” Who used ministry funds to purchase his way onto the New York Times bestsellers list. Who has been credibly accused of plagiarism. At his current church, volunteers must sign NDAs before serving, and staff are ranked on a numerical loyalty scale that determines how much access they earn to the Driscoll family. Whatever board exists operates entirely on his terms. Nearly everyone at the church, including the outside directors named in its articles of incorporation, reports directly to Mark and Grace Driscoll.

So that’s the photo. Four men grinning at a conference about national repentance.

And this problem extends far beyond one photo op. Greg Locke, Sean Feucht, and Mark Driscoll continue to receive endorsements, invitations, and friendly public association from major names and influential ministries across American evangelicalism. Driscoll has appeared at major churches and conferences for years despite the implosion of Mars Hill. Sean Feucht continues to headline large worship gatherings and conservative Christian events nationwide. Greg Locke still commands massive online audiences and speaking platforms despite his repeated scandals and conspiratorial behavior.

For an event that cites repentance among its stated goals, the question that demands an answer is: where is the repentance in the lives of these men? And what’s the foundation upon which they are inviting us to build?

Foundations matter enormously to God. In the church, we teach our children early on that “the wise man builds his house upon the rock, and the house on the rock stands firm when the rains and the floods come tumbling down. Genuine righteousness must be the foundation of a nation that seeks God’s blessing.

Isaiah 28 indicts Israel for building on lies and false security. David refused to build casually for God. He spent years preparing before Solomon laid a single stone, because holy things require careful preparation underneath the visible work.

We are not being careful. We are being sloppy and star-struck and tribal, handing microphones to men whose lives do not reflect the God we claim to be rededicating ourselves to. We keep mistaking celebrity for credibility and charisma for character. The world is watching. They are drawing conclusions about who Jesus is based on who we choose to elevate. That should sober us.

The desire behind Rededicate 250 (the hunger to see this nation turn back to God, to acknowledge His hand in our history, to ask for His blessing going forward) is a righteous desire. I share it. I want that too. But God is not obligated to bless what we build just because we labeled it for Him. He never has been. He has been nothing but consistent about what He actually requires: justice, humility, clean hands, honest hearts, and leaders whose lives match their words.

It’s time to elevate our standards. Better yet, let’s rededicate ourselves to God’s.

I’m trying to treat my writing less like a hobby and more like real work worth investing in, because thoughtful, time-consuming writing actually is work. If my essays have encouraged you, challenged you, made you laugh, helped you feel less alone, or simply given you something worthwhile to think about, I’d be incredibly grateful if you’d consider supporting this work with a paid subscription.

I do my best to keep subscription costs accessible, but every single contribution genuinely helps support my family and gives me more space to keep writing honestly and consistently. Thank you so much for reading, sharing, encouraging, and supporting this little corner of the internet.

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And when that theory fails, the next layer of insulation against honest introspection is this: “Darn Californians need to stop moving here.”

The obvious implication is that any deviant behavior plaguing our area must come from the outside. It couldn’t possibly be homegrown. Idahoans don’t have drug problems. Idahoans don’t burgle cars or stage shootouts in parking lots. That’s beneath us.

It reminds me of a light-hearted debate my husband and I once had about rattlesnakes. I did not believe him when he insisted there were virtually no rattlesnakes in our town. “But Spokane is only 30 minutes away,” I argued. “And I know for sure there are rattlesnakes there!”

It turns out he was right. Apparently ecosystems and elevation matter to this kind of thing.

But we tend to apply that same logic to people, as if all the figurative rattlesnakes conveniently stop at the Washington border. As if vice, addiction, violence, and dysfunction belong to Spokane, while North Idaho somehow remains morally untouched simply because we’d prefer to believe it does.

The problem is always outside ourselves.

There’s a name for this tendency in psychology. It’s called the fundamental attribution error: the habit of explaining other people’s failures as character flaws while explaining our own as circumstantial. They are homeless because they are lazy or dangerous. We lost our job because the economy was bad. They vote the way they do because they are evil or stupid. We vote the way we do because we’ve thought it through and love our country.

As Christians, we should find this deeply uncomfortable. For one thing, Scripture is chock full of reminders to examine our own hearts first and most aggressively. It should be a top priority if we’re walking in step with the Spirit. Like David, we ought to be praying, “See if there is any offensive way in me” and then begging for grace to fix the ways that offend. But we also have an obligation to love even our enemies. When we’re so preoccupied with protecting ourselves from the people we cast as villains, it’s really hard to prioritize loving them.

This is rampant in political activism. It’s most obvious in words like “Demoncrats” and “Repugnicans” and “libtards.” The name-calling is a tell. It signals that the person has stopped being curious about why someone might see the world differently, and has instead decided that the difference itself is proof of the other side’s stupidity or evil. It’s the political equivalent of blaming Spokane, a way of outsourcing the problem so you never have to sit with the uncomfortable possibility that reasonable people can look at the same set of facts and arrive at different conclusions. Once you’ve reduced your opponents to a cartoon, you’re no longer required to engage with their actual arguments. It’s a convenient way to avoid the discomfort of actual critical thought.

I’m not saying there are no real threats. I’m not saying it’s wrong to conclude that some policy positions are actively dangerous or misguided. I’m not saying we shouldn’t fight tirelessly against them. What I am saying is that any honest analysis requires a dogged, intentional willingness to ask which part of the fault may actually belong to us. The policies we hate are often overcorrections to real problems, problems we may have created, or simply refuse to acknowledge exist within our own camp.

Everything becomes us vs. them. Right vs. wrong. Good vs. evil.

It can even creep into our parenting. I’ll give you a couple examples of how I’ve seen this play out in recent history. I share the following not to shame anyone, but to illustrate the point. Not long ago, I was troubled to observe an otherwise wonderful Christian-schooled kid I know sharing an illustrated video he made depicting himself striking a homeless woman with a stick. My heart sank when I saw it, and all I could think to say was, “She needs Jesus, doesn’t she?”

Another time, while driving past a homeless person, another Christian kid we know, usually such a great kid, jokingly asked, “Should we throw food at him?”

In neither scenario did a parent intervene to correct the thinking. The unspoken lesson was clear: homeless people are dangerous scum to be avoided and spat upon, rather than broken people Jesus came to save.

Is it wrong to teach your kids to be guarded around people with a high likelihood of addiction? No. You couldn’t pay me a million dollars to drop my kids off in downtown Portland without a bodyguard. Risk is risk. It’s not wrong to name it. But if we aren’t even trying to see the human being underneath the risk, something in us has started to rot, too. There’s a difference between discernment and dehumanization, and a society that loses the ability to tell them apart eventually becomes just as spiritually sick as the problems it’s trying to avoid.

What struck me is that these kids come from families with genuinely wonderful parents, homes that are, by design, pretty hostile to rattlesnakes. A lot is being done right. But what if rattlesnakes aren’t the thing to worry about? What if it’s the pine beetles? Those pesky little bugs that go largely undetected until they’ve quietly destroyed entire forests. Dehumanization is like that.

When this hardness of heart learns to speak Christianese, it doesn't feel like self-righteousness or insularity. It feels like wisdom. It feels like protecting your family, your community, your values. But the homeless woman being hit with a stick or the man panhandling on the roadside are not abstractions. They are, by any honest reading of the Gospels, precisely the people Jesus went out of his way to touch, eat with, and defend from the religiously respectable. The Good Samaritan was not a parable about stranger danger.

My husband was right about the rattlesnakes. Ecosystems matter. You can build a home hostile to obvious predators and still lose the forest, not to anything that slithered in from Spokane, but to something sneakier, something that found purchase in the very certainty that you were one of the good ones.

The solution isn’t to stop caring about real threats, or to pretend that discernment is the same thing as bigotry. But at a certain point, we must learn to hold even our righteous anger loosely enough to ask, regularly and honestly, “What might be growing in me? In us? In my church or political party or even my own home? What lesson did I just teach without meaning to?”

David didn’t pray, “Search their hearts.” He prayed, “Search mine.” That’s the harder prayer. It’s also, I would argue, the more powerful one.

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I tried to explain that I did not have an extra $129.45 lying around for this superfluous expense, as I had already committed the remainder of my life’s salary and at least one kidney on the black market to financing his astronomical legal fees, but my objections fell on largely deaf ears: I was required to purchase the subscription.

“Why?” you might ask. I will tell you.

Apparently, my attorney believed my words were too harsh and sharp and that, as such, I was jeopardizing my future custody arrangements because the court might interpret my passionate conversational style as caustic and unstable.

I tried to explain that hostility is actually a very rational response to chronic infidelity and abuse. I assured him that measured, stoic, passionless words should register as psychopathy, not stability, to anyone with a pulse, but again, he seemed pretty committed to not hearing me.

So instead, I purchased the app. Any word I entered into the software that registered as too sharp was immediately underlined in red, as if to scream, “Thou shalt not express human emotions in my presence.”

I remember sitting there having an out-of-body experience as I typed. How was this my life? The irony was not lost on me. I worked in marketing and communications. I was literally paid to police the tone of all written communications our company released. If you, as a customer, were unhappy with our services, your complaint would often be escalated to me, and it was my job to pacify you with calming language like, “I’m so sorry you had such an unpleasant experience today. Would you like to tell me more about your frustration?”

I didn’t need a bot to tell me when I was being too harsh. I was being too harsh on purpose. Because my heart was broken, and I was angry and bleeding. And because I’m honest and I really don’t enjoy BSing people like I had to do so often at work. It felt manipulative and condescending and, quite frankly, absent of genuine concern or empathy.

I remember bristling during the mandatory “Listen First” customer service de-escalation trainings where we had to practice pacifying angry people with phrases like, “I can understand how that would be frustrating” and “If I’m hearing you correctly, it sounds like (fill in the blank with whatever grievance was just shared with you.)”

I’m not saying the techniques are ineffective. They’re not. They work wonders for a lot of people. I’m just saying that if people try using them on me when I’m feeling hostile, I’m not going to interpret it as an act of kindness; I’m going to feel like I’ve been identified as someone who needs to be managed, and that’s probably only to compound my frustration.

I’ve never been particularly good at accepting being managed. Ask anyone who’s tried. Patrick Henry famously said, “Give me liberty, or give me death.” My personal mantra would probably be more along the lines of, “Give me sincerity, or give me solitude.”

I don’t know why this matters so much to me, but it does. I know a vast majority of people don’t seem nearly as bothered by the perception of fakeness as I am, and that’s great for them, but for me? Not so much.

I’m sure we’ve all encountered this at work or at church—that one co-worker who’s so insufferably polished and precise and articulate at all times that you actually wonder if you might be talking to a robot. The one who wears professionalism like a costume without ever dreaming of letting you see what’s behind the mask. If you’re wired like I am, the temptation to poke the bear is strong when I encounter people like this. I want to make sure they actually bleed.

I don’t trust people in masks. I don’t trust them in the workplace. I don’t trust them in the church. I don’t trust them on the internet.

If all you ever post on social media are color-coordinated family photos where everyone is smiling into the middle distance like they’re posing for an LDS calendar from 1987, forgive me if I struggle to believe I’ve met the real you.

Over the weekend, I picked up a lilac bush someone had listed on Facebook Marketplace. I arrived with my brawny teenage son to retrieve the plant and immediately noticed the pristine nature of the entire home and garden. Not a thing was out of place. While I was genuinely grateful to be receiving the plant, the woman was so aggressively particular about how I maneuvered the thing into my car that my anxiety eventually reached a level where I almost just said, “You know what? Forget it. Thanks, but no thanks.”

My car first had to be backed into a very specific section of her driveway, which was already unfortunate because I’m an objectively terrible parker, especially if anyone’s watching.

Once I finally got the car positioned to her satisfaction, I then had to figure out how to maneuver this enormous lilac bush from her lawn into my backseat without allowing a single molecule of dirt to touch the driveway. This mattered deeply to her because she had apparently just swept it and it needed to remain perfect enough to be fit for a Better Homes and Gardens photoshoot.

To make matters worse, she hovered directly behind me the entire time offering highly specific instructions while I spiraled internally.

All I could think about was the state of my backseat. Goldfish crackers. Crumpled receipts. Three abandoned water bottles. A rogue Sunday School craft featuring Jesus, a Dixie cup, and a pipe cleaner. The entire chaotic record of my motherhood experience was laid bare before this woman and her immaculate driveway.

I became so nervous and desperate to escape her exacting presence that I finally just shoved the entire bush sideways into the car, sending dirt absolutely everywhere anyway, before slamming the door shut and fleeing the scene in shame.

The point is that appearances mattered so much to this woman that it actually started affecting me as a complete stranger. Not only did it trigger every latent shame issue I possess, but it also made me wonder what all the control was protecting. Because that’s the thing about perfectionism: it never creates rest. It creates tension. Everyone around it starts holding their breath.

And I know we all have our crap, and Jesus meets us there, wherever we are. But people become so much easier for me when they stop trying to curate themselves into untouchability and just show up human. Rumpled. Honest. Slightly dirt-covered. Like the rest of us.

There is something profoundly lonely about being asked to sanitize your pain for other people’s comfort while you are actively surviving it.

Perfection does not make me feel safe. It makes me feel watched. What makes me trust people is the willingness to let the mask slip a little. To admit the marriage is struggling. To admit the kids are hard. To admit there are Goldfish crackers ground into the backseat and they cried in the church parking lot fifteen minutes ago. To show up in divorce court and be allowed to say, “I’m scared as hell right now that this man who has betrayed me in every imaginable way is going to trick you into believing it’s a good idea to give him custody of my daughter, and the thought makes me so angry and so filled with terror that I feel like I might actually die.”

I don’t think that’s asking for so terribly much. I think deep down most of us just want to be allowed to be real people — scared, angry, imperfect, and present. Without the app. Without the script. Without the red underlines telling us that what we actually feel is too much for public consumption. It isn’t. We’re all too much.

That’s the part that makes us worth knowing.

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The woman can make the most gorgeous things: Nordic sweaters, sock monkeys, elaborate tapestries, you name it.

A few months ago, she posted a video that has stayed with me ever since. She was nearly finished knitting the sweetest little strawberry sweater for a child when she realized she had made a mistake: one armhole had 50 stitches, the other only 40. To anyone else, the sweater looked perfect. No one would have noticed. But she knew the flaw would compromise the fit and integrity of the piece.

So she did the most painful thing an artist can do: She started pulling the thread. Slowly, carefully, she unraveled hours of beautiful work, row by row, until she reached the exact place where things had gone wrong.

I’ve thought about that moment often since then, and how this seemingly ordinary act was really a rare display of integrity: the willingness to tear apart something beautiful rather than secretly build on a flaw.

There’s plenty of church language around this concept—warnings not to build on faulty foundations, reminders to repent before small compromises harden into structural failures. But in practice, so many of us would rather preserve the appearance of beauty than endure the pain of unraveling what we know is wrong. We keep stitching over mistakes because starting over feels too costly, too humiliating, too wasteful. And yet the longer you ignore the flaw, the more of the final piece is shaped around it.

I’ve been thinking of this, especially in the context of the current crisis revolving around Paul Pressler and the SBC. This isn’t a new story. But it’s having a moment again this week, as it tends to do when the SBC annual meeting draws near, and people remember what’s been quietly stirring behind the scenes.

For those unfamiliar with the controversy, Paul Pressler was one of the chief architects of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Conservative Resurgence, the movement that dragged the SBC back toward biblical authority and theological orthodoxy after years of liberal drift. Pressler helped insist that the church stand firm on Scripture in a cultural moment when so many other churches were abandoning orthodoxy for the spirit of the age, replacing crosses in their buildings with rainbow flags, and preaching Jesus as friend but never as Lord. Paul Pressler’s public stand was for biblical truth.

And yet later in life, he was accused by multiple men of sexual abuse and predatory behavior spanning decades, allegations that culminated in a major lawsuit and eventual settlement. The work he championed was, on paper, righteous. The man himself? An alleged fraud who seems to have turned a legitimate crisis in the church into a launchpad for his own power and prominence rather than for the glory of God.

That’s what makes the whole thing so fraught. The standards themselves were not wrong. Many of the theological convictions Pressler championed were actually right and necessary. But the man most closely associated with defending those standards was simultaneously failing to live by them in his own private life.

What on earth are we supposed to do with this? When we’re smacked upside the head with information that forces us to grapple with the terrifying possibility that someone can be profoundly correct in what they proclaim publicly while being profoundly corrupt in who they are privately? How are we to rightly discern which of the threads in the masterpiece we are tediously crafting need to be pulled?

I’ll admit upfront that I’m an outsider looking in; I was raised hardcore PCA. SBC church politics are complicated, and they’re outside my personal purview. I can’t pretend to understand every institutional nuance or speak to every good-faith disagreement within a denomination of millions. But I’m going by what I can see, and what I can see is damning enough.

What makes the Pressler scandal especially disturbing is the growing evidence that a number of influential people around him knew, or at the very least strongly suspected, that something was deeply wrong for years. Reporting from journalists like Robert Downen (first at the Houston Chronicle and later at Texas Monthly) and commentary from writers like Karen Swallow Prior have highlighted the culture of silence, reputation management, and institutional self-protection that seemed to surround him.

The documented details are bad: Jared Woodfill, Pressler’s own law partner, testified under oath that he’d known since 2004 of an allegation that Pressler had abused a child, and yet continued to send young male assistants to work out of Pressler’s home. Who actually does this???

Leaders at First Baptist Houston investigated claims that same year that Pressler had been nude with a young man from the congregation, quietly reduced his involvement, and then allowed him to transfer his membership to another church years later without any warning to that congregation.

The SBC’s own legal team later admitted they feared that proceeding to discovery would surface substantial evidence that the abuse had been real and ongoing. Survivor advocates and insiders alike have documented how those who raised concerns about abusive leaders in SBC circles were often marginalized and smeared, while powerful men like Pressler and Patterson continued to be platformed and protected, a pattern documented, however imperfectly, by the Independent Guidepost investigation, and one that extends well beyond it. Meanwhile, the victims (some of whom were boys as young as fourteen) were left to absorb the damage alone.

From the outside looking in, it sure does seem like the broader goal of building and amassing power and influence seemed to matter a great deal more to the powers-that-be than actual righteousness did, and for the earnest people who trusted those powers, now even the things that felt certain seem hazy.

Again, I’m not here to declare any kind of certainty about what righteousness would have looked like in the context of Paul Pressler. It’s complicated, but one thing that strikes me as fairly obvious is that choosing to ignore catastrophic sin in your midst in order to keep on building is a form of wickedness. Go back and remove the faulty stitch. Be willing to do the work of maintaining integrity. Invite people to join you in grieving the failure and working together to rebuild on solid ground.

The SBC cracked that door open with its 2022 apology in Anaheim, a genuine step, and one worth acknowledging. But an apology is just a beginning. It’s just words. They need substance and action and follow-through. That means asking who knew what and when, and whether those people still hold power. It means rebuilding bridges to the people who were pushed out for telling the truth. It means treating survivors as people whose trust has not yet been re-earned and fostering the humility to exist in the awkward, painful space between repentance and restoration. It means understanding that accountability is not a box to be checked and then resented when someone asks about it again.

But that’s not what happened. What happened was continued denialism, cover-up, demonization of the whistleblowers, exile of the brave souls with the integrity to require the truth. Those with the audacity to stand and be counted were written off as Marxists, as troublemakers, as apostate progressives with an agenda to destroy God’s faithful.

Many of the loudest voices have been sent into virtual exile from the SBC, cast out as political enemies, or leaving of their own accord when they could no longer stomach the abuse. Names like Russell Moore and Karen Swallow Prior and Christa Brown and Beth Moore. If your very first instinct is to cringe and think, “Progressive traitors” when you encounter their names, then consider the possibility that maybe the character assassinations against the whistleblowers may have actually been pretty effective. Have some of these folks embraced political values that conflict with Scripture? Maybe so. Does it mean they were wrong in their observations or frustration with the SBC’s response to them? Nope. Not at all.

The cost of intentionally continuing to build on a foundation with cracks is that you’re going to have to be willing to throw good people under the bus in order to do so. You’re going to have to continually rationalize your decision and make excuses to silence the people who challenge it. You’re going to have to turn righteous people into enemies, and eventually you run the risk of becoming the monster you abhor.

Paul Pressler is hardly an isolated case. There was also Paige Patterson. And Darrell Gilyard. And Johnny Hunt. And others. When the independent firm Guidepost Solutions was finally brought in to investigate in 2022, their report documented that the SBC Executive Committee had maintained an internal list of accused abusers while publicly claiming no such tracking was possible, a fact that has not been seriously disputed, whatever criticisms one may have of the investigation’s broader methodology.

The DOJ later reviewed these matters and declined to indict, a fact worth noting. But as anyone who has navigated the criminal justice system as a survivor knows, the absence of charges is not the same thing as the absence of sin. Just because I didn’t wear a body cam to my sexual assault as a child hardly means it never happened.

A friend and I got to discussing this this morning, and he lamented, “People think they have only two choices: ‘Join a movement that is trying to do something righteous where there might be some bad apples, and think of the bigger picture’ OR ‘Allow a denomination to collapse into liberalism and apostasy.’ What do you think most earnest, Bible-believing evangelicals are gonna choose?”

I don’t think he’s wrong in his diagnosis. The problem is that it’s certainly not the Holy Spirit that inspires us to believe this false dichotomy. At a certain point, our decision to plug our noses and choose the lesser of two evils has to have limits. There have to be lines that are too far to cross. There has to come a point in our own thinking where we say, “Nope. God, these are the only two options I see in my natural human mind, but you don’t operate according to those limitations. I choose righteousness, and I trust you to work out the details.”

I want to speak directly to those who are sitting in the wreckage of this right now, wondering if any of it was worth it. The temptation, and I understand it completely, is to conclude that because your good faith was exploited by leaders who ultimately cared more about power than righteousness, the cause itself was the con. That every sacrifice you made, every relationship you strained, every unpopular hill you chose to die on was just you being played.

The vast majority of faithful, prayerful people who poured themselves into defending convictions they genuinely believed were worth defending were not brainless pawns. They were not naive idiots being puppeted by masterminds. They were people who loved God and took His word seriously, and that is not nothing. That has never been nothing.

There is nothing new under the sun. Selfish, greedy charlatans have always hidden behind religion to secure personal power, but that hardly makes truth any less important or those who genuinely seek it any less righteous. Rage should be directed at the corrupt, but the baby should not be discarded with the proverbial bath water. As a man I admire used to always say, “Bad ideas, create victims,” which means that abandoning orthodoxy won’t save anyone. The victim count will only increase if you quit because someone betrayed your trust.

This tension was already visible a few years back, when a number of friends enthusiastically reached out to solicit my endorsement of a then-newly circulating statement of faith called “The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel,” often referred to simply as “The Dallas Statement.” I remember reading it and thinking, “Yes, but.”

It was woefully incomplete.

While the statement drew clear lines in defense of biblical orthodoxy on cultural issues that absolutely matter in the church, I was struck by the realization that every moral evil that believers were being invited to condemn was a monster outside ourselves. The threats, while real, were always external: secularism, critical theory, identity politics, feminism, “wokeness,” cultural Marxism. There seemed to be almost no meaningful introspection about the sin festering within our own camp.

And yet even then, there were already mounting piles of carefully hidden stories suggesting something was deeply rotten inside the house of God itself.

Women had been warning for years about chauvinism, bullying, and abuse. Survivors had been begging to be heard. Minority believers had been trying to explain that racism was not merely an abstract sin from the distant past, but something they had personally experienced within conservative evangelical spaces in the present. Again and again, these concerns were brushed aside as distractions from “the real battle.”

I couldn’t make peace with this because “the real battle” has always been a war over peoples’ souls, and these were real people bleeding in front of them. Jesus never treated wounded people as inconvenient interruptions to theological faithfulness. He confronted false teaching constantly, but He also moved toward the broken with both compassion and urgency. He never seemed remotely interested in preserving the appearance of righteousness while cavalierly sacrificing people underneath it.

Scripture does not merely call believers to identify the sins of Babylon. It repeatedly commands God’s people to examine themselves first. “Judgment begins in the house of God.” The prophets of the Old Testament were not primarily condemned for failing to denounce pagan nations loudly enough. They were condemned because they tolerated corruption, exploitation, hypocrisy, and idolatry among God’s own people while maintaining a public performance of righteousness.

As this year’s SBC Convention approaches, I find myself praying less about resolutions and voting blocs and political maneuvering and more about courage—the courage to tell the truth, the courage to pull the thread. The courage to stop confusing institutional preservation with faithfulness to Christ.

If we are honest, I think we have to admit that every single one of us is tempted to do this in our own lives. We all have stitches we quietly hope no one notices, areas where we know something is off, but unraveling it would be painful, embarrassing, costly. So instead, we rationalize. We minimize. We protect the image of the thing rather than the integrity of it. Families do this. Churches do this. Institutions do this. Nations do this. Individuals do this.

And yes, it is no doubt extremely difficult to simultaneously defend theological orthodoxy and resist liberalism while holding to account corrupt conservatives who claim doctrinal purity but are living impure, double lives. But Christians are called to do both. We MUST do both.

Because the beautiful thing about Christianity is that repentance, painful as it may be, is not the end of the story; it’s the birthplace of God’s restoration. He can do infinitely more with a contrite heart surrendered to His will than He can with a powerful institution operating in its own strength while claiming His name.

And sometimes unraveling is the only way something true and lasting can finally be made.

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Cordial, yes. We would have connected over the things we share: a background in basketball, a rejection of gender ideology, faith in Jesus. But not besties. Her enthusiastic embrace of complementarian theology would have gotten under my skin. My feminist leanings would, no doubt, have been an issue for her.

When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, a certain kind of influential voice online began policing the grief responses. “Stop saying ‘I disagreed with Charlie Kirk, but…’” they lectured. “No one needs to know you disagreed with him. Just say the assassination was wrong, full stop. Stop protecting your image.”

I rejected that framing entirely. The disclaimers weren’t cowardly or self-serving. They were actually important. There has never been a more urgent moment to model, clearly and publicly, that you don’t have to agree with someone to defend their humanity. You don’t have to be a loyalist or a fangirl or a zealot to say, “This is wrong, and this person deserves better.”

I offer what follows in that same spirit.

I am not an Erika Kirk fangirl. In any other context, I would probably find myself bristling at her positions on a semi-regular basis, the same way I do with people like Megan Basham or Allie Beth Stuckey. But those disagreements feel small and almost embarrassingly beside the point given what Erika Kirk is being put through right now.

We’re watching a grieving widow get picked apart from every angle by people who have convinced themselves their cruelty is principled. In the months since her husband was publicly executed on a world stage, she’s been accused of everything from conspiring with foreign governments to orchestrate his death, to running a Romanian child trafficking operation, to grooming teenage girls.

If she cries too much, it’s theater. If she doesn’t cry enough, she’s a cold, calculating woman who never really loved her husband. If she shows up polished, the rhinestones and pyro are “tacky in grief.” If she dresses it down, she’s unraveling. The rings with her children’s initials aren’t sentimental; they’re suddenly Free Mason coded symbols, proof of something sinister if you squint hard enough.

If she posts, she’s chasing attention. If she disappears, she’s evasive. If she defends herself, she’s manipulative. If she stays silent, it’s an admission. If she runs her business, she’s opportunistic. If she steps back, she’s incapable. She should be home with her kids, but if she were, they’d say she was hiding. There is no version of her that passes inspection. The only version they’ll accept is one that disappears.

But who is “they?” Who, exactly, are the people demanding her head on a pike?

The answer to this question is fascinating. Erika Kirk seems to exist in the exact coordinates where two groups that should have nothing in common discover their overlap.

The woke right, drunk on conspiracy and antisemitism, and the progressive left, with its own complicated relationship to certain kinds of women, meet in the middle over her. The shared territory isn’t really about Erika at all. It’s about a specific type of woman they both find intolerable: intelligent, Christian, traditionally feminine, unapologetically conservative, and now powerful. She is the thing both groups need a villain to be.

I had to roll my eyes this week when Jeremy Boreing grasped at straws and tried to pawn off the entirety of the blame on feminism. This was one of the more intellectually dishonest moves I’ve seen in a while. His argument, as best I can reconstruct it, is that feminism has cultivated some kind of cultural disposition in women to tear down someone like Erika Kirk, who represents everything the feminist project supposedly despises: complementarian marriage, Christian domesticity, wifely submission.

It’s a convenient theory. It’s also wrong, and he knows it, because the single most aggressive and sustained attacker of Erika Kirk is Candace Owens, and true feminists won’t touch the woman with a 10 foot pole. The woke right haters fueled by Candace’s swift decline into madness are not motivated by feminism. They’re motivated by conspiracy.

These are people who have somehow arrived at the conclusion that it is more reasonable to believe that Charlie Kirk was a time traveler with ties to ancient Sumerian technology than to believe he was a victim of a trans activist with a gun. They believe in Egyptian military planes and Israeli cellphone pings and Fort Huachuca assassination planning meetings. They believe Erika’s Romanian charity work was a trafficking front. They have spent months generating content designed to strip this woman of her humanity one insinuation at a time.

The psychology here is deeply unnerving to me. I’ve written before about what inspires people to cling to conspiracy over reason. I don’t have a ton of patience for it because the root is always an identity crisis; a clawing need to be the one with the secret information, the one who sees what the rest of the peasantry cannot. It’s a big old ego problem, and innocent people are the collateral damage. I mean, trust me: I understand distrust of the mainstream media and the government. We’re still reeling from COVID propaganda and a government that gaslit women’s shelters into admitting men under duress and the threat of losing funding. The distrust is well earned. But leaping wildly from, “I don’t know if I can trust this source” to “I therefore believe in time travel…” Come on, people. Log off of YouTube. Touch grass. Plant a garden. Come back to planet earth.

Again, this isn’t some weird manifestation of feminism. It’s just paranoia and a flirtation with mental illness.

But these aren’t the only Erika haters. There’s another faction of people who are entirely hostile to Erika, and they’re the same exact people who celebrated when her husband was killed: hardcore progressives.

They look at Erika Kirk and see a walking contradiction: a multiply-degreed, credentialed, entrepreneurial woman who now runs a major national organization, all things made possible, in part, by the very feminist movement her husband spent his career attacking. She benefited from Title IX. She benefited from women’s access to higher education and property rights and the legal right to run a business independently. And in their eyes, she has used the platform those gains afforded her to tell young women that their highest calling is to be a helper and a servant to their husbands. The critique is, at root, ideological, not personal, though they’ve allowed that line to completely blur to the degree that they no longer even see a human worthy of compassion. She’s seen as someone pulling up the ladder behind her. And yes, there’s also just straightforward opposition to TPUSA’s agenda. She is Charlie Kirk’s successor. People who hated everything Charlie Kirk stood for are not going to give his widow a pass.

Zero empathy. No space whatsoever for grief to be messy or nonlinear. Relentless commentary on her appearance, her outfits, her facial expressions, the precise number of tears she produces and whether they’re falling at the correct rate.

What’s actually striking, and worth pausing on, is that both sides land on the exact same accusation, even though they start from totally opposite places.

The left says her grief is a performance, a calculated display of submission dressed up as virtue. The conspiratorial right says her grief is a performance too, just one meant to cover guilt. The shared conclusion is that she’s fake and, as such, worthy of public ridicule.

I don’t know Erika Kirk. I have no reason to doubt that she loved her husband. But I’ll play devil’s advocate with myself long enough to entertain even that uncharitable allegation. Let’s say her marriage was a sham, that she didn’t actually love the man, so her grief is a little contrived. Okay fine. It wouldn’t be the first time this happened in political activism. But to leap from, “It wasn’t a great marriage” to “She conspired with time travelers to have him killed…” Come the heck on.

You know what I think the most plausible explanation is? I think not a single person on planet earth has any idea what it’s like to be this woman right now. It’s one thing to grieve the violent execution of a spouse. It’s another thing entirely to do it with the wide world watching as you process every move and bear the pressure of keeping your husband’s life work afloat.

I think it’s possible the woman is in the white-hot, frenetic phase of grief where you claw at purpose because stillness would kill you. She is throwing herself into everything that makes her feel closer to her husband’s work because if she keeps moving, the shooter doesn’t win. I know this mode. When I grieve, I do not sit still. I do things. I find meaning. I distract myself with purpose. I build something so I don’t have to feel the full weight of what I’ve lost. It is not pathological. It is survival.

So before you slow down the clip of her face to analyze her micro-expressions when she says Candace Owens’ name, let me ask you something: Have you ever had your spouse publicly executed in front of thousands of people? Have you ever had to stand up days later and carry the weight of a public response in front of hundreds of thousands more, with the entire country watching to see if you cry correctly?

No?

Then with respect: you might not be the authority you think you are.

Grief is not a performance you can audit from your phone. It’s not linear. It’s not tidy. It doesn’t show up on command in the exact shape strangers find acceptable. Sometimes it looks like tears. Sometimes it looks like work. Sometimes it looks like movement because stillness would break you in half.

What you’re watching is not evidence. It’s a human being trying to survive something most people will never even come close to understanding.

So give her space. Give her silence. Give her the basic dignity of not being turned into content while she is still bleeding.

If you’re sitting there on the sidelines crying “fake!” or criticizing her wardrobe choices, ask yourself the question, “Would I say this to her face? How would I feel if I learned she was, in fact, in deep grief instead of faking it? What does my behavior right now reveal about my own heart? Is it good? Is it humane? Is this the kind of person I want to be?”

Then pause long enough and dig deep enough to answer honestly. Because the way you treat a bleeding woman when you think no one important is watching is probably the truest thing about you.

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I ugly cried for days. It felt traumatic in ways that both irritated my commitment to logic and made me question my own stability. (I’m the gal who refuses to watch animal movies because I’m so frugal with my emotional energy that shedding tears for a dog I already knew was going to die seems like a poor return on investment.)

In any case, the cat croaked, and when the dust settled, I found myself face to face with something I have spent a lifetime frantically avoiding at any cost: my own shame. It must be my fault. How had I not noticed? Neglect. That’s what it was. I was a neglectful pet owner. If I had been paying closer attention, surely I would have caught the signs. But I didn’t, because deep down I’m a monster. There must be something fundamentally wrong with me, and if everyone really knew how terrible I was behind the scenes at things like caretaking and basic maintenance of home and hearth, I should be tarred, feathered, and roundly denounced into oblivion.

That’s a fairly accurate description of how I felt, and yes, it was a bit extra, but the problem is I couldn’t help it. There’s no feeling or doing anything halfway in my economy. It happened months ago, and yet every time that poor animal’s name comes up, I require everyone to abruptly change the subject. Everyone, that is, except for my sweet four-year-old, who has somehow arrived at the conclusion that kitty is now a winged creature floating around heaven. I’m not interested in telling him he’s wrong because why would I do that? And who’s to say God isn’t in the habit of admitting our angel pets through the pearly gates? It’s heaven; He’s good, and He can do what He wants.

Unfortunately, the cat saga was not shame’s final appearance in my calendar year. That same shame response was freshly resurrected on Sunday night, as I made the thirty-minute drive to the only local Walgreens open past 9 p.m. to pick up antibiotics for my preschooler’s abscessing tooth, a tooth that ultimately required extraction this morning because the decay was too severe to save. The kid is only four. “How is this possible?” you might ask. It’s a valid question, and the answer probably has something to do with bad genetics and my lackluster approach to forcing a preschooler to sit still while I floss.

I’ve never watched an episode of “Game of Thrones,” but I know the iconic scene well: a main character stripped bare and marched through jeering crowds while a stone-faced nun tracks her every step, ringing a bell and delivering that single, tolling word — shame. Shame. Shame.

That’s exactly how I feel when things like this happen. Shame is a vortex that pulls me downward into catastrophic thinking and self-condemnation, and it’s taken marriage to a pragmatic husband who does not similarly struggle for me to realize just how intense and debilitating I can sometimes allow that cycle to become. It’s a little self-indulgent, if I’m honest. But it’s not like I’m doing it on purpose.

And I don’t think I’m alone in this. We cleverly figure out ways to market shame to ourselves as something else, something worthier like “accountability.” The self-talk goes something like this: “I’m not really wallowing in shame. I’m being accountable for my actions.”

I can’t be the only one who’s mastered that particular rebrand, right? I know at least a few of the hardline Presbyterians can relate to the tendency to conflate self-flagellation with righteousness. And don’t get me wrong: there is, in fact, value, in leaning into the hard lessons pain can teach about areas in our lives where self-improvement ought to be the goal. Sometimes we do, in fact, need to pay the piper.

But the thing about shame is that it wants us to believe we need to keep on paying the piper long after the debt has been settled.

Accountability says, “I made a mistake.” Shame says, “I AM one. Forever.”

The cat didn’t get sick because I’m a monster. My son’s tooth decayed because kids get cavities and parents miss things and life is relentlessly, exhaustingly full and because he inherited my abysmal dental genetics. (I think I’ve had 8 or 9 root canals now, but who’s counting?) Shame isn’t interested in proportionality. It’s interested in verdicts.

And for people like me, verdicts are ultimately a form of control. If I am the problem, then theoretically I can fix the problem. I can do better, pay closer attention, be more vigilant. As long as the fault is mine, the outcome is still negotiable. Shame, as crushing as it is, is preferable to the alternative. I’d rather be a failure than admit that I’m powerless.

I suspect this is not a uniquely personal failing. We live in a world that is very good at handing out verdicts and very bad at tolerating the alternative, which is simply that some things happen, that children get sick, that pets die, that careful people make mistakes, and that none of it is always someone’s fault. Powerlessness is the thing we collectively cannot sit with, so we manufacture culprits. Sometimes the culprit is a politician, or a pharmaceutical company, or a negligent parent we read about online and judge from a safe distance.

I’m freshly stunned every time I read a news story about a child who drowned or wandered off into the woods. The condemnation in the comments section is always so swift and so severe that it sometimes takes my breath away, and I think to myself, “Holy smokes! Do they genuinely believe it could never happen to them? Oh to have that kind of confidence in my parenting abilities!”

Hoping to understand the biblical understanding of shame’s role in the Christian life, I decided to do a bit of a deep dive that only left me more confused. Did you know there are like five Hebrew words for “shame” in the Bible and another three in the Greek, all meaning different things? The Bible ultimately portrays shame as a painful but redeemable reality that entered the world through sin (starting with Adam and Eve’s nakedness and hiding in Genesis 3), yet one that God actively covers, confronts, and ultimately removes through Christ. It’s never intended to be embraced as a final destination.

Healthy shame can prompt repentance and humility, much like the corrective “shame” Paul urges in the New Testament to restore wayward believers. But the gospel’s triumph is that Jesus, “despising the shame” of the cross, bore our ultimate humiliation so that believers need never be put to shame again.

In Him, there is no condemnation. In myself… well, that’s another story, one I’m still aggressively editing with a big old red pen as I go.

The work, I think, is learning to tell the difference between conviction and accusation. Conviction is specific and temporary. Shame is sweeping. Conviction says, “Call the dentist sooner next time.” Shame says, “You are unfit to be trusted with anything fragile.” Conviction leads to repair. Shame leads to hiding. Hiding leads to isolation, isolation to depression, depression to hopelessness, and hopelessness to more self-reliance and deeper sin. It’s an ugly cycle. Zero out of 10 recommend.

Sunlight, as it turns out, remains the best disinfectant, which is why, once in a blue moon, instead of writing a scathing critique of the injustices plaguing the culture wars or the misogyny afflicting the universe, I write something a bit more introspective and personal about my own journey with the glaring awareness of my humanity.

So here I am, in the sunlight. Still embarrassed about the cat, still second-guessing the dentist appointments and the snacks and the screen time and the hundred other small decisions that constitute a day of parenting. But I’m learning (slowly, reluctantly, and with all the enthusiasm of someone being dragged to an Amway presentation) that I am not the sum of my worst moments.

Neither, I suspect, are you.

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Depending on where you sit politically, this is either a long overdue potential death-knell to a corrupt hate group, or this is the Trump administration using the Justice Department as a weapon to silence one of its most prominent critics. It’s hard to weed through the media bias and heavily politicized narratives to discern what’s actually true about this situation.

And I’ll level with you. I’m not without personal bias of my own here. I approach this as someone whose name has been listed on the SPLC website as a dangerous member of a hate group. Why? Because I publicly oppose men in women’s spaces. This is not serious advocacy on their part. When women defending our sex-based rights are categorized next to white supremacists and domestic terrorists, it’s really pretty hard to take hate claims seriously.

Catholic charities that subscribe to the biblical definition of marriage are not the same as neo-Nazis organizing terror from a compound in the diddysticks. I don’t think this is particularly hard to understand. When you call everything hate, you make it harder to identify the real thing. When you invite the wide world to view decent people in the same light as terrorists, decent people are going to roll their eyes and stop listening to anything else you say.

Somewhere along the way, the SPLC shifted from defending victims of real discrimination in the post–Jim Crow South to targeting nearly any organization to the right of Mitch McConnell. What began as a just fight against real discrimination has become an intersectional crusade that often sweeps up even innocent people in perceived “oppressor” groups. Over time, the SPLC blurred the line between combating real injustice and opposing conservative Christianity. And the conflation has not been inconsequential.

Perhaps the most harrowing example came in 2012, when Floyd Lee Corkins II entered the Family Research Council’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., armed with a handgun, three magazines, and 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches, which he intended to smear in the faces of the staffers he planned to slaughter.

In FBI interrogation footage, when asked how he found the building, Corkins said: “It was a, uh, Southern Poverty Law, lists, uh, anti-gay groups. I found them online. I did a little bit of research, went to the website.”

The FRC is a mainstream conservative Christian organization that opposes same-sex marriage. Disagree with that stance if you will, but hopefully we can agree that adherence to age-old biblical doctrine is decidedly NOT the same as allegiance to the Ku Klux Klan. These are not difficult distinctions to draw. But because the SPLC put the FRC on the same list as the white supremacists, a man loaded a gun and entered the FRC looking for people to kill. A security guard named Leo Johnson stopped him, taking a bullet in the arm. Thank God for armed security.

Even after an actual shooting inspired by their recklessness, the SPLC never removed the FRC from its hate map.

So for people to pretend like they simply can’t understand conservative frustration with the SPLC strikes me as either tremendously ill-informed or just straight up disingenuous. There are more than a couple legitimate grievances.

That hardly means those grievances should be allowed to eclipse truth in the way we interpret current events involving the indictment for fraud.

I’ve already seen a number of prominent conservatives leaping to extreme conclusions, essentially arguing that, like Jussie Smollett, the SPLC was manufacturing hate crimes in order to keep lining their pockets with the rage of the vulnerable, just to keep the Democratic victim narrative alive. The Blaze went so far as to run a headline suggesting that the 2017 violence in Charlotte was a “leftist-funded false flag.”

And look, I get the instinct. When someone who built their entire brand on exposing racism turns out to have been secretly cutting checks to actual Klansmen, the temptation to cry “false flag” is understandable. But what’s actually true?

Let’s talk about Charlotte. Here’s what the indictment actually says: one SPLC informant was a member of the online leadership chat group that helped plan the rally, made racist posts under SPLC supervision, and helped coordinate transportation for several attendees. This is troubling by all standards.

But there’s a large gap between “one paid informant helped coordinate some logistics” and “the whole thing was a staged false flag.”

Charlottesville was organized by real white nationalist groups with real ideological convictions. James Alex Fields, who had a documented history of neo-Nazi beliefs going back years before the SPLC’s informant program had any involvement, drove the car that killed Heather Heyer. The other participants were real people who showed up because they actually believed what they were marching for.

The false flag claim essentially requires you to believe that hundreds of committed white nationalists, many of whom faced serious legal consequences for attending, were unwitting props in an SPLC production. Let’s be reasonable, shall we? That’s not what happened.

So what motivates the leap from “this organization behaved unethically and possibly illegally” to “therefore racism is a liberal hoax”? It’s not a logical leap. It’s a motivated one. Why are we so very eager to believe that all racist activities on the right are fake? That no one on our side of the political divide could possibly actually be racist? That the entirety of the problem is always someone else’s fault? Or that the problem is manufactured and fake entirely?

Shady financial practices at a civil rights nonprofit do not retroactively erase the history that made civil rights nonprofits necessary in the first place. The SPLC’s misconduct is a reason to demand better accountability in that space, not a reason to abandon the space altogether. Racial equality is not a finish line we crossed in 1964; it’s a matter of maintenance we must actively pursue in a fallen world until the day Christ returns.

I think the question that needs to underscore our collective process regardless of how a situation might confirm our preferred biases is this: “What is ultimately true here?”

What’s really true is that the SPLC took donor funds and funneled them into shell companies in order to secretly distribute money to individuals they did not disclose to donors. That alone is enough to warrant serious scrutiny. Nonprofits do not get a free pass to obscure financial activity just because they believe their mission justifies it, especially when that money is being routed to members of the very extremist groups they publicly condemn. That’s just really shady territory. And it’s illegal.

It is also true that the SPLC claims this was part of an informant program designed to gather intelligence and monitor dangerous groups, and that secrecy was necessary to protect those sources. On a human level, it’s not hard to understand this reasoning.

If Joe Schmo is a neo-Nazi who agrees to feed me information provided I pay him for it, and then a public report comes out saying, “Hey donors all over the nation, Kaeley paid thousands of the dollars you gave her to a neo-Nazi,” there’s going to be trouble for everyone involved, especially Joe who will inevitably find his name on a hit list somewhere. I don’t know a safe or legal way to protect the anonymity of informants. That’s above my paygrade. But the presence of the dilemma doesn’t justify the choice to violate the law, nor does it erase the ethical problems attached to it.

As previously mentioned, according to the indictment, at least one SPLC paid informant was involved in organizing logistics for the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. That means donor money may have been flowing to someone actively participating in an event that turned deadly. That’s a pretty big yikes.

Even if the intent was intelligence gathering, you are no longer just observing extremism at that point, you are financially entangled with it. People are right to be upset about this. It’s like asking people to fund your fight to keep men out of women’s prisons, then quietly cutting checks to someone actively working to keep them in, and calling it strategy while your donors unknowingly bankroll the other side.

The people who should be most angry about this are the donors. But they don’t seem to be that upset. At all. So why not? Are they buying the “We had to do it in order to keep our informants safe?” line? Maybe. Do they just distrust the DOJ so aggressively that they’re not even willing to consider the merits of the charges? Highly likely in my opinion.

Conversely, I think those of us who were at least a little tickled by the apparent schadenfreude of the SPLC indictment ought to be aware of our own propensity toward confirmation bias. The temptation on our side is to let legitimate grievances do the work of actual thinking, and just assume the worst is true because we already believed the worst.

Maybe the best response would be a firm personal commitment to refusing tidy narratives that offer convenience without complete truth. The SPLC has done real harm through reckless labeling, and the financial misconduct alleged in this indictment is serious and warrants accountability. Both of those things can be true while also acknowledging that the Trump DOJ is not a disinterested party here, and that dismantling organizations that monitor extremism, however imperfectly, carries its own risks.

Even if the SPLC implodes because of this latest scandal, racism doesn’t magically disappear just because the loudest watchdogs stopped barking about it. If the organization collapses, it will not be because racism was fake. It will be because truth was treated as optional. And that is a far more dangerous precedent because when the people claiming to fight injustice start playing fast and loose with facts, they do not just damage themselves; they make it easier for everyone else to dismiss the problem entirely.

And that is a loss no one should be celebrating.

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Note: I’ve enjoyed all the feedback about my essay “What It’s Really Like Being a (Almost) 40-year-old Virgin Christian Man in 2025” from February of last year. It was quite something to see it shared, reshared, and then read dozens of poignant comments. Many of them made me smile. Thank you all for that. I offer this essay as a follow-up of sorts.

So, I have crossed the 40-year mark, and the journey continues. In fact, I’ll soon be 41. I’m still single and would still love to be married and start a family. I’ve not completely given up, but it’s a grinding, daily struggle.

I never wanted to be here, and lately, I have found myself wishing I were 30, not 40. But since it is a fruitless exercise to wish for something impossible, as none of us can rewind our lives for a redo, I’ll also say that, all things considered, I am doing well at 40, and I have much for which to be thankful.

I can also say that I have no major regrets in life, but there are a few chapters I look back on, especially during my 20s, and I have wondered: “What in the world was that? Those months during this year, and then that one fall and winter in that, two years after that? Oh man, those felt so lifeless, frustrating, and unproductive. What a pointless wasteland that was, and what meaningless toil they were.”

And then I realize how much of life is beyond my control, and my whole perspective shifts. Maybe God was working in ways I didn’t see or couldn’t perceive in those seemingly unproductive, frustrating months. Maybe they were, in the grand scheme of things, stepping stones to build a certain kind of tenacity in me to propel me forward. Perhaps I wouldn’t be as successful as I have become without that hardship, and navigating all the unforeseen challenges and overcoming dozens of aggravating hurdles was a good thing.

But what about getting married and starting a family? Yeah, that’s the biggie. It’s almost existential. What about the simmering desire for marital affection and sexual intimacy that gnaws at me every single day? The Apostle Paul says it’s better to marry than to burn with passion (1 Corinthians 7:9), and, yeah, it would be accurate to say I’m feelin’ that burn.

There is no point in sugarcoating it. The struggle hurts physically…and fiercely.

And now that I passed the big 4-0? Age may be just a number, but when you finish a decade and start another, there is something about how your brain works, in that it’s about segments of time, and it punctuates your mortality and how you think about your circumstances. And how can I put this delicately…uhh, there is nothing that reminds a guy more that he’s in a new phase of life than his first prostate exam at the doctor. Yeeeeaaaaahhh, it’s not exactly a pleasant experience.

So, in light of the many moving comments I’ve received, maybe the best way to unpack this journey a bit more is to elaborate further on the two most vulnerable sections I wrote in my first essay, which were about the terrible moments in this journey of faith for which nothing could have prepared me. Even as a sincere Christian who has experienced the joy of the Lord amid the waiting and has known God’s presence consoling me in the difficult times, some seasons of the journey have been parched spiritual deserts I never thought I would endure. I offer the following in hopes that many of you will be encouraged. I’m working to encourage myself as much as anything.

IS GOD TRULY GOOD?

Specifically, I said: “The worst times are what you might call ‘dark nights of the soul’ and you begin to wonder if God is truly good.”

What exactly are these dark and troubled nights of the soul like? What was it like to be so emotionally bottled up but deep down resentful and furious that it felt like something physically weighty was choking the life out of me?

When you have waited and prayed for a spouse for a long time, and it’s not happening, at least for me, there is almost a feeling of cruel divine betrayal.

And then you feel guilty for feeling betrayed because you know that God clearly brought spouses together (see Genesis 24-25, Isaac and Rebekah), but He never specifically promises spouses to his children anywhere in Scripture. And though He awaits a Bride, Jesus lived a fulfilled life, and he never married while on earth. So, let’s be clear here, God did not betray me. He’s not culpable of any wrongdoing. He doesn’t owe me a wife and family.

He certainly could provide a wife. But, at the moment, He isn’t. And I have had to face the brute fact that I might never be married. If that happens, it induces a most uncomfortable panic in me – that I very well may have several decades more of dreadful loneliness and suffering ahead of me in this earthly life, and only death and being with Jesus will set me free. I’ll even admit it that in my weakest moments, I’ve borrowed trouble and even feared dying alone in the nursing home with no family to visit because I never got to have kids.

I mean, c’mon, haven’t I waited long enough? And didn’t I keep my promise to be a good boy by never crossing certain lines? And then I remember, again, that faith is not transactional. “Do this, and you’ll get this” is not a Gospel promise in the Christian faith, but that thinking can seep into one’s mindset. I believe it unwittingly, even as I know it’s theologically wrong.

When this foremost longing of the heart (at least for me) goes unmet year after year, it’s easy to start believing that God doesn’t care, and that He is aloof and unconcerned with this blazing furnace of intense yearning. The pain of unanswered prayer is tough enough. But when your heart is on the line? Again, it hurts like hell.

But is it true that God doesn’t care?

If He’s not concerned or attentive to these heartbroken cries of mine, can He be trusted? Am I being ignored? Does God truly love me…at all? I have asked all these questions in the wilderness of wondering why I can’t seem to find a spouse, the one dream I’ve had since I was a child.

Because if the Lord doesn’t love me or care about this, particularly since the struggle has caused me such enormous heartache, can I honestly even say that I believe He is good?

And if I can’t say God is good, well, who even is…God?

A.W. Tozer wrote in his book exploring God’s attributes, “The Knowledge of the Holy, ” specifically about God’s goodness:

“When Christian theology says that God is good, it is not the same as saying that He is righteous or holy. The holiness of God is trumpeted from the heavens and re-echoed on earth by saints and sages wherever God has revealed Himself to men; however, we are not at this time considering His holiness but His goodness, which is quite another thing.

The goodness of God is that which disposes Him to be kind, cordial, benevolent, and full of good will toward men. He is tenderhearted and of quick sympathy, and His unfailing attitude toward all moral beings is open, frank, and friendly. By His nature He is inclined to bestow blessedness and He takes holy pleasure in the happiness of His people.”

“God is love,” reads 1John 4:8. And I can’t help but see the love of God displayed in the ministry of Jesus, and quite obviously, in his sacrificial death on the cross. That is, quite literally, the crux of my faith. So yes, He loves me more than I can fathom.

Tozer continues:

“The whole outlook of mankind might be changed if we could all believe that we dwell under a friendly sky and that the God of heaven, though exalted in power and majesty is eager to be friends with us.”

If true, there are many ways we can know and experience love. He enjoys being with me.

Maybe I shouldn’t expect a bunch of warm fuzzies or the tangible, peaceful presence of the Holy Spirit every day. But Jesus is always there, a faithful Friend who sticks closer than a brother.

But when your heart and soul are famished on these achingly lonely nights? When nothing is changing for years on end, and you’re crying out for something to break, to no avail? God’s love as a lofty, nice, ephemeral idea sure doesn’t cut it. Not for me anyway.

Sure, I know I can’t always trust feelings. Faith has to be built on more than the dashboard lights of our emotions. But if God’s love is so great, why can’t I experience it in my moment of need, especially when I can’t sleep, and I’m distressed and pillow-hugging?

“I need you to come through for me NOW, Lord. Why are you holding out on me here, leaving me hanging in my misery? Surely there has to be more to life in Christ in this area of my life than white-knuckling it until the wedding night (if I ever even make it to such a day), but at the moment, I don’t know what to do! I want to honor you here. I don’t want to break my commitment to you and engage in gross sexual sin. I need help!”

I swallow, pray a bit more, and the tears well up in my eyes. This tests me to my limit.

I even hate saying these things out loud or having to write them down, because an earnest Christian is supposed to believe that God is who He says He is. And then I think, but of course God loves me!

A faithful Christian knows that when our lived experiences don’t match the biblical description of God’s character, well, we should still defer to God’s infallible Word, which is the plumbline for all matters of faith and practice.

So, shouldn’t that settle the matter?

Maybe it should doctrinally settle it...except the deep waters of the heart are a strange thing. Proverbs 20:5 declares that the “purposes of a person’s heart are deep waters, but one who has insight draws them out.”

Watertight doctrine and theologically correct Sunday School answers aren’t enough here. I need to encounter God Himself.

And then I realize, what am I even thinking? This is Pharisaical religious foolishness talking! Neither God nor the Bible put this weird pressure on me! I remember that it’s fine not to be fine sometimes. I don’t have to plaster a fake smile on my face and pretend I’m OK.

All these weird religious habits of mind wherein I revert to thinking that if I’m to be a sincere Christian, I should never struggle? They are not from the Holy Spirit. This is human weakness, and the Accuser of the Brethren who is pushing my buttons. I turn to the Psalms and start to pore over the words of King David as he pours out his soul to God. Talk about a guy who didn’t always have his act together!

And I don’t either; I can take my heartache directly to God. Come to think of it, that is actually good theology, right doctrine in practice.

On David’s tormented days? He concludes many of the Psalms acknowledging who God is, anchoring his heart in Him. He wonders why God has rejected him and why he must go about mourning Psalm 43:2, but ends with “Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God” (Psalm 43:5).

Indeed, it seems to me that around half the battle (maybe more?) is in the mind, specifically believing that God is good.

Because there is nothing, and I mean nothing, like the pain of unanswered prayer and a desire for sexual union when you hit 40, that will push you to the end of yourself as to whether or not you believe that.

GETTING RID OF THE ANVIL AROUND MY NECK

I also mentioned in my first essay that I went through an “extremely bitter phase of the struggle” a few years ago in which I sensed God asking me if I would trust Him no matter what, even if I never got to fulfill my heart’s deepest desire of getting married and, by extension, enjoying a fulfilling sex life that God blesses. I became so bitter and angry during this period of struggle, and so viscerally did I spurn the thought of never having these dreams come to fruition that I shut down emotionally. And I further noted that I wound up feeling as though I had an “anvil around my neck” and ultimately called a counselor to process the searing heartache. As far as that anvil around my neck is concerned, I told that same counselor friend in July: “This is a tremendously sore spot between me and God.”

The weekend before, I had back-to-back meltdowns about this, two days in a row. I found myself crying and venting on the phone with my dad and another friend, frustrated as all get out that nothing I was doing seemed to be moving this area of my life along. I’d just enjoyed a great success at work, but I couldn’t even enjoy it because I felt like I was in a relational straitjacket trying to wrangle myself the heck out. I’m an ambitious, type-A go-getter type, and there are few things I hate more than the feeling of being caged and that whatever I’m trying to do (and I work hard) is not working.

I’ve tried everything.

I’ve used a few dating apps, and those are a mixed bag. I’ve asked gals out from church, and even went on a few dates, but got friend-zoned. One of them even told me that dating me was the most pleasant experience she’d ever had, but she just wasn’t feeling it, and I respected her honesty. I’ve made efforts to go to young adult gatherings, like dances and worship nights at churches. I’ve even done Zoom calls with friends of friends who set me up with their friends, but we’re separated by a few time zones, and I’m just not down for a long-distance relationship, and I don’t have a travel budget nor the mental strength to be hopping on planes all the time to make something happen.

If I know anything now, it’s that I know I can’t “make it happen.”

But even as the deep longing remains, the anvil isn’t there anymore. As the days tick by, even with the ups and downs, the journey of surrender continues.

Hebrews 5:8 says of Jesus: “Though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered.”

I hate this particular suffering. Haaaaaaate it. I wish it would end. If I could snap my fingers and make it stop tomorrow, I would. I also can’t stand how some Christians conceptualize suffering and make it into a weird, almost fetish-like thing, as though we receive more holiness points on God’s heavenly chalkboard the more we experience it.

And yet, suffering is inescapable. Had I known what was ahead of me when I committed to God to wait to have sex when I was 8 years old, I’m not sure I would have done it.

But if Jesus, God’s Son, had to learn obedience through suffering and he never sinned, as an adopted son of God who has absolutely erred and strayed from God’s ways at times, let’s just say I I know I have few things to learn by this most unwanted suffering of my own, none of which can compare to what He endured at Calvary. I’m not trying to give a pat Christian answer here. But in all honesty? It’s at the cross where it lands for me.

I still have no idea what God’s doing through this, but may my testimony be: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” (Psalm 23:6).

The sculpture depicted then presidential nominee Barack Obama decked out in Jesus robes with a neon blue halo. He called it “Blessing.”

When asked about his inspiration, Cordero explained, “All of this is a response to what I’ve been witnessing and hearing, this idea that Barack is sort of a potential savior that might come and absolve the country of all its sins.”

The backlash from the evangelical right was swift and severe, and even the Obama campaign had the good sense to try to distance itself from the display. The official statement from spokeswoman Jen Psaki was this: “While we respect First Amendment rights and don’t think the artist was trying to be offensive, Senator Obama, as a rule, isn’t a fan of art that offends religious sensibilities.”

Say what you will about Obama, his policies, or his reign in office. I’m not here to offer commentary on any of that. But his team did get this one right. They innately understood something that feels almost foreign now: that elevating a political figure into something quasi-divine is, at very least, terrible optics.

Presidents are not saviors. Policies do not redeem. Elections do not atone for sin.

This used to be a point of broad agreement.

Despite the Obama team’s damage control campaign, this would not be the only time the right condemned the left for elevating Obama to a Messiah status, whether in art, in rhetoric, or in the almost liturgical language that crept into public discourse: phrases about “hope,” “redemption,” and “healing the nation” that, to many critics, sounded less like politics and more like theology.

Fast forward to last week when President Donald Trump took to his Truth Social account to share a now-infamous AI-generated image of himself in glowing Jesus robes, healing the people around him.

Here’s what strikes me about the contrast between these two moments. Obama, a man I didn’t particularly care for politically, encountered an artist who had cast him as a messianic figure, and his instinct was to pump the brakes. His team put out a statement that essentially said, “We appreciate the First Amendment, but no thank you.” He understood, at least in that moment, that there was a line a public figure simply should not cross. Trump encountered a AI-generated image of himself draped in the robes of Christ, glowing with divine light, and his instinct was to hit “share.”

Now, to be fair, a number of evangelicals were quick to say so publicly. Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, called it “deeply troubling” and warned against the conflation of political and spiritual authority. Commentator and author David French wrote that the image reflected a dangerous form of political idolatry that Christians should reject outright. Conservative Christian commentator Allie Beth Stuckey was among those who pushed back directly, stating plainly that this kind of imagery is not something a follower of Christ should be promoting, regardless of political affiliation. These voices exist, and they deserve to be acknowledged.

But for every Christian who was willing to say the obvious, there were dozens more tying themselves in knots to explain it away, to minimize, whitewash it, and shame anyone with the nerve to call it what it is. They’re eager to believe that Trump didn’t know the image was messianic in nature, a claim that requires a genuinely heroic suspension of disbelief. And they’re even more eager to wag a finger in the face of anyone who says, “This is not okay.”

You know the script. “Have more grace.” “God is using him, even if he’s imperfect.” “Why are you so quick to condemn?” “Pray for the man.” “Would you want every one of your own missteps judged this harshly?”

These are the same people who would have flipped over actual tables if Barack Obama or Joe Biden had posted that exact image with their own face in the Christ figure’s spot. In that universe, there are no lectures about grace. There are no gentle reminders to pray for our leaders. There are no calls to consider the man’s heart. No. There would have been demands for heads on pikes. And honestly, they would have been right to be outraged. That’s the point.

The hypocrisy isn’t subtle. Nobody wants to be told they’ve made an idol out of their politics, but that is precisely what has happened. Some of this is garden-variety partisan tribalism that has convinced itself the ends justify the means. But there’s a subset of this crowd that concerns me on an entirely different level, one I’ve been watching and warning about since 2020.

There is a faction of charismatic believers who were led badly astray by a wave of influential “prophetic” voices during the 2020 election cycle. These were prominent names with large platforms who told their followers, with confidence, that God had revealed Donald Trump would win 2020 re-election decisively and serve a full second term.

And they were wrong.

Jeremiah Johnson, who had gained credibility for predicting Trump’s 2016 win, later publicly repented, admitting he had misinterpreted what he believed he heard from God and calling parts of the prophetic movement “deeply sick.” Kris Vallotton, Pat Robertson, Shawn Bolz, Loren Sandford, and others made similar claims. Several eventually acknowledged their prophecies had failed. Not one of them warned in advance of a “stolen election” or hidden outcome. Those explanations only surfaced after the predictions collapsed.

At the same time, a parallel stream of QAnon-driven narratives took hold in many of these same circles. Followers were told Trump was secretly waging war against a Satanic global cabal of elite child traffickers. “The Storm” was imminent. Mass arrests were coming. High-profile political and cultural figures would be exposed and taken down. Some even claimed coordinated military operations tied to the Vatican and global trafficking networks were already underway. I had more than one friend send me alleged video footage of the Vatican. “It’s gone dark, Kaeley,” they insisted. “See how there are no lights on? The pope has been arrested! It’s happening now.”

But it wasn’t actually true. None of it happened. At all.

No storm. No mass arrests. No secret takedowns. No Vatican raids. The predictions failed outright, in full public view.

And yet, even after all of that, after the prophecies failed, after the timelines collapsed, after reality refused to cooperate, thousands of people, including personal friends, simply…kept believing.

The goalposts moved.

“The prophecies were right; we just got the timeline wrong,” they insisted. “Just wait and see. Biden won’t be sworn into office. God is going to expose him before inauguration day.”

But that didn’t happen either. So the date moved again. “It’s going down in March. Just wait. All will be revealed. There will be undeniable evidence that shakes Democrats to the core.” March turned to June, and nothing happened. But still they believed.

Cognitive dissonance is a terrifying beast. And this stubbornness of belief despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary is actually really dangerous.

It is the same posture that has shielded abusers in the church for generations. Put a man on a high enough pedestal, convince people that God’s hand is uniquely on him, and suddenly the normal rules of discernment no longer apply. Nothing but “Touch not the Lord’s anointed!”

If you can convince yourself that the very survival of your entire nation depends on one man hand-picked by an Almighty God as an actual savior of sorts, then you can also convince yourself that anyone challenging your belief in this man is simply spiritually defective. The reason people think you’re crazy is because they’re spiritually blind, but not you. You have true faith. You have secret knowledge. You are special. They are not.

I had one friend tell me sadly, “If you don’t have the spiritual eyes to see what’s going on behind the scenes, then God’s just not going to be able to use you.”

Again, the thesis is “Trump is God’s chosen one, and if you disagree with me it’s because you aren’t close enough to Jesus.”

So let’s talk about this “chosen one” language for a second. Like what does that even mean? Let’s say God DID choose Donald Trump for this season of America. That could mean any number of things, none of which make Trump a second Messiah.

God obviously chooses flawed people to accomplish His purposes. Flawed people are the only kind He has to work with. But just because God chose someone for a job does not mean God approves of the way they behave.

Scripture is full of wicked people that God technically chose. He chose Saul. He chose Nebuchadnezzar. He chose the Assyrians. He chose Pharaoh.

The choice for a role is not the same as the endorsement of a behavior. Chosen does not mean anointed. It does not mean exempt from scrutiny. And it certainly doesn’t mean righteous.

So even if God did choose Trump for this gig, it does not necessarily follow that we have to pretend his bad behavior is holy because it’s not.

If Christians can’t even honestly name the difference between righteousness and wickedness, how the heck can we expect anyone else to understand God’s standards?

This same friend who insisted that Trump is a prophet tried to use Saul/Paul as prooftext for her silencing campaign against me. “But Kaeley. Saul was persecuting early Christians and putting them to death, but we don’t see anyone gossiping about him. They just went and prayed for him.”

This is simply untrue.

The reason we even know that Saul was persecuting Christians is because people talked about it. Luke explicitly recorded that Saul “began to destroy the church.” We don’t call this gossip. We call it truth-telling. The believers in Damascus knew exactly who Saul was and what he was doing. When Ananias was told to go help the newly blinded Saul, he replied: “Lord, I have heard many reports about this man and all the harm he has done to your holy people in Jerusalem. And he has come here with authority from the chief priests to arrest all who call on your name” (Acts 9:13-14).

“Many reports.” Again, people were telling the truth. It wasn’t a smear campaign against God’s anointed one.

There’s literally not a single human in all of Scripture who gets a free pass against righteous critique on account of being chosen by God to complete a job. Not one. So why are we inventing this category now?

That’s really what this comes down to. Not Trump. Not Obama. Not politics. It comes down to whether the people of God are actually willing to be the people of God, even when it’s inconvenient. Even when the person who needs to be held accountable is someone they like, someone they voted for, someone they’ve built an entire eschatological framework around.

Sharing an image of yourself in the robes of Christ is not a minor gaffe requiring a gentle redirect and a prayer. It is a serious theological offense. And the fact that so many Christians cannot bring themselves to say so out loud tells us something important about where their loyalties actually lie.

You can support a politician’s policies without building a shrine to him. You can vote for someone without deciding he’s beyond reproach. You can believe God uses imperfect leaders without concluding that this particular imperfect leader is therefore untouchable. We manage to make these distinctions for every other human being on the planet. The fact that we suddenly can’t make them for this one man is not a sign of anything good or righteous.

The world is watching the church decide what it actually believes. A president in the robes of Jesus, shared proudly and defended loudly, is not a good answer to the question they’re asking.

We can do better than this. We’re called to. Don’t be weird.

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Earlier this week, a Twitter friend set the internet on fire when she unleashed her righteous indignation through a series of X posts denouncing the hypersexualization of public spaces. She had taken her teen boys on a spring break beach trip to Florida, only to find herself repeatedly confronted with what she described as an onslaught of nearly nude women, clothed in little more than what amounts to two cocktail napkins strung together with a piece of dental floss.

My friend was vexed by what she saw as a lack of basic social consideration, and she called out what she perceived to be a glaring double standard. She wasn’t entirely wrong.

When a man walks through a public park in nothing but a thong, people don’t debate his right to self-expression. They call security. They move their kids away. They assume something is off, because we instinctively understand that level of exposure, in this context, violates shared norms.

If a man lingered near a playground dressed the way some women dress at public beaches, we wouldn’t be having a philosophical discussion about body positivity. We would be asking why he’s there and whether someone needs to intervene.

If a man posted videos of himself barely clothed in public spaces, drawing attention to his body from strangers, we wouldn’t call it empowering. We’d call it exhibitionism.

But when women engage in behavior that is functionally similar, the script flips entirely:

“How dare you body shame her?”
“Why are you treating women’s bodies like they’re dirty?”
“If you don’t want to see it, why are you looking?”
“Haven’t you been to Europe? They’re just bodies. Chill out.”

These are gaslighty responses to what, until fairly recently, would have been considered reasonable expectations for public behavior and decency.

My friend is doing her level best to raise boys who respect women, who don’t reduce them to sexual objects, and who treat them with dignity. But when she named the tension of trying to do that in an environment saturated with sexualized imagery, she was roundly punished for it, as though her boys were somehow the problem for noticing what was plainly in front of them or for having predictable biological responses.

I didn’t agree with all of my friend’s conclusions, particularly the way she assumed intent or misapplied the term “groomer,” and I shared my strong disagreement publicly, but I do think she stumbled into a broader conversation that’s long overdue.

There is a double standard where female sexuality is concerned, and refusing to name it won’t make it disappear. It will only increase male frustration and widen the relational gap between the sexes. When I shared this discussion on my own page, I was met with the same kind of reactionary hostility that flooded her feed.

Some of that is likely backlash to purity culture, and I’m not without empathy. It wasn’t so long ago that I attended a private school where girls’ hemlines were literally measured and we could be fined for showing our shoulders. I learned, like many of us did, that my body was dangerous to men, that it was my responsibility to manage their thoughts and mitigate their desires.

I sat through the well-intentioned lectures that compared our bodies to treasures that somehow depreciate in value with exposure. I spent much of my twenties untangling that messaging from my psyche so it no longer dictated how I understood modesty or gender dynamics.

So if some of what we’re seeing now is a recoil from that, I understand it. I also understand there’s a physical power dynamic underscoring the conversation. Since men as a class are responsible for upwards of 90% of the world’s sexual crimes, public male sexuality may be held in higher suspicion than female public sexuality. Naked men pose more of a threat.

But I don’t think that justifies abandoning the conversation altogether, or pretending that all expectations around public behavior are inherently oppressive. And I don’t think it’s right to carve out a safe space where obvious double standards are allowed to hide.

It’s also wrong to neglect the dignity of all men because we’re angry at the bad behavior of some. Female discomfort is not the only discomfort that matters, and (especially) those who claim to champion equality ought to be fair and consistent about this.

Generally speaking, the pattern I keep encountering is this: If a man walks around mostly naked, he’s a pervert. If a woman does it, the problem is you and your puritanical pearl-clutching.

I could write pages of content on this topic from a strictly Christian perspective. Pretty much the first thing God did for Adam and Eve when they left Eden was clothe them. In the garden, they were naked, and He declared it good. But sin entered the world, and everything changed. They became aware of their nakedness and ultimately of their vulnerability. Before the fall, they were fully known to God and to one another, with nothing hidden and no need for protection. That transparency was beautiful.

But sin created a barrier, and that barrier created a need for covering that hasn’t lifted and will not lift until Christ returns. God’s response was provision, a quiet act of mercy extended to people who were now too broken to bear full vulnerability with one another.

Whether or not anyone wants to recognize it as an extension of that framework, the same vulnerability still informs how we instinctively navigate this issue today. And I realize that the moment I bring a Christian lens into the conversation, it becomes easy to dismiss everything I’m saying as puritanical by default.

But the truth is, you don’t need lofty theology to make a coherent case for reasonable modesty expectations. There’s a deeply practical, common-sense argument to be made here, one that has nothing to do with shame and everything to do with how we function in community.

Public space is, by definition, shared space. And shared space always comes with some level of mutual restraint. We all intuitively understand this in other areas of life. I don’t crack open a can of sardines on public transport. That would be rude. I don’t blast Five Finger Death Punch at full volume in a park where small children are playing. Why? Because the universe does not revolve around me, and I recognize that my preferences don’t override everyone else’s experience of a communal environment.

That same principle applies here.

When we pretend that hypersexualized public presentation exists in a vacuum, that it affects no one but the person choosing it, we’re ignoring the reality that other people are involuntary participants in that environment. Consent does not magically disappear just because men have more physical power. Boundaries don’t become optional just because the person crossing them is a woman.

Your choice to wear essentially nothing in a public setting is not just a personal expression; it’s also a decision that imposes that expression on everyone around you, including people who did not choose it, do not want it, and, in some cases, are actively harmed by it.

That matters.

It matters for parents trying to raise their kids with a coherent framework around sexuality. It matters for people from different cultural or religious backgrounds who hold to different standards of modesty. And it especially matters for survivors of sexual trauma, for whom unexpected exposure to near-nudity in public spaces can be genuinely destabilizing.

We are not disembodied beings floating through neutral environments. We are embodied people navigating a world full of context, history, and vulnerability, and social intelligence requires us to take that into account.

Context is everything. The context of American culture is pornsickness. It colors absolutely everything. We must navigate the world as it actually exists, not as we wish it would be. If I know that an estimated 78% of the men on a beach have porn addictions, then I don’t have the luxury of saying, “What’s the big deal? It’s just a body.”

Because in a pornsick culture, it is never just a body. The context has already been poisoned. The male gaze has already been trained, distorted, and weaponized by an industry that has rewired how millions of men perceive the female form. That is the world we are actually living in, and wishing it were otherwise does not change the reality that women navigate every day.

This is not an argument for burkas. It is not an argument that women are responsible for men’s sins. It is simply an acknowledgment that we make decisions inside a cultural moment, and that cultural moment is saturated with sexual dysfunction on a scale that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. Ignoring that context in the name of liberation is not brave; it is naive. The people who pay the price for that naivety are rarely the ones making the argument.

A nude beach is one thing. Everyone present has, in some sense, opted in. The expectations are clear, and participation is voluntary. But a public beach, a grocery store, a family resort? These are not opt-in environments for sexualized exposure. They are mixed-use spaces, occupied by people with wildly different expectations, boundaries, and life experiences.

Do we care about other people, or not?

Because right now, the dominant response to any discomfort is to pathologize the person feeling it. If you object, you’re insecure. If you notice, you’re the problem. If you draw a boundary, you’re regressive, a pearl-clutcher, a prude, a misogynist even.

Call me all the names you wish to call me; it does not negate the point I’m trying to make here.

There is a difference between rejecting shame-based control and rejecting all forms of restraint. There is a difference between honoring bodily autonomy and pretending that our choices don’t have communal impact. And there is certainly a difference between advocating for dignity and demanding that everyone else silently absorb whatever we choose to put on display.

We don’t need to swing back to measuring hemlines or assigning moral value to skin, but we also don’t need to pretend that the complete absence of modesty norms is neutral, harmless, or enlightened. Because I promise you it isn’t.

It’s just another kind of imbalance, one that requires the burden of adjustment to fall on everyone except the person creating the disruption.

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The question before us was this:

“Name a time you felt disappointed by God and had to wrestle through it.”

New lady was the first to answer: “If you actually have faith in God, He can’t disappoint you. You just have to remain in prayer when times get hard.”

I internally groaned and coached myself toward a civil response, ultimately deciding that humility and vulnerability would probably be more effective than the harsh rebuttal pleading for escape from my razor sharp tongue.

“I don’t know if I agree with that,” I countered. “God knows we’re human. We’ve got all kinds of Scripture showing heroes of the faith who struggled to believe in the goodness of God in the midst of struggle.”

I went on to share about how disappointed and abandoned I felt when, after 7 years of hardcore prayer and faith for the restoration of my first marriage, it ended in divorce. “I felt really disappointed that God provided miracles for all these other people but not for me,” I confessed.

The story had not even fully escaped my lips before new lady responded. “But did you even marry a Christian?” she demanded.

I did not have the time, bandwidth, or, quite frankly, the patience to explain how narcissists can shapeshift and make you believe they’re something they’re not. Neither did I have time to explain that this line of questioning is irrelevant and unhelpful to anyone in the middle of the storm.

Hindsight is a hell of an office assistant, always ready with color-coded folders and confident conclusions long after the damage is done. It’s fluent in the shaming techniques of “You should have known better” and “It was technically your fault,” quietly sabotaging already fraught journeys back to stable ground.

I took a deep breath and, as I tried to quickly form a gracious response, she continued firing, “That’s why you have to just keep praying and believing. You can’t afford to just quit when it gets hard.” And, my very favorite of her contributions to the discussion: “There’s always a light at the end of the tunnel.”

You guys….

Thank God the rest of my tablemates were wise old women who have lived a lot of life and more than earned their stripes. Our group leader put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I understand exactly what you mean, Kaeley. Faith is not a formula, and if we can’t admit we struggle sometimes, we’re never going to get where we need to go.”

God bless this woman.

The rest of Bible study continued with new lady inserting Christianese cliches at every possible opportunity and me just waiting for the session to end already. Do I internalize her judgments? Not at all. She’s obviously just at a different place in her own journey, and the Lord will deal with her the way He deals with us all—on His timeline and according to her own unique needs. But did I secretly want to smack her upside the head? I plead the fifth.

The whole experience got me to thinking about how often we do this— how often I do this — without even realizing it.

We call it faith. We call it trust. We call it keeping our eyes on Jesus. And sometimes, it genuinely is all of those things. But sometimes (maybe more often than we’d like to admit) it’s something else wearing the costume of those things. Theologians and Christian counselors have a term for it: spiritual bypassing.

If you think of a bypass in any other context, let’s say a gastric bypass, for example, what you are doing is actively rerouting food around part of your digestive system, instead of letting it follow its normal path. A bypass is a shortcut. It skips standard steps to arrive at its destination by intentionally avoiding the normal route. In weight loss, bypass can be helpful because it limits what your body processes, but in faith, bypass keeps you from engaging the very pain that leads to growth.

We’ve all heard the analogy about how prematurely removing a caterpillar from its cocoon strips it of its ability to fly. It’s only through the struggling to escape the cocoon that the butterfly develops the strength to use its wings. Similarly, Scripture is full of examples of God’s use of refining fire to develop believers into the people He intends for us to be.

So why do we do it? And I don’t just mean the woman at my Bible study table — I mean we. Me. You. The well-meaning friend who responds to your miscarriage with ‘God needed another angel.’ The pastor who preaches victory so relentlessly that the struggling people in the pews conclude they must be the only ones sitting there with secrets. The “You didn’t get your miracle because you didn’t have enough faith” comments offered as well-intended feedback when your faith is already flailing.

Part of it is simple discomfort. Other people’s pain is destabilizing, and a cliché is a way to regain footing fast. But I think it goes deeper than that. I think we’ve quietly absorbed the idea that our faith is somehow on trial when we struggle, that if we admit the road is hard, we are poor advertisements for the gospel. That doubt is a PR problem for Jesus instead of an invitation for His goodness to shine.

So we perform okayness. We curate our testimonies. We lead with the resolution and skip the part where we were on the bathroom floor at 2am shaking our fists at heaven and crying out, like David, “How long, oh Lord? How long?!”

We invite people to admire our scars but never to bind our wounds. Scars say, “God brought me through the fire” where wounds scream out, “I’m still in it. Lord, take this cup from me!”

If I had to guess, the people who offer spiritual bypassing most frequently to others are only doing so because they’re actively doing it to themselves, too— gaslighting their grief with paint-by-numbers theology that promises tidy solutions and a light at the end of every tunnel. We confuse emotional suppression with spiritual surrender. We think ‘taking every thought captive’ means executing the thoughts that make us look weak or sound untrusting.

But when we do this to others, when we hand someone a formula in the middle of their freefall, it doesn’t land as faith. It lands as judgment. It communicates, however unintentionally, “Your pain is making me uncomfortable, and I need you to wrap this up.” It sends people back underground with their doubt, their grief, their quiet rage at God— alone now, and newly ashamed of it.

James opens his letter with what might be the most countercultural sentence in the New Testament: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds.” We’ve heard it so many times it’s lost its scandal.

But notice what he does not say. He does not say “Pretend it isn’t happening.” He does not say “Remind yourself there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.” He does not say “At least you’re not going through something worse.”

He says “consider it joy,” which implies there is something real to consider, something hard enough that it requires a deliberate reframing. You cannot reframe what you have not first allowed yourself to feel.

The most honest thing I can offer anyone who is in the middle of the fire right now is this: your struggle is not evidence of your failure. It is evidence of your humanity, the same humanity God chose to inhabit when He decided the world needed saving. Jesus wept. David wailed. Job demanded answers. Elijah personally saw God send fire from heaven, and even he sat under a tree and asked God to let him die. And not one of them was disqualified for it.

We cannot bypass the messy parts of our faith, which, ironically, is only fostered through testing and struggle and days of white-knuckling your way back to the foot of the cross.

If His power is made perfect through our weakness, the very least we can do is stop pretending we don’t have any.

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My sin, not in part, but the whole,

Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more.

Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, o my soul!

I’ve written about my public screw-ups before. It’s a risky thing to do when you have any type of an audience or platform, especially if you take bold public stances on controversial topics. You’ll quickly find there are people salivating over the chance to cancel your voice.

They sit in wait, gathering every misspoken word, every human moment, to use as evidence to prove their deeply held belief that you are a sociopathic monster, hellbent on destruction, from whom the world must be protected.

If you think I’m exaggerating, I’m not. I’ll never forget my time spent on the frontlines of the great trans wars or the day someone messaged me a link to a five page hit piece about me entitled something to the effect of “Kaeley Triller, the Family Stain.”

Page after page of the most aggressively uncharitable interpretation of my life, piecemealed together by a complete stranger who took creative liberties with the snippets she could publicly deduce about my life to paint a picture of me as a narcissistic whore, a liar, an abuser, and an embarrassment to my family. She published the essay all over the worldwide web on every platform full of activists who opposed me, and it caught on like wildfire, with countless people believing things that weren’t even true, to the point that I had to shut down my social media accounts for a few days as I fielded violent threats from people calling me everything from a murderer to a child rapist.

I was paralyzed by a forcefield of shame that’s taken quite a few years to unpack. If she had just written a bunch of crazy lies about me, that would be easy enough to shrug off. What she did was far more insidious than that. She took things that were rooted in truth and then twisted them into something grotesque, weaponizing my history of childhood sexual trauma, my estranged family relationships, and my destructive sexual decisions to construct a narrative designed to destroy me. When shame has real roots, when there is genuine wreckage underneath the story someone is using against you, the forcefield of humiliation it creates doesn’t just sting. It paralyzes. It makes you want to curl up in a ball and disappear. It whispers taunting accusations in your ear: “Maybe she’s right. Maybe you ARE just seeking attention. Maybe you ARE a liability to the work you think you’re championing. Maybe the right thing to do is to stop talking and just let other people take over from here. You’re really a fraud. If people only knew…”

I don’t think I’m unique in this. I think many people are walking around with a version of that voice in their head, even without a hit piece to trigger it.

It’s a really debilitating place to exist. I’ve often wondered if maybe one of the reasons we don’t see prominent pastors stopping to apologize or model repentance when they screw up is because they subconsciously know this is what comes next— a character assassination so thorough and severe that there’s almost no hope of recovering even the good work they’re attempting to accomplish. This isn’t an excuse, of course. When you sin and hurt people, the only appropriate next step is repentance. But if you have any degree of influence, you had best be prepared to pay the piper.

While this has definitely proven painful in my own life, if I’m honest, I also have to say that God has used it for good, and, in some ways, being forced to contend with the gravity of my own sin has been one of the most edifying, revolutionary parts of my personal walk with Jesus. I think it’s way too easy in many corners of evangelicalism to grow up knowing things about God, going through the motions, and half-heartedly parroting talking points about how grateful we are for the forgiveness of our sins without really having to stare that sin in the face. Deep conviction can easily elude those whose sins feels petty by comparison. Saying something mean about the playground monitor is easier to sweep out of your mind than contending with the reality that you just got drunk and hooked up with a stranger.

I see this all the time in Christian influencers who did everything by the book and genuinely believe they have all the answers. Faith is reduced to a formula, and if you just follow their prescribed steps, you too can have a marriage like theirs, a family like theirs, a faith like theirs. It’s a tidy, domesticated gospel that has never been stress-tested, and it can afford to stay tidy precisely because it has never really had to reckon with the depths of human brokenness. But there is something that happens to a person when they are forced to stop managing their image and start grieving what is actually true about them. When the carefully constructed version of yourself collapses under the weight of its own contradictions, you run out of places to hide, from people and from God. Something shifts at a cellular level. You stop relating to Jesus as a lifestyle accessory and start relating to him as the only reason you are still standing.

Someone recently left a heartfelt and sincere comment on one of my blogs. She isn’t a Christian herself, though she respected that my faith read as genuine to her, but she wondered if maybe I was just blind to my own self-worth, attributing to God a strength I should simply be claiming as my own. I’ve thought about that comment ever since, filing it away as something that deserved a thoughtful response, but failing to provide one because I haven’t known, until now, exactly what to say.

The reality is that my faith didn’t become genuine until I reached the end of myself and realized my absolute need for a Savior. There is something about lying face down on the bathroom floor, holding out the pieces of a life you personally destroyed despite your very best efforts, that has a way of making the gospel stop being theoretical. When you have exhausted every resource within yourself and still come up empty, when you have tried sincerity and willpower and self-help and still watched everything fall apart in your own hands, the idea that you just need to believe in yourself a little more isn’t comforting. It’s absurd. What I found in that place wasn’t a deeper reservoir of personal strength I had been too timid to access. What I found was that I was genuinely bankrupt, and that Jesus had been waiting there all along, not surprised, not disgusted, not holding my failures over my head, but ready to do in me what I had proven, beyond any shadow of a doubt, I could not do for myself.

Am I saying you have to rob a bank in order to feel the weight of sin? Of course not. I’m just saying you have to feel the weight of sin in order to start viewing grace as a lifeline instead of a courtesy.

Strangers on the internet take my failures and call me a monster. Jesus takes my failures and calls me His child. The facts don’t change. The verdict does. And somehow, in His hands, even the broken pieces become part of the story He’s telling.

He doesn’t cancel my voice. He invites me to continue using it to invite others to the kind of freedom that only starts making sense when you’ve truly had nowhere left to turn.

This Easter, I pray that someone reading this who has been living inside that paralysis, who has been curled under the weight of real shame attached to real sin, would dare to believe that the resurrection was for them too. He rose to prove that nothing, not your worst moment, not your most public failure, not the most devastating thing anyone has ever written or said or believed about you, gets to be the final word. The tomb is empty. His arms are open. Come as you are. He won’t leave you that way.

I’m working to treat my writing like a job, so if you appreciate my writing, I would be so grateful if you would consider investing in a paid subscription. I try to keep my costs low, but my family thanks you for every dollar you invest in my writing. Thanks so much for your support!

You can also donate to my work via Venmo or PayPal