I Don't Wish For His Death... Yet.

I Don't Wish For His Death... Yet.

It feels like a good portion of this nation is on death watch right now. My social media feed is filled with photos and videos gleefully documenting the markers of his physical deterioration, with rising hope as his public appearances grow more sporadic, with almost giddy prognostications of his departure date from this place. People are posting their plans as if preparing for New Year’s Eve or a World Series Championship. I am not exactly one of those people. Yes, he has been an odious blight upon this planet and a cancerous presence to this nation. He is, without question, one of the single most objectively horrible human beings our species has produced. Setting aside the reality that his passing would elevate a successor who is smarter, shrewder, less impulsive, and potentially far more effective in accelerating this country’s slide into theocracy, authoritarianism, and economic devastation for everyone but the billionaire cadre of amoral tech bro vampires who elevated him to the platform to begin with. But I don’t wish for his death. I wish he’d never been born. If he departs this mortal sphere as I type this, it will do nothing to undo all the evil that his now bruised hands have wrought, to erase every vile thing his presence has exposed as he ascended politically. It will not rewind the years of those who lived in squalor and poverty in New York City, on whose backs he built his jittery, hollow empire. His death will not bring financial restitution to the thousands of workers and contractors left abandoned by the many bankruptcies that emancipated him from responsibility. It won’t give back wholeness and healing to the girls and women he violated in secret or maligned in public. It will not reverse the irreparable damage he has done to a political party whose members individually and collectively abandoned every legal and moral expectation to fall prostrate before him. It will not elicit repentance in a white Evangelical Church that parted ways with the compassionate, loving namesake of its faith tradition and fashioned a vicious, sneering, profane, God-mocking idol out of his antithesis and bowed down before it. His passing now could not allow us to unsee the repugnant grievance cult he unleashed here; the historically hateful movement of miserable people who’ve spent the last decade reveling in an unrepentant ugliness because he gave them consent. It will not remove the legion of incompetent, predatory, corrupt sycophants he poisoned our government with; people who have and will continue to dismantle and pervert our systems of care and legal oversight. And his death, as much as it would feel like an initial reprieve from the chaos he has engineered and the unfathomable suffering he has spearheaded, would do nothing to conceal the vile sickness he exposed within the people around us: the long-simmering racism, the scalding contempt for foreigners, the phobic hatred of human beings for their gender identity or sexual orientation. Long after he is gone, we will be left with what we now know about our family members and friends and neighbors; about the people in our churches, about the parents of our children’s friends; about the pillars of our communities, about those we trust to govern us, protect, and serve us. These atrocities, sadly, will all long outlive him. He lived, and his life has done its brutal, irreversible damage. And with that being true, I do not wish for his death; not yet. I hope and pray that he lives long enough to face legal accountability for his crimes; that he will not depart this place before escaping consequences for the willful disregard he has spent 80 years showing for the laws of our land, for the disparate humanity that has called this place home, and for the sacred and powerful platform he never deserved to begin with. I want him to be humiliated, to be broken, to see his vile empire crumbled, to see his name erased from the places he disfigured with it. I want him to live long enough to face a cell before he faces his maker; to rot in prison before he rots in the ground. And I want to live long enough to see it. That will be cause for true celebration. The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe [https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Republicans Are Telling Us They Can't Win in November, But Aren't Going To Lose. We Need To Believe Them.

Republicans are telling us something right now, America: They know they can’t win in November. They’re shouting with absolute clarity that they know they can’t. They’re declaring it through their unceasing attempts to gerrymander millions of people’s voices out of the political process. They’re confessing as much through nonsensical word salad press conferences, condemning mythical past election fraud with invisible proof and non-existent evidence. They’re telling us through unrelenting Fox News fictions about thousands of supposed illegal immigrants somehow voting Democrat.They are preemptively admitting defeat in the Fall as they eliminate voting sites, oppose absentee ballots, weaponize the Postal Service, and conjure up ever more restrictive voter ID requirements. Most of all, they’ve admitted they cannot win a free and fair election by making no attempts to construct a political platform of any kind to address the economic and social sicknesses of this nation (most of which they have authored), because they have no interest in governing, only in holding power. Trump and his GOP acolytes have never run on substantive ideas or concrete solutions. In ten years, they have produced no healthcare plan, launched no programs to improve wages, and crafted no legislation to help working-class people. They have made no attempts to give more people access to education, financial security, home ownership, or opportunity. They have been a violent, greedy, parasitic movement of systemic destruction: a toxic sludge of fear porn, billionaire sodomy, racist dog whistles, and human rights and environmental protection rollbacks. Republicans are evil, and they’re treasonous, but they’re not stupid. They have the data. They’ve seen their grim poll numbers. They’re aware that Donald Trump’s approval rating is in the lowest depths of the toilet of history. They know they are hopelessly underwater on astronomical grocery and gas prices, on multiple wars we have no business participating in, on partnership in multiple genocides, on the Epstein Files, on ICE’s unrelenting barbarism, on an America where no one outside of the tiniest fraction of the wealthiest people feels good about their prospects for the future. For all of these reasons, we need to stop pretending that November will bring some magical emancipation from these Christo-fascists and tech bro oligarchs. We need to prepare our collective response to their inevitable refusal to relinquish their stranglehold on our barely-breathing Republic. There is no time to waste in believing we only need to show up at the polls and wait for Election Night. Yes, we must continue to canvass and support candidates and drive people to the polls in numbers that theoretically are too great to manipulate—but we also need to understand that this isn’t going to be a clean transfer of power, because Republicans are going to fight it by any means necessary. January 6th will seem benign compared to what they have prepared. Back in June, Speaker (and soulless bootlicking coward) Mike Johnson declared: “If we were to lose the midterms, heaven forbid, these Democrats, y’all impeachment’s not even the big concern.” Johnson continued: “They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the cabinet, his donors and friends; half of you in this room will be targeted. I run the protection program. I’ll take care of you. We’re going to win the midterms.” There it is. There are only two ways November plays out: Republicans conjure a “win” at the polls through every kind of technological malfeasance at their disposal, or, they are victims of a political bloodbath at the hands of the people and then flatly refuse to abide by the results. The worst thing any of us can do right now is to operate under any delusions that we are going to experience anything resembling a normal midterm election. The time to decide how we’re going to respond to Republicans’ current and promised lawlessness isn’t the day after the election; it’s right now. Find ways to support election security in your local community.Connect with organizations who are already actively pushing back against Trump’s corrupt regime, like Indivisible [https://indivisible.org/], Common Cause [https://democracyforward.org/], Flare USA [https://flareusa.cargo.site/], Democracy Forward [https://democracyforward.org/], Democracy Docket [https://www.democracydocket.com/], and Removal Coalition [https://removalcoalition.org/]. Educate people around you who are still sedated on a cocktail of wishful thinking, ignorance, and American exceptionalism, so that they understand what is coming in November.Build partnerships across lines of ideology, race, theology, and preference, knowing that we will only survive this coming assault on our Constitution by leveraging our collective power, in both bodies and dollars. Talk to your families and friends about how you will specifically respond when Trump and his Congressional sycophants follow through with what they are forecasting. Republicans are telling us they can’t win in November, but that they must and will win. The rest of us, the people who truly love this nation and the people who call it home or wish to, need to believe them. How are you specifically preparing for November? What organizations have you connected to? What work, voices, strategies are you finding helpful? 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]

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]