Two centuries of Supreme Court cases, IRS rulings, and congressional statutes have built an elaborate legal framework for defining religion. The through-line is consistent: the government can ask if you’re sincere, but it cannot tell you whether your faith is real.

Here is the foundational paradox of American religious liberty: the First Amendment forbids the government from establishing religion, but to protect religion, courts and agencies have to know what counts as religion in the first place. Every attempt to draw that line creates the very entanglement the clause was designed to prevent.

Legal scholars have acknowledged the impossibility openly. Any definition that focuses on the particular characteristics of religious practice is “destined to fail” because definitions establish what religion is and therefore dictate what a religion must be — thereby contradicting the idea of freedom to practice whatever faith a person feels compelled to observe. Many scholars believe a government definition of religion is “contrary to the entire concept of religious liberty” and will only “create stagnancy by restricting the present and future growth of religion.”

The Pentagon just decided the 17-million-member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints doesn’t qualify as Christian. There’s just one problem: the government has absolutely no business making that call.

“Christian” is not a trademark. It is not a licensed designation. No federal agency holds the registration. No act of Congress defines its membership criteria. The word has been in continuous dispute — theological, cultural, political — for literally two millennia, and the ink dried on the First Amendment more than two centuries before any Pentagon bureaucrat decided to sort service members into a government-approved list of who counts and who doesn’t.

And yet, here we are.

There is a moment in James 2 that should stop every pastor cold.

“If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,’ but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit?”

James is not describing a cruel person. He is describing a religious one. Someone who uses the right words, offers a genuine-sounding blessing, and walks away having done nothing. And James’s verdict is devastating: that faith is dead.

Every person who holds power stands under the same evaluation:

Am I using this authority to protect the vulnerable, or to protect myself?

That question — drawn from a recent piece on what authority is actually for — is more uncomfortable than any policy debate. It cannot be answered by citing accomplishments. It cannot be hidden inside good intentions. It is answered in behavior. And it is measured not by the condition of the powerful, but by the condition of the person standing beneath them.

A strange thing happened recently.

A former reality television villain found himself being discussed as a serious candidate for public office.

Predictably, much of the conversation focused on who Spencer Pratt used to be. The manipulator from The Hills. The tabloid celebrity. The professional attention-seeker.

One of the reasons I write books is because I believe money is a tool.

Not a scorecard. Not a measure of worth. Not something to be accumulated indefinitely while people around us struggle.

A tool.

It is Pride Month. Somewhere this June, a sixteen-year-old is sitting in a pew listening to adults debate whether she deserves to exist openly in public life. She is hearing from legislators, activists, pundits, and neighbors. The one voice she needs most is her pastor’s. And too often, that voice says nothing.

This piece is for her. And for everyone who has sat in that silence and wondered if they were wrong to expect more.

A recent Christianity Today post argued that the church’s rush to issue statements on every controversy is a sign of unfaithfulness. “Urgency is not faithfulness,” it declared. The piece invoked the image of Jesus spending 30 years in obscurity before speaking a single public word — suggesting pastors might do well to follow suit.

“Not For You To Judge”

[Verse 1]

You come with your scripture, your stones already thrown
Like the rainbow that hung there was yours and yours alone
It was a promise, not a weapon, not a word meant for your war
So tell me who made you the keeper of that door

There is a phrase that circulates through Christian communities like a well-worn coin, passed from hand to hand until its edges have gone smooth: God has a plan.

It gets said at funerals. At hospital bedsides. In the awkward silence after someone shares news that has no good response. It is meant as comfort, and the people who say it usually mean it that way.

But ask the parent whose child just died whether it helped, and you will often get a look — the one that says I know you’re trying, but please stop.

There is a statistic that stops most people cold when they first encounter it.

In the United States, men die by suicide at nearly four times the rate of women. In the UK, suicide is the single biggest killer of men under 45. Globally, in every country on earth without exception, men die by suicide more than women.

And yet women attempt suicide at roughly three times the rate of men. Women experience suicidal ideation more often. Women are diagnosed with depression at twice the rate. Women are, by almost every measure of mental suffering short of death, in more distress.

Doug Wilson is easy to dismiss.

He’s the pastor in rural Idaho who wants to reinstate anti-sodomy laws and thinks women shouldn’t vote. He preaches at the Pentagon at Pete Hegseth’s invitation. He covered up child sexual abuse in his congregation for eight months. He is, by almost any measure, an extreme figure — and his extremism makes it easy for ordinary evangelical churches to point at him and say: that’s not us.

But the estrangement isn’t coming from Doug Wilson’s church alone.

It’s June again, and somewhere right now a pastor is preaching about it.

Not celebrating it. Lamenting it. Naming it as evidence of cultural decay, moral confusion, spiritual rebellion. The rainbow flags outside the coffee shop, the parade downtown, the month-long visibility — all of it framed as an offense against the natural order, a symptom of a society that has lost its way.

And in the pews, LGBTQ+ teenagers are sitting very still, learning what their church thinks of people like them.

There is a question that keeps surfacing, quiet and persistent, underneath all the political noise:

What is authority actually for?

Not in theory. Not in Sunday school. In practice — in the real world, where real people wield real power over other real people — what is it for?

There’s a story circulating right now about Graham Platner, a Maine Democratic Senate candidate and Marine combat veteran, who wrote on Reddit in 2019 that a wounded soldier “didn’t deserve to live.” The condemnations came fast. Robert O’Neill — the Navy SEAL credited with killing Osama bin Laden — called it “barbaric.” Susan Collins blasted it. Veterans lined up to say Platner is unfit for office.

They might be right. But the way the argument is being made carries its own risks — and tracing those risks is worth the effort.

In 2012, Pfc. Ted Daniels was caught on his own helmet cam being shot four times by Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. The footage went viral years later, garnering tens of millions of views. What the video looks like is a soldier making every tactical mistake in the book — running into the open, getting lit up, barely surviving.

There is a line in the Bible so frequently quoted in the aftermath of scandal, abuse, and institutional failure that it has almost become a kind of liturgical shield. It comes from Psalm 51, verse 4, traditionally attributed to King David after the prophet Nathan confronted him over his actions with Bathsheba and Uriah the Hittite:

“Against you, you only, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight.”

On its surface, this is one of the most beautiful lines in the Psalter — raw, undefended, spiritually honest. And it is. But over the last several decades, particularly in certain corners of American evangelical culture, this verse has been quietly repurposed. It has become a way to talk about sin that leaves human victims out of the room entirely.

There’s a Substack article making the rounds in Christian publishing circles. An acquisitions editor describes receiving a book proposal she suspects was written by AI. She runs it through detectors. She feels disappointed, then suspicious, then angry. She compares the deceptive author to a fake chef serving microwave dinners.

It’s a well-written piece. The anger is real. The chef metaphor lands.

But it misses the most important thing happening right now. And what it misses reveals more about the publishing industry’s anxieties than it does about AI.

In 1990, a team of Harvard researchers and a small biotech startup had human data proving that a molecule called GLP-1 could lower blood sugar in diabetics, suppress hunger, and slow digestion. It worked. The science was solid. The patent was held.

Their partner, Pfizer — one of the largest pharmaceutical companies on earth — reviewed the data and walked away. Not because the drug failed. Because, as Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard Medical School and one of the researchers in the room, later wrote, Pfizer concluded that “nobody would ever want an injectable diabetes drug.” The market didn’t see the profit. So the program died.

The patents sat dormant. Novo Nordisk eventually picked them up in 1992, spent the next two decades engineering a stable, once-weekly injectable form of the molecule, and in 2017 released it as Ozempic. It is now one of the best-selling drugs in human history, generating tens of billions of dollars annually. Flier, now in his late 70s, finally wrote the whole story down because — as he put it — he didn’t want the history to die with him.

It is younger than the Moral Majority. More online than the Tea Party. More intellectually ambitious than MAGA populism alone. And unlike the old evangelical establishment, it is increasingly comfortable speaking in the language of power, hierarchy, nationalism, and civilizational struggle.

One of the clearest recent examples appeared in a conference branded:

“Christ Is King — America After Trump”

On Monday, MSNBC’s Katy Tur asked one of the more historically confused questions in recent cable news memory. Responding to a clip of House Speaker Mike Johnson at a Christian prayer rally on the National Mall, she turned to her panel and asked: “Is this him putting God over the Declaration of Independence?”

The backlash was swift and deserved. Johnson had not departed from the Declaration — he had paraphrased it. The second paragraph of the document that birthed this nation states plainly: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Tur, who holds a philosophy degree from UCSB, managed to mistake a quotation from the founding document for an attack on it.

But in the right’s gleeful dunking on Tur’s gaffe, conservatives sidestepped a question the Rededicate 250 rally itself raises — one that goes back to the founding, and one the founders themselves never cleanly resolved.

There is a particular kind of disappointment reserved for things you once loved.

For millions of Christians — and many non-Christians drawn in by its humanity — The Chosen represented something genuinely rare: a portrayal of Jesus that felt earned. Not the waxy, stained-glass Christ of religious obligation. Not the culture-war mascot of American evangelical politics. A Jesus who wept. Who laughed at dinner. Who sat with the broken and the excluded and treated them like they mattered.

Then came Rededicate 250.