A policy perspective · Companion to “A Bear Trap in the Living Room”

Imagine two dogs standing side by side. Same size. Same build. Same breed label. One of them, if it decides to attack a child, will cause a serious injury. The other will cause a fatal one. From the outside, they are indistinguishable. Both are dangerous. The difference is degree — and degree is exactly what policy should care about.

We already accept, as a society, that some things are dangerous enough to require registration, licensing, and demonstrated responsibility before a private citizen can own or operate them. Cars. Firearms. Certain chemicals. Exotic animals in most jurisdictions. The logic is not that these things are evil or that their owners are bad people. The logic is that the consequences of failure are serious enough to warrant oversight — and that oversight creates accountability where none otherwise exists.

There is a metaphor that cuts through years of circular argument: owning a pit bull–type dog is like having a bear trap in your home. Everything is fine. Until it isn’t. And when it isn’t, the outcome is categorically different from other kinds of “isn’t.”

The metaphor is imperfect—dogs are not mechanical devices, and most will never cause harm—but it captures the structure of the risk. The problem isn’t the probability of activation. It’s the combination of an unpredictable threshold and a catastrophic consequence. A bear trap in good working order, properly stored, never causes injury. But it creates a persistent level of responsibility that most people aren’t actually capable of sustaining—and crucially, the absence of an accident is wrongly attributed to owner skill rather than to the trap simply not having been triggered. You don’t know which condition you’re in until you find out.

That’s the honest framing. Everything else follows from it.

A rash of viral moments has confused performative politics with protection. The confusion is dangerous — and it’s older than you think.

You’ve probably seen the clip by now, or one like it. A man on a date declines to pay for dinner, making a point of his feminist credentials — equal pay, equal bills. When his date is threatened moments later, he does nothing. He stands aside. The implicit logic: he’s treating her as an equal, which apparently means abandoning her to fend for herself.

The punchline lands hard. Whatever your politics, you’d rather have a conservative — or at least someone who understood that protection and respect are not opposites.

There is a kind of book that arrives at exactly the right cultural moment—naming something real—and stops just short of demanding anything.

Moral Injuries is that kind of book.

Michael Valdovinos has written a serious, well-researched account of what happens when people violate their own conscience—or are forced to. He calls it moral injury: not trauma in the conventional sense, not the fear-response of PTSD, but the rupture that happens when you do something, or fail to stop something, that contradicts your deepest sense of right and wrong. It shows up in soldiers ordered to fire on civilians. It shows up in doctors rationing ventilators. It shows up in executives who watched the system they served produce harm they could have named. The concept is real. The suffering is real. The book takes it seriously.

Content warning: This article discusses sexual violation, abuse of power, and the theological frameworks that enable them.

Let’s start with the story as the book tells it.

A man named Alex is watching TV. His sister-in-law falls asleep in the same room. He becomes aroused. He does not get up and leave. He does not wake her. He does not remove himself from the situation.

There’s a LinkedIn post making the rounds. A therapist writing to parents whose teenagers have gone quiet. Her framing is kind. You’re not trying to argue. You’re trying to help. But somehow everything turns into conflict.

She’s not wrong about what it feels like. She’s wrong about what’s driving it.

The post assumes the parent wants a relationship and is accidentally producing conflict through poor communication. Fix the communication, fix the relationship. It’s a comfortable diagnosis. It lets the parent off easy.

There is a persistent fantasy at the center of American Christian politics, and it goes something like this: if we could just get the right people into office, pass the right laws, win the right Supreme Court seats — we could build it. The good society. The godly nation. The shining city on a hill, assembled by hand.

The Book of Revelation has a direct answer to that fantasy. It is not what you might expect from a book full of dragons and bowls of wrath. The answer is architectural. The New Jerusalem doesn’t rise. It descends.

“I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (Revelation 21:2). The verb matters. It is not constructed. It is not voted into existence. It is not established by a conquering army or a supermajority. It is given — “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” It is a gift. And that changes everything about how we are supposed to think about power.

There are two charcoal fires in John’s Gospel. Most people only notice one.

The first is in the high priest’s courtyard, chapter 18. It is cold. The servants and officers have made a fire because it is cold, and Peter is standing there warming himself, and three times he says: I am not. I do not know the man. I am not one of them.

The second fire is in chapter 21, on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias, after everything. After the cross, after the tomb, after the locked room appearances. Jesus has made a charcoal fire — the only other time John uses that specific word, anthrakia, in the whole Gospel — and he has bread, and he has fish, and he is waiting.

There’s a moment in John 20 that is so quiet it almost disappears.

The tomb is empty. Peter and the beloved disciple have come and gone — they “saw and believed,” the text says, and then went home. Back to wherever you go when the world has just been turned inside out and you don’t know what to do next. They went home.

Mary stayed.

I did this exercise years ago and I’ve never needed to redo it since. This is the reference article — the place I point people when the topic comes up, so I never have to reconstruct it from scratch again.

Let me be clear upfront: I’m not trying to convince your church to change anything. The odds of that are zero. Easter is Easter. Good Friday is Good Friday. The liturgical calendar is load-bearing infrastructure for too many institutions to move. This isn’t a crusade. It’s just the math.

And the math doesn’t support a Friday crucifixion.

Between the crucifixion and the resurrection, there is a full day. And Scripture refuses to skip it.

The women who loved Jesus spent it grinding spices, braiding grief, and waiting. They didn’t rush through it. They couldn’t. The law said rest.

We’ve often read that as an obstacle — as if the Sabbath were an inconvenient pause between Good Friday’s tragedy and Easter Sunday’s triumph. But what if it was something else entirely? What if the Sabbath, in that moment, was doing exactly what it was designed to do?

Christianity Today recently posted a Good Friday reflection titled “Good Friday’s Answers to Wounded Church Members.” The theology in the free portion is real — the Man of Sorrows bearing wounds alongside the wounded is not nothing. But the article is paywalled. And if there is any accountability in it for the people who did the wounding — any language about confessing to the person you hurt, confessing to the church, waiting in the discomfort of having confessed — that part costs money to read.

The wounded get the comfort for free. The reckoning, if it exists at all, is a premium feature.

I want to be careful about intent here. Maybe the accountability is in there, behind the paywall, and the editorial team simply led with what they thought would draw readers in. That happens. Publishing is hard. But regardless of intent, the structure produces something worth examining — because it mirrors a pattern the church has been running for decades. And it raises a question worth sitting with: who, exactly, is likely to pay for a subscription after reading a Good Friday piece about the church’s wounded? Someone who has been hurt and wants more comfort? Or someone who has done the hurting, who feels the weight of it, who reads the free portion and thinks — thank goodness, we weren’t implicated — and then pays to find out if there’s a path back?

A realtor on LinkedIn is filling up his minivan for $100 and has found a way to feel good about it: he drives a Tesla. Good for him. The post is friendly, even a little charming. “Makes you wish it came with a free drink or pizza slice.”

But here’s what the post doesn’t say, and what almost no one in this conversation ever says: for most drivers, a hundred dollar fill-up is not the tragedy it’s being sold as.

And our collective inability to do the math — or demand that our politicians do it — is exactly how we keep electing people who promise to fix a problem they’ve misrepresented to us.

Someone recently accused me of wanting to dismiss the Eastern Church entirely.

My offense was pointing out that the canon of saints is overwhelmingly male — and that this isn’t coincidence. It’s what you get when the institution that decides who counts as a saint has been, for most of Christian history, run exclusively by men. The outcome speaks for itself. You don’t need to establish intent when you have five hundred years of publication records.

Their counterargument: We don’t reject the Western church because of colonialism.

The rooster crowed.

That’s how the song ends. That’s how the gospel ends that scene. And it’s not just a detail about the hour. It’s the sound of a worldview breaking open.

Peter hadn’t simply lied to save his skin. He had, three times over, declared a theology. He knew what a Lord was supposed to be — and the man being led away in chains didn’t match it. So the denials weren’t just fear. They were confession. Every “I don’t know him” was also an “I know what a Lord looks like, and it’s not that.”

There is a confusion embedded in the name itself. Good Friday. As if death were the point. As if the cross were the gift. As if what we are celebrating — if that word even applies — is the killing of a man by an apparatus of imperial power and religious collaboration.

It is not.

Death is the enemy. Paul says so plainly: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). The whole arc of the New Testament runs against death, not toward it. Jesus doesn’t die because death is good. He dies because the machinery of human sin — state power, religious legitimacy, crowd psychology, bureaucratic cowardice — grinds up innocent people, and he walked straight into it rather than around it.

There is a thing we do when we are afraid. We ask for the map. We want to know the route, the timeline, the method. We want someone to tell us: here is exactly how this ends. Here is the morning that is coming. Here is the mechanism by which the suffering resolves.

And when no one will tell us — when the silence holds, when the answer doesn’t come — we decide that the silence means the story is not going to end well.

We conflate not knowing the how with not knowing the what. We mistake the absence of a timetable for the absence of a promise.

A LinkedIn post went modestly viral this week. It warned that people in emergencies are reaching for their phones instead of helping. It urged “responsible actions over passive observation.” It got a lot of 🙏 reactions and shares.

It was also wrong — or at least wrong enough to be worth correcting.

In 1964, Kitty Genovese was murdered outside her apartment building in Queens. The story that spread was that dozens of neighbors heard her screams and did nothing. No one intervened. No one called the police. Later reporting showed the original account was exaggerated — fewer witnesses, more ambiguity. But the psychological research it inspired has been replicated dozens of times under controlled conditions. The phenomenon is real even if the founding story was messy.

One sermon can’t do everything. But it does choose what it will leave out.

I want to be fair about what happened at the Maundy Thursday service I attended, because it was led by a woman pastor — and we need more of those, not fewer. She preached well. The message was drawn straight from the opening of John 13: Jesus loves his people to the end. True. Grounded. Worth sitting with.

And the basins came out. The towels followed. People removed their shoes.

There is a kind of knowledge that only imagination can give you.

Not speculation. Not fantasy. Something more painful and more useful than either — the capacity to hold what could have happened alongside what did, and to feel the difference. Not abstractly. In your chest.

This is what grief does at its most honest. And this is what the dramatic monologue at the heart of this song asks Judas to do — not from the outside looking in, but from the wreckage, looking back at the fork in the road he didn’t take.