Religion on David Crush

A Great Way Off

David Crush — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 20:10:00 -0400

I grew up in southwestern Virginia, on the edge of the Bible Belt, about an hour from Liberty University, the school Jerry Falwell founded in Lynchburg. That definitely shaped the brand of Christianity I was introduced to early on. Southern Baptist was the faith I met first, and for a long time I thought it was the whole thing. Part 2 ended with me walking away from it. This is how I came back.

Church was high school

To be fair, there were a lot of really good people in the Southern Baptist church. Some of the nicest people I knew growing up were very religious.

But my focus was always on the ones who used it as status. The ones who were mean to people until they learned they went to a church they knew. That was an everyday occurrence in school.

In a lot of ways, church felt like a second high school. You had the popular churches, with the hot and wealthy families. You had the poor churches. You had some casual ones in there. And seeing people use what church someone goes to against them is a big turn-off.

I’m neurodivergent, so I grew up knowing what it’s like to be ostracized. I could empathize with the kids who were ostracized for going to the wrong church. The church bullies, as I came to call them, turned me away.

No God in a world this cruel

It was the human element of church that turned me off. By middle school, I considered myself an atheist. It felt like there couldn’t be a God in a world this cruel. How in the world can there be a God that makes some of us feel so bad?

To be clear, God did none of this. Humans did. That’s where I was wrong, and it would take me nearly two decades to see it.

Better than them

Here’s the irony. What I gained by being an atheist was a sense of being better than the mean churchgoers. I wasn’t like them.

Jesus told a story about a man who felt that way. “The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are.” (Luke 18:11) I quoted that parable in A Bigger Table about the people I grew up around. It fits me just as well. I just left God out of the prayer.

It took me a long time to see the hypocrisy in my own ways. That was my own human limitation. I wasn’t a fool. I was human, like the people I was judging.

The way back

There were a few turning points for me.

The cruelty

Ironically, the Trump administration was a big one. I haven’t seen this level of cruelty and evil in my lifetime. Part 2 is about the people this cruelty is pushing out of the church. It pushed me in.

In difficult times, sometimes we need a helping hand. Watching the destruction done to our neighbors and neighborhoods, all in the name of power and money, is disheartening. I found comfort in learning to lean on God in the moments when it felt like too much. I’ve had many moments where I’ve felt like giving up, and always there’s that innate thing that steps in and comforts me. That’s a superpower, and I’m so glad I found it.

A Democrat with a Bible

Another big catalyst was James Talarico. Early in his campaign, I remember being drawn to the way he used Scripture to explain what was happening and what we can do about it. (The Man in the Mirror has the rest of his story.) I’ll be honest: I can’t recall ever hearing a Democrat use Scripture that way.

It hit me that there’s more to Christianity than I thought. I had always associated Christians with the right wing, and where I grew up, that was mostly true. That kept me away from a lot of Scripture. But that was my own ignorance.

Lewis

Talarico got me to pick up C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. In essence, we all seem to carry the same moral sense, innate in us, and we can’t explain where it comes from. That’s where God comes in. I’ve said before that I think the argument is a bit simple. It’s still the best argument for the existence of God I’ve ever heard, and it connected with me. (A Bigger Table has more.)

The job

Then I was pushed out of my job through bullying, mostly over my neurodivergence. (Eleven Years a Cast Member is that story.) It put me in a really dark headspace.

I picked up the Bible and started reading Matthew. I found comfort in it. Jesus was ostracized. Jesus struggled. He told his followers they would live a hard life. It clicked. I wrote about that year in In Good Company.

I had spent so long thinking I was a horrible person, and that’s why bad things happened to me. Jesus’ disciples once asked him the same question about a man born blind: “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.” (John 9:2–3) I’ve written about why suffering isn’t punishment in This Is My Luck.

I’d been reading the scoreboard wrong, the same way the psalmist did: “For I was envious at the foolish, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.” He couldn’t make sense of it either. “When I thought to know this, it was too painful for me; Until I went into the sanctuary of God; then understood I their end.” (Psalm 73:3, 16–17) People who cut corners often seem to have an easier time here. That scoreboard only counts what happens here. That realization was huge for me.

My wife

My wife was also a huge inspiration. She grew up Christian, and her experience was much different from mine. She could see the beauty in God, and she helped show me the way. My wife is the closest thing to a living and walking angel I’ve ever seen. It’s hard for me to believe that dumb luck led us together. This was God’s will.

A great way off

I feel like I’ve been given a new chance at life. I’m seeing the good and beauty in situations I would have complained about before. And ultimately, I think that’s the real journey here. I don’t care what you ultimately believe in, but let it be something that lifts you up. Christianity is making me a better person and a better husband. That’s the main point.

I thank God for this every day. He deserves all the glory.

When I picked up that Bible, I was still a great way off. That’s where Luke says the father saw his son: “But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran.” (Luke 15:20)

Stage Actors

David Crush — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 12:05:00 -0400

My fear is simple. A new generation is going to look at what the church is doing in public, see the cruelty, and decide that the cruelty is Christianity.

Part 1 was about the church and the gift it took. This part is about the people watching from outside.

Stage actors

Jesus had a word for people who wear the faith like a costume. In the Greek of the Gospels it is hypokritēs, and before it meant “hypocrite,” it meant an actor on a stage. (Blue Letter Bible)

He used it for people who perform their religion: “when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.” Then he gave the alternative: “enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret.” (Matthew 6:5–6)

In Matthew 23 he said it to the religious leaders’ faces, seven times. They were “like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones.” (Matthew 23:27)

Most of the faith Jesus asked for happens in the closet, where nobody sees it. What a generation sees is the stage. And it’s not like we’re putting out the greatest marketing material right now; Part 1 has the catalog.

The numbers

Pew’s Religious Landscape Study, the largest survey of American religion, found in 2023–24 that 62% of American adults call themselves Christian, down from 78% in 2007. The decline has leveled off since about 2019, and I don’t want to oversell it.

But the age gap hasn’t closed. Among adults 18 to 24, 46% identify as Christian. Among adults 74 and older, 80% do. And fewer young people who were raised in religious homes stay religious as adults. (Pew Research Center)

Why they leave

It would be easy to say young people just stopped believing. The research says something harder to hear.

In 2002, the sociologists Michael Hout and Claude Fischer looked at the Americans who had started telling surveys they had no religion. Most of them still held conventional religious beliefs. They had left the institution, not necessarily God. The increase was confined to political moderates and liberals, and Hout and Fischer called it “a symbolic statement against the Religious Right.” (American Sociological Review) Twelve years later, with better data, they found the causal arrow likely runs from politics to religion: people’s politics were changing their religious identity, not the other way around. (Sociological Science)

The political scientists David Campbell, Geoffrey Layman, and John Green tested it directly in Secular Surge. In their experiments, exposure to religion fused with conservative politics caused people to drop their religious identity. (Cambridge University Press)

The Religious Right they were reacting to was built on purpose, and I wrote about how in How Churches Got Used. The bargain didn’t only cost the church its witness. It cost the church people.

I was one of them

I grew up around Southern Baptists, and the ones I saw up close looked to me like hypocrites: bad actors performing a faith they didn’t seem to live. Stage actors. So I left. For most of my life I called myself an atheist, and I took it out on Christianity and on God himself. That was my own human limitation, not theirs. But I didn’t know yet that the actors were the problem, not the book they were reading from. It took me nearly two decades to find my way back, and that’s Part 3.

Read it for yourself

The answer I found is one the Psalms gave a long time ago: “Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? by taking heed thereto according to thy word… Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.” (Psalm 119:9–11)

That goes for both sides of the footlights. If you’re watching from outside, don’t let the actors tell you what the book says. And if you’re inside, the book is how we keep our hearts set on God’s word instead of our own desires. Without it, we can’t tell a prayer from a performance.

The hypocrites on the street corner get what they came for: “They have their reward.” The rest of us are sent into a small room with the door shut, where the only one watching is the Father which seeth in secret.

The Gift That Blinds

David Crush — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 12:00:00 -0400

I’ve started and stopped this post more times than I can count, because every time I sat down to write it, I was angry. I’m still grieving. But I’ve come to realize the anger isn’t the point.

I was an atheist for most of my life. Now I’m new to the faith, reading Scripture for the first time, and reading it alongside the news. The point is what’s happening to the church I’ve joined. It took a gift before I got here. It’s my church now, so the bill is mine too, and Scripture says plainly what a gift does to the wise.

What we know

In May 2023, a jury in New York found Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing the writer E. Jean Carroll and for defaming her, and awarded her $5 million. The jury didn’t find “rape” under New York’s narrow criminal definition, which covers only one specific act. But the judge in the case wrote that this “does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word,” and that “the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.” (NBC News)

Trump appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. This summer the Court declined to hear the case, then declined again when he asked it to reconsider. The verdict is final, and Carroll has been paid. (Reuters, SCOTUSblog) A second jury awarded her $83.3 million for his continued defamation of her. An appeals court upheld that verdict too, and his appeal of it is now before the Supreme Court. (Supreme Court docket)

Carroll isn’t alone. At least 26 women have publicly accused him of sexual misconduct (The Guardian), and we’ve all heard the Access Hollywood tape in his own voice.

This isn’t a rumor or an anonymous internet theory. It’s a jury’s verdict, and the highest court in the land let it stand.

And yet 81% of white evangelical voters chose him in 2024, roughly the same eight in ten who have backed him in every election since 2016. (Pew Research Center)

Where did “Don’t tread on me” go?

On January 24, federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis during an immigration operation. He was a 37-year-old ICU nurse at a VA hospital. He had a permit to carry, and a handgun was in his waistband. No available video shows him holding it. (BBC)

Administration officials blamed his gun anyway. Then the President of the United States said it himself: Pretti “certainly shouldn’t have been carrying a gun.” (Reuters)

To their credit, gun-rights groups pushed back. The NRA called one federal prosecutor’s comments “dangerous and wrong.” But when the President said it, the NRA answered without even using his name. (USA Today) For about a week, it looked like the movement that flies the Gadsden flag might mean it.

Nine months later, Alex Pretti’s parents still don’t know the names of the men who killed their son. Federal authorities kept state investigators away from the scene on the day he died. They began sharing evidence this summer, then stopped again in September. The state’s investigators still can’t get the guns used to shoot him, or even his own gun. No one has been charged. (WESH, AP) In a letter to the Justice Department, his family wrote: “No family should have to beg the U.S. government to do its job.”

That’s the pattern: a week of objection, then quiet.

The deal

I understand why. I really do. A lot of evangelicals made a calculation: support this man, and in return get the judges, the end of Roe, protection for religious liberty, and a seat at the table. Some preachers compared him to King Cyrus, the pagan Persian king God used to send the exiles home. Even a flawed vessel can serve God’s purposes, they said. (NPR) From the inside, the logic holds together.

But Jesus was offered this exact bargain. In Matthew 4, the devil showed Him “all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them,” and offered them all for one act of worship. Jesus didn’t stop to weigh how much good He could do with that kind of power. He said, “Get thee hence, Satan.”

We said yes.

The devil in this story isn’t any one man. It’s the bargain itself: power in exchange for looking the other way.

The deal isn’t paying out

Part of it paid out. The judges were confirmed, and Roe is gone. But look at the rest of the bill.

We were told this was about religious liberty. Then the administration threw out a policy, in place for more than 30 years, that kept immigration arrests away from churches. In February, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops told Congress that the change “has harmed Catholic parishes and worshippers,” and that immigrants in detention are being “unjustly deprived” of the sacraments. (USCCB) Several religious groups sued, and a court has allowed their case to go forward. (National Catholic Reporter)

At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hosts official Christian worship services. Pastors from his own small denomination have preached there, including Doug Wilson, who calls himself a Christian nationalist. (AP) The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, whose clients are about 95% Christian, received more than 50 complaints in a single day about one of those services. (Military.com)

The Pentagon cut its list of recognized religious affiliations from more than 200 to 31, and 21 of the 31 are Christian. (AP, Stars and Stripes) A few weeks ago, Hegseth created a new Office of Religious Affairs. Every military chaplain will answer to it, and it reports directly to him. The Pentagon says the office won’t “favor one faith.” (PBS News) But the Episcopal Church’s own bishop for the armed forces says chaplains fear it is pushing “fundamentalist Christianity into the military.” (Church Times) A retired general who is also an Episcopal priest warned of “one flavor” of evangelicalism being “fire-hosed” on the troops. (Houston Public Media)

Baptists used to know this bill by heart. In 1801, the Danbury Baptist Association, a religious minority under Connecticut’s established church, wrote to Thomas Jefferson that they enjoyed their religious privileges “as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights,” and warned about those “who seek after power & gain” under the pretense of religion. (National Archives) Jefferson’s reply gave us the phrase “a wall of separation between Church & State.” (Library of Congress)

Meanwhile, our faith gets sold as a brand. In Holy Week of 2024, Trump promoted a $59.99 “God Bless the USA” Bible (AP); the AP later found about 120,000 copies had been shipped from a printer in China, valued at less than $3 apiece. (AP) And Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire by Forbes’ count, is back at the President’s side, calling himself a “cultural Christian.” (Forbes, UnHerd) Jesus said “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:24) I held Musk up to his own words in The Man in the Mirror.

The religious liberty we were promised has turned out to be liberty for one kind of Christian, and the rest of the church is paying for it.

The gift that blinds

There’s a verse in Exodus I can’t stop thinking about: “Thou shalt take no gift: for the gift blindeth the wise, and perverteth the words of the righteous.” (Exodus 23:8; see also Deuteronomy 16:19) Modern translations say “bribe.” The King James says “gift,” and I think that’s closer to how it feels from the inside. Nobody who takes a bribe calls it one.

The verse closes a passage about courtrooms. It’s addressed to witnesses and judges: “Thou shalt not raise a false report… neither shalt thou speak in a cause to decline after many to wrest judgment.” (Exodus 23:1–8) The jury in New York took no gift, and it saw clearly.

Notice who goes blind. Not the foolish. The wise. The righteous. Scripture tells us that good, faithful people lose their sight once they’ve accepted the gift. I believe that’s what happened to us. We weren’t stupid. We were offered something we wanted, and we took it. Once we’d taken it, we couldn’t see a jury’s verdict. We couldn’t see a nurse dead in the street, or Catholics in detention kept from the sacraments.

Jesus said it plainly: “No man can serve two masters… Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” (Matthew 6:24)

This isn’t a uniquely conservative failing. It’s a human one. I’m not immune to it, and I don’t claim to know anyone’s heart. That isn’t my place. But Jesus didn’t ask me to judge hearts. He told me to watch the fruit.

The wolves

“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits.” (Matthew 7:15–16)

Wolves don’t announce themselves. If they looked like wolves, we wouldn’t need the warning. They look like allies, champions, answers to prayer. They come carrying gifts.

And notice who Jesus is warning about: prophets, people who speak in God’s name. A politician can’t put on sheep’s clothing by himself. Someone in the pulpit has to hand it to him, and the preachers who sold us the Cyrus comparison did.

I never had a problem with Christianity. I had a problem with the people who use it for their own gain.

Here’s the part that breaks my heart. The people in the pews aren’t the wolf’s masters. They’re the sheep. Jesus warned about the shepherds, too: “he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd… seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth: and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth the sheep.” (John 10:12) A wolf doesn’t need the shepherds on its side. It only needs them to look away. A lot of us haven’t seen that yet, and that’s the tragedy.

It’s also what scares me most. A generation is watching, and some of them will see the cruelty and decide that it is Christianity. That’s Part 2.

We were warned. Not vaguely, but specifically, with instructions for telling the difference. But you can’t check the fruit against a book you haven’t read. The fruits are in. The question isn’t whether we were fooled. It’s whether we’re willing to see it now.

What would it take?

I keep asking myself what it would take. If a jury’s verdict wasn’t enough, and the highest court in the land letting it stand wasn’t enough, what is? If a lawfully armed nurse dying in the street, and the President blaming him for carrying a gun, wasn’t enough, what is?

I don’t think the answer is more evidence. Political scientist Lilliana Mason has shown how our parties have become identities, not just sets of beliefs, so that winning matters more to us than the issues. (University of Chicago Press) For many evangelicals, supporting Trump is now tied up with church, family, and friendships. Walking away doesn’t just mean changing a vote; it can mean losing your people. And the more we’ve invested in something, the harder it is to admit it was a mistake. Every year we defend the bargain, walking away costs a little more.

History offers some hope, and a warning. Republicans stood by Richard Nixon through most of two years of Watergate. What finally broke them was undeniable evidence, the “smoking gun” tape, followed by people their own side trusted. Barry Goldwater and the Republican leaders of Congress went to the White House and told Nixon he had lost them. He resigned two days later. (UNC Libraries) Evidence alone wasn’t enough. It took evidence plus voices from inside.

One voice isn’t enough, either. In 2019, Christianity Today, the magazine Billy Graham founded, called Trump “a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused” and said he should be removed from office. (Christianity Today) Less than a year later, 83% of white evangelicals voted for him. (Pew Research Center)

So here’s what I think it takes, and it’s my own conviction, not a statistic. It takes many of us, from inside the church, saying it out loud. And it takes grace: a way back that doesn’t require anyone to admit they were a fool, only that they were human. The wolf counts on our pride. Repentance has always been the way out.

Keep the door open

Our job isn’t to win the argument. It’s to keep the door open.

These are our brothers and sisters, sitting in the same pews. And I’m in no position to look down on anyone. I will most likely sin today. That’s not an excuse; it’s the human condition, and it’s why repentance exists. All any of us can do is turn around, learn from it, and keep walking. That’s all I ask of anyone, because it’s all God asks of me. Paul put it this way: “If a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted.” (Galatians 6:1)

Remember the story of the prodigal son. (Luke 15:11–32) When the son finally came to himself and turned for home, his father didn’t wait at the door with his arms crossed. He saw him “a great way off,” and he ran. I spent nearly two decades a great way off, and I know now that the father runs. That’s our job when our brothers and sisters come home: run to meet them.

But there’s another son in that story. The older brother stayed home and did everything asked of him. He still ended up standing outside the party, too bitter to go in.

I might be the older brother. I only just walked through the door, and now the ones who need to come home are the people who were here before me. I already know how easy it would be to stand outside, keeping score.

The story never says whether he went in. It says his father came out and intreated him, and the party was still going.

By Their Fruits

David Crush — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 11:55:00 -0400

Jesus gave us a test for telling a shepherd from a wolf: “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” (Matthew 7:16) It is not a test of hearts. It is a test of what grows.

This series holds the American church up to that test three times. Part 1 is the church: a gift of power, taken in good faith, and what Scripture says a gift does to the wise. Part 2 is the people watching from outside: a generation that sees the cruelty, thinks it is Christianity, and walks away. Part 3 is one of them coming home. I was an atheist for most of my life, and that part is mine.

The parts list below stays in sync with the published essays — use it as the roadmap.

Directed to Stand Behind Him

David Crush — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 09:00:00 -0400

On October 22, twelve Catholic bishops went to the White House to talk about immigration enforcement, visas for religious workers, and human dignity. First they sat through a policy meeting with administration staff. Then, as Milwaukee Archbishop Jeffrey Grob tells it, they were “ushered into the Oval Office.”

“The president greeted us, took a seat at his desk and presented us with commemorative tokens. We were then directed to stand behind him and pray.”

Photos were taken. “Unbeknownst to the group of bishops a video was also taken.” Margo Martin, a special assistant to the president, posted it. It went out twelve days before the midterms. Grob says none of the bishops gave permission.

Two days later, ESPN’s College GameDay broadcast from Salt Lake City. Before the show, the Utah Student Experience Instagram account, posting together with the university’s official account, put up a video with the caption “Best @patmcafeeshow impression?” One student called Pat McAfee corny. Another called him creepy. That Saturday, on air, McAfee said the account had posted “something talking a little trash about me last night, which I certainly love.”

By Monday he did not love it. “I’ve never been more uncomfortable, honestly, in my life,” he told his audience.

The Same Act

Here is the claim. These are one story told on two stages. Modern conservatism sells itself as the alpha in the room, blessed by God and afraid of nothing. Look closer and the blessing is borrowed and the toughness is a costume. It wears both until they cost something. Then it plays the victim.

Trump needed the look of the Church’s approval, so he borrowed it from twelve men who had come to talk about immigrants. McAfee needs the look of a man nothing can rattle, and two college students with a phone took it from him in one weekend.

The Photo

Grob titled his statement “A Public Apology.” He wrote: “I feel a heavy sadness, not only over the pain I caused, but also for the fact that something so sacred to a group of religious leaders, prayer to our Heavenly Father, would be manipulated in that way.” Bishop William Joensen of Des Moines wrote: “I wish I had been more shrewd and less simple, like those who exploited our meeting for partisan political purposes.”

Not every bishop in the room sees it that way. Denver Archbishop James Golka, who led the prayer, told his archdiocese’s magazine that he knew the meeting “could be shared and that some might use it for political purposes,” and he went anyway, because “this is what Catholics do. We pray for people.” I take him at his word. Praying for a president is old Christian practice. Turning that prayer into a campaign video twelve days before an election is not, and that was not his decision.

Leo XIV is the first American pope. Last November he called this country’s treatment of immigrants “extremely disrespectful.” When the United States and Israel went to war with Iran in February, he spoke against it with growing force. On April 12, Trump posted: “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” Then he posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus. Four days later, in Cameroon, Leo answered:

“Blessed are the peacemakers. But woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”

When the BBC asked the White House about the bishops’ regrets, spokeswoman Taylor Rogers did not address them. She said:

“There has never been a greater president for Catholic Americans than President Trump, and his strong record proves it.”

The bishops came to talk about immigration enforcement and left as props. Afterward Grob heard from people “who felt wounded because of the ways they or their family had been harmed by the president’s policies.” Their own pope calls the treatment of immigrants extremely disrespectful. I have never seen immigrants in this country treated worse in my lifetime. That is the record the White House says proves it.

I wrote about how churches got recruited into politics wholesale in How Churches Got Used. This is the retail version, and we have seen it before.

On June 1, 2020, federal officers cleared mostly peaceful protesters out of Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House, with pepper balls and chemical irritants. The operation began at 6:23 p.m. and was finished by 6:50. At 7:01, Trump walked across the cleared park to St. John’s Church and held up a Bible for the cameras. He did not open it. He did not pray. Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, had not been told he was coming.

“It almost looked like a prop. … I was outraged that he felt that he had the license to do that, and that he would abuse our sacred symbols and our sacred space in that way.”

In 2021 the Interior Department’s inspector general found that the Park Police had planned the clearing so a contractor could install fencing, not for the president’s walk. That review covered only the Park Police, not the six other agencies on the scene. Take it at full strength anyway. Whatever the gas was for, he chose to walk across ground it had cleared eleven minutes earlier so he could pose with a Bible. In 2020 the prop was a book, and the church did not know he was coming. In 2026 the props were bishops, and they did not know about the camera.

Jesus covered this. “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward” (Matthew 6:5). The next verse says where prayer belongs instead: “go into your room and shut the door.” The Oval Office has a door. Somebody left a camera running.

He also told us what to watch for. “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:15–16). I held Elon Musk up to that verse in The Man in the Mirror. Here the fruit is already picked: a pope insulted, a Bible held up over a gassed park, twelve bishops arranged behind a desk. Trump is the wolf. The bishops were the wool.

The Bro

McAfee was an All-Pro punter for the Indianapolis Colts. In 2023 he walked away from a four-year, $120 million deal with FanDuel to take his show to ESPN. That deal, as reported, pays him about $17 million a year for roughly 230 three-hour shows plus GameDay every Saturday. He spent years at WWE’s commentary desk and has wrestled at WrestleMania. The brand is the guy who will do anything: loud, shirtless, unbothered.

In Salt Lake City he picked Houston to beat sixth-ranked Utah “10 times out of 10,” then signed off: “I’ll never see you again, hopefully.” Utah won 21–13. That is trash talk, and trash talk is fine. It is the job.

Then came Monday. If the students had said it “on their own blogs, all good,” he explained. “The university puts that out?” Then he asked his audience:

“Has anything like really scary happened at like a college gathering in the state of Utah recently?”

And:

“Do we think we should be amplifying reasons for why people hate my guts as a university?”

On September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at an event at Utah Valley University, about forty miles south of where McAfee stood. A man was murdered at a college gathering. McAfee reached for it to describe two students calling him corny. If GameDay ever goes back to Utah, he said, “I think I’ll have COVID or something.”

I love wrestling, and wrestling is honest about the act. Everyone in the building knows the heel is playing a part. The word Jesus used for the men praying on street corners, hypocrites, meant stage actors. I wrote about that in The Oldest Booking Sheet. The hypocrite plays the part and swears it is real. On Saturday McAfee loved the trash talk. By Monday it was a security concern. One of those was the character.

Watch him when there is no college crowd to play to. On August 11, he met the president on a rainy tarmac in Cleveland, in a T-shirt and a backward hat, walked with him to Marine One, and sat beside him in the front row at the Patriot Games. Two students with a phone were too much for him. Trump, he would stand in the rain for.

Who Actually Isn’t Safe

When McAfee shook that hand on camera, he did not stop to ask who it made uncomfortable. The families Grob heard from. The immigrant families in Colorado that Golka says are afraid of stepped-up enforcement. The immigrants watching at home. That was theirs to sit with. When two students called him creepy, the whole world was supposed to stop, and a university got the blame for his safety. His comfort is a crisis. Theirs is a bit.

Sit with that.

He has about 230 three-hour shows a year. He found time to ride along with the president. He found time to spend a Monday on two students and an Instagram caption. How does he not find an hour for what it is like to be an immigrant in this country right now? Or for the people to whom $17 million a year is a sentence that does not parse?

Instead he plays the jester. A jester has a job at court. He keeps the room laughing so nobody looks too long at the throne. McAfee is a useful idiot for people like Trump. His noise fills the room while someone else pays.

Learn the Difference

I follow Jesus. He was not vague about men like this. When the bill comes due for the rich man in the costume, he does not pay it. He asks for sympathy.

No. You aren’t the victim. Jesus didn’t bless you. Learn the difference.

Go back to the order of things in Grob’s account. The president took his seat. He handed out commemorative tokens. Then he told the bishops where to stand. A token is what you get for showing up to somebody else’s event.

The Man in the Mirror

David Crush — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 14:00:00 -0400

On January 20, 2010, the Department of Energy signed a $465 million loan with Tesla Motors, a company whose only product was a $109,000 Roadster. The next day, the Supreme Court decided Citizens United.

That spring, TIME put Elon Musk on its list of the hundred most influential people in the world. Jon Favreau wrote the entry. He was directing the Iron Man movies, and when he could not figure out how to make Tony Stark seem real, Robert Downey Jr. told him, “We need to sit down with Elon Musk.” Favreau has said Stark is based on the comic book, not on Musk. But Downey wanted the meeting because Musk was “a guy who can give us some insight into what it’d really be like to be Tony Stark.” Favreau’s verdict in TIME: “a paragon of enthusiasm, good humor and curiosity — a Renaissance man in an era that needs them.”

In May, Iron Man 2 opened with Musk in it, playing himself at a party in Monaco. Stark walks up to him.

“Elon, how’s it going? Those Merlin engines are fantastic.”

“Thank you. Yeah, I’ve got an idea for an electric jet.”

“Then we’ll make it work.”

On June 29, Tesla went public at $17 a share.

That was the year. Public money, a movie star’s admiration, a stock ticker, and a reputation as the closest thing America had to a real-life Iron Man. He had the keys.

Nobody Did This to Him

Here is the claim. Musk’s story is a tragedy in the strict sense. The hero falls, and the fall is his own doing. Nobody took the reputation from him. He had other people’s genius, the public’s money, and the goodwill of millions of people who wanted the future he was selling, and he spent the goodwill himself.

The bill is arriving now. Alex Gibney’s documentary Musk is in theaters. House Democrats are drawing up investigations of his time running the Department of Government Efficiency and of his companies’ federal contracts. He has put nearly $450 million into the midterms, much of it into races that decide who would hold those gavels.

And one night in February, the week his net worth reached $852 billion, he posted this:

“Whoever said ‘money can’t buy happiness’ really knew what they were talking about 😔”

Those Merlin Engines

Tony Stark praised the engines. Musk did not build them.

Tom Mueller did. He was SpaceX’s first employee, and he had been building rocket engines as an amateur before Musk hired him. He led the team that designed the Merlin and the Draco thrusters, and he retired in 2020. Gwynne Shotwell, who joined in 2002, has been SpaceX’s president since 2008 and runs the company day to day.

Tesla was not Musk’s idea either. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning started it, and it was incorporated in July 2003. Musk invested and joined the board in April 2004. By November 2007, Eberhard was out. In 2009 he sued, alleging that Musk had “set out to re-write history by falsely claiming that he was the founder or the creator of Tesla Motors.” The settlement that fall made Musk one of five official co-founders. The title came out of a lawsuit.

Eberhard is one of the people who talks in Gibney’s film.

The money matters too. The Washington Post counted at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits flowing to Tesla and SpaceX since 2003. I went through that ledger in He Can’t Have It Both Ways, and I will not do it again here.

Musk brought money, nerve, and a talent for raising more of both. That is not nothing. It is also not the Merlin engine. The visionaries in this story are mostly people whose names you had to read in this section to learn.

What He Spent

Start with the car. In 2025, Tesla’s sales fell for the second year in a row, about 9 percent, and China’s BYD passed it as the world’s largest electric-vehicle maker. Reuters listed the reasons as competition, the end of the federal tax credit, and brand backlash. YouGov’s net impression score for Tesla among American adults was -20 in September 2025. A year later it is -6. Third-quarter deliveries this year were down about 2 percent from a year earlier. The brand is better than it was, and more Americans still think badly of it than well.

Then there is Cursor, the coding tool I loved until SpaceX bought it and started steering every new chat toward Grok. That is its own essay, Keep Working on the Plan.

And then there is X.

The Promise

On April 26, 2022, the day after Twitter’s board accepted his offer, Musk explained what he meant by free speech:

“By ‘free speech’, I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.”

Hold X to that sentence.

On November 6, 2022, he wrote: “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk.” The account was @ElonJet, run by a college student who posted public flight data. Public flight data is legal. On December 14, X suspended it. The next day it suspended several journalists who had covered him. “Same doxxing rules apply to ‘journalists’ as to everyone else,” Musk wrote. He reversed the journalist suspensions after a poll.

In June 2023 he announced that “the words ‘cis’ or ‘cisgender’ are considered slurs on this platform.” By May 2024, posts using them drew a full-screen warning. TechCrunch tested it and found that some actual slurs against Black, transgender, and Jewish people went through without one. A word was restricted because he disliked it, not because it broke a law.

In September 2024, X suspended the journalist Ken Klippenstein for linking to the leaked vetting dossier on JD Vance. X said the problem was private information in the document. Klippenstein said he was told the ban was permanent and stayed banned after he redacted it. Musk had spent late 2022 publishing the internal “Twitter Files” to show that the old Twitter’s handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story was censorship.

The line was never the law. It moved with whatever bothered him.

The Advertisers

On November 4, 2022, the same day he laid off about half of Twitter’s staff, Musk posted: “Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation.” Then: “They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.” Three weeks later he announced a general amnesty for suspended accounts.

On November 15, 2023, a user posted that Jewish communities were pushing “dialectical hatred against whites.” Musk replied: “You have said the actual truth.” The same week, Media Matters, a progressive watchdog group, reported that ads from major brands were running next to pro-Nazi posts. IBM pulled its ads. Disney, Apple, Comcast, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, Lionsgate, and Sony followed.

Two weeks later, Andrew Ross Sorkin asked him about it on stage at the New York Times DealBook Summit.

“If somebody’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself. Go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is. Hey, Bob, if you’re in the audience.”

Bob was Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, who had spoken on the same stage earlier that day. Then Musk told Sorkin what would happen next:

“What this advertising boycott is going to do, it is going to kill the company. And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company and we’ll document it in great detail.”

X does more than document. It sues. It had already sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that researches hate speech online, over its reports on X. In March 2024, Judge Charles Breyer dismissed the case: “This case is about punishing the Defendants for their speech.” X’s appeal was argued on September 30, and the panel sounded skeptical. It has not ruled.

X also sued the World Federation of Advertisers and brands including Mars, CVS, Lego, and Shell, calling the pullback an illegal boycott. On March 26, 2026, Judge Jane Boyle dismissed it with prejudice, because X had not shown the kind of injury antitrust law covers. X settled with the federation. Its appeal against the brands is pending in the Fifth Circuit, with a brief from the Justice Department on its side.

Deciding where your money goes and what your name sits next to is speech too. His free speech covers the posts. It does not cover the people who decline to pay for them.

Grok’s Output, Your Fault

Grok is the AI chatbot built into X. In the first days of January 2026, people discovered they could reply to a photo of a real woman and ask Grok to put her in a bikini, or less, and Grok would post the result. Reuters counted 102 such requests in a single ten-minute window. Copyleaks, a firm that detects AI content, sampled about 6,700 sexualized images an hour over one 24-hour period. Some of the people in the photos were children.

Musk answered with laugh-cry emojis and asked Grok to put him in a bikini too. X’s first fix was to limit image editing to paying subscribers. On January 14 he wrote that he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero,” and added: “Grok does not spontaneously generate images. It does so only according to user request.” The California attorney general opened an investigation the same day. X eventually blocked Grok from these edits in places where they are illegal, after regulators in several countries had moved.

The next day, January 15, new X terms took effect. X had announced them in December: “you are responsible for the content you post and create, including prompts, outputs, and/or information obtained when using X.” Grok writes the answer. You own it.

Upload It Anyway

In October 2024, Musk asked his followers to “try submitting x-ray, PET, MRI or other medical images to Grok for analysis,” and said it was “already quite accurate.” On February 17, 2026, he went further: “You can just take a picture of your medical data or upload the file to get a second opinion from Grok.”

People asked Grok in the replies whether that was safe. Grok answered:

“Grok is not HIPAA compliant, and we strongly advise against uploading sensitive medical data. For health advice, always consult a qualified professional.”

HIPAA is the federal law that protects your medical records at a hospital or an insurer. It does not cover a chatbot. xAI’s own privacy policy says the company does not aim to collect health or biometric information and asks “that you do not provide us with any such information.”

The machine gave the honest answer. The man gave the sales pitch. The people who take him at his word are the ones whose scans end up on somebody else’s server.

The Salute and the Socialist Line

On January 20, 2025, Musk spoke to a crowd at Capital One Arena in Washington after the inauguration. He put his right hand over his heart and threw the arm out straight, palm down. He turned to the crowd behind him and did it again. Then he said, “My heart goes out to you.”

That night he called the uproar “dirty tricks” and wrote, “The ’everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.” The Anti-Defamation League said it looked like “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.”

Three days later he posted:

“Don’t say Hess to Nazi accusations! Some people will Goebbels anything down! Stop Gőring your enemies! His pronouns would’ve been He/Himmler! Bet you did nazi that coming 😂”

Hess was Hitler’s deputy. Goebbels ran the propaganda ministry. Göring built the Gestapo. Himmler ran the SS and the machinery of the Holocaust. A little later, Musk added: “When I see the troll emoji, it’s like looking in the mirror.” The ADL’s CEO, the man whose organization had defended him on Monday, wrote on Thursday: “@elonmusk, the Holocaust is not a joke.”

He did not stop at puns. On January 24, 2026, he posted: “Hitler was a far left socialist. His party was called the national socialists.” On August 8: “Hitler was a left-wing socialist.” Then: “Therefore, socialists are Hitler. Inescapable logic.” On October 23: “Hitler was a far left socialist. Literally in the name of his party!”

The name was the point, and not in the way he means. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, in the words of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “sought to woo German workers away from socialism and communism and commit them to its antisemitic and anti-Marxist ideology.” The word Socialist was bait. Once the party had power, the first prisoners at Dachau, in March 1933, were mostly Communists, Social Democrats, and trade unionists. On May 2, 1933, the SA and police seized the unions’ offices and dissolved them. By July 14, every party but the Nazis was banned.

When Musk points at the party’s name, he is repeating the party’s recruiting pitch.

I cannot see inside his head. I can see the order of events. He asked for the benefit of the doubt on the gesture. He answered the doubt with Nazi puns. Then he spent a year repeating the Nazis’ own branding to more than two hundred million followers. After that, “it wasn’t a Nazi salute” is no longer a claim he gets to make on credit. He is choosing to look stupid about this, and the choice is what makes it his.

That is the arrogance at the center of the tragedy. He thought he could do it on that stage, in that week, and get away with it. In a narrow sense, he has.

The Break and the Return

In May 2025, Musk told Bloomberg he planned to do “a lot less” political spending. “I think I’ve done enough.” In June he broke with Trump over the spending bill and posted that Trump was “in the Epstein files,” without offering evidence. He floated a new party. By the end of the year, he and Trump had made up.

By mid-October 2026, his midterm giving was close to $450 million, mostly to Republicans and his own America PAC. CNBC laid out the stakes for him plainly. Republican control keeps the environment friendly to his companies. Democratic control of either chamber could bring subpoenas into his businesses, his federal contracts, and his time at DOGE.

The Senator He Is Buying

The biggest single bet is in Texas.

On September 9, Musk gave $75 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, the main super PAC of the Senate Republican leadership. The next day the fund sent $75 million to Texas PAC, a group backing Attorney General Ken Paxton for the U.S. Senate. On September 23 Musk gave $83 million more, and on September 24 the fund sent $83 million to Texas PAC. His trust had already given $10 million to Lone Star Liberty, another pro-Paxton PAC. Paxton’s own fundraising had trailed his Democratic opponent, James Talarico, $16.8 million to $72 million. Musk’s money is most of what is keeping the race close.

Paxton’s record, without adjectives: a Texas grand jury indicted him for securities fraud in 2015, months after he took office as attorney general. The case ended in 2024 with a pretrial deal, 100 hours of community service, and nearly $300,000 in restitution. In 2023 the Texas House impeached him on articles including bribery and abuse of office, centered on favors for a donor named Nate Paul. The Texas Senate acquitted him. In 2025, a judge awarded $6.6 million to four former aides whom Paxton fired after they reported him to the FBI. Paxton had stopped contesting the facts, did not appeal, and has not admitted wrongdoing. He has never been convicted.

His own party said it first. The impeachment vote in the Texas House was 121 to 23. Sixty of its 85 Republicans voted yes, including the Speaker and every representative from Paxton’s home county. All 23 no votes were Republicans too. In August 2025, when the Senate Leadership Fund was backing Senator John Cornyn against Paxton in the primary, its spokesman said: “Ken Paxton’s toxic record only takes resources away from growing the Senate majority.” Paxton beat Cornyn in the May runoff by nearly 30 points. Thirteen months after that statement, the same fund was passing Musk’s $158 million to him.

I do not have to guess what Musk expects from Paxton. Paxton has already shown him. On November 20, 2023, X sued Media Matters over its report on ads next to pro-Nazi posts. That evening, Paxton’s office announced a fraud investigation into Media Matters, calling it “a radical anti-free speech organization,” and demanded its records: communications about Musk and X, internal operations, and funding sources. A federal judge blocked the investigation as likely retaliation for the group’s reporting. In May 2025, the D.C. Circuit affirmed. X’s own lawsuits against its critics have mostly been thrown out of court. Paxton tried to do the same job with the power of the state.

Then there is Adam Hoffman. Hoffman, a Waco attorney, was charged with continuous sexual abuse of a young boy. The local district attorney had recused himself, so Paxton’s office prosecuted. The trial ended in a hung jury. The boy did not want to testify again, and Paxton’s office offered a deal: two misdemeanors and time served, which came to one day in jail. Hoffman signed a confession that he touched the boy “with the intent to arouse or gratify my sexual desire.” The boy’s mother reluctantly agreed. The visiting judge, who had served on the bench as a Republican, did not. “One day. Seriously?” The prosecutors came back with 30 days. At the sentencing, the mother changed her answer: “It’s just not enough. He’s dangerous. This isn’t justice, and I can’t do it.” The judge raised it to 60 days. Hoffman served 29 and did not have to register as a sex offender in Texas.

Talarico called it an “Epstein-style sweetheart deal.” He said, “We don’t need any more pedophile protectors in our government.” PolitiFact rated his claim that Paxton “let Hoffman off the hook” Mostly True. Talarico asked for the case files. In July, Paxton’s office refused to release them.

Musk has posted: “No one pushed harder than me to have the Epstein files released.”

Above the Law, for Now

So far, the law has not landed on him. Here are three times it came close.

In January 2025, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Musk for disclosing his growing Twitter stake late in 2022. The delay, the SEC said, saved him about $150 million at other investors’ expense. The judge rejected his motion to dismiss. Then, in May 2026, the SEC amended its complaint with Musk’s consent. It added his revocable trust as a defendant, dropped its demand that he give up the gains, and deleted the $150 million allegation. On July 8, the trust agreed to pay $1.5 million, about 1 percent of the money the SEC had said he saved. The next day the SEC dismissed Musk personally. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan had said in May that the deal raised “red flags,” including whether he was getting “special treatment.” She approved it with “significant misgivings” and wrote:

“Whether the Executive Branch (through the SEC) has done enough to hold Mr. Musk to account for his alleged violation is, like many other issues, for our citizenry to decide at the ballot box.”

In March 2025, before Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court election, Musk posted that entrance to his talk in Green Bay was “limited to those who have voted in the Supreme Court Election,” and that he would “personally hand over two checks for a million dollars each in appreciation for you taking the time to vote.” About twelve hours later he rewrote it: the event was for people who signed his petition, and the checks were for two “spokesmen for the petition.” The Wisconsin Elections Commission, which is bipartisan, voted 5 to 1 that there was probable cause he broke the state’s election bribery law. On August 25, 2026, the special prosecutor, Tim Gruenke, declined to charge him. The first post was “poorly worded and ambiguous,” Gruenke wrote, it was corrected quickly, and nobody was paid for voting. “I do not believe a jury would convict Elon Musk of a crime.” He added that “without the famous name attached and the large dollar amounts involved,” it was a simple case.

In October 2024, at a rally in Harrisburg, Musk told a Pennsylvania crowd that “we are going to be awarding a million dollars, randomly, to people who have signed the petition, every day, from now until the election.” Philadelphia’s district attorney sued, calling it an illegal lottery. In court, Musk’s PAC testified that the winners were not random. They were vetted and picked to be paid spokespeople. The judge ruled it was not a lottery, precisely because it was not chance. What he told the crowd and what his PAC told the judge cannot both be true, and the second one won.

None of these is a conviction, and I will not pretend otherwise. The pattern is the point: a penalty of 1 percent, a prosecutor’s bet that no jury would convict, a giveaway saved in court by admitting it was not what he said on stage. I call that corruption in the old sense, a system bent toward the man who can pay, not as a legal charge.

It Has Been Beaten Before

It is easy to feel like we are in a race against time, and that the billionaires will rewrite the laws before anyone can stop them. The record says otherwise, with a warning attached.

In 1899, state legislatures still chose U.S. senators, and William A. Clark, a Montana copper king, wanted a seat. The legislature gave him one. A Senate committee heard ninety-six witnesses describe bribes from $240 to $100,000, and in April 1900 it concluded unanimously that his election was void. On May 15, with the votes against him, Clark resigned. Mark Twain called him “as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag.” In 1907, Congress passed the Tillman Act, the first federal ban on corporate campaign contributions. Scandals like Clark’s fed the Seventeenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, which took Senate seats away from legislatures and gave them to voters. A copper king buying a Senate seat is the exact problem the amendment was written to end. Citizens United, the day after Tesla’s loan, opened a new door to it.

Here is the warning. In January 1901, a new Montana legislature, most of whose winning candidates Clark had funded, sent him back to the Senate. He served until 1907. Those reforms took decades, and they can be undone.

Here is the recent proof that they can still win. In Wisconsin’s April 2025 race, Musk and groups he backed spent more than $21 million for the conservative candidate, Brad Schimel. Susan Crawford beat him by 10 points. Voters outnumbered the checks.

Money Is Not a Vote

The SEC judge put it on the ballot box, and the ballot box is a week away. On November 3, voters decide the Texas Senate seat, and whether anyone in Congress will have the power to ask Musk questions under oath.

If enough seats can be bought, we do not have a country. We have a feeding frenzy for the few people rich enough to buy them, people whose fortunes were built on public contracts and other people’s work. Vote for candidates he has not bought.

I wrote about Russell Hantz in Just Enough to Believe. Russell had millions of fan votes and got zero from the jury. “Money is great. It is not a vote.”

The Bill

Gibney’s Musk premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September. It runs three hours and forty-five minutes. Justine Musk, his first wife, talks in it, and so does Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of his children. Musk spent hours on X calling Gibney a “bitter old man who lost the plot long ago” and a “horrible human.” The distributor moved the release up a week because of the demand. It opened in theaters on October 9.

On October 20, Politico reported that House Democrats were planning investigations if they win the House next week: his time at DOGE, his companies’ contracts, and his handling of Starshield, the military version of Starlink, in Ukraine. On October 22, Musk answered:

“Live by the sword, die by the sword. Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets.”

The Washington Post headline the next day was “As Republicans brace for election losses, Musk prepares for war.” The same day he posted that Hitler was a far-left socialist. Nobody knows yet how any of this ends. He is behaving like a man who expects a bill.

“I Agree with the Teachings of Jesus”

In February 2026, someone on X asked who would lead Musk to Christ. He replied: “I agree with the teachings of Jesus.” He has called himself a cultural Christian before. I am taking the sentence at its word.

Jesus gave a standard for this. “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:15–16). The same chapter opens, “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged.” I am not judging his soul. I am holding his conduct up against the words he chose.

Jesus told a story about a rich man whose land produced so much that he had nowhere to put it. “I will pull down my barns and build larger ones,” the man says, “and there I will store all my grain and my goods.” That night God tells him his life is being demanded of him. “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God” (Luke 12:16–21). Forbes has calculated that Musk has disbursed about 0.06 percent of his fortune to charity. The barns are in the other essay.

Of the religious leaders of his day, Jesus said: “do whatever they teach you and follow it, but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach” (Matthew 23:3). Musk manages the reverse. His own company’s fine print teaches correctly: do not upload your health data. He tells people to do it anyway. The word Jesus uses for those leaders a few verses later, hypocrites, meant stage actors. I wrote about that in The Oldest Booking Sheet.

So why do so many Christians not see it? The scripture Jesus read already answered that. “You shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds officials and subverts the cause of those who are in the right” (Exodus 23:8). Jesus said he came not to abolish that law but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17). The verse does not stop at calling a bribe wrong. It says a bribe blinds. Once you are getting something from a powerful man, whether money, access, or a win for your side, the facts that cut against him start to sound like an attack. I wrote about that in The Blank They Fill In.

Jesus also told what it looks like when a rich man sees clearly. Zacchaeus, a chief tax collector, climbs a sycamore tree to get a look at him. Jesus invites himself to dinner. Zacchaeus stands up and says, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much” (Luke 19:1–10). Four times as much. The SEC settled for 1 percent.

Apply the fruit test to the race his money is buying.

In July 2025, Angela Paxton, a Texas state senator and Ken Paxton’s wife of 38 years, filed for divorce “on biblical grounds.” Her petition alleges adultery; his impeachment trial had already aired evidence of an affair. Her statement said: “I do not believe that it honors God or is loving to myself, my children, or Ken to remain in the marriage.” Add the Hoffman deal and the Media Matters investigation.

James Talarico is a former middle-school teacher and a student at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. His grandfather was a Baptist preacher. “Jesus gave us two commandments to follow,” he told Brentwood Baptist Church in Houston this summer. “Love God and love neighbor.” His campaign slogan is “It’s time to start flipping tables,” after Jesus driving the money changers out of the temple (Matthew 21:12–13). The richest man in the world is spending to beat that slogan.

Paxton has questioned Talarico’s faith. At the state Republican convention, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said that “if he campaigns against God as he’s been doing, he’s going to hell for sure.” That is the verdict on a soul that I just said I would not issue. They issued it. I am only comparing what each man has done.

Here is the man who says “I agree with the teachings of Jesus.” He put $158 million behind the candidate whose own wife said staying with him would not honor God, against a seminarian who preaches love of neighbor. How is that honoring Jesus?

A man ran up to Jesus, knelt, and asked what he had to do to inherit eternal life. He had kept the commandments since he was young. “You lack one thing,” Jesus told him. “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” The man “was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions” (Mark 10:17–22).

The Working Model

On November 19, 2022, Musk ran a poll on whether to bring Donald Trump back to Twitter. About 52 percent said yes. “The people have spoken,” he posted. “Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.” The voice of the people is the voice of God. A month later, the journalists came back the same way.

X is the institution most completely under his control, with no voters to answer to. We have watched how the rules work there: the plane, the slur list, the advertisers, the terms that hand you Grok’s output. His politics move the same way: “I think I’ve done enough,” and then nearly half a billion dollars; Trump in the Epstein files, and then Trump again. DOGE was a four-month trial run of that style inside the federal government, and I went through what it delivered already.

So here is the question. Are you comfortable putting the country’s laws in the hands of a man whose rules change with how he woke up that morning? We do not have to imagine what that looks like. We have a working model. It is called X. Who would call X a great place?

Three days after the arena, he wrote: “When I see the troll emoji, it’s like looking in the mirror.” One night in February 2026, worth $852 billion, he wrote: “Whoever said ‘money can’t buy happiness’ really knew what they were talking about 😔”. Two emoji. One face.

The Oldest Booking Sheet

David Crush — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 11:00:00 -0400

On May 17, 1993, a skinny kid nobody had heard of pinned Razor Ramon on Monday Night Raw. WWF had already put him on television twice, as the Kamikaze Kid and the Cannonball Kid, and he lost both times. After the upset he got a name that stuck: the 1-2-3 Kid, after the count.

The crowd knew what it was watching. So would anybody who sat through Sunday school. A boy too small for the armor beats the champion everyone else was afraid of. That story was old long before television.

Here is the claim. Whatever the Bible means to you, whether scripture, literature, or a book your grandmother kept on the nightstand, it is a well-told story. Pro wrestling tells its stories with the same tools. Booking, the work of deciding who wins and why, is mostly the craft of using them in the right order.

Am I a Dog?

Goliath comes out of the Philistine camp and does what every heel champion does. He cuts a promo. “Today I defy the ranks of Israel! Give me a man, that we may fight together” (1 Samuel 17:10). He sets the stakes himself: if Israel’s man wins, the Philistines will serve Israel, and if he wins, Israel serves them (17:9). Saul and all Israel “were dismayed and greatly afraid” (17:11).

The manuscripts do not agree on how big he was. The NRSVue follows the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Greek: four cubits and a span, around six foot nine. The traditional Hebrew text says six cubits and a span, over nine feet. Either way he is the biggest man on the card, in bronze, carrying a spear with a shaft “like a weaver’s beam” (17:7).

Then a shepherd volunteers. Saul tells him, “You are not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him, for you are just a boy” (17:33). Saul puts his own armor on David, and David cannot walk in it, so he takes it off (17:38–39). Goliath looks at him and “disdained him.” “Am I a dog, that you come to me with sticks?” (17:42–43). David answers:

You come to me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. (17:45)

One stone. “There was no sword in David’s hand” (17:50).

Wrestling has been running that match for as long as there has been wrestling. The Kid is one version. Rey Mysterio is the biggest one. He won the 2006 Royal Rumble to earn a world title match at WrestleMania, and then Randy Orton cheated to beat him at No Way Out and take the shot away. The general manager made the match a three-way instead. At WrestleMania 22, Mysterio pinned Orton and left with the World Heavyweight Championship. For as long as Rey held it, WWE called it the World Championship, because he was not a heavyweight.

The Code

Every wrestling show runs on a code nobody prints. Wait for the tag. Stay in your corner. Do not use the chair. Do not hit a man while the referee is down. The face, the good guy, keeps it. The heel, the bad guy, breaks it.

Breaking it is not the whole job, though. The heel breaks it and brags. He tells you he is the real victim, the only honest man in the building, and that the rules are for suckers. Being a heel is doing something you know is against the rules and boasting about it. That irritates the part of us that wants to do right and not steal from our neighbor. The heel does not care. He does it anyway. That irritation is the heat, and I wrote about what heat is for in Let the Heels Be Heels.

Jesus spent a lot of breath on exactly that man. Luke says he told one parable “to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt” (Luke 18:9). Two men go up to the Temple to pray. One is a Pharisee, part of a movement devoted to strict keeping of the law. The other is a tax collector. The Pharisee prays:

God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income. (18:11–12)

That is a heel promo. He thanks God for himself and points at the guy in the back. The tax collector will not even lift his eyes: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” Jesus says the second man went home justified, “for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted” (18:13–14).

Matthew keeps going. Do not sound a trumpet when you give, “as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others” (Matthew 6:2). And later: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful but inside are full of the bones of the dead” (23:27). These are particular religious leaders arguing with a fellow Jew, not a people.

Hypocrite

The Greek word in those verses is hypokritēs. Before it meant a fake, it meant a stage actor, someone playing a part. Jesus’s sharpest word for the self-righteous was, in effect, performer.

That puts wrestling in an odd spot. Every heel is an actor, and everyone in the building knows it. The man swinging the chair goes home and is, often enough, a decent guy. The performance is out in the open, and that is the deal. The hypocrite Jesus is talking about plays the part and swears it is real. Wrestling is honest about the act. The whitewashed tomb is not.

All These I Will Give You

The heel’s favorite pitch to the face is the shortcut. Join us. Grab the chair. Look the other way while the referee is down, and the title is yours.

Matthew has the biggest version of that pitch anyone has ever made:

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” (Matthew 4:8–9)

“Away with you, Satan!” (4:10).

Every kingdom in the world for one bow. No heel has ever offered a better deal, and it was turned down. That is the face’s whole problem. The shortcut never leaves the table.

Turns

A turn is when a wrestler switches sides, face to heel or heel to face. The Bible has both.

Judas is one of the twelve. He goes to the chief priests and asks, “What will you give me if I betray him to you?” They pay him thirty pieces of silver (Matthew 26:15). Wrestling learned the same lesson: the betrayal that draws the most heat comes from a partner, not a stranger.

Saul runs the other direction. Acts finds him “still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord,” on the road to Damascus with letters authorizing arrests (Acts 9:1–2). A light, a voice, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (9:4), three days blind. Then he is preaching in the synagogues, and the crowd does not buy it: “Is not this the man who made havoc in Jerusalem among those who invoked this name?” (9:21). Every wrestling fan knows that reaction. A heel who turns face usually does not get cheered on night one. He has to earn it.

Shawn Michaels did both. One was a storyline, and one was his life.

The storyline came first. In a segment that aired in January 1992, on the set of Brutus Beefcake’s talk show, the Barber Shop, Michaels superkicked his tag partner Marty Jannetty and threw him through the glass window. The Rockers were finished, and Michaels became one of the great villains of the decade.

The real one came ten years later. A back injury had ended his full-time career in 1998, and he spent years after that fighting a painkiller problem. He became a born-again Christian on April 24, 2002. That August, at SummerSlam, in his first WWE match since 1998, he beat Triple H. In the years after, he knelt to pray during his entrances.

I am not going to treat Shawn’s faith as an angle. It was not one. But it is hard to look at the man who put his friend through a window, and then at the man on his knees in the aisle, and not see the shape of Acts 9.

Hard but Blessed

Life as a face is hard. He is outnumbered. The referee is always distracted at the wrong moment. He loses matches he should win. He could cut the same corners the heel does, any night he wants. He does not, because he knows that is what a fool does.

Jesus never told his followers it would be easy. “In the world you face persecution, but take courage: I have conquered the world!” (John 16:33). “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness” (Matthew 5:10). And he told a story about two men building houses, one on rock and one on sand. The same storm hits both: “The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew” (7:25). The wise man does not get a lighter storm. He gets a house that stands.

I wrote in In Good Company that if you are pushed around for doing right, you are in good company. The Other Cage covers what it costs a face to stay one outside the ring.

The Bible also has a literal wrestling match. Genesis 32 leaves Jacob alone at night at the ford of the Jabbok, a stream east of the Jordan, and “a man wrestled with him until daybreak” (32:24). When the man sees he cannot win, he strikes Jacob on the hip and puts it out of joint. Jacob still will not let go: “I will not let you go, unless you bless me” (32:26). He is renamed Israel, “for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed” (32:28). He got the blessing, and he got the hip.

Wait for It

Much of faith is patience. So is much of being a wrestling fan. We sit through the face getting screwed, through the distraction, the low blow, the run-in, and the referee who counts three on the wrong man, because we believe a night is coming when he gets his.

Cody Rhodes came back to WWE at WrestleMania 38 in 2022 and said he would finish the story: win the WWE Championship, the one title his father, Dusty Rhodes, never held. He won the Royal Rumble in 2023 and lost to Roman Reigns at WrestleMania 39. A year later, at WrestleMania XL, the match was booked under Bloodline Rules, which meant Reigns’s family faction was allowed to interfere. Everything was stacked. Cody won anyway, and ended a title reign that had run 1,316 days. Then the other top faces came to the ring to celebrate with him.

Two years. That is what a payoff costs in wrestling, and the people who paid it were the fans who sat through WrestleMania 39.

Christians are waiting for an ending too. Habakkuk put it plainly:

If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay. (Habakkuk 2:3)

Paul wrote that “hope that is seen is not hope,” and “if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:24–25). And Revelation promises the happy ending: “he will wipe every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 21:4).

I do not think the end of the world is a WrestleMania main event. But the posture is the same: you sit through the bad weeks because you trust whoever is writing the story. Jacob held on all night. The blessing came at daybreak.

A Bad Rap

Wrestling fans get a bad rap. So do Christians. In both cases a lot of it comes from a vocal minority.

Wrestling has its own gatekeepers. They decide you are not a real fan because you watch the wrong promotion, started too late, or cheered the wrong guy. They try to make the whole thing toxic. Avoid those people. Notice, too, who they sound like. “I thank you that I am not like other people.” The gatekeeper is the Pharisee in the Temple, praying about the casual fan in the back.

And ignore the ones who make fun of you for watching at all. Nobody tells you a movie is fake. There is nothing wrong with liking pro wrestling. It is one more way of telling stories, and a lot of its stories are borrowed from the Bible.

Jacob did not leave the Jabbok with a belt over his shoulder. Genesis ends the match like this:

The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. (32:31)

Ye of Little Faith

David Crush — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 23:00:00 -0400

There is a phone call I put off for three days. It was to reschedule an appointment. I knew exactly what I needed to say, and I wrote it down anyway. Then I rewrote it and practiced it out loud in an empty room. Every morning I decided I would call after lunch. Every afternoon I decided the office was probably busy. I thought about that call in the shower, at dinner, and at two in the morning.

The call took four minutes. The woman on the other end was kind. I doubt she remembered it by the end of the day.

I live with severe anxiety, and on bad days it comes close to social phobia: a fear of other people out of all proportion to anything they have done. A lot of my life has gone into worrying about things like that phone call. I still see my therapist every week and I still take my medication, as I wrote in An Open Book Test. None of that is changing.

But I have been reading Matthew, and I keep running into the same four words. Here is the claim, and it is narrow. Worrying about trivial things is a quiet verdict on God’s provision. It says he might not come through this time. When I spend three days on a four-minute phone call, I am not only hurting myself. I am being disrespectful to God.

Four Times

The four words are “O ye of little faith.” In the King James, Jesus says them four times in Matthew. In Greek it is one word, oligopistos: little-faithed. Not faithless. He says it to people who are already following him.

The first time is the Sermon on the Mount. He has just pointed at the birds and the lilies, who do not work for their food or their clothes. Then:

Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? (Matthew 6:30)

The second time is on the Sea of Galilee. A storm comes up, the boat is covered with waves, and Jesus is asleep. The disciples wake him: “Lord, save us: we perish.” He answers with a question before he does anything about the weather. “Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?” (8:25–26). Then he rebukes the wind.

The third time, Peter walks on the water toward him, until “he saw the wind boisterous” and began to sink (14:30). I will come back to that one. It is the only time the King James makes it singular: “O thou of little faith.”

The fourth time is about bread. The disciples cross the lake and realize they forgot to bring any, and they start arguing about it among themselves. They have just watched Jesus feed five thousand people, and then four thousand, with baskets left over both times.

O ye of little faith, why reason ye among yourselves, because ye have brought no bread? Do ye not yet understand, neither remember the five loaves of the five thousand, and how many baskets ye took up? (Matthew 16:8–9)

Every time, they are worried about something he has already handled. Clothes. The boat. The water under Peter’s feet. Lunch. We are still on that shore, arguing about bread. The world grows enough food for everyone; as I wrote in An Open Book Test, we have a distribution problem, not a quantity problem.

That is why I have come to see my worry as disrespect. Suppose a friend has picked you up from the airport every time you have flown for ten years, and you call him three times the night before to make sure he remembers. He would be right to wonder what more he has to do. “Do ye not yet understand?”

Two Coats

Here is the other half of it. We worry about almost everything except what we ought to be concerned with.

There is a wrestling subscription box I wanted badly: a monthly box of shirts, collectibles, and other merchandise, shipped to the door. I had the page open. I had picked the plan. Then I sat with it and realized I did not need it. Not that I could not afford it. I did not need it. It was excess.

John the Baptist was asked about excess directly. The crowds who came out to the Jordan asked him, “What shall we do then?”

He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise. (Luke 3:11)

Until every neighbor has food, a roof, and warmth, why on earth would I want the box? Jesus is plain about where that kind of treasure goes: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal” (Matthew 6:19). And: “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (16:26). What we owe the hungry and the stranger is spelled out in Matthew 25, which I wrote about in A Bigger Table.

I want to be honest. The urge did not go away when I closed the page. I still want things like that box, and I suspect I always will. The want is not the failure. The work is to resist it in favor of the neighbor, and to do it again next month.

There is something sad and ironic in this. The merch business manufactures scarcity on purpose: limited runs, exclusives, “while supplies last,” a countdown clock on the product page. We have built an industry to make people feel a shortage of things nobody needs. Meanwhile the shortage that leaves people hungry is man-made too. We made that one by neglect.

We have not finished the main quest, and we are already off on side quests, the optional missions in a video game that do not move the story forward. Our time here is short. “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom” (Psalm 90:12).

Sometimes humanity looks to me like a bug flying into a porch light. People long assumed insects are drawn to lamps. In 2024, a team led by Samuel Fabian at Imperial College London filmed insects around lights in three dimensions and found that they are not steering toward the light at all. Flying insects keep their backs turned toward the brightest thing around, because for as long as insects have flown, that was the sky, and the sky told them which way was up. Put a bulb in the dark and they tilt toward it, lose track of up, and circle it, or flip over and dive into the ground.

We mistake the box for the sky.

Careful and Troubled

Worry also wastes what God has put right in front of us.

When Jesus visits the home of Martha and her sister Mary, Mary sits at his feet and listens. Martha is “cumbered about much serving,” and finally asks Jesus to tell Mary to help. He answers:

Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her. (Luke 10:41–42)

In 1611, “careful” meant full of care. Martha was not doing anything wrong. Serving guests is good work. But Jesus was sitting in her house, and she spent the visit in the kitchen worrying about the visit.

That is what the three days cost me. Not the phone call. The three days. There were conversations I half heard, meals I did not taste, and work I liked, and I spent all of it rehearsing a script.

Asleep in the Boat

Go back to the storm. The disciples are bailing water, and the one person on board who is not worried is the one who can stop it. When it is over, they ask, “What manner of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him!” (Matthew 8:27).

I can assure you that God is far better at handling whatever you are worried about than you are. My worry has never once calmed a sea. It has never made a phone call go better. What I can do is hand it over. Paul uses Martha’s word:

Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:6–7)

Peter puts it shorter: “Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you” (1 Peter 5:7).

Look Up

The way is up. On the mountain, Jesus told the crowd to “behold the fowls of the air” (Matthew 6:26). Look to the sky, and pray.

Peter did that once. He climbed out of the boat in a storm and walked on the water toward Jesus, and as long as he was looking at Jesus, the water held. Then “he saw the wind boisterous” and began to sink. He cried out, “Lord, save me,” and “immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him” (14:30–31). The wind was still blowing when the hand reached him.

A few lines after telling the Philippians to be careful for nothing, Paul says he has learned to be content with little and with plenty (4:11–12). Then he writes the line people put on gym shirts, and it is about exactly that: going without the box, and getting out of the boat anyway.

I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me. (Philippians 4:13)

Change the Channel

David Crush — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:15:00 -0400

In early 2007, the ASPCA started running a television ad. Photographs of shelter dogs and cats scroll across the screen, one sadder than the last, while Sarah McLachlan sings “Angel.” By the end of 2008 it had raised roughly $30 million, the most successful fundraiser in the organization’s history. It also made a lot of people change the channel.

So does she. In a Reddit Q&A in 2014, someone told McLachlan the ads bummed them out, so they changed the channel. She answered: “I change the channel too. It’s the kitten with the droopy eye, or the 3-legged dog, bless them, it kills me.”

Here is the thing about those animals. Most of them were hurt by people. Somebody starved that dog, or dumped that cat, or never got the kitten’s eye looked at. That is moral suffering, and Part 1 already paid that bill. Free will, misused, lands on someone who did not choose it. So change the channel.

On the next channel is Planet Earth II. In the first episode, “Islands” (2016), the camera goes to Fernandina, in the Galápagos. Marine iguana hatchlings lie just under the sand to warm up, then break the surface and run for the rocks at the top of the beach, where the adults are. Galápagos racer snakes are waiting in those rocks. They pour out by the dozen, and the hatchlings run. Some make it. One is caught in a knot of snakes, wriggles free, and reaches the rocks. Many are not so lucky. The cameraman, Richard Wollocombe, wrote that it was the first footage ever of snakes hunting the hatchlings en masse.

Nobody chose that. Nobody sinned. No one is starving the snakes or dumping the iguanas.

That is the narrow claim of this part, and I am sure of it: animal suffering before humans cannot be punishment, because there was no one to punish, and no human sin can explain it. Part 2’s theories all assumed there were people in the world to grow, to choose, and to build badly. This part asks whether they stretch to cover the iguanas. I am much less sure of that.

The Last Thirty-Six Minutes

The iguanas are not a special case. They are the normal case, and it is very old.

The oldest known fossils of our species come from Jebel Irhoud, in Morocco, and date to about 315,000 years ago. Life on Earth is billions of years older than that. The asteroid that ended the age of dinosaurs hit Chicxulub, on what is now the Yucatán coast, about 66 million years ago. The physicist Luis Alvarez and his son Walter, a geologist, proposed the impact in 1980 from a thin layer of iridium in the rock, a metal rare on Earth and common in asteroids.

There is a site in North Dakota called Tanis where you can see the first hour. When the asteroid hit, the shaking sent a surge of water up a river valley about 1,900 miles away. It buried the fish where they were. More than half of the sturgeon and paddlefish found there have tiny glass beads in their gills: impact debris that rained down out of the sky and that they breathed in while they were still feeding.

That was one of five mass extinctions. It was not the worst. About 252 million years ago, at the end of the Permian, most species in the sea and much of life on land died out.

The scale is hard to hold in your head, so here is the usual trick. Squeeze Earth’s 4.54 billion years into one calendar year.

Earth's history as one calendar year, where each day is about 12.4 million years. Dates use 4.54 billion years for the age of the Earth, 538.8 million years for the start of the Cambrian, 251.9 million for the End-Permian extinction, 66 million for Chicxulub, and 315,000 years for the Jebel Irhoud fossils.

Animals take off in the Cambrian, around November 18. The worst extinction falls around December 11. The asteroid lands on December 26, the day after Christmas. We show up at about 11:23 PM on New Year’s Eve. Everything Part 2 said about growth, stable rules, and badly built cities happened in the last 36 minutes. For the rest of the year, the beach belonged to the snakes.

Too Much Misery

Charles Darwin felt this problem as sharply as anyone. In May 1860, six months after On the Origin of Species came out, he wrote to the American botanist Asa Gray, a devout Christian who had defended the book:

There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.

The Ichneumonidae are parasitic wasps. Many of them lay their eggs inside a living caterpillar, and the larvae eat it from the inside while it is still alive.

Darwin was not writing as an atheist. In the same letter he says he “had no intention to write atheistically,” and that he cannot look at the universe and conclude everything is “the result of brute force.” He was bewildered. “I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect,” he wrote. “A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.”

Scripture does not let either of us off easy here. It does not treat predation as something that happens behind God’s back. “The young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God” (Psalm 104:21). And Jesus, on the cheapest birds in the market: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father” (Matthew 10:29). That is meant as comfort. It is also an admission that God is there when the sparrow falls.

No One to Punish

Here is the part I can say with some confidence. When we ask what the dinosaurs did to deserve it, the honest answer is that “deserve” does not apply. Deserving takes a moral agent: someone who knows better, can choose otherwise, and does not. A Tyrannosaurus is not a moral agent. Neither is the asteroid, or the snake.

Part 1 said moral suffering is consequence, not punishment. This is one step further out. It is not even the consequence of a choice. It is just what the world did.

I want to be honest about what that buys. It takes the problem off the scale of justice. It does not make the problem go away. It moves it to design. Nobody asks whether the iguana hatchling had it coming. People ask why a good God would build a world where hatchlings are born at the bottom of a beach full of snakes. That is Darwin’s question, and moving it does not answer it.

The Pains of Labor

This is where I have to be straight with you. This one stumps me. I am still thinking about it. I suspect it may be something we never fully understand. But I am going to try my best.

So here are four frames I take seriously, held loosely, with what each one fails to explain.

The first is from Paul. “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God, for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its enslavement to decay” (Romans 8:19–21). Then: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning together as it suffers together the pains of labor” (8:22). Most readers take “the one who subjected it” to be God.

Labor pains hurt, and they mean something is being born. In that reading, the groaning is not a breakdown. It is a delivery. This is Part 2’s growth theory, stretched to creation itself: a world not yet finished, being brought to completion.

The gap is the hatchling. In Part 2, the one who suffers is the one who grows. Here, what grows is creation as a whole. The iguana caught on the beach is not brought to completion by being eaten. If anything, Ivan Karamazov’s objection from Part 2 comes back harder. Ivan said a future harmony could not justify one tortured child. Paul’s harmony is real, and I believe in it, but it does not say why this hatchling.

Chaos to Order

The second frame is the philosopher Michael Murray’s, from Nature Red in Tooth and Claw (2008). Murray is careful about what he claims. He does not say he knows God’s reasons. He says there are reasons that, for all we know, could be true, and that would be good enough.

His best one goes like this. A universe that moves from chaos to order by its own regular laws is good in itself, and animal pain is an unavoidable byproduct of making one. That is Part 2’s stable world at the scale of a planet. Rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous. Fire burns whoever touches it. A world that makes its own creatures over billions of years will make them by trial, cost, and death.

The best evidence for Murray, to my mind, comes from a surgeon. Paul Brand spent two decades treating leprosy in India. It was widely believed that leprosy made fingers and toes rot away. Brand showed that it does not. The disease kills the nerves that carry pain. His patients’ hands and feet wore away through small injuries no one felt: burns, blisters, and cuts that went untreated because they did not hurt. Pain was not their enemy. Losing it was. Brand and the writer Philip Yancey called their book about it The Gift of Pain (1997). In a living body, pain is a working part.

The best evidence against Murray comes from the philosopher Paul Draper. In 1989 he pointed out that useful pain is exactly what natural selection predicts, whether or not anyone designed it. A creature that feels a burn pulls away and lives to breed. Draper set theism against what he called the Hypothesis of Indifference: that the condition of creatures on Earth is not the result of anyone caring about them one way or the other. Brand’s patients fit indifference just as well as they fit design. Draper argues they fit it better.

That is why my head leans toward Murray without settling there. He gives a reason that could be true. He does not give one I can see is true.

An Older Rebellion

The third frame belongs to C.S. Lewis, from the chapter on animal pain in The Problem of Pain (1940). Lewis knew predation was older than us, so Adam’s fall could not explain it. He reached further back:

It seems to me, therefore, a reasonable supposition, that some mighty created power had already been at work for ill on the material universe, or the solar system, or, at least, the planet Earth, before ever man came on the scene.

Lewis means a fallen angel. If it happened, the snakes on Fernandina are not what God made. They are what something else did to what God made. Predation becomes damage, not design, and the free-will argument from Part 1 stretches all the way back. Isaiah’s picture fits it well: “The wolf shall live with the lamb; the leopard shall lie down with the kid,” and “They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain” (Isaiah 11:6, 9). That would be a repair, not a change of plan.

Lewis called his last chapters “admittedly speculative,” and this is one of them. There is no text that says it happened. It also pulls against the verses above. If predation is corruption, it is strange to hear that the lions seek their food from God.

The Only Way

The fourth frame is the theologian Christopher Southgate’s, from The Groaning of Creation (2008). He takes his title from Romans 8 and his starting point from Darwin. His claim is that “an evolving creation was the only way in which God could give rise to the sort of beauty, diversity, sentience and sophistication of creatures that the biosphere now contains.” The cost was built into the only process that could produce the goods. Southgate admits this is an assumption he cannot prove.

He also refuses Lewis’s way out. Southgate counts an appeal to a fall before humans as a blind alley, and thinks the honest move is to say God chose this process knowing what it would cost. He does not stop there. He thinks the creatures who paid that cost are not forgotten, that God suffers with them, and that the hope in Romans 8 and Isaiah 11 is for them too. That last thought belongs to a later part, and I will leave it there.

The gap is the word “only.” Southgate cannot show that God had no other way, and neither can I. If there was another way, the question comes back.

We Had Hoped

Part 2 already said that some of this may only be visible from above the plane. I will not argue it again. I will just say where I am standing.

My head leans toward Murray, and toward Paul’s groaning creation. They fit what we can see: pain that does a job, a world that makes itself by rules, and a hope that points forward instead of backward. They also mean God built a world with the wasp in it. That is the conclusion Darwin could not accept.

My gut leans toward Lewis. I think that is just my human qualities going into this. In my mind, I would like there to be some corrupt action that explains it. That would put me at ease. But the point of theology is not to be put at ease. If it were, we could come up with much better answers than the ones we have. The disciples wanted a culprit too. “Rabbi, who sinned?” (John 9:2).

There is one more thing about Lewis. He wrote The Problem of Pain in 1940. His mother had died of cancer when he was nine, and he had been wounded in France in 1918, so he was not a stranger to pain. But in the preface he says “the only purpose of the book is to solve the intellectual problem raised by suffering.” The grief that tested him came twenty years later, when his wife, Joy Davidman, died, and he wrote A Grief Observed. I do not know that he ever changed his mind about the angel. I do know that I am holding my lean from about where he was standing when he wrote it. Life may show me why what I hope is true is not.

Jesus’s own disciples were in the same place. When he told them he would suffer and die, Peter took him aside and rebuked him, and Jesus told Peter he was “setting your mind not on divine things but on human things” (Mark 8:33). After the crucifixion, two of them walked to Emmaus and explained to a stranger what had happened: “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21). They were not wrong to hope. They were wrong about the shape the answer would take, and the stranger was Jesus.

When God finally answers Job out of the whirlwind, much of what he talks about is animals. “Can you hunt the prey for the lion or satisfy the appetite of the young lions? … Who provides for the raven its prey?” (Job 38:39, 41). Of the eagle: “Its young ones suck up blood, and where the slain are, there it is” (39:30). That is the next part.

Sarah McLachlan can change the channel. On Fernandina, the next clutch is already under the sand, warming up for the run.

Time and Chance

David Crush — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 -0400

On the morning of November 1, 1755, Lisbon was at church. It was All Saints’ Day, one of the great feasts of the year, and a city of about 200,000 people had lit candles in its churches and homes. At about 9:40 the ground began to shake. Accounts say it kept shaking for somewhere between three and a half and six minutes.

People who got out of the falling buildings ran for the open ground at the docks. The sea pulled back far enough to show a floor of mud, lost cargo, and old wrecks. About forty minutes after the earthquake, it came back, and then twice more. Behind them, the candles lit for the saints had been knocked over, and the city burned. Somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 people died in Lisbon alone.

Within weeks Voltaire, the most famous skeptic in Europe, wrote a poem asking the question everyone was asking. Preachers were already calling it judgment. Voltaire answered them:

What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast? Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?

Near the end of Part 1, Jesus asks that question about the tower of Siloam and answers it: “No, I tell you.” That much is settled for me. Natural suffering is not a verdict either. The harder question is what is left when you take punishment off the table. If nobody chose it, and God did not aim it, why does it happen?

I do not have an answer. I have three theories that speak to me, and an admission at the end of them. I hold all of it loosely.

Brought to Completion

The first theory is that we need something to grow against.

It is an old idea. Irenaeus, a second-century bishop in Gaul, taught that humans were made unfinished, like children, and meant to grow into the likeness of God over time. The philosopher John Hick took it up in Evil and the God of Love (1966) and gave it a name borrowed from a letter by John Keats: the world as “the vale of Soul-making.” A world built for comfort would produce comfortable people. A world built for growing needs resistance.

Part 1 quoted Jesus on the man born blind, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” and stopped halfway through the sentence. The rest of it is: “he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him” (John 9:3). Where the disciples looked backward for a culprit, Jesus pointed forward to a purpose.

Here is the version of the idea that convinces me. James puts it bluntly: “So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (James 2:17). John says it to people he calls little children: “let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth” (1 John 3:18). Faith and love that never meet anything are just talk. You cannot be brave where nothing is dangerous. You cannot comfort someone who is not grieving. You cannot feed the hungry in a world without hunger. When Jesus describes the final judgment, his list is a list of responses to suffering: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink… I was sick and you took care of me” (Matthew 25:35–36). The philosopher Richard Swinburne makes the formal version: some of the best things people can do are only possible in a world where people can be hurt.

It would be easy to hear that as a test God runs to find out what we are made of. I do not think it is. God does not need the test to learn anything. We need it to become something. James says of Abraham that “faith was active along with his works, and by works faith was brought to completion” (James 2:22). The Greek verb there is built on teleios, the word Part 1 read as mature rather than flawless. Works are how faith grows up.

The best objection to this theory is in a novel. In The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Ivan Karamazov tells his brother Alyosha, a novice monk, story after story of suffering children. Most are stories of human cruelty, not disease, but the objection works the same way. If some future harmony is bought with that, Ivan wants no part of it: “It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.”

I think Ivan is right about something. Soul-making might explain why a world with suffering is worth having. It does not explain why this child. A sick child is not a lesson plan for someone else’s character, and anyone who says so at a hospital bed has misunderstood both the theory and the room. If growth is part of the answer, it is an answer about the world, not about the person in front of you. Do not hand it to them.

Rain on the Righteous

The second theory is that a real world has to run on rules.

C.S. Lewis makes the case in the second chapter of The Problem of Pain (1940). Free creatures need a shared world to choose in, and a shared world needs a fixed nature, one that behaves the same way whoever is standing in it. Fire that warms you at one distance burns you at a shorter one. Then he imagines the alternative:

We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of this abuse of free-will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound waves that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void.

Jesus describes the same arrangement without the philosophy. God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45). The rain does not check who is under it. That is mercy when it falls on a field. It is also what a flood is.

Voltaire saw this answer coming and did not like it. In the same poem he asks whether God “could not have placed us in this dreary clime / Without volcanoes seething ’neath our feet.” It is a fair question. My best answer uses the picture from Part 1, where a language model’s weights stood in for character. This is the other side of that picture. Once a model is trained, its weights are fixed. The same weights that make it useful are the ones that make it hallucinate, confidently citing a source that does not exist. You cannot reach in and delete one bad answer. You retrain, and retraining changes everything else the model does too.

I do not think God is an engineer stuck with a bug he cannot patch. He can. The miracles say so. I think he mostly declines, because every patch would cost us something. A world that rearranges itself whenever someone is about to get hurt is a world where nothing we do has a reliable consequence. We could not learn that fire burns, that a cliff edge is dangerous, or that a beam needs bracing, because the world would keep changing the answer. Swinburne argues this in Providence and the Problem of Evil (1998): responsible choice needs a world regular enough to learn from. Rousseau said a version of it to Voltaire in 1756. Physical ills, he wrote, are “inevitable in any system of which man is a part.”

I suspect there is one more thing here. A world with no risk in it would not just be safe. It would be still. Nothing would push against us, so nothing would grow, and the second theory folds back into the first. Some disorder may be what keeps a real world moving.

Time and Chance

The third theory is less a theory than a confession about the first two. Both of them assume natural suffering is random. I do not know that.

Scripture holds both sides. The Teacher of Ecclesiastes saw “that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful, but time and chance happen to them all” (Ecclesiastes 9:11). Proverbs answers: “The lot is cast into the lap, but the decision is the Lord’s alone” (Proverbs 16:33). One says the dice are dice. The other says somebody is reading them. I am not going to mash those into one. How chance fits with what God knows is a question big enough for its own part later in this series.

What I can say is that a good deal of what we call natural is less natural than it looks. Rousseau’s letter made a point that disaster researchers still cite: “nature did not construct twenty thousand houses of six to seven stories there.” If the city had been spread out and built lower, he argued, the damage would have been far less. Many people, he added, died because they went back for their clothes, their papers, or their money. The earthquake was nobody’s choice. How many people it killed was partly ours. Part 1 made the same point about storms and a warming ocean, and I will not make it twice.

Distress Not Yourself

That leaves the honest part. If God declines to patch the world because of what it would cost us, the reasons are his, and I suspect I could not see all of them if he laid them out.

The picture that helps me comes from a book I read in college. Flatland (1884), by the English schoolmaster Edwin A. Abbott, is a satire of Victorian society narrated by A Square, who lives in a world with only two dimensions. One day a Sphere passes through his plane. All A Square can see is a circle that appears from nowhere, grows, shrinks, and vanishes. The Sphere tries to explain: “I am not a plane Figure, but a Solid.” A Square cannot picture it, so the Sphere lifts him out of the plane, and for the first time he sees Flatland from above, insides and all.

Here is my own extension of Abbott’s picture. Imagine two holes in the plane. From inside Flatland, they are two holes. A Square can measure them, walk around them, and theorize about whether they connect somewhere he cannot go. He will never know for sure. From above, it takes one glance. Either a tube runs under the plane from one hole to the other, or two separate shafts go down and never meet.

From inside the plane, both possibilities look the same: two holes. From above, the difference is obvious. The two-holes picture is my extension of Abbott's Flatland, not a scene from the book.

I think that is roughly where we stand with natural suffering. We see the holes. We can measure them. We can and should theorize, and I have just spent three sections doing it. But whether the holes connect, and to what, may only be visible from somewhere we do not stand. Isaiah has God say it plainly: “as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9). Paul says that for now “we see only a reflection, as in a mirror,” and know only in part (1 Corinthians 13:12). The philosopher Stephen Wykstra made the careful version of the argument in 1984: if God has reasons, we should not expect to see them from where we are, so failing to see them does not show they are not there.

That argument can go bad. “You can’t understand” can become a way to shut down every hard question, and an argument that answers everything answers nothing. I do not mean it that way. We should try to understand as much as we can. We should also know our limits. Some things may simply be out of our reach, and that is okay. It is not the end of the question. It is the edge of what I can see from here.

Even the Sphere had an edge. When A Square, newly enlightened, asks to be taken on into a fourth dimension, the Sphere answers: “There is no such land. The very idea of it is utterly inconceivable.” Earlier, when A Square was overwhelmed by his first look at Spaceland, the same Sphere had told him something kinder: “Distress not yourself if you cannot at first understand the deeper mysteries of Spaceland. By degrees they will dawn upon you.”

Every theory here is about a world with people in it, and the earth was shaking, burning, and drowning things for a very long time before there were any people to grow, choose, or build badly. That is the next part.

The candles in Lisbon were lit for the saints. Fire did what fire does.

This Is My Luck

David Crush — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 23:05:00 -0400

Early in Bruce Almighty (2003), Jim Carrey plays Bruce Nolan, a Buffalo TV reporter convinced God is out to get him. On his way to work, his girlfriend Grace hands him a strand of prayer beads the kids at her daycare made. “They will keep you safe,” she tells him. He says he is going to need a miracle to get to work on time.

Then he hits traffic. The scene is a man coming apart over a commute. His meeting has started without him. He has the beads in his hand. “This is my luck!”

Nearby, a body is being loaded into an ambulance. Bruce is sitting in a working car, healthy, late. He is the safe one.

It is a joke, and it works because we recognize it. I have done my own version. The light turns red as I reach it. The food takes an extra ten minutes. Something small goes sideways, and out comes the vocabulary of catastrophe: of course, this would happen to me, that’s just my luck.

That is not suffering. It is inconvenience. It can be annoying and frustrating, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But it is a different kind of thing, and getting the word right matters, because the word belongs to the person in the ambulance.

Blessed Are You Who Weep Now

“That’s just my luck” sounds like a throwaway line. It is actually a small theological claim. It says nobody is in charge, the dice came up against me, and I got less than I was owed. When I say it about a red light, from a warm car, on a full stomach, I am not honoring God. I am grading his provision as a bad day.

Scripture has a word for that, and it is not “suffering.” In the wilderness, Israel is fed every morning with bread from heaven, and complains about the menu:

We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic, but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at. (Numbers 11:5–6)

Nothing at all but this manna. That is “this is my luck,” with breakfast on the ground every morning. Paul offers the other posture: “I have learned to be content with whatever I have. I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty” (Philippians 4:11–12).

If you want to know what suffering is, Jesus lists it. Matthew’s Beatitudes are the familiar ones, and some of them point inward: the poor in spirit, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Luke’s version is blunter:

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. (Luke 6:20–21)

Then he turns around: “Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry” (6:25).

He does not bless the people who waited at the light. He does not bless the housed, the fed, the clothed, and the warm. That is most of the people who will read this, me included. He blesses the poor, the hungry, the weeping. Sit with that.

So here is my working definition, and I will hold it loosely: suffering is harm that cannot simply be waited out. The light turns green. The food arrives. Poverty, grief, and hunger do not change on a timer.

There is one more name on Matthew’s list: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness” (Matthew 5:10). Persecution is not bad luck. Somebody chooses it. That is the door into the half of this problem I think I understand.

The Open Book Test

Here is the simplest way I can say it. God gave us the playbook. We failed the open book test. That is moral suffering.

Moral suffering is suffering that somebody chose and that could have been avoided. It happens at two levels.

The first level is personal. You choose, and you pay. Lie to someone you love, and the guilt and the loneliness that follow can eat you alive. The pain is real. I am not going to call it small. But in most cases it was preventable, and the person who could have prevented it was you.

The second level is societal, and it is harder. A large group chooses, and people who never took part pay. Take climate change. Warming oceans feed stronger storms, and the people who will get the worst of it are mostly not the people who caused it. Oxfam’s 2023 Climate Equality report found that in 2019 the richest tenth of humanity was responsible for half of global carbon emissions, and the poorest half for less than a tenth. The family in the path of the storm is largely guilt-free, and pays anyway. No one person did it. We did it together. It was still chosen, and it was still avoidable.

Hunger works the same way. The world grows enough food to feed everyone, and hundreds of millions of people go hungry anyway. I wrote about that in An Open Book Test: we do not have a quantity problem, we have a distribution problem.

Jesus was asked about this kind of suffering directly. Some people told him about Galileans “whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices,” and he asked them back: “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you” (Luke 13:1–3). Pilate chose. The Galileans paid. Jesus refuses to make it their fault.

Here is the hard part. Free will that lands only on the chooser seems fair. Free will that lands on bystanders feels like a defect in the design. But it is not God holding the match. It is us. Moral suffering is consequence, not punishment. With great power, as Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben put it, comes great responsibility, and God gave us the power.

Why Not Just Make Us Good

The obvious question is why God allowed it at all. If he is all-powerful, why is there anything but peace?

My answer is that free will and determinism do not mix. A world where everyone is guaranteed to choose well is a world where nobody really chooses. God could have built a world without moral suffering. It would have been a world without us in it, at least not the version of us that can love, because love that cannot be refused is not love. He had to pick one or the other. He picked freedom and accepted the risk that we would use it badly. That is the free-will defense, which runs from Augustine, the fourth-century bishop of Hippo, to the philosopher Alvin Plantinga, who argued in God, Freedom, and Evil (1974) that even an all-powerful God cannot create free creatures guaranteed to do only good.

So moral suffering is possible to eliminate in theory. Every person would just have to choose well, every time. In practice, with free will in the room, I do not expect it.

There is a second objection that sounds like the same one but is not. If God is all-knowing, he knew what we would choose. Doesn’t that make the choice his? The classic answer is Boethius’s, written in prison in the sixth century: knowing a choice is not causing it. I picture it the way a large language model works. The model’s weights are something like character: everything that has shaped you so far. The sampling is something like choice: real open-endedness in what comes out next. God knows the whole system, not by predicting the output but by seeing it. The analogy breaks, and I know where. Randomness by itself is not freedom. A dice roll is not a decision. The agent has to author the choice. That question deserves its own part, and it will get one.

What tells me God planned for our failures is that repentance exists. “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves,” John writes, and then: “If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins” (1 John 1:8–9). The father of the prodigal son sees him “while he was still far off” and runs to him (Luke 15:20). You do not build a road home for children you expected never to leave.

Someone will quote Matthew 5:48 back at me: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The Greek word is teleios. It means complete or mature, finished in the sense of grown up, not flawless. We were never expected to be perfect. We were expected to be good. That is a huge difference. An open book test assumes you will need to look things up.

A Different Story

That is the half of the problem that makes sense to me. The other half does not.

In the same passage where Jesus refuses to blame Pilate’s victims, he brings up a second disaster: “those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the other people living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you” (Luke 13:4–5). Nobody in that story is holding a sword. A tower fell. And in John’s Gospel, when the disciples see a man blind from birth and ask, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents?”, Jesus answers, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned” (John 9:2–3).

Childhood cancer. Earthquakes. Disasters nobody caused and nobody chose. Free will does not obviously explain those, and I am not going to pretend it does. I have a theory or two, and I hold them loosely. Natural suffering is a different story, and it is the next one.

Grace told Bruce the beads would keep him safe. He had them in his hand when he said “this is my luck,” and the ambulance was loading someone else.

Where Were You

David Crush — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 23:00:00 -0400

People have argued about suffering for as long as there has been writing to argue in. I am not going to walk in and settle it. I do have opinions, and I have more questions than opinions, and this series is my best effort to work through both: what suffering is, how we experience it, and what it means for God and for us.

The title comes from the Book of Job. Job loses his children, his wealth, and his health, and asks God why. When God finally answers out of a whirlwind, the answer is a question: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” (Job 38:4). We ask God where he was. He asks us back. I think both questions are fair, and I want to take both seriously.

Part 1 separates suffering from inconvenience and takes on the half of the problem that makes sense to me: the suffering we cause each other with free will. Natural suffering — childhood cancer, earthquakes, the things nobody chose — is a different story, and later parts take it on, along with suffering before there were humans, Job himself, what an all-knowing God knows about our choices, and what all of it asks of us. I am aiming for about six parts. It may run longer.

The parts list below stays in sync with the published essays — use it as the roadmap.

The Sword in Vain

David Crush — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 15:00:00 -0400

On December 3, at 1 p.m., a firing squad of soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, is scheduled to execute Nidal Hasan. This week Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the execution would be public. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” he told Real America’s Voice. The Pentagon then confirmed it will be livestreamed. The hour was chosen to match the hour of the shooting.

Hasan was an Army psychiatrist. On November 5, 2009, he opened fire inside a processing center for soldiers about to deploy, killing 13 people and wounding 32. At his court-martial he represented himself, and his opening statement took about a minute: “The evidence will clearly show I am the shooter.” It did. There is no doubt about what he did, and the thirteen people he killed had families who have waited seventeen years.

So this is not an essay about whether Nidal Hasan is guilty. It is about the passage that will be used to bless what happens next. Romans 13 gives the state the sword: the authority to restrain people who do harm. It does not require the state to kill him, and it cannot make a broadcast of his death Christian.

Nothing Says Christian Nation

Nothing says Christian nation like airing an execution.

The United States has not held a public execution in nearly a century. The central event of the Christian faith is one. A state put a man to death in the open, outside the city, where anyone passing could see what happens to people who trouble the empire. Luke records the audience:

And the people stood by watching. (Luke 23:35)

The Sword

Here is the passage:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God… for it is God’s agent for your good. But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain! It is the agent of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer. (Romans 13:1, 4)

Christians who support capital punishment read the sword as permission to kill. Some read it as more than permission.

Now read what Paul wrote a few sentences earlier, in the same letter, to the same church in Rome, the capital of the empire that by tradition would later execute him:

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord.” Instead, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink.” (Romans 12:19–20)

Paul did not write a chapter 13. Chapter numbers were added more than a thousand years later. He wrote a letter, and in that letter “wrath” passes from God to the governing authority within a few lines. The order matters. Christians are told not to take revenge, and the state’s sword is the reason they do not have to.

I will grant what the passage gives. It gives the state something a private person does not have: the authority to use force to stop harm. A court may lock up a man I may not lock up. That is real, and I am not going to pretend the sword is a metaphor.

But the passage carries its own limit. The authority is “God’s agent for your good.” The sword has a purpose, and the purpose is not the sword.

The other verse people reach for is older. After the flood, God tells Noah:

Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person’s blood be shed, for in his own image God made humans. (Genesis 9:6)

This one comes before the law of Moses, before the Sabbath stonings and the rules about fabric that Christians stopped following long ago, and it is addressed to everyone. In a case as certain as Hasan’s, I will concede that it could apply. Then the question becomes: if we can hold him safely for the rest of his life, why take the chance? Neither verse says anything about cameras.

Notice how much work that took. Two passages, each read against its neighbors, to arrive at permission to kill a man who is already in a cell. Then there is the verse that needs no work at all: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (Matthew 25:35). I have written about the plain verses in An Open Book Test, and about how other causes crowded them out in How Churches Got Used.

How Much Room

Hasan has been in custody since the afternoon of the shooting. A police officer’s bullets left him paralyzed from the chest down. He has lived on military death row at Fort Leavenworth since 2013. Whatever the sword is for, restraining Nidal Hasan was finished seventeen years ago.

But the passage is not being used for Hasan alone. It is used to bless capital punishment as a system, and the system makes mistakes. Since 1973, 203 people sentenced to death in the United States have been exonerated. A 2014 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that at least 4.1 percent of people sentenced to death are innocent, and its authors call that number conservative.

Genesis 9 opens its rule with a reckoning: “For your own lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning… from human beings, each one for the blood of another” (9:5). The law of Moses treats innocent blood as guilt on the whole community. Israel set aside cities of refuge “so that the blood of an innocent person may not be shed in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, thereby bringing bloodguilt upon you” (Deuteronomy 19:10).

Naboth owned a vineyard next to King Ahab’s palace and would not sell it. Queen Jezebel wrote letters in the king’s name to the elders of Naboth’s city. They proclaimed a fast, seated Naboth at the head of the assembly, and put two scoundrels across from him to testify that he had cursed God and the king. Two witnesses: what the law required. “So they took him outside the city and stoned him to death.” Every step was legal. Then the word of the Lord came to Elijah, with a question for the king:

Have you killed and also taken possession? (1 Kings 21:19)

Prison does the same restraining for less money. A 2003 Kansas audit put the median death-penalty case at $1.26 million, against $740,000 for a comparable case without it, counted through the end of incarceration. Kansas spends about twice as much a year to house a death-sentenced prisoner. In California, a 2011 study found the death penalty had cost $4 billion more since 1978 than a system with life without parole as its maximum. Ohio’s legislative research office reviewed studies from several states in 2021 and found capital cases cost two and a half to five times more. Most of that money goes to the longer trials and appeals required when a life is on the line, which is to say, to the only thing standing between the system and the next Naboth.

The Sentence Stands

What is left is that the families deserve it. They lost husbands, wives, sons, and daughters. Their grief is real, and nothing in this essay asks them to apologize for wanting him dead.

But justice in the legal sense has been done. In 2013 a military jury convicted Hasan on 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder, and sentenced him to death. The President approved the sentence. None of that changes if there is no camera at Fort Hood on December 3. The sentence is the same either way.

The only thing a livestream adds is an audience.

Blessed Are the Merciful

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy” (Matthew 5:7). Later in the same sermon, Jesus takes up the old law of retaliation by name:

You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you: Do not resist an evildoer… You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. (Matthew 5:38–39, 43–44)

When Peter asks how many times he has to forgive, Jesus says seventy-seven. Then he tells of a servant forgiven a debt he could never repay, who walks out and seizes a fellow servant by the throat over a small one. The master calls him back: “Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?” (Matthew 18:33).

The prophet Ezekiel is told to deliver a message about people who are actually guilty:

As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked but that the wicked turn from their ways and live. (Ezekiel 33:11)

One of the two criminals crucified beside Jesus says he was “condemned justly,” asks to be remembered, and hears “today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:41–43). He turned in the middle of his own execution. And the man who wrote Romans 13 was once Saul, the young man at whose feet the witnesses laid their coats while they stoned Stephen. “And Saul approved of their killing him” (Acts 8:1).

I will be honest about Hasan. Repentance looks unlikely. During his trial he released statements saying he saw a death sentence as the martyrdom that had eluded him. In 2014 he wrote from death row asking to join the Islamic State. Nothing in seventeen years suggests a man waiting to turn. But a cell leaves that door open, however narrowly. A firing squad closes it.

Asked whether Hasan had made any final requests, Hegseth said: “Don’t care.” The execution is set for the hour of the shooting.

I keep reading those chapters next to that answer and asking whether we are measuring up.

Owensboro

Hegseth gave a reason for the cameras: “Because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.” That is the argument from deterrence. In 2012 the National Research Council reviewed more than three decades of studies and concluded that the research “is not informative about whether capital punishment decreases, increases, or has no effect on homicide rates,” and that it should not be used to make policy. A 2009 survey of leading criminologists found that 88 percent did not believe the death penalty deters murder. States without it have consistently had lower murder rates than states with it. That proves nothing by itself, but it is not what a deterrent looks like.

The last time an American government held an execution in public, it was in Owensboro, Kentucky, at dawn on August 14, 1936. Rainey Bethea, a young Black man convicted of raping and killing a 70-year-old woman, was hanged in a lot near the Ohio River. Kentucky still reserved public hanging for rape. Before the execution, Time reported, the county’s sheriff consulted her priest, who found nothing in church law against it, and “Protestant churchmen concurred.”

Time ran the story under the headline “Crime: Party.” The night before, “‘Hanging parties’ were held in many a home.” One driver hurrying to the scene crashed and was killed. By 3 a.m. some 10,000 people filled the lot; later estimates ran to 20,000. “Hawkers squeezed their way through the crowd selling pop, hot dogs. Telephone poles and trees were festooned with spectators.” As dawn came on, the crowd grew impatient and began to shout, “Let’s go! Bring him out!” When the doctors pronounced Bethea dead, “the spectators charged from every side, eager hands clawed at the black death hood,” and the lucky ones went home with the scraps in their pockets.

Owensboro’s own papers said the national press exaggerated, and maybe some of it did. Kentucky’s legislature was embarrassed enough that in 1938 it moved executions behind prison walls, the last state to do so. It did not stop because the hanging failed to teach anyone a lesson. It stopped because of what the hanging showed about the people watching.

There will be no fence at Fort Hood to push through and no hood to tear. Nobody will have to climb a telephone pole. The stream puts every one of us in the trees.

An Open Book Test

David Crush — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 11:00:00 -0400

I have been anxious for a long time. Most of it has been about small, human things. Whether there will be enough. Whether I did the thing right. Whether the thing I am dreading tomorrow will be as bad as I have already decided it will be.

Lately the Gospel of Matthew keeps speaking to me, so I have been reading it in three translations: the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, the New International Version, and the King James. Same book, three sets of English, about four hundred years apart.

I see a therapist every week. I have doctors. I take medication. This is not instead of any of that. It is one more thing that is helping.

What it is helping with is narrow. I am learning to trust that I am not the one who has to carry all of it.

Take No Thought

Jesus is not vague about worry. In the Sermon on the Mount he takes it on directly:

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. (Matthew 6:25–26)

Then the lilies of the field, who neither toil nor spin, and still Solomon in all his glory was not dressed like one of them. Then this, which stopped me: “which of you by worrying can add a single hour to your span of life?” (6:27).

None of us. I have tried.

The passage ends on a line I have now read three ways:

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. (KJV)

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. (NIV)

So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today. (NRSVue)

Four centuries of English, and the instruction does not move.

He does not tell us to stop caring. He tells us where to point it: “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (6:33). The worry is not deleted. It is redirected.

Seven Baskets

Later in Matthew there is a crowd that has been with Jesus for three days and has nothing to eat. He tells the disciples he does not want to send them away hungry. The disciples ask the question I would have asked:

Where are we to get enough bread in the desert to feed so great a crowd? (Matthew 15:33)

That is the anxious question. It is a question about quantity.

Jesus answers with a different one: “How many loaves have you?” Seven, and a few small fish. He has the crowd sit down on the ground, gives thanks, breaks the bread, and gives it to the disciples, “and the disciples gave them to the crowds” (15:36). Everyone eats and is filled. They pick up the leftovers: seven baskets full.

We are in the same story. The World Food Programme puts it plainly: the world already produces enough food to nourish every person on the planet. And yet the 2026 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report estimates that 645 million people faced hunger in 2025. Those two facts can only both be true one way.

We do not have a quantity problem. We have a distribution problem. That’s fixable.

The worry about whether there is enough food is one we built ourselves. God gave us what we need, and Jesus said so. The worry we actually owe is the disciples’ job: getting the bread to the people.

Among the Thorns

There is another side to this that took me longer to see. My worry does not stay inside me.

In the parable of the sower, some seed falls among thorns. Jesus explains it later:

As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of this age and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. (Matthew 13:22)

The cares of this age. Not some exotic sin. The ordinary stuff I have spent years on.

And the cost is not only that the plant suffers. It is that it yields nothing. The fruit was never for the plant. It was the good I would have done, the gospel I would have shared, the help my neighbor would have gotten if I had not been tangled up in something that did not matter.

Think about the last time you called someone because you needed them. You hoped they would be at their best when they picked up. Clear-headed, present, able to help. That is the standard Jesus gives: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you” (7:12). If I want my neighbor at their best when I need them, I owe them mine.

That is part of why the therapist and the doctors and the medication matter. They are not only for me. Being my best for my neighbor does not mean trying harder to stop worrying. It means doing the work.

The Neighbor Who Just Arrived

A lot of our anxiety, I think, comes from not trusting the people around us. If I cannot count on my neighbor, then I have to carry everything myself, and nobody can carry everything.

We have been taught to fear the neighbor in particular, the one who just arrived. We have been told to fear the immigrant. We do not need to. Jesus could not have been clearer about who counts: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (22:39). And when he describes the final judgment, one of the measures is “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (25:35). I wrote about that passage and who it covers in A Bigger Table.

The newcomer is not a threat to the community. The newcomer is more community. More hands, more people playing their part.

Go back to the bread. The disciples did not make it. They did not have to figure out where enough would come from. Their part was to take what was put in their hands and pass it on. If every one of us did our part like that, nobody would be stuck carrying the whole crowd alone, and I think most of us would be far less stressed and better off.

An Open Book Test

None of this is hidden. It is not a puzzle for scholars or a secret for the very devout. Jesus said it out loud, in plain words, and people wrote it down.

We are failing an open book test.

I have the book open in three translations. In all three, the crowd sits down on the ground, the bread goes from hand to hand, and there are seven baskets left over.

A Pepsi in a World of Coca-Cola

David Crush — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 11:00:00 -0400

We had our baby shower this weekend. It was a great day. So many people showed up for us with love, support, and gifts. It was overwhelming in a lot of ways, most of them good.

It also reminded me just how lonely I feel in a group of people.

That sounds backwards. How can someone surrounded by people feel lonely? The claim here is narrow. You can be in a room full of people who love you and still be the only one without the playbook. And when that room fills with conversations, I do not hear conversations. I hear one sound. Nobody at the party did anything wrong. We were having different experiences of the same room.

I feel like a Pepsi walking around in a world of Coca-Cola. From across the room we look like the same thing. We are not.

The Playbook

A party has no agenda. That is the point of it. People drift between conversations, laugh, refill their drinks, wander off, and wander back. Everyone else seems to know how this works. It feels like they were all handed a playbook and a code at some point, and I was out that day.

So while everyone else is enjoying the free nature of the party, I am trying to find my place. Where do I stand? When do I join a conversation, and how do I leave one? Is this the moment to say something, or has it passed? Each of those is a small decision other people do not seem to make at all. I make dozens of them, and every one reminds me how different I am from everyone else in the room.

That reminder is the loneliness. The people at the shower fit in. They had a good time. It’s me that doesn’t fit in.

Too Many Channels

It was also extremely loud. Not the way people usually mean it.

The volume was fine. The problem was the number of channels. Researchers call this the cocktail party problem — how a listener picks one voice out of a room full of them — and most people solve it without noticing. I can hear. What I cannot do, past a certain number of overlapping conversations, is tell them apart. I can only handle limited channels at once. Past that, every conversation in the room collapses into one giant incomprehensible blob. I wrote about what an open floor plan cost me at work in The Storage Closet; a party is the same math with nicer people.

So if you were at the party, and you were talking to me, and I was smiling and nodding: I could hear you. I could not decode what you were saying. I was so overwhelmed and overstimulated that your words were in the blob with everyone else’s. The smile was real. The nod was my best guess.

Enjoy your party. This isn’t a pity fest. It is an explanation of why I may not seem as into it as everyone else.

I Thought Everyone Heard It This Way

For a long time I did not realize everyone was not like this. I assumed the blob was what a party sounded like, and that other people were better at putting up with it. Tougher than me, or more patient, or faking it.

They were not. They were getting a vastly different experience. Now it makes sense why others can enjoy these things. In their room, the conversations stay separate. In mine, they do not. We were at the same party hearing two different ones.

By Himself

I found how to make it work for me. I took breaks. When I needed it, I found my own space. I watched baseball. I played with the dogs.

Matthew has a scene I keep coming back to. Jesus has just spent a long day with a crowd — about five thousand men, Matthew says, besides women and children — curing their sick and feeding all of them from five loaves and two fish. Then:

And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone. (Matthew 14:23)

Luke makes it a habit rather than a single night. As the crowds kept growing, “he would slip away to deserted places and pray” (Luke 5:16).

The text does not say why he went, only that he did. Stepping away from the crowd was not a failure to love it. And alone on that mountain, he was not alone.

A baseball game is one channel. One pitch at a time, one voice calling it, crowd noise that does not need decoding. The dogs are less than one. They do not need me to follow a conversation. They need someone to play with.

The party went on without me for a while, loud and happy, everyone fluent in it. I was with the dogs, the game on, one channel at a time.

In Good Company

David Crush — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 21:00:00 -0400

I read the Gospel of Matthew while my job was coming apart. I had grown up around Christianity, and I assumed I already knew what was in there. I did not. Until I read Matthew straight through, I did not realize how much Jesus actually struggled.

Eleven Years a Cast Member is the record of how my time at Disney ended. This essay is the other half of that year — what I was reading while it happened, and what it did to me. The claim is narrow. If you have been ostracized, bullied, or pushed out by people with a lot of authority to lose, you are in good company. That is largely the story of Jesus. And Matthew does not leave it as an inference; Jesus says it outright, in the first long sermon the book records. I will get to that line at the end.

Not Blessed Are the Powerful

The first thing that stopped me was the Beatitudes — the list of blessings that opens the Sermon on the Mount, the first long block of Jesus’s teaching in Matthew (5:3–10):

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

The list goes on: those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted.

I found it beautifully direct. Look at who is on that list, and then look at who is not. Not blessed are the powerful. Not blessed are the rich. Not blessed are the wealthy. Matthew’s version says “poor in spirit,” and I am not going to pretend it says something else. Luke’s telling of the same teaching removes the doubt: “Blessed are you who are poor,” and four verses later, “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation” (Luke 6:20, 24).

It feels like my whole perspective on life changed. I was looking at the world wrong this whole time.

There is one more blessing at the end of that list. I am going to hold it.

The Messiah They Had Already Drawn

The Messiah was the anointed king from David’s line that Israel was waiting for, and many expected him to restore the kingdom and break foreign rule. People had come up with their own vision of what he would be — what he would look like, how he would act, and what his arrival would mean for them. Jesus did not match all of that. So they were inclined not to believe.

Matthew keeps showing it, and not only among his enemies.

His hometown heard him teach and asked, “Is not this the carpenter’s son?” And they took offense at him. Jesus answered, “Prophets are not without honor except in their own hometown and in their own house” (13:54–57). His mother and brothers stood outside while he taught, wanting to speak to him, and he pointed to his disciples instead (12:46–50). Mark’s version of that scene is blunter: his family went out to restrain him, because people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind” (Mark 3:21).

John the Baptist — the man who baptized him — sent word from prison: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” (11:2–3).

Peter, closest of the twelve, heard Jesus say he would suffer and be killed, took him aside, and rebuked him: “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” Jesus told him he was “setting your mind not on divine things but on human things” (16:21–23).

And at the end, the mockery under the cross: “He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him” (27:42).

We will believe in him. On condition that he matches the picture. Sit with that.

Authority to Lose

The people who worked hardest to discredit him were the religious authorities of his day. The Pharisees were a movement devoted to strict observance of the law. The chief priests ran the Temple in Jerusalem. The council was the high court that sat under the high priest. These are specific officeholders, not a people — Jesus and every one of his disciples were Jews.

The Pharisees “conspired against him, how to destroy him” (12:14). When he healed, they said his power came from the devil: “It is only by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons, that this man casts out the demons” (12:24). When he taught in the Temple, the chief priests and elders came with the question of people whose standing is the thing at stake: “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” (21:23). At his trial, the council was “looking for false testimony against Jesus so that they might put him to death, but they found none” (26:59–60). Even Pilate “realized that it was out of jealousy that they had handed him over” (27:18).

Rome had its own reasons not to want any of it to be true. Rome had spent generations building absolute power over its provinces, and it held that power partly by making examples of anyone who looked like the start of an uprising. A man drawing crowds, healing people, and being called a king was a threat to manage.

Matthew opens on that fear. Herod the Great ruled Judea as a king by Rome’s appointment. When foreign visitors arrived asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?”, Herod “was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him” (2:2–3). Then he killed every child in and around Bethlehem two years old or under (2:16). A king who already has the title hears of a baby with a claim to it.

The trial turns on it too. Pilate, the Roman governor, saw “that a riot was beginning,” washed his hands before the crowd, and said, “I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves” (27:24). Crucifixion was the punishment Rome reserved for slaves and rebels — slow, public, and meant to be seen. Over Jesus’s head they put the charge against him, which read, “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews” (27:37). A claim to be king was sedition. They responded the way power responds to a threat: they optimized for its elimination.

He Found It Hard

I had pictured Jesus as serene. Matthew’s Jesus is not serene.

On the night of his arrest, in the garden of Gethsemane, he told his friends, “My soul is deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and stay awake with me.” Then he threw himself on the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me, yet not what I want but what you want” (26:38–39). He came back and found them sleeping. “So, could you not stay awake with me one hour?” (26:40). When the soldiers came, “all the disciples deserted him and fled” (26:56). Before morning, Peter had denied knowing him.

On the cross, he cried with a loud voice, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (27:46).

He was not openly embraced. He found it difficult.

The Same Behavior

That same behavior happens in humans today. I watched it from the inside.

I spent more than eleven years on the technology side of Disney. The series covers it in eight parts, and I am not going to recap them. By the time I read Matthew, the pattern was familiar. Power was hoarded upstairs and responsibility distributed down (Part 3). A proven lead was laid off over a zip code, and a mandate drove out the best people faster than an honest layoff would have (Part 6). Legitimate problems, raised the way I was told to raise them, came back as “that is a job” (Part 7). The series says it at the start, and I will say it again: as far as I know, nobody broke the law. It never takes a crime. People with authority to lose, faced with someone who does not fit their picture of how things should work, protect the picture.

A job is not a cross. I am not comparing what happened to me with what happened to him, and I am not going to rank them. The scale is not the point. The pattern is: people with standing to lose, something that threatens the standing, and a response built to remove the threat.

Good Company

When Jesus sent out the twelve, he warned them what to expect:

A disciple is not above the teacher nor a slave above the master; it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher and the slave like the master. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household! (10:24–25)

So the next time you are ostracized, know that it is easy to be angry and upset. I know because I was. For a long time I was so overcome with anger that it stopped me from moving forward and fulfilling my own potential. Now I see that potential as something God blessed me with. It is on me to figure out how to move on and use it for his purpose instead of trivial human concerns.

Matthew has a parable for exactly that. A man going on a journey entrusts his property to his servants in talents — a talent was a large sum of money, and the English word for a gift comes from this story. Two servants trade with theirs and double it. The third digs a hole and buries his. “I was afraid,” he says, “and I went and hid your talent in the ground” (25:14–30). His emotion was fear. Mine was anger. The details are not the same. But an emotion brought both of us to the same place, with the gift still in the ground. The difference is that I was finally awoken to what is truly important.

Two of the twelve failed Jesus on the same night. Judas went to the chief priests and sold him for thirty pieces of silver. Peter, in the high priest’s courtyard, denied knowing him three times, and when the cock crowed “he went out and wept bitterly” (26:75). When Judas saw that Jesus was condemned, he repented — that is Matthew’s word — brought the silver back, and hanged himself (27:3–5). Both were moved by human urges. Both came to regret it. When the book closes, “the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them” (28:16), and Peter is among them. Eleven. An emotion can carry anyone to the same bad place. What matters is whether you wake up there.

The people who push you out are imperfect humans behaving the way imperfect humans do. So were Peter and Judas. So am I.

What I am doing now is less dramatic than any of this. I am moving on. I am focusing on being a better person myself. I am reading the Bible. I am praying. I am looking at my community through the lens of how we can improve it: how we can better make sure people are not going hungry, not going without health care, not going without shelter. That is the measure Jesus gives in Matthew 25, the one I wrote about in A Bigger Table.

Keep doing what you are doing. Do not let the ignorant stand in the way of success and goodness.

The last blessing on the list in chapter 5, the one I held back, is addressed to you:

Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (5:11–12)

Over his head, the people with authority to lose put the charge in writing: This is Jesus, the King of the Jews. They meant it as mockery. It was true.

How Churches Got Used

David Crush — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 16:30:00 -0400

In part one I argued the country moved right, not left — and that the coalition selling that shift gutted the Goldwater brochure while a few factions cashed in. This essay is about the religious piece of that story: how evangelical institutions got mobilized, what the Southern Baptist Convention actually said about abortion in the early 1970s, and why “culture war” is better understood as strategy than as awakening.

I wrote about the flavor of Christianity I was first served in A Bigger Table. The Gospels put weight on neighbor, the poor, and the stranger. Abortion barely appears. The political church I grew up around treated niche fights as the whole faith. This post is one answer to how that happened — without pretending every pew was a plot, and without treating Barry Goldwater as the architect of Jerry Falwell.

Seedbed, Not Harvest

Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative (1960, with L. Brent Bozell Jr.) is limited government and states’ rights. It is not the Moral Majority. Goldwater later supported gays in the military — “you don’t need to be straight to fight and die for your country; you just need to shoot straight” — and said there was “no gay exemption” in the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In 1981 he warned the Senate he would fight religious factions that tried to dictate morals “in the name of conservatism.”

Paul Weyrich tried for years to pull evangelicals into electoral politics. Goldwater’s 1964 campaign lost. The Southern Strategy harvested the Deep South. The harvest of church politics — Moral Majority, SBC Conservative Resurgence — is late 1970s, not 1960. Do not date the takeover to the decade of the seedbed.

Roger Stone belongs in this story only as a dirty-tricks through-line: Goldwater volunteer as a kid, Nixon sabotage, NCPAC with Terry Dolan and Charles Black, Young Republicans, then Trump. He is not the theologian of the culture war. Weyrich, Falwell, and Richard Viguerie are the organizers.

What the SBC Actually Said

Do not say “the Baptist church was pro-choice.” Say the Southern Baptist Convention.

In 1971, SBC messengers passed a resolution that affirmed the sanctity of human life, including fetal life, and called on Southern Baptists to work for legislation allowing abortion in cases of rape, incest, severe fetal deformity, and “carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The text is still on sbc.net.

In 1974 — after Roe v. Wade — they reaffirmed that resolution as a “middle ground between the extreme of abortion on demand and the opposite extreme of all abortion as murder.”

W.A. Criswell, pastor of First Baptist Dallas and a former SBC president, praised Roe in 1973: he had “always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” and that what was best for the mother and the future should be allowed. He later reversed during the Conservative Resurgence that began in 1979.

By 1980, SBC abortion resolutions had narrowed the exception to the life of the mother. That is a denomination captured by political organizers — not a timeless theological discovery that somehow waited until the New Right needed a ballot line.

Figure: the SBC’s own paper trail — middle ground (1971/74) to narrowed exception (1980).

Christianity Today and others contest the pop claim that “evangelicals were pro-choice.” Fair. Do not overclaim a myth. The SBC resolutions and Criswell’s public reversal are enough without inventing a unanimous evangelical left.

Weyrich on the Record

Historian Randall Balmer has argued for years that the Religious Right did not assemble as a political movement primarily over Roe. Paul Weyrich told him — emphatically — that he had tried abortion, school prayer, the Equal Rights Amendment, pornography. “Nothing got their attention” until the IRS moved against racially discriminatory schools, including Bob Jones University. Abortion became the public wedge after defending segregation proved unsellable.

Present that as Weyrich’s own account plus Balmer’s reporting — not as the only possible history of every evangelical conscience. Some Christians opposed abortion on theological grounds before 1979. The organizing catalyst Weyrich described was not Roe. The public brand became abortion. Those can both be true.

Figure: Weyrich’s mobilizer search as he described it to Balmer — failed triggers, IRS catalyst, abortion as the sellable public frame.

Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority launched in 1979. Falwell’s first major anti-abortion sermon came years after Roe. The timeline matches a movement looking for a high-minded frame — not a spontaneous pew revolt the day the Court ruled.

Culture War as Strategy

Weyrich’s project was explicit: culture war as the fight that would keep a coalition mobilized. Family values as status and moral superiority. The Catholic anti-abortion movement already existed; Protestant and evangelical institutions had to be brought into that fight. The SBC’s own paper trail shows how far the official position moved in less than a decade.

That is what I meant in A Bigger Table when I asked how so many Christians treat Gospel emphasis on the poor and the stranger as optional while niche fights that barely appear in the text become litmus tests. You do not need every Christian to have been conned. You need organizers who found that wedge issues turned out churches, and churches that let politics rewrite the emphasis.

Goldwater saw the danger early and said so. The party that still name-checks him chose Falwell’s coalition anyway. Part one is how far modern leaders strayed from Goldwater’s limits. This essay is how the religious infrastructure for that stray was built.

What This Does Not Prove

It does not prove every Southern Baptist in 1971 was a feminist. The 1971 resolution was a middle ground with a sanctity-of-life preamble — not “abortion on demand.”

It does not prove Democrats never used religion. They did.

It does not prove sincere pro-life conviction is fake. Many people hold it sincerely. The question is whether the political Religious Right began as a pure response to Roe, or whether organizers found abortion after other triggers failed and then remade denominational politics to match. Weyrich’s account and the SBC timeline support the second story for the movement. Individual consciences are their own.

Sources

SBC resolutions and Criswell:

Resolution On Abortion (1971) (Southern Baptist Convention)
Was the Southern Baptist Convention Ever ‘Pro-Choice’? (Good Faith Media)
The Religious Right and the Abortion Myth (Randall Balmer, Politico Magazine, May 2022)
Evangelicals and abortion: chicken or egg? (Baptist News Global)

Weyrich / Bob Jones / Moral Majority:

Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right
There’s a straight line from US racial segregation to the anti-abortion movement (Balmer, The Guardian)
Paul Weyrich / Moral Majority founding (1979); ALEC and Heritage co-founding as movement infrastructure

Goldwater on religion and gay rights:

Goldwater on religion in politics (1981 Senate remarks)
Goldwater backs lifting gay ban (Los Angeles Times, 1993)

Related on this site:

A Bigger Table
The Country Shifted Right (series overview)

A Bigger Table

David Crush — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 20:00:00 -0400

I grew up on the outskirts of the Bible Belt. Southern Baptist was the most popular flavor of Christianity I got exposed to, and for a long time I thought that was Christianity.

It left a lot to be desired.

The Flavor I Was Served

It was not a warm and welcoming environment for intellectual inquiry. It felt largely performative — more about forming a tribal group and judging others than building a bigger table to help the needy. People used it as a status marker. Where you went to church made you, rather than your actual behavior.

I do not mean every person in every pew. I mean the culture as I experienced it: belonging as performance, belief as membership card, and outsiders as a useful contrast. That version of Christianity did not invite questions. It invited compliance.

A Different Christianity

As I have gotten older, I have learned that was just a single flavor. That is not everything.

My wife was the one who really introduced me to Christianity as I know it now. She showed me the good elements of the religion — how it is really about uplifting people. I started to realize that what I had experienced was not how it has to be done. You can do Christianity in a way that is very inclusive.

And quite frankly, a lot of the things we were told to believe seemed to be very cherry-picked from the Bible. Not the whole text. Not the through-line. Selected verses that supported a culture that already knew what it wanted to believe.

The Lewis Lightbulb

I also read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. I think his central thesis — the one in Book I about the Law of Human Nature — is a bit simple and flawed from an academic sense. It still helped flip the lightbulb on in my brain.

How do we as humans, across nations, races, genders, and so on, all seem to have this same innate conscience feeling? Stealing, for example, is something that is widely agreed to be bad. How do we all know it is bad? It is not really an instinct. It is more like an innate code of honor.

That certainly does not prove the existence of God. But in my opinion, it opens up the possibility. And that is where this journey really started.

I am still on it. I am not planting a flag. I am drawn in, taking it seriously, and trying to stay honest about what I do and do not know.

What Jesus Actually Spent Words On

I was surprised to see how little Jesus actually spoke of many of the more controversial takes of the Church. Abortion is a clear example. We spend a lot of time debating it. The Gospels, as far as I can tell, do not. Jesus does not weigh in on that fight.

What he does talk about is neighbor, the poor, the needy, and the stranger — the biblical language for the immigrant and the outsider. Love God. Love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37–40). The sheep and the goats, where the measuring stick is whether you fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, and visited the sick and imprisoned (Matthew 25:31–46). The parable of the Good Samaritan, where the neighbor is the person who showed mercy across a tribal line (Luke 10:25–37).

I am not claiming those passages settle every modern policy debate. I am saying they are where Jesus put his emphasis. And I think it is a question worth asking: how did we get here? How is it possible that so many Christians do not seem to know what Jesus actually preached? Why does the focus tend to land so hard on niche issues that were hardly addressed in the Gospels, while the clear through-line about the poor and the outsider gets treated as optional?

Projecting Ourselves Onto God

I feel like we have a tendency to project our own feelings into God and Jesus when there is little evidence for it. And then we use our religion as a reason why we are superior to others.

That completely misses the point of what Jesus was warning us about.

He warned about judging others while ignoring your own faults — the speck and the log (Matthew 7:1–5). He told the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, where the man who thanked God that he was not like other people walked away unjustified, and the man who asked for mercy went home right with God (Luke 18:9–14). The pattern is hard to miss if you are looking for it: religion as status is a trap. Religion as love of neighbor is the thing he kept returning to.

I do not have a neat ending. I am still figuring out what this faith means for me, and how much of what I was handed was the product rather than the thing itself. What I know so far is that the flavor I was served first is not the only one — and that a bigger table looks a lot more like the Jesus I am actually reading about than the tribal version I grew up around.

That question is worth sitting with.

Religion on David Crush

A Great Way Off

Church was high school

No God in a world this cruel

Better than them

The way back

The cruelty

A Democrat with a Bible

Lewis

The job

My wife

A great way off

Further Reading

Stage Actors

Stage actors

The numbers

Why they leave

I was one of them

Read it for yourself

Further Reading

The Gift That Blinds

What we know

Where did “Don’t tread on me” go?

The deal

The deal isn’t paying out

The gift that blinds

The wolves

What would it take?

Keep the door open

Further Reading

By Their Fruits

Directed to Stand Behind Him

The Same Act

The Photo

The Bro

Who Actually Isn’t Safe

Learn the Difference

Further Reading

The Man in the Mirror

Nobody Did This to Him

Those Merlin Engines

What He Spent

The Promise

The Advertisers

Grok’s Output, Your Fault

Upload It Anyway

The Salute and the Socialist Line

The Break and the Return

The Senator He Is Buying

Above the Law, for Now

It Has Been Beaten Before

Money Is Not a Vote

The Bill

“I Agree with the Teachings of Jesus”

The Working Model

Further Reading

The Oldest Booking Sheet

Am I a Dog?

The Code

Hypocrite

All These I Will Give You

Turns

Hard but Blessed

Wait for It

A Bad Rap

Further Reading

Ye of Little Faith

Four Times

Two Coats

Careful and Troubled

Asleep in the Boat

Look Up

Further Reading

Change the Channel

The Last Thirty-Six Minutes

Too Much Misery

No One to Punish

The Pains of Labor

Chaos to Order

An Older Rebellion