The obvious rebuttal to the last piece is: but there are small groups. Life groups, home groups, growth groups, whatever the branding — most large-campus churches build an entire second structure specifically so people can talk, ask questions, and process the sermon together in a living room instead of a sanctuary. If the Sunday stage is one-to-many, the small group is supposed to be the many-to-many. That’s a fair point, and it deserves its own honest look, because on paper it answers everything the last piece complained about.

It’s worth being fair about what small groups are actually for, most of the time, for most people in them. Nobody joins a life group hoping it’ll double as a shareholder meeting. People join for the casserole when someone’s in the hospital, the honesty that’s easier in six chairs than six hundred, the prayer request nobody would say into a microphone. That relational function is real, and it’s not the thing this piece is questioning. The question here is narrower: when a small group does become the place where someone raises a real objection — to a sermon, to something political said from the stage, to how the church has handled a specific harm — what happens to it there. Not whether small groups are worthwhile. Whether they’re built to let that particular kind of concern go anywhere.

Almost none of these groups sit down and talk about whatever’s actually on someone’s mind. They work through a curriculum: a printed guide, an app, a set of “discussion questions” tied to that week’s sermon, usually written by the same staff who wrote the sermon. The questions are rarely do you agree with what the pastor said. They’re closer to how can you apply what the pastor said this week. The sermon isn’t up for discussion. It’s the assigned text, and the small group’s job is application, not evaluation. That’s a completely different activity than dialogue. It’s guided practice.

To be clear about scope: this isn’t a claim about every church. Quaker meetings, house churches, small Bible studies, plenty of congregational-governance traditions build real dialogue into how they gather. What follows is about a particular, very common shape — the large-campus, generally white evangelical church that has, not by accident, become one of the more comfortable spaces in American life to be openly MAGA. That’s the room I’m describing.

Go to a wedding and, at some point, someone hands you a microphone. It’s the toast — the best man, the maid of honor, sometimes half the reception, each getting a turn to say something in front of everyone. It’s ordinary. Almost nobody thinks twice about it. The room is built, on some level, for voices other than the one running the show.

Now go to one of these churches on a Sunday. Sit through the sermon. Try to imagine a moment — any moment — where you could stand up and say something in front of everyone the way you would at that reception. There isn’t one. There was never going to be one. And increasingly, there isn’t even a person in the room to say it to. It’s a screen.

There’s a question I keep coming back to when I hear another story of someone quietly slipping out the back of a church they used to love: what would it look like if the pastor actually did their job?

Not their job of comforting. Not their job of building the budget or growing the campus or keeping the potlucks running. Their other job. The Jonah job.

Most of us learned the Jonah story as a fish tale — a guy runs from God, gets swallowed, gets spit out, learns his lesson. But the fish is a footnote. The actual assignment was this: go to Nineveh, a city so violent and corrupt it had become a byword for cruelty, and tell them, out loud, that their sin had been seen and it had to stop.

Compass Church recently launched a five-week series called Foundations, opening with a sermon on the congregation’s mission statement: “helping people find and follow God.” The message is built from Mark 1:16–20 — Jesus calling Peter, Andrew, James, and John by the Sea of Galilee — and it’s a warm, well-illustrated sermon, anchored by genuinely strong historical and archaeological material on Capernaum.

But underneath the two-word mission statement — find and follow — sits a more useful analytical grid than the sermon itself supplies. If you break the mission down into two modes and three destinations, you get a clear picture of what the sermon actually covers, and — more tellingly — what it quietly leaves out.

Two modes — how the mission gets carried out:

There’s a strange gap in how most of us talk about Satan versus what the Bible actually says he does. Ask a room full of people to describe him and you’ll get a fallen archangel, a rebel who led a third of heaven in a war against God, a serpent who tricked the first woman, a being locked in cosmic combat with the Almighty for the soul of humanity. Ask them to point to the verse for any of that, and things get quiet.

This isn’t a piece arguing Satan doesn’t exist or isn’t dangerous. It’s an attempt to do something the Bible itself seems oddly insistent on: separate what’s recorded from what’s assumed. Because when you actually do that, the picture that emerges is smaller, stranger, and in some ways more interesting than the one most of us inherited.

Start with the Old Testament, where “Satan” barely shows up, and when he does, he’s often not even a proper name.

There’s a version of the AI-authorship panic that’s about ethics, and a version that’s about money pretending to be about ethics. This week gave us two case studies — a YouTuber and a novelist — that make the difference easy to see, if you’re willing to look at it.

Hank Green, the science YouTuber behind SciShow and Crash Course, admitted he’d been using ChatGPT as a research aid after fans caught what sounded like leftover AI phrasing in a script. He apologized, called it an unhealthy habit, and paused his main channel.

Jerry Falade, a debut novelist, had a $2.4 million book deal collapse after his own agents said they could no longer “authenticate” how his manuscript came together. He denies using AI and says the suspicion reflects a pattern: three Black authors landed major deals this year, and all three later saw those deals disrupted by AI rumors.

Fairness requires this companion piece. If the diagnostic from “What Is Authority For?” — does this authority move outward, toward the protection of the vulnerable, or inward, toward the protection of the one holding it? — is going to be run against Andy Biggs, it has to be run against Katie Hobbs too. She is, after all, the incumbent, which means she has something Biggs doesn’t yet have to answer for: four years of executive power, not just votes and floor speeches.

Hobbs’s path to office runs through social work, not law: she spent years as chief compliance officer at one of the country’s largest domestic violence shelters, then moved through the Arizona House, the state Senate as minority leader, Secretary of State, and finally the governorship in 2023 — the first social worker elected to the office in the country’s history, and the fifth woman to hold it in Arizona. She is currently seeking re-election against Biggs in November 2026.

Same caveat as before: this framework is not neutral, and applying it to a sitting governor mid-campaign risks reading conclusions into the record rather than out of it. I’ve tried to include her strongest defenses alongside the strongest criticisms.

The essay that opened this series offered a single diagnostic for evaluating anyone who holds power over other people: does this authority move outward, toward the protection of the vulnerable, or inward, toward the protection of the one holding it?

Andy Biggs is a useful — and timely — test case. He has held institutional power almost continuously for over two decades: fourteen years in the Arizona Legislature, the last four as Senate President; nearly a decade in the U.S. House; a stint chairing the House Freedom Caucus; and, as of July 2026, the Republican nomination for Governor of Arizona, where he’ll face incumbent Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs in November.

That is a long paper trail. Rather than argue a verdict, this piece tries to lay the record next to the framework and let the pattern — or lack of one — speak.

On July 29, 2026, Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate Homeland Security Committee for nearly three hours and said one sentence, over a hundred times: on the advice of counsel, he was invoking his Fifth Amendment right not to answer. Chairman Rand Paul had built a case, document by document, diary entry by diary entry. Fauci built a wall. Nobody moved.

It was, by any honest account, a hearing designed to produce a moment rather than an answer — and it mostly succeeded at that. But it’s worth separating out what actually happened from the theater, because buried in Paul’s exhibits is a genuinely uncomfortable record, and buried in the whole spectacle is a question this Congress still hasn’t tried to answer: what do we actually do differently next time?

I went back through The Diaries of Anthony Fauci, 2019–2022 — the edited compilation Senator Paul released — to check the specific lines quoted at the hearing against the source material. Several of the headline claims hold up almost exactly as presented:

There is a woman in Proverbs 31 who has become, over several centuries of sermons, almost unrecognizable to herself.

She is held up as a model of quiet domestic virtue — the woman who rises early, tends her household, and is a credit to her husband. What gets quoted far less often is what she actually does with her hands:

“She selects wool and flax and works with eager hands... She makes linen garments and sells them, and supplies the merchants with sashes... She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard... She perceives that her merchandise is profitable.” (Proverbs 31:13, 24, 16, 18, paraphrased composite)

Every week, in churches all over the world, people say some version of the same sentence: forgive us our sins, by thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and what we have left undone.

It’s beautiful. It’s honest. It’s also completely generic — and that’s not an accident. Nobody in a room of three hundred people can stand up and itemize their week. The liturgy has to speak for everyone, which means it can’t speak specifically to anyone.

That’s fine, as far as it goes. The trouble is what we’ve quietly let that generic moment become. Somewhere along the way, a lot of us started treating the liturgy as the whole transaction — the place where sin goes in and forgiveness comes out, start to finish, in about ninety seconds, without ever leaving the pew.

Two stories broke within weeks of each other this summer, and they make an almost too-perfect natural experiment.

In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that five city-backed grocery stores will sell a core basket of staples — produce, meat, seafood, milk, eggs, about twenty-five items in all — at a locked-in 30% discount off typical retail prices, updated monthly. The reaction from the right was immediate and scornful: this is naive, it’s unsustainable, you cannot sell things below cost without someone eating the loss, and that someone is the taxpayer. RedState called it “one of his worst” ideas yet. The framing across conservative media was consistent: this is what happens when people who don’t understand markets try to override them.

In Pennsylvania and New Jersey, a network of gas stations backed by enthusiastic promotion from President Trump began selling gas at $3.47 a gallon — a number chosen, transparently, because he is the 47th president. The reaction from the same commentators was celebratory. Patriotism. Winning. “This retailer is taking the lead, and others should follow,” Trump posted, praising the operator for loving America enough to cut its own margins.

There’s a story ricocheting around right-wing media this week: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration has published a “searchable database” exposing the names and home addresses of the city’s wealthiest residents, supposedly as retaliation for opposing his new tax on second homes. Fox News, the New York Post, Twitchy, RedState, and a chorus of aggregators have all run versions of the same framing — Mamdani “doxxed” nearly a million property owners.

The underlying facts here are real. The spin around them is not.

New York’s new pied-à-terre tax — officially a surcharge on non-primary residences, enacted this year with Governor Kathy Hochul’s sign-off — took effect July 1, 2026. It applies to condos and co-ops valued above $1 million and one-to-three-family homes above $5 million, when the owner’s primary residence is somewhere else.

Gab AI has been marketing hard lately. The pitch is simple: stop feeding ChatGPT and Claude your private thoughts, and switch to a platform that “protects your privacy” and gives you “honest, unfiltered answers” from Arya, its in-house model, alongside 100+ third-party models bundled into one dashboard.

Two claims are baked into that pitch. First, that Gab AI is meaningfully different from — and more private than — the major AI platforms. Second, that Arya gives you the truth without ideological filtering, in contrast to models that supposedly bend answers to fit “the whims of culture, politics, or ideology.”

I wanted to test both claims. Here’s what I found.

Substack added an AI-detection scanner this month, built on Pangram. Open an eligible post, choose “Scan for AI text,” and it gives you an estimate of how much was written by a human versus with AI assistance. Writers can add a “How I make this” disclosure, contest a result they think is wrong, or turn detection off for a post. People seem to like having the number. I think it’s usually the wrong number to be asking for — though not for quite as simple a reason as I first thought.

Substack’s CEO has been explicit that Pangram isn’t a quality judgment — it can’t tell you whether human care went into a piece, or whether the piece is any good. It’s positioned narrowly, as information about authorship and reader expectations. That’s a fair and modest claim, and worth taking at face value.

But even taken on those modest terms, a detector answers a much thinner question than the one most readers actually have in mind when they reach for it. “Is this reliable?” and “is this substantially a person’s own expression?” are two different questions, and a detection score is weak evidence for the first and only loosely relevant to the second. The trouble isn’t that Substack is claiming otherwise — it’s that readers reach for the tool as a proxy for both, and it’s built to answer neither cleanly.

Thomas Hobbes spent a good part of Leviathan trying to solve a problem that had just finished killing a large fraction of England: what do you do when multiple groups each claim final religious authority, and none of them recognize any common judge? His answer, laid out in Part III, was to shrink Christian doctrine down to a single sentence — Jesus is the Christ — and give the sovereign final say over its public interpretation.

It’s worth being precise about what that means, because Hobbes is subtler than he’s often given credit for. He isn’t asking the sovereign to reach into people’s heads and enforce private belief. He repeatedly concedes that people can and will believe all sorts of things inwardly — faith, he says at one point, is “internal and invisible.” What he wants the sovereign to control is public teaching, public confession, ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and the outward obedience that keeps competing doctrines from tearing the commonwealth apart. His concern is civil peace, not the contents of anyone’s soul. That distinction is worth holding onto, because everything that follows is entirely about religious authority — the question of who, if anyone, gets to rule over another person’s conscience — not about private belief as such. Even a child who performs the expected motions in church on Sunday and believes whatever she actually believes back in her own room is living out the very distinction Hobbes relied on.

Even granting Hobbes that much subtlety, though, his solution answers the wrong question. And untangling why gets at something people still get backwards today, whenever “religious freedom” comes up: the difference between a claim to authority being individual and a claim to authority simply lacking a state sponsor.

I heard a sermon this week on Matthew 22:34-40 — the passage where a Pharisee asks Jesus which commandment is the greatest in the Law, and Jesus answers with two:

“’Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40)

The reading stopped at verse 38 — the first commandment alone. Verse 39, the second commandment, wasn’t read at all. The stated reason was time.

On July 16, a Trump administration official stood in a State Department conference room in front of representatives from more than 60 countries and explained that he can tell who the political enemies of the United States are by looking at their faces.

That’s not a paraphrase for effect. That’s the argument.

Stephen Miller — White House deputy chief of staff, homeland security advisor, and the man widely credited as the intellectual author of this administration’s immigration policy — was there to help kick off something called the “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism,” a gathering aimed at rallying dozens of allied governments around a shared framework for treating the American left as a national security threat. Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent spoke about debanking. FBI Director Kash Patel sat in the room.

In “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. reserved his sharpest disappointment not for the Klansman but for the white moderate — the person “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice,” who “prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” The moderate wasn’t hostile. He was worse than hostile: he was reasonable. He had a framework sophisticated enough to acknowledge the problem in the abstract while declining, every single time, to name the concrete thing being asked of him.

I thought about that essay while reading Russell Moore’s recent piece for Christianity Today on The Odyssey — occasioned, like most Odyssey commentary this month, by Christopher Nolan’s new film. Moore is a serious writer, and this is not a bad piece of prose. But it’s a small, perfect specimen of a move I keep seeing from a certain kind of thoughtful, literate, moderate Christian commentator: take a text that makes a specific, concrete, uncomfortable demand, and translate it into a universal ache that makes no demand on anyone at all.

(What follows leans on a framework I owe to Ben Kucenski’s recent book The Messy Odyssey*, which puts the poem on trial three separate times — before the court of Xenia, the court of Torah, and the court of Christ — and refuses to let any one of them borrow another’s reasoning to reach a verdict. It’s a far more disciplined way of asking what the poem owes each tradition than anything in my own draft, and it happens to dismantle Moore’s central move almost by accident.)*

There is a particular genre of religious writing that has perfected the art of sounding compassionate while asking nothing of the reader. It goes something like this: those who are leaving aren’t rebels, they’re wounded; don’t judge them, hold the door open; be patient, the way Jesus was patient. It is warm. It is quotable. It gets shared thousands of times on Facebook under a soft-focus photo. And it almost never asks the one question that would actually matter: what did we do?

That is the shape of a widely shared Russell Moore quote making the rounds again this month, tied to a piece titled “My Dad Taught Me How to Love the Exvangelical.” The quote dates to 2021 — a moment when much of white evangelicalism was still working hard to avoid a full reckoning with how deeply Trump’s presidency had reshaped its politics, its institutions, and its relationships. Read now, five years later, it’s a useful artifact of that avoidance: gracious in tone, but written at a moment when the tone of grace was doing a lot of work that honest self-examination wasn’t yet doing.

In this particular essay, Moore’s framing is generous to the people leaving. He resists the easy caricature of “deficient worldview” or “chasing immorality,” and instead casts many departures as grief rather than defiance — Simon Peter at the seashore, not Judas fleeing by night. Taken on its own terms, in this piece, that’s a real improvement over the harsher rhetoric common in evangelical spaces at the time. It’s worth saying plainly, too, that Moore has elsewhere been one of the more willing establishment evangelical voices to name institutional failures directly — the SBC abuse cover-ups, the political capture of the evangelical brand — which is part of why he’s become unwelcome in a lot of Southern Baptist circles. This essay shouldn’t be read as his complete position on the church’s institutional health. But it should be read on its own terms, and on those terms it has a specific, common flaw.