Why America's 250th Birthday Feels More Like a Funeral

Christian Nationalists Are Mocking Jesus, Making Atheists, And Creating An Exodus From The Church

Growing up in the Church, I was taught that the worst thing one could be was a non-believer; that nothing was as tragic as a damned soul that condemned itself by rejecting God. The religion of my childhood drew a sharp, clear line between the saved and the damned. All that mattered was making sure someone found themselves on the better side of this line, and the Atheists, Humanists, and Democrats didn’t have a shot. In light of this supposed truth, the heart of the faith (I was told) was to live in a way that reflected the character and love of Jesus so vividly, so beautifully, that others were compelled to follow after him; that a Christian’s living testimony might be the catalyst for someone’s conversion. The Bible called it “making disciples,” and it was the heart of our tradition. As the venerable hymn declared, people were supposed to know we are Christians by our love. What a difference a couple of decades make. Just ask around, now. People outside the Church will tell you: love is no longer our calling card here in America. It is now condemnation, bigotry, judgment, and hypocrisy. In fact, the Christianity prevalent in so much of America right now isn’t just failing to draw others to Christ; it is actively repelling them from him. By operating in a way that is in full opposition to the life and ministry of Jesus, that counterfeit religion is understandably producing people fully opposed to the faith that bears his name. In record numbers, the Conservative American Church is consistently and surely making Atheists—or at the very least, it is making former Christians—people who no longer consider organized religion an option because the Jesus they recognize is absent. With its sky-is-falling hand-wringing, its political bed-making, and its constant venom toward diversity, it is giving people no alternative but to conclude that, based on the evidence of people professing to be Godly, God is of little use. This God may, in fact, be terribly toxic. And that’s the greatest irony of it all: that the very Evangelicals who’ve spent the last 60 years in this country demonizing those who reject Jesus are now the single most compelling reason for them to do so. They are giving people who suspect that all Christians are self-righteous, hateful hypocrites all the evidence they need. The Church is confirming the outside world’s most dire suspicions about itself. People rejecting White Evangelical Christian nationalism aren’t stupid. They realize that bigotry, even when it is wrapped in religion or justified by the Bible or spoken from a pulpit, is still bigotry. They can smell the putrid stench of phony religion from a mile away—and this MAGA version of the Church, frankly, reeks of it. People are steering clear in droves, choosing to find meaning and community and something that resembles love outside its gatherings. With every persecution of the LGBTQ community, with every unprovoked attack on immigrants, with every planet-wrecking decision, with every defense of a serial predator, with every regressive civil rights assault, with every attempt at theocracy by these professed believers, the flight from Christianity rightly continues. Meanwhile, the celebrity preachers and professional Christians publicly feign disbelief about the multitudes walking away from God, oblivious to the fact that they are the impetus for the exodus. And one day soon, these same Conservative religious folks will look around, lamenting the empty buildings and the irrelevance of the Church and a world that has no use for it, and they’ll wonder how this happened. They’ll blame a corrupt culture, or the woke liberal media, or a wholesale rejection of Biblical values, or the devil himself—but it will be none of those things. No, the reason the Church soon will be teetering on the verge of extinction and irrelevance will be because those entrusted to perpetuate the love of Jesus in the world lost the plot so horribly, and gave the world no other option but to look elsewhere for goodness, purpose, and truth. Soon, these Evangelicals will ask why so much of America has rejected Jesus, and we will remind them of these days and assure these people haven’t rejected Jesus at all. They just found no evidence of Jesus in them. In the comments, share the ways the hatred and hypocrisy of professed Christians have shaken your faith, driven you from the Church, or reinforced your opposition to organized religion. The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe [https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

America Isn't Politically Divided, It's Morally Fractured.

This mess we’re in? It has nothing to do with politics. The current President is a court-adjudicated rapist who recently paid nearly 6 million dollars in damages for sexual assault and defamation. His name appears tens of thousands of times in the Epstein Files, and he has been credibly accused by dozens of women of sexual assault and harassment. He is a 34-count felon, indicted four separate times, with 88 charges, ranging from fraud to election interference. The only reason he is not in prison right now is that he has assumed the Presidency and marshalled the vast resources of the office to pervert our judicial and legal processes.Despite all of this, we still have family members, friends, former friends, and neighbors who would vote for him again right now. In what universe, in what iteration of this nation over the last 250 years, would a being this bereft of human decency have been tolerated in office, let alone passionately embraced? In what legitimate political movement would rape and treason not be dealbreakers? The answer is none. This isn’t a political fracture. I wish it were, though, as that would be relatively easy to navigate. We are not a nation, as we’ve often thought, simply positioned on either side of the aisle working to craft reasonable, good-faith compromise somewhere in the humane middle. Sadly, that ship left the port a long time ago. We aren’t even contending with a blind political tribalism that sees party over country, as the GOP of a decade ago has long since been rendered unrecognizable, abandoning its calls for a limited Government in exchange for unabashed authoritarianism. The prevailing narrative of the last decade is that America has been fractured by political ideologies, bunkered down in disagreement on what path will most serve the common good. This is a dangerous fiction we need to discard once and for all. The dividing lines in America have nothing to do with party affiliation anymore. Just open up your phone, eavesdrop at the checkout line, or talk to your neighbor, and you’ll see the lines along which we now find ourselves: One side celebrates innocent people being assassinated in front of their children, without due process. One side rejoices in strangers going without food or medical care or housing, without knowing a single one of their stories. One side applauds the bombing of foreign school children and the destruction of entire populations. One side blindly despises other people for their gender identity, despite it having no impact on their lives whatsoever. One side reduces an entire population to terrorists and drug dealers to justify their swift eradication. One side conflates whiteness with righteousness. One side defends the protection of pedophiles. One side steadfastly worships a felonious, treasonous rapist. And none of this is about politics; it’s about when faced with the suffering and injustice in our path, whether we will default to compassion or to cruelty. America’s present divide reveals the orientation of our hearts as we move through the world, the story we tell ourselves about other people, and what we want our lives to be marked by. Will we be bleeding-heart empaths who err on the side of love toward all our neighbors, or callous, f your feelings sociopaths who rejoice in the pain of others because we’ve dehumanized them to the point that their lives are worthless to us? Will we see empathy as our highest calling as human beings, or as a character flaw needing to be discarded? One of the greatest lies we’re asked to accept as gospel is that all opinions are valid, that every position is somehow equally worthy of merit and deserving of consideration. We’re often led to believe that in every situation where an impasse is reached, the most humane response is to “agree to disagree”. Of course, we can disagree on all sorts of issues without that disagreement being a relationship killer, but there are some things that, as people of faith, morality, and conscience, we simply will not allow—and these things transcend politics. The days ahead are going to require us to dig beneath the surface skirmishes and into the bedrock of what’s really happening here so that we don’t waste a second fighting fruitless battles that miss the point entirely. Refuse to be gaslit and guilted for allowing “politics” to get in the way of your relationships because that’s not what’s happening here. This is an effort by people around us to sidestep conversations that call them to accountability for their beliefs, choices, and alignments. It’s time we stopped pretending that our current national crisis is political, as that only serves to distract us from the far more worrisome truth that we need to reckon with: We’re not politically divided; we are morally fractured. We are not fighting legislative battles but a war to stay human or abandon our humanity altogether. No election result will change that. No power balance in Congress will remedy it. No dictator’s expulsion will heal the brokenness of the people around us. The question is, what will? Do you agree or disagree that the divides here are beyond politics? What do you see as the path forward for our nation and for each of us who call it home? Let me know in the comments. The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe [https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

To The People Who Raised Us To Be Decent Humans, And Then Became Trump Supporters.

To Our Loved Ones, To Our Grandparents, Parents, Uncles, Aunts, Cousins, and Older Siblings, We’re aware of what you think of us, either because you’ve told us during explosive, room-clearing conversations, over terse Cold War text exchanges, or in second-hand words passed through the people who now serve as the sole intermediaries between us. You believe that we’re lost. You believe we’ve changed. You think we’ve become radicalized. You think we’ve abandoned our faith, our families, and our nation, and you’re disappointed with us. And we need you to know that you’re largely responsible. Much of this is your fault. You say that we’ve changed, and we have: we’ve become the people you taught us to become when we were growing up. people who are deeply offended by inequity, people who look out for the underdog, people who grieve the suffering of others, people who find the beauty in the diversity around us, people who want others to have enough, people who are aware of how fortunate we are to live here, people trying to love our neighbors as ourselves, people who detest liars, predators, and con men, people who abhor bullies and bigots and braggarts, And the people that we’ve become, in large part because of the wisdom and compassion you poured into us as children, can’t fathom, as adults, how you’ve voted for Donald Trump three times and how you still support him now. It would have been unthinkable to those younger versions of us (and the younger version of you, for that matter), that you would have embraced this man: his cruelty, his depravity, his petty, vengeful, unloving heart. That’s not the way you raised us, and so whatever issues you have with us now, you need to understand: You made us this way. You have radicalized us into loving, compassionate human beings, and we can’t fathom how that can be a problem for you. We’re really proud of the people we are today, and grateful for the time you spent with us; the lessons you taught us about seeing all people as inherently valuable,about being a person of your word,about telling the truth even when it’s costly,about admitting your mistakes, about taking responsibility for your actions, about valuing people over money, about how we treat people, being what defines us, We were paying attention in history class. We were paying attention in Sunday School. We were paying attention around the dinner table. We were listening. We believed you. We did what you told us to do and became who you told us to become—and so now we care about the world, and we despise evil, and we live open-hearted and open-handed. And that’s why we’ve found ourselves standing here wondering how you’ve become people we no longer recognize, how you’ve embraced the embodiment of the ugliness you warned us to avoid, how you stopped taking your own advice somewhere along the way. You say that you only support the party or the policies and not the man—but we remember you telling us that we are known by the company we keep, that the ends don’t always justify the means, and that we can’t gain the world (or a Supreme Court seat) and lose our souls. Back then, you wouldn’t have tolerated those flimsy excuses for aligning with someone horrible, and we won’t tolerate them from you now. As children, we looked up to you, and that part of us will continue to love you dearly and be grateful to you.But as adults, we now see you eye to eye, and we grieve the loss of the people we imagined you were when you were teaching us how to be good human beings. By continuing to support this man, you have gone against everything you told us was important growing up: decency, honesty, fairness, maturity, and empathy. Either you were lying then, or you’re wrong now. Which one is it? The children we were and the adults we’ve become both want to know. The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. . This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe [https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Good People, Please Don't Let The Monsters Break You.

Hey, good human. (Yeah, you.) I wanted to remind you of some things that you might have lost sight of lately: The exhaustion you feel right now?The heavy sadness that you can’t seem to shake?The sense of dread that hovers over you like a drone?The Resting WTF Face you walk around with every day?The scalding rage bubbling just beneath the surface? This is all by design. This is intentional. This is the monsters’ master plan. The entire point of the curated chaos is to disorient you, to dishearten you, to choke the hope from within you until you stop fighting. All terrorism is ultimately emotional. Yes, they are rolling back decades of civil rights.Yes, they are trying to take healthcare away from tens of millions of our most vulnerable.Yes, they are waging legislative war on the poor and hungry.Yes, they are weaponizing the highest court against us.Yes, they are obliterating our systems of education and national security.Yes, they are purging brown-skinned people from our nation. But these stomach-turning atrocities are all just means to an end, and that end is to crush the spirits of good people like you, and you need to remember that. Your capacity to care for strangers is a threat to them.Your ability to have your heart broken by the suffering of others is a weapon.Your refusal to abandon the right thing, even when that makes your path more turbulent, terrifies them.Your decency makes you dangerous. A nation isn’t destroyed when its systems are bulldozed or its laws are perverted, but when its collective compassion is eradicated—and you and I are here in these dark, bleak, unthinkably painful days to protect it; to hold it close to our chests and to make sure that it survives. Fascists don’t win when they dismantle the scaffolding of government, when they wage war on the Arts and Sciences, or when they eradicate long-standing rights under the law. They win when good people give up; when they become too tired to push back, when apathy and hopelessness snuff out the spark inside them, when the emotional cost of giving a sh*t feels too high. They want you to become as nihilistic, miserable, and internally broken as they are—and so you need to refuse: over and over again. Look, I’m not going to minimize the horrors being conjured up by these vampires or ignore the scale of the sorrow they’re generating or peddle some toxic positivity that pretends everything is going to be OK. But I know that if you’re still reading this, you haven’t fully surrendered yet. Despite the 24-7 Category 5 s**t storm the monsters have been throwing at you for the past eighteen months, you haven’t completely packed it in, and I guess I just want to say thank you and to ask you to stay in the fight another day if you can. There is too much beauty at stake, too much of priceless value to lose, too many people whose futures are tethered to what we do right now. I’m not a blind optimist, and I don’t traffic in cheap hope. I’m not pretending the historical signs aren’t grim or that the existential threat isn’t very real. I just recognize that right now, some irredeemably terrible people are working incredibly hard to crush our spirits, and I’m stubborn enough to say, “To hell with that.” I won’t give them the satisfaction of my submission or my hopelessness. My life will be an annoying, brazen, defiantly joyful middle finger in their fascist faces, and if you still feel up to it, maybe yours can be, too. Good people, these monsters are trying to break you because when they do, they win. So, don’t let them. The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe [https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

This Week, Death Took Lindsey Graham's Body. Trump Took His Soul Long Before That. We All Know That Grief.

Lindsey Graham is dead, and it gives me no joy. This is not a celebration; it is a lament. The moment any human being leaves this planet, it is almost always an occasion to mourn. When death arrives, it is a permanent interruption, an unexpected or unwanted end to a complIcated life in progress. There is an incompleteness that comes: work left undone, plans abandoned, journeys ceased. In nearly every case, in the wake of someone’s passing, so many possibilities die as well. This is no different. Lindsey Graham has passed away, and regardless of our politics, today we should grieve over the loss of the man and the leader he might have been, had he never crossed paths with Donald Trump. It is a day to wonder how he could have altered this nation for the better, the good he might have authored in the lofty position he occupied. It is a day to rewind through one person’s very public story and watch how a soul can be sold off in a thousand tiny moral transactions long before their body expires. Lindsey Graham’s moral collapse over the last decade has been staggering to witness: In 2015, he called Donald Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot" and a “jackass” who did not deserve to be President. In 2016, he said of the Republican Party, “If we nominate Donald Trump, we will get destroyed… and we will deserve it.”In 2021, following the January 6th assault on our Capitol, Graham seemingly cut ties with Trump, commenting, “All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.” And in June of 2026, just weeks before his sudden death, at a victory speech that preserved his Senate seat, Lindsey Graham gushed, "I want to thank the big guy, God, Trump comes later. Mr. President, you're not far behind God, but we're going to start with him.” That, in itself, should merit profound grieving across this nation. It’s difficult for younger people to understand how Lindsey Graham was viewed before Trump’s arrival. He was largely regarded as a reasonable, level-headed politician, always willing and capable of collaboration across the aisle. For those nearly twenty-five years prior, he forged friendships, built alliances, and crafted compromises in ways that became all but impossible for him in his final years. While campaigning in 2015, Graham famously said of Joe Biden: “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, you’ve got a problem. He’s the nicest person I’ve ever met in politics. As good a man as God ever created.” I grieve the death of that man; the one capable of seeing the humanity across the aisle, the one who was human first, politician second. Every one of us should. I think, deep down, we all do, because we know what it feels like to lose someone long before they die. We all have Lindsey Grahams in our lives: people whose humanity we have watched erode since the escalator descent of a morally vacant career criminal a decade ago. We’ve all looked on in helpless disbelief as their bedrock values began to shift, their hard moral lines were erased and redrawn, and their once soft hearts became calloused and closed. We have all had someone we love die a shell of who they once were, because of their allegiance to a serial grifter whose cultic hold slowly poisoned them. That’s why his death hits close to home. Lindsey Graham’s ethical implosion is perhaps more understandable than that of the people in our lives, as his proximity to Trump’s power (or the fear of that power being weaponized against him) was likely too great a temptation to withstand. The kind of wealth and influence he had access to probably seemed well worth the moral compromises and severed ties. For our family members and former friends, it’s much harder to make sense of how it’s all happened; how they were seduced and duped into such a sycophantic tribal allegiance to a man they’d have openly condemned a decade ago. That transformation isn’t as easy to unpack, and many of us will spend the rest of our lives wondering who the people we love might have been. This week, death took Lindsey Graham’s body. Trump took his soul and the man he might have been long ago. For most of us, that kind of grief feels all too familiar. The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe [https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]