Part 1 of By Their Fruits: The Gift That Blinds

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.