A question worth taking seriously: why doesn’t the church send delegations to investigate new works the way the apostles sent Peter and John to Samaria? Why do denominations wall themselves off, compete, and refuse the correction that comes from outside their walls?

It is a good question. But it has an answer those who ask it rarely anticipate.

The church did send delegates. The Spirit did show up in unexpected places. And again and again, the institution’s response was not Peter and John kneeling in the dirt to ask what God was doing. It was a trial. A condemnation. A burning.

Today the New York Times published the results of a multi-year investigation into César Chávez. The findings are not ambiguous. Two women — Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas — say he sexually abused them for years during the 1970s, beginning when they were twelve or thirteen years old and he was in his forties. More than sixty people were interviewed. Union records and documents were used to corroborate accounts. And then there is Dolores Huerta — now nearly ninety-six, Chávez’s most celebrated co-founder, a living civil rights legend — who disclosed publicly for the first time that he sexually assaulted her and fathered two of her children.

Huerta’s statement is worth sitting with. She said she kept silent for sixty years because “building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work.” She believed, as so many women before and after her have believed, that the cause was too important to risk on the truth about the man.

This is the bargain women have been asked to make throughout history. Over and over again. Across ideological lines. On both sides of every partisan divide. The pattern is always the same: powerful men do what they want to women, the movement closes ranks, and the women are quietly asked to understand that the work is bigger than what happened to them.

There is a pattern hiding in plain sight in American immigration history. Corporations recruit people from other countries, extract their labor under conditions no one with other options would accept, and then — once the political winds shift, or the work is done, or domestic workers start complaining — those same people become “the problem.” The gate swings open from the inside. It swings shut from the inside too.

But this isn’t just a story about what’s done to migrants. It’s a story about what’s done to all workers — and the racial grievance that is always available, on demand, to keep them from figuring that out.

Let’s start with the most literal example of building America.

There is a recurring move in debates about women in ministry that I want to name before we go any further, because once you see it you cannot unsee it. The move goes like this: someone asks whether women are permitted to preach, teach, or lead in the church. And the answer comes back immediately, confidently, with the tone of a man reading from a settled constitution: First Timothy 2:12. “I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man.”

That’s it. That’s the whole case.

Now, the person making this argument is often sincere. They are not usually trying to harm women — they believe they are simply reading the Bible as it is written. And in a certain surface sense, they are reading something as it is written. But here is the question they rarely stop to ask: What else is written?

There is a regulation in the United States that says a parent receiving food assistance cannot use those benefits to buy a birthday cake for their child.

Not because birthday cakes are harmful. Not because the child doesn’t deserve a celebration. But because someone decided that poverty is a moral condition requiring supervision — and that the price of survival is submission to the judgment of those who provide it.

There is a word for what we used to call this.

Vocation.

Not a job. Not a headcount. Not a line item on a labor cost report.

Every so often someone raises a familiar objection: How can we trust history books? After all, the winners write history, the powerful control the archives, and every generation tells the story differently. If the people in charge decide what gets preserved and what gets buried, how can anyone claim to know what actually happened?

There is some truth in that concern. Power has always tried to shape the narrative. Kings commissioned chronicles. Empires published heroic accounts of their conquests. Governments still produce carefully worded press releases explaining why everything they do is necessary and good, why the people they hurt deserved it, and why anyone who says otherwise is misremembering.

But the skeptical conclusion — that history is therefore unknowable, that we can never really get at the truth — is wrong.

There’s a video floating around where a guy named Skye weighs in on whether we should bring back the Sunday-best tradition. Pipe organs. Dress suits. The whole aesthetic. His answer is probably more nuanced than you’d expect — and it’s worth thinking through carefully, because the history here is more interesting, and more convicting, than the surface question suggests.

Let’s start not with fashion but with scripture.

When Paul writes to Timothy about women adorning themselves “in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire” (1 Timothy 2:9), the point is not a dress code. It’s an economic critique. Gold. Pearls. Costly attire. These were signals of wealth in the ancient world — the first-century equivalent of a Rolex on Sunday morning. The command to dress modestly is a command not to use the gathered assembly as an opportunity to display your social status above your brothers and sisters.

Fox News ran an opinion piece this week from the Foundation for Government Accountability. The headline: foreigners are “stealing the American dream” by buying up U.S. homes. The villain of the piece — introduced with its own dedicated paragraph, its own dollar figure, its own “strategic rival” framing — was China.

Between April 2024 and March 2025, the article reports, foreigners purchased over 78,000 American homes. Chinese buyers alone spent $13.7 billion. The solution proposed: ban foreign buyers outright, or tax them into submission.

It is a tidy story. It has a villain with a foreign face. And it is almost entirely beside the point.

There is a version of Christian charity that is, at its core, a gift from the comfortable to the comfortable, administered through a nonprofit, with a press release attached. It looks like generosity. It has the vocabulary of generosity. It is not generosity in any sense the Bible would recognize.

I want to be precise about what I mean, because the category confusion here is not accidental and the stakes are not small.

When the Hebrew prophets speak of the poor — anawim, the afflicted; dal, the weak and helpless; ebyon, the destitute — they are not describing people who need a better budgeting app. They are describing people who have been stripped of the means to sustain life. Proverbs 19:17 says that lending to the poor is lending to God himself, who will repay. The presumption of that verse is not that the poor have a cash-flow management problem. The presumption is that they cannot eat.

A sermon I heard recently repeated a familiar claim from modern stewardship teaching.

Hoarding is wrong — if it lacks a purpose.

The idea is familiar. Saving money is wise, hoarding money is bad, and the difference is simply whether there is a plan behind the accumulation. Give generously, tithe your ten percent, save another ten, live on the rest — and you are a faithful steward.

“Would you also destroy the righteous with the wicked? … Far be it from You to do such a thing as this, to slay the righteous with the wicked… Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” — Genesis 18:23–25

For two thousand years, Christian political imagination has carried a particular warning about power. The warning was not subtle. It appeared in sermons, in medieval chronicles, in Protestant pamphlets, in Puritan jeremiads, in American revival preaching. The danger was the warrior king — the ruler who loved glory more than justice, conquest more than mercy, whose armies burned cities and called it victory.

The fear had a theological shape. Kings, Christians were told, would answer to God for the innocent blood they shed. Augustine warned that empires could become “great robberies.” The prophets spoke of rulers who built their houses with injustice and their chambers with wrong. The Book of Revelation pictured kings drunk on the blood of the saints.

“Would You also destroy the righteous with the wicked? ... Far be it from You to do such a thing as this, to slay the righteous with the wicked... Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”

— Genesis 18:23-25, Abraham interceding for Sodom

On the morning of February 28, 2026, the girls of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, Iran arrived for the first day of their school week. The two-story building, painted with pink flowers and green leaves, sat in the southern Iranian city near the Strait of Hormuz. Parents began receiving panicked phone calls when U.S.-Israeli airstrikes started across the region. There was not enough time. By 10:45 a.m., a Tomahawk cruise missile — operated exclusively by the United States Navy — struck the school. Between 165 and 180 people were killed. Most of them were girls between the ages of seven and twelve. Hospital morgues reached capacity; authorities used refrigerated trucks to preserve the children’s bodies. Multiple independent investigations by the New York Times, NPR, BBC Verify, Bellingcat, and CNN concluded the same thing: the United States was responsible. The strike appears to have been caused by outdated targeting coordinates — the school had been walled off from an adjacent military base since 2016, a separation clearly visible in satellite imagery, but the Pentagon’s target list had not been updated.

A chart has been making the rounds on social media. It shows political ideology among Americans aged 18–29, broken down by gender, over the past 25 years. The headline finding: young men have stayed roughly where they were, while young women have moved substantially to the left. The partisan gap between them has nearly doubled — from 12 points to 23 points.

The most common interpretation, offered by the tweet that spread the chart, is that young men have remained steady while young women have radicalized. Hannah Cox, a political commentator, pushed back in a reply that cut closer to the truth: the label has stayed the same, but the beliefs haven’t. If you think the conservatism of 25 years ago is the conservatism of today, she wrote, you’re not reading the data.

She’s right. But I want to push the argument further, because I think what this chart is actually showing us is something older and more structurally significant than a political realignment. What we may be watching is the visible fracture of an arrangement that has organized American life — and American Christianity — for a very long time.

There’s a particular species of ingratitude that isn’t really ingratitude at all — or at least, it doesn’t feel that way to the person doing it. It feels like discernment. Like wisdom. Like finally having enough of a foothold to have standards.

I’ve been watching it up close lately, and I want to write about it because I think it’s one of the more quietly devastating things that happens between people who love each other.

Here’s how it works.

A recent headline reported a striking statement from Pete Hegseth about the escalating conflict with Iran.

“More casualties are expected… casualties stiffen our spine and our resolve to finish the fight.”

Read that sentence slowly.

One of the most repeated lines in modern political rhetoric goes like this: “The trouble with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.” The phrase is attributed to Margaret Thatcher, and it gets repeated whenever someone wants to dismiss public spending as naïve or irresponsible.

The line works because it sounds like common sense. It conjures a picture of the economy as a collection of separate piles of wealth — a productive pile and a dependent pile — and warns that the dependent pile will eventually drain the productive one dry.

But that picture of the economy is wrong. And understanding why it’s wrong turns out to matter quite a lot right now.

There’s a headline making the rounds from Christianity Today: “In Our Anger Era: Too Many Americans Stay Enraged Rather than Seeking Help.” The article, published in August 2024, opens with this framing:

“More Americans than ever are seeking help for mental health issues like depression and anxiety. But they seem to be avoiding help for another emotion, even though it comes up across life stages and can be destructive: anger.”

One counselor quoted in the piece offers an analogy for good and bad anger: “It’s okay for a kid to be angry, but it’s not okay for them to harm another child in their anger. It’s okay to feel it, but how they express it matters.”

There is a man in the New Testament named Eutychus. He appears in Acts 20, sitting in a third-floor window while the Apostle Paul preaches. Paul, we are told, “talked on and on.” And Eutychus, overcome with sleep, falls out of the window to his death.

Paul goes down, raises him from the dead, then goes back upstairs and keeps talking until dawn.

This story is in the Bible. It is not presented as a cautionary tale about the dangers of long sermons. But it is hard to read it without noticing that the early church had the same problem we have: someone in the back, tuning out, in danger of falling.

Here is a question worth sitting with.

When the United States launched strikes against Iran’s leadership, much of the Christian Nationalist movement cited Romans 13 in support. Governing authority is God’s instrument. The state bears the sword for good reason. Support your government.

When the international community — representing the governing authorities of most of the nations on earth — condemned those same strikes as unlawful and destabilizing, that condemnation was dismissed. Globalism. Anti-Americanism. Irrelevant.