A post went viral recently. A verified account on X wrote:

“The term ‘theological liberalism’ is thrown around a lot. When push comes to shove though, it still boils down to Richard Niebuhr’s summation of what theological liberalism truly is: ‘A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross’ (Kingdom of God in America, 193). Liberal/progressive Christianity is more than that but it is no less than that, and it will always come down to it. Niebuhr’s words 89 years ago are just as applicable in 1937 as they are today.”

54,000 views. The quote is real. Niebuhr did write it. But what’s being done with it is something he never intended — and the post contains a telling error that most of those 54,000 viewers probably didn’t catch.

A screenshot circulating on social media frames the erosion of Western civilization as a six-step program: convince women to hate men, men to hate themselves, minorities to hate whites, whites to hate themselves, the young to be LGBTQ+, and the old that they are backward. “Only takes a generation,” the author concludes.

The post presents itself as diagnosis. It deserves to be examined on its own terms — carefully, scripturally, and without assuming bad faith in those who find it compelling. Many people do find it compelling, and not without reason: something does feel broken. The question is whether this framework correctly identifies what.

Before examining each point, however, it is worth naming the strongest version of the concern — because there is one.

On Thursday, President Trump told reporters in the Oval Office — on camera, in English — “No, I’m not putting troops anywhere.” He paused. Then, apparently aware that this was not quite true, he added: “If I were, I certainly wouldn’t tell you.”

By Wednesday, the Pentagon had confirmed the deployment of elements from the 82nd Airborne Division headquarters, a brigade combat team, and assorted “division enablers” to the CENTCOM area of responsibility. The 82nd Airborne. Paratroopers. People whose entire professional purpose is to fall out of airplanes and land — boots first — on contested terrain, seizing it before follow-on forces arrive. According to CBS News, senior military commanders have already submitted specific requests preparing for ground operations. Pentagon statements indicate the planning includes meetings about where to detain Iranian soldiers if those boots — hypothetically, technically, not yet officially — touch the earth.

“We can confirm elements of the 82nd Airborne Division HQs, some division enablers and the 1st BCT will be deploying to the CENTCOM AOR. Due to operations security we have nothing additional to provide at this time.”

Last week, Brooks Potteiger — evangelical pastor, Pete Hegseth’s closest spiritual adviser, and a member of the Christian nationalist network built around Doug Wilson — appeared on a podcast called Reformation Red Pill to talk about James Talarico. Talarico is a Texas Democratic state representative, a Presbyterian seminarian, and the newly minted Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, running against John Cornyn.

The host, Joshua Haymes, opened by saying he prays “that God kills him.” Potteiger agreed: “We want him crucified with Christ.” Haymes continued: “And if it would not be within God’s will to do so, stop him by any means necessary.”

After the story broke, Potteiger posted a clarification: he wasn’t calling for Talarico’s physical death, he was invoking the imprecatory psalms, praying that God would “kill the old man” in Talarico and raise him to new life. He wants a Saul-of-Tarsus moment for the man. “Talarico of Tarsus,” he said.

There’s a Fox News piece making the rounds today about truckers being pulled off Florida highways for failing English proficiency tests. Embedded cameras, a federal ride-along, dramatic exchanges where truckers respond “No” to questions about road signs. The framing is immigration crisis. The subtext is danger on the roads.

But if you slow down and read it carefully, the article dismantles its own premise three times before you even reach the case studies.

The most revealing moment in the piece isn’t what’s reported. It’s what’s missing.

At the 2026 Oscars, actor Ethan Hawke was asked on the red carpet for advice about unrequited love — a fitting question, since he was nominated for playing Lorenz Hart, a man who loved deeply and was never quite loved back. His answer went viral almost immediately.

“The one who’s in love always wins. It doesn’t matter if you get your heart broken; you’re living. When you’re feeling, you’re alive. The sun doesn’t care whether the grass appreciates its rays, right? It just keeps on shining. That’s you.”

Almost immediately, the internet split. Half the comments were “this changed my life.” The other half were: easy for a man to say who allegedly cheated on Uma Thurman.

There’s a mythology at work in American energy policy right now, and it goes something like this: fossil fuels are power. The more we produce, the more we burn, the more pipelines we build — the more dominant we become. It sounds like empire. It isn’t.

The British didn’t conquer half the world because they loved pepper — they did it by controlling trade routes, monopoly charters, and the chokepoints between producers and consumers. They ate roughly the same amount of pepper before and after the East India Company. What changed was who paid whom to move it. They sat between supply and demand and charged a toll in wealth, labor, and sovereignty. The spice wasn’t the point. The dependency was.

If you want to use a resource to dominate other nations, you don’t consume it. You hoard it, control it, ration it, and make others come to you. You make yourself the chokepoint. That’s how resource imperialism actually works.

It started, as many arguments do, on the internet. A science page posted the classic bait question: which is more painful, childbirth or getting kicked in the groin? Predictably, a chorus of men arrived in the comments armed with a curious argument: nobody asks to be kicked, therefore it must hurt more.

The logic collapses on contact — nobody asks for kidney stones either, or bone fractures, or the kind of grief that makes it hard to breathe. Voluntariness has nothing to do with the intensity of pain. But embedded in the comment thread, almost as an aside, was the point that actually matters: women were historically denied pain medication because doctors assumed they could handle it better. That throwaway line contains an entire archive of atrocity.

This is not ancient history. It is one of the foundations on which American medicine was built.

There is something deeply satisfying about saying it out loud. He’s going to hell. After years of watching cruelty get baptized as righteousness, after watching children separated from their parents get shrugged off by people who claim to follow Jesus, after watching powerful men mock the deaths of people who simply did their jobs — the words feel like justice. They feel like prophecy. They feel like finally telling the truth in a room full of people pretending not to see it.

A recent video making the rounds declares, with theological framing, that Donald Trump is going to hell. I understand the impulse completely. Some days I share it.

But I want to sit with why it’s still the wrong move — not because it’s impolite, and not because we should sand down our witness to avoid offending the comfortable. It’s wrong because it claims knowledge we don’t have, and because Scripture is actually quite clear about who gets to make that call.

Pick up almost any evangelical sermon on 1 Timothy 1:8–11 and you will hear the same argument: the Law is not for the righteous. It is for murderers, fornicators, kidnappers, liars, sodomites. The implication is clear. Decent, church-going people are not the problem. The problem is out there, in the culture, among people who have not yet submitted to sound doctrine.

That reading is comfortable. It is also radically incomplete. And the proof is not in progressive theology or modern scholarship. It is in the Old Testament itself, in the prophets, and in the words of Jesus.

The passage includes “sodomites” in its list of lawbreakers. In modern usage, that word has come to mean one specific thing: male homosexual conduct. But that meaning is largely a product of later interpretation, not what the Biblical texts themselves specify.

There is a persistent idea in Christian circles that justice means punishment, and that mercy is what you extend instead of punishment when you’re feeling generous. By this logic, a society that goes easy on criminals is a society that has been seduced by sentimentality. What we need, the argument goes, is consequences. Law and order. The firm hand.

It sounds rigorous. It sounds biblical. But it has a significant problem: it only ever seems to notice crime flowing in one direction.

To be clear: harm matters at every level of society. When someone wrongs another person — regardless of their circumstances — that wrong is real and deserves to be named. The question is not whether justice matters. The question is whether our theology of justice is actually as biblical as we think it is, or whether we’ve selectively applied it in ways the prophets would not recognize.

There is a small cultural script that plays out over and over again.

A controversy breaks out around who is “allowed” to tell a particular story. The conversation quickly narrows to identity: who is on stage, who is not, who is permitted, who is not. Before long, the substance of the work itself — the accuracy, the tone, the care — has disappeared entirely. The controversy has replaced the content.

The recent dispute over Annette Hubbell’s one-woman historical show is a clean example of this script in action — and also, if you look carefully, a case study in where it breaks down.

There is a version of the prosperity gospel that never gets called that.

It doesn’t involve private jets or seed faith offerings. It wears thoughtful literary prose and gets published in respected evangelical magazines. It quotes C.S. Lewis. It is written by serious scholars with genuine pastoral intentions.

But it does the same thing the prosperity gospel always does: it takes human suffering, runs it through a theological framework, and hands it back to you as a lesson about contentment.

Last week, Dave Ramsey told Fox Business that Corporate America has screwed young people out of the housing market. He cited record-high car loans, student debt, and credit card balances as the forces draining the disposable income young Americans need to buy a home.

He’s not entirely wrong about the debt. But he’s framing it in a way that obscures a more uncomfortable truth: you could follow every piece of Dave Ramsey’s advice — no credit cards, no car payments, no student loans, emergency fund fully stocked — and still not be able to afford a house. Not because of your choices. Because of math.

Take a worker earning $20 an hour. That’s not poverty. In most of the country, that’s a decent wage. Annualized, it comes to roughly $41,600. After taxes, take-home is around $34,000.

Christianity Today is keeping an eye on this summer’s denominational conventions. The SBC. The LCMS. The ACNA. The CREC. The Global Methodist Church. Millions of churchgoers represented. Dozens of decisions to be made. Abuse investigations on the agenda.

Here is what they will not tell you: the abuse survivors are women. And the women will be ignored.

This is not a prediction. It is a pattern so well-established that predicting it is barely different from reading last year’s minutes.

Russell Moore recently wrote that “a church severed from empathy is a church lacking the compassion of Jesus, but it is also a church unable to call people to repentance of sin.” It’s a good line. Theologically coherent, pastorally honest, and — given the tradition Moore is addressing — genuinely courageous to say out loud.

But it contains an assumption worth examining.

It assumes the problem is a deficit of empathy. That somewhere along the way, white evangelical Christianity lost its capacity to feel. That the corrective is to restore something that went missing.

If you’ve spent any time in gamer culture, you know the legend of Leroy Jenkins. His teammates are mid-strategy session, calculating risks, assigning roles, coordinating the plan — and Leroy just charges in screaming his own name. Everyone dies. Leroy shrugs.

On March 19, 2026, a Japanese reporter asked President Trump why the United States hadn’t informed its allies before striking Iran.

Trump’s response, delivered in front of Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi:

There is a long tradition in Christian and Jewish education of treating the patriarchal narratives as stories of heroes — men of faith whose missteps are either minimized or spiritualized into object lessons about grace. Jacob wrestles with God and is celebrated. Joseph is sold into slavery and becomes a type of Christ. The moral texture of what actually happened tends to fade behind the theological payoff.

But the Torah does not ask us to ignore what happened. It records these stories in unflinching detail, and it gives us a legal framework — the Mosaic covenant — that names what these actions were. Yes, the law came after the patriarchs. The anachronism is intentional. The Torah is not simply reporting history; it is interpreting it. When Moses receives the commandment against kidnapping and selling a fellow Israelite, the reader is meant to remember Joseph’s brothers. When the law condemns wage theft and contract fraud, Laban’s face is in the background.

This piece catalogs the specific violations in two episodes: Jacob’s years of labor under Laban, and the brothers’ trafficking of Joseph. In each case we will name the act, identify the applicable law, and let the text speak.

Here is the uncomfortable thing someone needs to say out loud: organized crime ran a better town.

Not a safer town. Not a cleaner town. Not a town where the books were honest or the violence stayed theoretical. The mob controlled Las Vegas from the 1940s through the early 1980s with guns, skims, Teamsters pension funds, and the occasional car bomb in a casino parking lot. Nobody is disputing that. The workers who crossed them, the rivals who encroached, the debts that went unpaid — those people were not protected by the hospitality philosophy. The system had victims, and it had coercion running beneath every surface that looked generous.

But here is what they also did for everyone else: they comped your room. They charged five dollars for a steak. They put Frank Sinatra in the showroom and covered the ticket. They knew your name at the front desk. They built a hospital with a Teamsters loan. They bought uniforms for local kids’ sports teams. They paid hospital bills for employees with sick children — not as policy, but as relationship.

There is a reason most Americans only know Eva Perón through a Madonna film and a Broadway ballad. The musical is gorgeous. The woman was not.

This is not an accident. History has a well-documented habit of softening its female wielders of power. Male authoritarians get clinical analysis — thick biographies, documentary series, university syllabi dedicated to understanding how they built what they built. Female ones get musicals. Cleopatra gets Elizabeth Taylor. Mary Queen of Scots gets Cate Blanchett. And Eva Perón — a central architect of a political machine that helped shape decades of Argentine instability — gets Andrew Lloyd Webber, Rachel Zegler singing from a London balcony, and a generation of people whose entire frame of reference is “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.”

That song is a lie. Argentina should cry. It has been crying for seventy years.