Two thoughts, actually:

1. As a Christian, I am interested in the advance, flourishing and full-flowering of the Christian faith.

2. I am not interested in the advance and success of a “Christian society” or a “Christian nation.” Nor even the advance of “Judeo-Christian values.”

Give me …

Macro efforts to produce, or impose, #2 have been deleterious before (see: History), and they arguably make it harder for people to hear the actual Gospel.

In other words, as a popular worship song says: “Give me Jesus.”

Don’t give me the effects of a lot of Jesus-following on a society, as beneficial as those effects are (and they surely have been!). Give me Jesus.

Give me the gospel “good news” that individuals can actually find God, and find relief and repose in knowing Jesus rescues us from our sins, and find hope that a happy life-after-death can be counted on — and then we’ll find that the effects of this heart-transforming dynamic across our society will be salutary and beautiful. As it so often has been.

But we must not conflate the consequences of a thing with the thing itself.

The British essayist Matt Whiteley — who writes on this very platform — notes the recent ascendancy, in Britain and here in the U.S., of the idea that the Christian religion is an essential part of our societies — that we need to fight for the Christian “values” that built our countries, and fight to reverse the societal decline that is due to the jettisoning of those values. Well: Is personal “saving faith” advocated? Not so much. Is Jesus frequently mentioned? Um, no. Leave out that private faith stuff. It’s those “values” that we want.

In other words, Whiteley says, this particular notion of Christianity is basically a form of cultural nationalism; “Christianity” is being used as another word that means “make American (or Britain) great again.” No Jesus or personal faith required.

The problem here is that nothing in the New Testament indicates anything that suggests any interest in the construction of a worldly kingdom. That the history of Christianity since Constantine is a history of Christendom and the triumph of its worldly kingdom is to some extent beside the point if we are to ask what it means to be a Christian, which must mean at its core to follow Christ.

We see leaders, and their followers, conflating faith with their favored brand of politics.

That many of those arguing for said political and cultural project appear in their conduct and values to often express nothing of the teaching of Jesus or have ill-concern for the gospel or for the eternal kingdom which moth and rust cannot destroy, should be evidence enough that such a conflation is dubious. (Emphasis mine.)

Talk of “returning” to a time when “Judeo-Christian values” reigned, when kids recited prayers in public school, when society was “Christian” — like talk of “taking back” our culture — is not only a romanticizing of history, but is positively unhelpful if our aim is to help people actually find faith.

Top-down efforts to give society a Christian sensibility — from requiring that the Ten Commandments be posted in public schools1, to framing the U.S. battle against Iran as a sort of Christian crusade — are not only off-putting to many Americans, they imply that we’re all Christian believers just by virtue of being Americans, thereby obscuring the biblical teaching that faith is individual and involves a supernatural work of God.

If the emperors say so…

The top-down thing has been tried again and again. Whiteley mentioned Constantine. The early-4th-century Roman emperor converted and decreed that Christianity was legal. It was now cool to be a Christian! Not required of you, but okay. Then, his late-4th-century bud, Theodosius, went further and made Christianity the state religion: you’ve gotta be a Christian; the other religions are, in fact, illegal!

It is Our Will that all the peoples we rule shall practice that religion which the divine Peter the Apostle transmitted to the Romans. (Emperor Theodosius, 380 A.D.)

What happens when you declare your country is a Christian nation? People call themselves “Christian” whether they have been — as Jesus famously taught — “born again” or not. Where Christianity is officially favored — as in the hopes of some “Christian nationalists” today — you’re rather more likely to have a lot of citizens who say they are Christians than you would have in a nation where the faith goes against the grain of society or is positively scorned and mocked.

One more time from Whiteley:

Christians should recognize that the societal effects of Christianity are not Christianity; they may at times be emergent from it, but as such they would be its heat not its fire.

We need the fire, not just the heat. The effects will come as Christians humbly, prayerfully and steadfastly live out their faith. We mustn’t try to have the heat without the fire of personal faith. We pray there would be Christian people, not Christian nations or societies, which, biblically, are not a thing.

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Theme of the Week: My long-lost MUSTACHE, and its very own Facebook page.

Tempted as I am to write about wars, (non-stolen-but-may-yet-be-stolen) elections, and other bits of heaviness (like last week's on Trump, Christian faith and the AntiChrist!) ... I think, instead, I’ll turn my attention inward, to some vainglorious, self-absorbed, amusing musings about ….ME.

(Please don’t say ALL of these posts are about you! However much that might be true.)

The fuss over my under-nose fuzz, and its demise

It’s so crazy. I worked for decades in the Philadelphia TV market (WFMZ-TV, Allentown, PA), so I guess I should not have been surprised that the removal of my mustache a few years back would cause a ruckus among viewers. We like things to stay the same, I guess.

I refer to this nonsensical story now because my daughter, for some reason, decided to tell the tale to her daughter — by Googling “Rob Vaughn’s mustache.”

If you do that, and you do it multiple times, you get slightly different A.I.-generated “Overviews” each time. Here’s one:

Usually, the A.I. blurbs are accompanied by this picture. Not sure where they got it:

A.I. helpfully provides more info!

The history of his facial hair is quite simple:

• The Early Years: He famously sported the mustache for decades, dating back to his early days at the station in the 1980s.

• The Shave: He eventually shaved the mustache off for a brief period, which became a memorable and well-known moment among his co-workers and viewers.

• The Symbol: Even without it, the mustache remains a symbol of his legacy and the more than 37 years he spent delivering the news.

When I shaved it off in 2011,

…and the community upheaval ensued, somebody in our viewing audience — I still don’t know who — decided my mustache should have its own Facebook Page, and that my facial hair should offer opinions on the news of the day.

Here’s a partial image of that page, which is, for better or worse, still active:

Opinion-wise, my facial hair had little flair. Some sample posts:

One post by my mustache linked to an NPR article on Salvador Dali, he of the famously thin upturned ‘stache. The article, my mustache said, made it think that it, and Rob, “should reunite.”

Indeed, maybe the most fascinating thing about my post today is that 2017 NPR article, which said that Dali’s body — embalmed and buried in 1989 — had been exhumed, and that the iconic mustache was still intact. Odd. And a little disturbing.

You see, in the early 2000s, a wave of vanity broke over me, I guess, and I decided that the mustache made me look old. Too much like a grandpa. (I actually was a grandpa after 2007.) I told the station’s general manager, Barry, that I wanted to shave it off. Besides, I argued, I was keeping it very short, and because the hairs were gray, you could barely see it on my face anyway! But Barry said: we’ve invested all kinds of promotional money on you — the way you look. Like, on billboards:

And yeah, I was known for the stupid face-fur.

Then one day, a few years later, the GM, Barry said to me: “You know, you keep the mustache short, and since it’s gray, you can hardly see it on your face.” And he said, OK, you can shave it off.

(A Principle of Life emerges: if you can’t persuade your boss of your great idea, just wait — it will one day become his idea, and you’re good to go!)

On later billboards, I was as smooth-as-silk above the lip:

As I look back, the fuss over the fuzz was just fun. I don’t think my wife Angela misses those days of Maximal Hair on either one of us:

These days, in our retirement, we’re fuzzing again…in a new way:

And it doesn’t seem to be causing a ruckus at all.

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» Item: President Trump has identified as a Christian and some Christian leaders say they think that's true.

» Item: Donald Trump has also said, “I don’t think there’s anything gonna get me into heaven…. I think I’m not maybe heaven-bound.”

» Item: In April of this year, Tucker Carlson asks about Trump: “Could this be the Antichrist?” (It’s on tape, though Carlson has since quibbled.)

» Item: Some Christians believe demons control certain geographic regions and should be called out by name and battled.

What to make of all this? How should we understand these often-contradictory claims about spiritual life and the invisible world?

We need to make some important distinctions — not just distinctions between the religious folk and the non-religious, but between, and among, those of us who go by “Christian.”

Lots of distinctions, please. We believers agree on many things, but not all.

Who’s a Christian?

So, presumably (!), we who call ourselves “Christians” agree on Jesus, and that we need to believe in Him for the forgiveness of sins — for salvation. Presumably! This is key for us — but here’s where some nuance comes in.

What do we mean when we speak of the “Jesus” we say we believe in?

We mean: Jesus, the eternal Son of God, Second Person of the Trinity, who became a man, died on a Roman cross in Jerusalem around 30 A.D. and who rose, bodily and truly, from the dead, offering salvation from sin for all who believe in Him.

Such a definition is embraced by millions, and always has been, but it excludes some people who may use the name “Christian,” such as, say, Thomas Jefferson and others who think the way Jefferson thought — who see Jesus as merely a great man and profound teacher, but not (as Scripture describes Him) as divine and worthy of worship.

Also critical to the notion of “being a Christian”: that a person sees herself as a sinner in need of God’s forgiveness; that a person understands that he receives salvation by grace, i.e., as a gift that cannot be earned through good works. (Gifts, by definition, are not earned.)

Only God knows whether Donald Trump has what Christians call “saving faith.” But it would seem, from a human standpoint, that Trump denies any need to seek forgiveness. And he seems to think — wrongly, from a biblical standpoint — that a person attains eternal life through doing good deeds. Christianity is not moralism. He has revealed his thinking on those points quite a few times.

Moreover, there’s the question of fruit. Jesus said, “you will recognize them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:20); Paul wrote of spiritual “fruit” that characterizes the lives of true Christians (Galatians 5:22).

Need I compare the “fruit” of Trump’s life to what Scripture speaks of? Um…I think I need not. (I mean, if I were to do that, I could mention the crudity, crassness, cruelty, self-dealing, vanity-on-stilts, lawlessness, and sexual indiscretions — and sexual abuse, if a jury is to be believed. But all of that has been catalogued out the wazoo, to use the technical, legal term. “Trump’s moral depravity, which touches every area of his life, private and public, has long been in public view, undisguised and impossible to miss,” writes the evangelical observer Peter Wehner.)

He does not seem to be a Christian — to grossly understate things.

Am I making a big deal of this? Actually, no. I mean, I do hope Trump is a Christian! I really do. I bring it up only as a way of illustrating that not all Bible-believers agree on things. Some say the president is a believer; some say he is not.

Some, like Tucker Carlson, even suggest that Trump is an — or the — AntiChrist!

Oh my.

But either way, is Trump on a mission from God?

Some other believers argue that Trump — whether he’s a Christian or not — has been chosen by God “for such a time as this” (to use a biblical phrase) in accordance with prophecies made that he (Trump) would win the presidency and lead America to a revival of faith in God. Or that Trump is a modern form of the ancient Persian king Cyrus, who — though an unbeliever in the true God — was an instrument in God’s hand to help the Jews return from exile to the holy land. (See, for instance, Isaiah 44:28. On Cyrus, that is, not Trump.)

Anyway… distinctions. I sometimes see reporting and commentary that don’t make distinctions, framing all evangelicals as backing Trump, or considering him a believer, or considering him a Cyrus. And I see critics of evangelicalism — including critics who are my friends — sometimes lumping all evangelicals together, possibly because of such uncareful reporting and commentary. Thus, the thrust of this commentary — about distinctions.

Now to another area of note in the news — another facet of religious life where it’s wise not to smush all Christians together.

Demonology

Another area to be careful about — so that we might avoid the lumping and smushing I just referred to — has to do with the prevalence, power and jurisdiction of demons, and how Christians think about such things.

In a recent article in The Atlantic, entitled “The Demon Next Door,” Stephanie McCrummen introduces us to an East Tennessee couple who established a church committed to engaging in “strategic-level spiritual warfare” in their town of Maryville. That is, they believed they were told by God directly that they were to eradicate “witchcraft and demonic activity” in their area, to oppose that activity, as McCrummen writes, “by their physical presence, intensive prayer, singing, marching, and other strategies.”

These "charismatic” Christian believers discerned that a “high-ranking demon named Lilith” not only was leader of a “regional demonic stronghold,” but was orchestrating nefarious events through a local bookstore in town.

It’s a fascinating read. But again: distinctions are in order.

I tread carefully here. “Belief in satanic forces has been part of Christianity since the first century,” McCrummen writes. I don’t deny that. Scripture is plain that all of us should be on guard and prayerful because “Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). We are exhorted to be aware of Satan and dark forces that desire to hinder our devotion to Jesus; we are to “resist” the devil and to “stand firm” in our faith (1 Peter 5:9) through prayer and the reading of Scripture.

The Bible does indeed speak of “spiritual warfare” (Ephesians 6:10-17): we are to don the metaphorical “armor of God” so that we can “extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.” But this is best understood as careful attention to biblical truth and discernment about lies and false teaching in the Church, not about some sort of direct “battle” with demons who control territories and who may be known, and addressed, by name. No Scripture that I’m aware of encourages that kind of ministry by believers. Nor, as some charismatic ministries seem to suggest, are we to fear our demonic enemy, because “the one who is in you [the Lord] is greater than the one who is in the world [Satan]” (1 John 4:4); nor, as some ministry leaders seem to imply, should we think evil forces are somehow parallel in power with God — like the good and bad sides of “The Force” in Star Wars movies. The Bible indicates that while Satan is evil and not to be trifled with, he and his minions are already a defeated force because of the Cross of Christ (see Colossians 2:15; Luke 10:18); Jesus is Lord of all entities that exist, even the evil ones (Colossians 1:15-16; Ephesians 1:20-23).

We’re a diverse group

All that to say that Christians see many of these things differently, and we should resist — while we’re resisting the devil in biblically-appropriate ways — formulations in the media, and buzz among our friends, that paint all Bible-believers with a broad brush.

As I’ve written before, evangelicals differ on the age of the universe. They differ on “faith healing” and how the Holy Spirit leads and guides His children through life. In other words, though we agree on a lot, we differ on a number of non-essential, non-primary doctrines. Some have even embraced QAnon. (As I was finishing up this article, the New York Times posted an essay by Michelle Goldberg on Victor Marx, the GOP nominee for governor in Colorado. He is a Christian who reportedly used to sell a $99 guidebook for casting out demons and who has said he can perform exorcisms over the phone. Some of us would have doubts about that stuff.)

Beyond the main tenets of the faith, there’s quite a bit of variety out there in the professing-Christian world. Let’s make good distinctions. Let’s promote, and argue for, the faith, with zeal and integrity — while making clear which things are essential, which things are minor matters, and which things tend toward extremes.

Distinctions.

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I can’t thank you enough.

The rant that I expelled — a self-absorbed lament that I wasn’t planning to issue, but just sorta came out through tears, like snot extruded from a toddler’s nose — got a lot of people worried about me, judging by the comments. I’m okay. Trusting God. Thankful for each day.

I am overwhelmed by all the loving comments, I have to say. My “reach” here on Substack is rather small, but I got a bunch of supportive comments. I’m grateful.

But man, over on my Facebook page (where I also waxed rant-o-logical, since ranting, after all, wants an audience), my post is moving toward a quarter-million views, if you can believe that — it’s a strange world we live in today — and I’m still trying to get through the 1.5-thousand comments (and counting). So, thank you.

Indeed, readers were so kind that I thought I would share some examples of these words of kindness.

*****

What a window into the lives of others who are also hurting, and who are kind enough to offering encouraging words and prayers.

From the heart

So many people said they were praying for me. Not in a performative or perfunctory way. Heartfelt. Sweet, actually.

Jeannie: Prayers for you, Rob, and your very beautiful wife.

(She’s got my wife sized up right.)

Other comments were simply prayers.

Mae: We ask that if he is not completely healed from this cancer then we pray that you Lord and Savior allow him to have minimum pain if any at all.

Amen to that! We mustn’t underestimate or dismiss “Praying for you” comments. These are people who are talking to the God of the universe… on my behalf. That’s pretty awesome.

Tears = good

Debbie: I read your post with tears in my eyes.

Well, a couple mentioned their own tears, but more mentioned mine.

Kathy: Rant away…and let those tears flow.

Randy: Our tears are a voice that God understands — a liquid prayer that is not ignored by our Father!

Tears: liquid prayer. I like that.

So many hurting

I could not get over how many people were moved to share about their own health struggles. It’s heart-rending. Here’s small sampling:

Ingrid: Presently in a clinical trial at Sloan Kettering.

Sharon: I have degenerative cervical stenosis of my neck and the pain and other symptoms are unbearable at times.

John: As a person who has three relapses of [prostate cancer[ I hear you… two cycles of radiation 13 years apart and for the past two years getting Eligard shots every three months. [Note: I also get those Eligard shots.]

Hilda: I lost my friend to cancer stage 4, her funeral Monday.

Sandra: I myself am suffering from stage four cancer and it spread from my lungs to my spine.

Sally: I lost my husband Dec 9th from cancer. I’m still numb and can’t believe he’s gone.

You guys, I am praying for you. By name.

Encouragement

I know I’m old, but I never can get over it when people tell me they grew up watching me on WFMZ-TV. And these aren’t, um, young-looking people. Ha! I actually receive it as a blessing when people tell me that.

Gunzalis: You played a huge part in all of our homes as family should…with good news and bad news.

I love that. Thanks for all who said similar things. And for those who remember the kind of snacks I would mention on the air! I guess I mentioned Tasty-Kakes a lot.

Regena: Get some Butterscotch Krimpets or Peanut Butter Tandy Takes.

There were plenty of other smart exhortations.

Steve: Sometimes you just need to vent, or cry, or ask God what’s with this mud you put in my way? He can take it and I think he wants us to share when we feel like garbage sometimes. It’s what friends do.

Becca: You have a right to be crabby!

Melinda: Don’t worry about your house. That’s the least of your problems.

Patricia: Don’t cancel that trip - get a mobility scooter! Go on that trip!!

Linda: Just take care of each other and love each other as long as you can.

And I’ll wrap up with one of the many citations of Scripture that people sent me. An old friend named Neil pointed to 2 Corinthians 4:16. Pretty applicable:

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.

Finally, another heartfelt THANK YOU to all who have responded to my lament with words that are precious to me. My legs and back are a little ouchy tonight, but I go up to bed happy and awash in blessings.

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I suppose I shouldn’t do this.

I don’t like life right now. It’s a stink-fest. You hear me?

Is that okay to say?

I’m just being honest with you. Something is grinding and grey inside me. The cancer. My butt and legs are on fire from spinal stenosis, and the shots I got don’t seem to be working.

I might have to cancel our Alaska trip in August if I can’t walk well enough.

Sorry. Unloading this on you. I’m sorry.

But man, this is a mess. I’m sleeping in the recliner. Angela has to do all the grunt work around the house.

Also, it occurs to me now and then — a lot, actually — that if the averages play out, I won’t have a lot more time in this world with Angela. That makes me — I can’t say. I have enough tears lately. I look at her and cry sometimes.

Where is my faith in all this?

Fortunately, praise God, it’s still there. Jesus is “the bread of life” and believe me, I’m chewing every day. I am satisfied. Most of the time. I think of Him, the one who comes between me and the righteous wrath of God and absorbs what I deserve — this is standard Christian doctrine, folks — the One who absolves me, pardons and exonerates me, and promises me glory with Him — and I am satisfied and cheered up and running, internally, on the highest octane possible, filled to the brim, fat and happy, and, you know, as Peter said, rejoicing “with a glorious, inexpressible joy.”

Okay. Rant over. Nothing wrong with tears. More coffee — fourth cup…

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I’ll take you to Normandy — little white crosses and a fine mist over Omaha Beach.

What a great privilege to go overseas. To sing! We saw wonderful things in Italy and France. And ended up growing in love for our own country.

It was a blazing hot July in 2016. Angela and I joined singers with her choir, the Valley Choral Society, and with the Schuylkill Choral Society. An unforgettable trip. We sang in the Vatican, at St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

We sang. We dined and sipped. The Champs-Élysées. Trevi fountain. Pisa. A Croque Madame sandwich and a cappuccino at a sidewalk cafe in Paris.

Almost too much to take in. It was wonderful.

And then we went to Normandy, to the famed coast, to encounter history, and to sing. After the delights of Rome, Venice and Paris, I began to feel strangely anxious as we drove toward those storied beaches.

As I said, it was hot. Terribly hot. The bus broke down. And its air conditioning kept failing.

Eventually we reached the Normandy shore. It was our privilege to sing our national anthem at the American cemetery there, the resting place of more than nine-thousand soldiers. Americans, who gave their all.

These are the ones whose deaths preserved our lives; the ones who fell at nearby Omaha Beach and four other beaches during the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944.

A mist began to fall.

We approached the curved colonnade, passing by the Wall of the Missing. It was time for the choir to assemble.

Umbrellas down. Music folders up. In the continuing mist, we sang the anthem.

A small crowd listened. My heart became full. I almost lost control as we sang. Why, after all, were we here? Because this place — for Americans and all free people — was a crux of modern history. A great price was paid here one terrible morning. It was almost too much to contemplate.

We then sang “God Bless America.” Then we walked into the field of white crosses.

The mist stopped.

It’s not far from the cemetery, and the crosses, to the beach itself. There was lump in my throat as we set foot on the sand.

Try, if you can, to picture landing craft hitting these beaches at 6:30 a.m. on 6/6/44. The young Americans splashing onto Omaha Beach encountered the best of the German machine gun units. “They had us pinned down,” recalled Verle Buck of Jubilee, Iowa, then 21 — then entering, with his colleagues, a scene from hell.

“You'd stick your helmet above; they'd shoot a hole through it.”

Imagine: a fusion of terror, hopelessness, and brittle determination. “Then everybody got organized a little bit amongst themselves and knew they had to go because there was no way you could swim that English Channel. You had to go.”

Confusion reigned. Tanks sank in the surf. Smoke everywhere. Noise, screams. And those invisible gunners raining down death from the hill.

More than 2,000 young Americans went down. Verle made it through. (He died in 2018.) 34,000 eventually came ashore. The path to an Allied victory was in sight.

America is now at 250 years. As we celebrate with red, white and blue, incline your hearts, at least now and then, to pondering the red. The meaning of the red, I’m told, is valor. The heroes of D-Day were the embodiment of valor.

I think also of blood, of course. Much was spilled on that infernal beach. What can we say now but “thank you”? We say it to those young men, and to countless others like them, whose deaths in the many battles across our history seem to be as numerous as the grains of sand on Omaha Beach. Freedom is costly.

And I say “thank you” to the Lord of history for His kindness to America.

We sang in the mist. What a privilege. A decade later I am still pondering that trip. And I am grateful.

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Once upon a time… we lived happily together. In the same world.

I looked out my window and saw that the sky was blue. You looked out of your window — and agreed. Yep. Blue.

We even agreed on other stuff:

• In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue

• The moon, on average, is 238,855 miles from the earth

• The McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich was introduced to the world in 1962

• In the summer of ‘69, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went to a secret soundstage and pretended to step onto the moon

  

HA HA HA on that last one! Of course, Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon. The claims otherwise are as weak as the claims that the earth only appears to be a sphere but is actually flat. Right?

I have written before about our trouble agreeing on truth. Things are getting worse.

The trouble is deepening.

Between the advance of AI-generated video that seems to have real people doing real things…

….and the advance of utterly contradictory claims about, oh, vaccines and climate and mail-in ballots, we are sinking further into an epistemic twilight zone. You think some things are obviously real and can be taken for granted; your neighbor thinks you ignore the obvious and since it’s, you know, obvious and the evidence is right there (but being ignored or hidden), it begins to dawn on your neighbor that maybe you are operating in bad faith.

*****

I had never heard the claim that “Michelle Obama is a man” before I heard it on raw video that one of our reporters showed me. An interviewee of his said it. This was three or four years ago. I laughed and said it was so stupid and surely a joke.

Well, here it is again. At the recent UFC cage fight event at the White House (I can’t believe I’m writing those words), a fighter decided to use his post-fight interview with Joe Rogan — in front of President Trump and the crowd — to straighten us out about the former First Lady: “Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?"

Speaking of what’s obvious, the fact-checker PolitiFact reported that this conspiracy theory about Mrs. O has been, obviously, debunked.

But there’s the trouble: a sizeable chunk of the public thinks such fact-checkers are truth-skewers. Can’t trust ‘em. They bend and they lie. When the fact-checkers are said to be (purposely) mucking up our world of facts, where does that leave us?

Fact-checking was concocted in the world of journalism to help us reach through the epistemic fog so that we can touch solid reality. Oh well.

Fact-checking doesn’t settle everything because we are driven by emotional factors, and team loyalty, at least as much as by intellectual concerns. Our feelings, our guts, can run roughshod over “facts.” Bonnie Kristian, in her book Untrustworthy, cites an interview the late Charlie Kirk conducted with the evangelical author Eric Metaxas (pp. 123-124). Both Kirk and Metaxas professed a firm belief that Trump won the 2020 election — based not on the facts of the matter, but on their feelings, their sense, that he won. Kristian quotes Metaxas as saying, “My attitude is, like, so who cares what I can prove in the courts? This is right. This happened.” It just…seemed right — even if all facts point in the opposite direction. Indeed, no matter how powerfully the evidence speaks on this matter — and it is powerful and it is very, very conclusive that the 2020 count was legitimate and there was no meaningful fraud — still, for some people, their feelings trump the truth.

How can this be? What is happening? We used to (mostly) share the basic facts about our shared reality: we went to the moon; the earth is a globe; 9/11 was the work of terrorists, not our own government, etc. Now: who’s to say? The people I trust, they say different.

Now, the “established” consensus about reality is seen as one option among many. We have “curated realities” — based on (as I said) our feelings, and also on our allegiances.

Both Kristian and author Jeffrey Bilbro cite the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci in explaining that the ineffectiveness of fact-checkers has to do with those allegiances — the “teams” we are devoted to. Tufekci observed:

So, we’re stuck. We can’t agree on the facts of our shared reality because we can’t dispassionately hear the authorities and experts we used to lean on — their authority having been pummeled for years now — and we are marinated in a cynicism that sees nothing but bad faith in our political opponents.

*****

What to do? The epistemological diagnoses are by now numerous; the proposals to restore a common reality are strewn across the cyber world. All I know is, it’s a five-alarm fire.

My best suggestion, frankly: Pray. Pray for renewed commitments to truth and truth-telling. As Alabama pastor Steve Bateman has written, political propaganda and distortion have always been a problem, going back to the schemers who tried, in the first century, to forge letters of the apostle Paul and generally obscure the facts (ancient “fake news,” I guess). We have to be people of the Ninth Commandment, committing ourselves to only what is true in our reading, viewing and sharing (see also Philippians 4:8). For Christians, we must commit to being “reasonable” people (Philippians 4:5), who prize the truth — even if it means splitting with the positions of the party we’re affiliated with. Allegiance to the kingdom of God must win out over allegiance to party, ideology or “team.”

If someone says: 9/11 was an inside job; immigrants commit more crimes in the U.S. than citizens do; Trump and his aides conspired with Putin in 2016; the 2020 election was “rigged”; Covid vaccines can alter your DNA — don’t repeat those things uncritically when you’ve heard that mainstream experts don’t agree. It doesn’t mean the experts are infallible. It just means we have to be careful, know the limits of our own knowledge and expertise, and be suspicious about extreme-minority views; there are likely solid reasons that they are considered dubious.

Lord, help us all — Christians and non-Christians, liberals and conservatives — to be devoted to truth. Even when well-established facts cut against our own views.

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Are you a progressive, and the Trump era is making you crazy-angry?

Are you a Trump-style conservative, and you think woke elites are destroying our country?

Or are you politically homeless, like me, and you find this sense of uprootedness distressing?

Well…. I’d suggest, if you want to be happy, that you make your peace with being an APATHETIC LOSER.

Let me make the case.

It’s so hard to be a loser. No one wants to be one. In our claws-out, nostrils-flared, blood-sport political climate, the stakes feel existential and everyone’s on edge.

Better to get comfortable with losing! And just worrying about, oh, whether a new season of your favorite show has dropped yet, or whether the Phillies can overtake the Braves. (I believe they can.)

“Beautiful losers”

Before I argue for a distinctively Christian sort of political apathy — for those, like me, in the evangelical camp — let me point to recent smart observations by Baylor University professor Elizabeth Corey. (Not that her suggestions for how we might be “beautiful losers” are not Christian — she is one — but that I think they’d resonate with people of all outlooks.)

Corey, a conservative, recently told a New York Times interviewer that a “beautiful loser” is “someone who is not interested in conceiving of life as a battle.” This person is the antithesis of the “scrappy warrior,” the one who sees the world as a stark dichotomy, whose way of life is under threat, and who is anxious to fight. We have lots of those these days; much is said to be at stake. From an earlier Corey essay:

If indeed we face a civilization-defining war between elites and ordinary people, between left and right… then everyone must choose a side… In choosing sides, we can’t be afraid of offending people or losing friends .… And nobody should be restrained by the norms of civility.

Yep, that pretty much describes our situation. Ditch the civility. It’s exhausting, and we often end up seeing people we love as enemies. Corey told the Times:

Because here’s the problem with warfare among citizens: What is the end game? What do we do with the opponents whom we’ve supposedly vanquished? They’re all still here, and we must live with them. It’s a little like a marital fight: You don’t think about “defeating” your “enemy”; you must somehow still live together in peace after the fight is over.

Today’s conservatism, Corey notes, is not what it used to be. It used to be about conserving the good and precious things from the past, with the emphasis on persuasion and civility. Now, she says, the “New Right” conservatives have borrowed methods from the cultural Left; everyone sees everything as a do-or-die, existential battle.

But what if the framework of games and battles were rejected altogether? We would then confront the challenge of expressing our thoughts not dogmatically but in graduated terms, with sobriety, discrimination, and patience. When faced with people who differ from us, our response wouldn’t be to condemn or incite, but to persuade, understand, and mollify.

Yeah: what if?

Holy indifference: political losing for Christians

Many of my fellow Christians have invested great energy and (in my view) anxious affections in their political concerns. You know what I mean. 80 percent of evangelicals voted one way. Some — but certainly not all — no doubt felt like the evangelical writer Eric Metaxas, who said after Election Day in 2020 that God was on Trump’s side, that the election had been stolen, and that he (Metaxas) was “happy to die in this fight.” Talk about seeing the stakes as existential! (The election, it must be said again, was lost, not stolen.)

“My kingdom,” Jesus said, “is not of this world.” The conservative evangelical writer Andrew Walker says “the pronouncement of Jesus’ kingship should produce an anti-fragility and anti-frenetic spirit” in believers, who should see politics as “at best secondary to our lives in this age.”

But let’s go farther.

We who are Bible-believers are citizens of an otherworldly kingdom; in an important sense, we’re “just passin’ through.” We are "sojourners and exiles" in the world. It makes no sense to be alarmed by the present “doomer” zeitgeist: we’re on a path to maximal joy; the USA, and the world, are temporary.

More than that, we should cultivate a studied, healthy, spiritually-minded indifference.

Not that we don’t care; we do. But our earthly cares are not ultimate. Not even close.

Jeffrey Bilbro tells how the 17th-century thinker Blaise Pascal encouraged a relative of his to rest, amid political turmoil, in the Providence of God. Things may not go our way politically… and it’s OK.

Bilbro, following Pascal, says the fact that the outcomes of our disputes are in a sovereign God’s hand “should radically temper our emotional investment in the victory of our preferred side.”

The Christian can pour herself into a political cause, but then — if her side loses — can relax.

Pascal, Bilbro says, recommended

a profound sort of apathy, a sancta indifferentia, toward the outcome of the issues… rooted in a confidence that God is in control and in a humility about our own ability to discern the workings of Providence in contemporary events. (Emphasis mine.)

God may desire that the other guy wins this time. That happens. God’s ways are inscrutable. The election outcome stinks, you think? Shrug it off. God is sovereign. Go back to loving your family, leading your Bible study, enjoying your steak and your grandchildren, and cheering on the Phillies. (You do cheer on the Phillies, right?)

The APATHETIC LOSER. Aspire to be one! The Christian — with the gleam of the celestial city in his eye — can lose well, and be as happy as ever.

All of us, of all persuasions, would do well to drop the swords and the epithets, and stop seeing our political opponents as mortal enemies.

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*****

I got a new toy in the mail! Well, more trinket than toy. Well, in fact: an artifact.

Or… a facsimile of an artifact. THIS:

Maybe this would not excite you. But it does me.

It’s a neat replica of “p52” — the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament known to be in existence, a little papyrus item dating back to the early 2nd century. Some ancient scribe wrote these words, probably between 125 and 150 A.D. It’s a little snippet of what we now call the 18th chapter of John. What’s it say? It contains bits of the conversation between Jesus and Pontius Pilate.

I bought the replica from — and I’m happy to support the work of — Wesley Huff, the Canadian Christian apologist who shot to fame recently by appearing on Joe Rogan's podcast, the world’s most popular podcast. Millions heard Wes explain the Christian faith. Here is that Rogan episode, if you’re interested. (Warning: It’s over 3 hours long.)

And here’s a closeup of the manuscript piece I bought:

Cool, right? It’s little — but it’s a famous part of a vast trove of New Testament manuscripts — more than 25,000 (!) in Greek and other ancient languages; 5,800 in Greek alone, the language of the New Testament.

Those numbers are staggering: they blow away the manuscript support of any other documents from antiquity. (We have seven copies of Plato’s writings, 10 of Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and 20 of Tacitus’ Annals, the oldest of which are hundreds of years after the originals were written.)

That’s a big part of why we know the New Testament text is so close to the originals (which have long been lost or destroyed); “for over 99 percent of the words of the Bible,” says the theologian Wayne Grudem, “we know what the original manuscript said.” That’s a big claim. But it’s because we have such an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the New Testament documents.

Not quite “Indiana Jones”… but… fascinating discoveries, in the desert… in the trash

Yes, in the trash.

Just as the Dead Sea Scrolls have had a huge impact on OT scholarship, though they weren’t found until the mid-20th century, some of the most significant discoveries of NT Greek manuscripts happened as recently as the late 19th century.

The ones found in a trash heap.

In 1896 British scholars explored a trash dump in the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus, and they found a whole bunch of ancient…garbage! Old sandals, food waste, scraps of Homer’s writings, receipts, contracts — and the Bible: snatches of Scripture text on papyrus, mixed up with shopping lists and accounting ledgers. Long story. To keep it short: these finds give us copies of the NT that are older than any other previously known manuscripts.

Sometimes there are treasures in the trash.

My own p52 fragment — well, the manuscript of which I have a facsimile — was purchased on the Egyptians antiquities market in 1920, but apparently wasn’t noticed for what it was until 1934. Now, get this:

Meaning: I. Am. Indiana Jones. (Well, I bought the p52 thing.)

No, no — meaning, we have extraordinarily early copies of the NT.

Hand copying…

Wes Huff — in the Joe Rogan video clip above — explains how the astounding number of ancient NT manuscripts helps scholars discern the original text of Scripture, and helps them evaluate the copying errors made by drowsy scribes working by candlelight. He notes (at about 1:02:48 into the clip, i.e., just over 1 hour in) that though there are various copying errors — you try copying thousands of words, perfectly, by hand! — yet the sheer volume of copies comes to the rescue. Here, I’ll type out what Wes says there:

Ironically, with the Christian manuscripts, because we have so many, it’s actually because of the mistakes that we’re able to trace the texts back with a high degree of confidence.

Getting clarity on “variants”

That is, through the discipline known as “textual criticism,” scholars can spot how various kinds of errors crept in; how many of them are common to different geographic areas; and how the vast majority of these text “variants” are accidental, trivial in nature, and easy to spot. Examples of these trivial errors: a word repeated from one line to the next; letters accidentally repeated or transposed; spelling mistakes; and confusion over words that sound alike when scribes were copying by dictation.

One interesting example of the latter is given by NT scholar Bruce Metzger.

Picture it: to produce more copies more quickly, several scribes are sitting in a room, pens and parchments in hand, scribbling away (reverently) while a leader reads the text out loud. Dictation.

Metzger writes that when a scribe was listening to a reader, the pronunciation of the Greek letter u and the diphthong ou “was sometimes indistinguishable, and that accounts for the variation in Rev. 1:5.” When writing down Revelation 1:5, some scribes heard the word lousanti and some heard lusanti.

Lousanti wound up in the Greek text used by the English translators of the famed King James version (1611), who translated it “washed” in the phrase, [Jesus] “washed us from our sins.” Most modern English translations, on the other hand, have used a Greek text of Rev. 1:5 that reads lusanti (found in the older Greek manuscripts), a word that means “freed.” So the modern English versions say Jesus “freed us from our sins.” Doctrinally, no big deal. The Bible teaches both ideas. We’re washed. And freed.

So, then…

And so it goes with the variants. No big deal. They do not affect the message of the Bible. No essential teaching of Scripture is affected by variants.

Some critics like to issue complaints like: how can we trust the Bible, since it contains so many errors? Or: so many copies were made, over so many years, that surely we can never know what the originals contained.

Well, with our extravagant riches in manuscript texts, and thanks to the science of textual criticism, we actually do know that we have the “right” Bible. Earlier, I quoted scholar Wayne Grudem saying we have “99 percent” certainty when it comes to our knowledge of the original texts. I’ll close by letting Randy Alcorn top Grudem’s number:

In fact, textual critics are certain of 99.5% of the biblical texts. The only uncertainties involve one half of one percent of all Scripture.

No, wait. Back to Grudem for the last word.

Our present manuscripts are for most purposes the same as the original manuscripts.

Your Bible is, shall we say, miraculously close to — indeed, virtually the same as — what the prophets and apostles, so long ago, were guided by the Holy Spirit to write.

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A few closing notes on my sources for this article:

» One renowned source on this topic is: The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, by Bruce Metzger. I used the 2nd edition, Oxford University Press, 1968.

» Also a helpful resource: Can We Still Believe the Bible? by Craig Blomberg.

» The commonly used ESV Study Bible has a nice article called “The Reliability of Bible Manuscripts,” (Crossway Bibles, 2008), starting on page 2585. Most study bibles will have explanatory notes, or whole articles, discussing the “variants” in the manuscripts. These are helpful to digest if you are confused, or concerned, about references to variants in your marginal notes (“some early manuscripts say….”).

» FYI, Greek New Testaments, like mine (see below), have specialized footnote sections called the “apparatus,” which shows which verses have variants; it shows by a lettering system (A, B, C, or D) the translators’ level of confidence in the words they think are the original wording; and shows the alternative wordings and the names of the manuscripts (like p45) that contain them. Super handy for understanding the choices that are made.

(In this picture, I am pointing to the footnote for verse 36 of chapter 16 of the book of Acts. The translators give their choice a {B} reading, meaning they are pretty confident that their choice is right. The next footnote — for verse 3 of chapter 17 — only has a {D} reading. They’re not super-sure their choice is the best one. But, man! What an example (which I chose at random) of how these alternative readings don’t usually matter! The footnote is showing that some manuscripts have the definite article before Jesus’s name and some don’t, and some omit the article before both “Christ” and “Jesus.” The meaning, either way, is the same: we’re talking about Jesus Christ!)

» LOTS of good online resources: Blue Letter Bible and Bible Gateway allow you to read all sorts of translations and “interlinear” Bibles, showing the Greek of the NT interlaced with the English.

» Also, a reminder about Wes Huff’s site, wesleyhuff.com, which includes very cool ""Infographics", which are colorful, detailed charts on all kinds of topics. Including ancient manuscripts, about which Wes is an expert.

» Other good sites on the Greek MSS: The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts; the blog called Evangelical Textual Criticism; another blog called The Textual Mechanic; and the site of The Museum of the Bible.

» More basically, a nice article on texts by Randy Alcorn.

» A 25-minute video on New Testament Textual Criticism

» Lastly, he doesn’t have a lot of material on textual criticism, but I like to plug the YouTube channel of Gavin Ortlund, who has helpful, scholarly and faithful videos on lots of subjects.

Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ· οὗτός ἐστιν πάντων κύριος. (the last phrase of Acts 10:36)

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NOTE: If you don’t mind: This is an “encore” — that is, repeat — post from nearly a year ago. Honestly, I ran into logistical problems getting a new essay published in time for my usual Tuesday posting. I will try to have a fresh piece out later this week.

But I think it’s apropos to return to this piece for today, since it appeared nearly a year ago — and I’m about to hit my first anniversary on Substack (86 published essays since June of 2025). Plus, I had far fewer subscribers when this first ran, so many of you have not seen it.

There! How’s THAT for justifying an encore piece?

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I’ve mentioned my twin loves: news (my career until last year) and my Christian faith. These two things have more affinities than you might think.

Let’s go now to renowned anchorman, Ted Koppel.

Koppel – one of the best broadcast journalists of our time – once tied these things together better than I ever could. He saw the ancient teachings of the Bible lurking in the background of the news we consume. Specifically, he pointed to Moses.

Here is Koppel from a 1987 commencement address at Duke University:

The sheer brilliance of the Ten Commandments is that they codify, in a handful of words, acceptable human behavior. Not just for then or now but for all time.

And then Koppel drew the connection to his business (and mine), the news:

The tension between those Commandments and our baser instincts provide the grist for journalism's daily mill.

You see what he means. Day by day the Commandments collide with human nature, and the ugly results appear in our news products. Grist for the mill.

Consider this, he said:

What a huge, gaping void there would be in our informational flow and in our entertainment without routine violation of the Sixth Commandment. Thou shalt not murder.

We could add, don’t bear false witness. Don’t steal. Think of how much lying and stealing – on top of all the killing – provide the content of our news flow.

And I reckon I could build an argument that other forms of commandment-busting adorn our newscasts too: many tales of family disintegration and anguish relate, no doubt, to violation of the injunctions to honor our fathers and mothers, and to avoid adultery. And to not covet – i.e., have an inordinate desire for – things that aren’t ours.

That is to say: much of the daily human drama depicted on the news is, very simply, a product of the daily clash of fallible, flawed human beings with God’s Law – the foundational moral precepts that have been passed down for centuries (which Koppel reminded us were “not the Ten Suggestions” but were, and are, “commandments”). We are sinners, all – to use another Bible word – which explains everything from envy and lies and cheating…to hate and thievery and violence and wars. The stuff of the news.

Another helpful take on news comes from a Christian writing hero of mine, C.S. Lewis.

He wrote to a friend in 1946:

It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning.

Ah, the good old days, when the sorrows of the world only showed up on our doorsteps at the start of each day. Now, it’s sorrows, non-stop. On the screens on our desks and on our walls and in our pockets.

When I was still working, many of my friends would apologize (because of the business I was in) and say the news is too bleak to watch. I get it. And it does give me pause to think of my contributions to the sum total of televised awfulness. But better to be a purveyor of bleak news than fake news, I guess. And we might benefit more than we know from a good dose of the bleak: we need to see the world the way it really is.

It was not my place to offer, on our newscasts, the Bible’s solution to the problems of commandment-breaking and sorrows. But boy, you can see how the dark content of our news reports sets the table for the Gospel preacher to offer the Scripture’s message of consolation, forgiveness and eternal hope.

“Set your sights,” Ted Koppel suggested that day at Duke, “beyond what you can see.” See the evils and sorrows on your screens. And see beyond them. A larger story hums beneath it all, featuring the Fall of our race, but also pointing the way – for those with eyes to see and ears to hear – to redemption.

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Yes, we’ve been over this. Media bias.

A new twist this time:

Conservatives: Liberal journalists are tilting the news to the Left!

Scott Pelley: Our conservative news boss is trying to tilt it to the Right!

Or, to use his metaphor: it’s about his new boss’s shady THUMB.

There was a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News.

Or so Pelley told the New York Times after his stunning firing by CBS.

So we’re talking again about: what journalism is, and what journalists’ independence is. And why you should care.

Praise for Pelley — from the same CBS News that fired him!

Oddly enough (in my opinion), the firing of Pelley — for what the new Executive Producer of 60 Minutes called a “performative display of hostility” in the June 1 staff meeting where Pelley slammed his new bosses — was followed on the CBS Evening News by the kind of laudatory retrospective piece you might see after a notable person dies.

And after that piece (clip below) aired, anchor Tony Dokoupil said, slowly and reverentially, “Well, Scott. From all of us: Thank you.”

As if Pelley had just had his jersey retired and raised to the rafters, not that he had just been turned out to pasture. (Sorry about the metaphor-mixing.)

I guess there is still some journalistic independence at the CBS News shop, since the flagship newscast was allowed to extol Pelley after he was shown the door.

We’ve got a mess on our hands

What is going on? Well, we’re in the wrenching process of figuring out for ourselves, again, what journalism is, and what it’s for.

, the former-network-reporter-now-Substacker, who knows a thing or two about being fired over biting comments, sums up, for me, the crux of the matter. In a video this week, Moran refers to the “wall” that’s supposed to exist between corporate media owners and their newsrooms.

Well, [that wall] doesn't exist anymore at CBS News. And it's a question, how long can it exist anywhere else? (from Moran video, 6-3-26)

This is the claim Pelley and other fired 60 Minutes personnel are making: that CBS — now under the direction of new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss — is trying to make nice with President Trump because the administration’s approval is needed for CBS’s parent company, Paramount, to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. Trump doesn’t like how CBS News reports the news. Listen, Mr. Paramount, if you don’t rein in your kid and his “reporting,” I might not look favorably on your big deal.

What journalists do

I’m not going to rehash all of the CBS/Paramount/Ellison/Bari Weiss stuff here. (There are helpful summaries out there, like this one from one of my former employers, the AP.) I just want to point out what Moran is pointing to, i.e., that journalists exist to describe, for the people, and analyze, for the people, what is happening in the halls of power, irrespective of what the powerful think about it, and free from the influence of the powerful on the journalists’ corporate bosses.

Journalists are to be independent, and to pursue truth, and to ask hard questions, and to probe and challenge, and to give context, and to explain ramifications — no matter what the subjects of the reporting have to say, and no matter what strings they might try to pull. Journalists exist to serve the readers and viewers, not the powerful.

In other words: the owners should let the reporters do their thing. You know, that wall Moran refers to.

Easier said than done, of course. I get it. The owners have to pay the bills. They have to stay in the good graces of the advertisers and of society’s power players. Sometimes the journalists, working for those owners, report on those advertisers and and on those power players. There’s a tension in the building. “Upstairs” vs. the Newsroom.

My own experience

I was fortunate enough, in my last 36 years in journalism, to work for station owners who were aware of that tension, but who tried to honor that wall we’re talking about. Rarely did we sense that management wanted a certain story spiked, or told in a certain way, to suit the station’s business interests. Our independence was honored.

More often, there was some nudging from upstairs to be sure we were being even-handed politically and ideologically. When CNN — one of our main providers of national and world news — was thought to be leaning a little too hard against Trump, management leaned on us to scrutinize every story for balance and to make edits as necessary. That’s a good thing. But again, there’s a tension.

As I’ve discussed with you before (for example, here and here and here), many of my conservative friends who consume mainly Fox News (for better or for worse — for worse, in my view) would say, good on WFMZ for spotting CNN’s bias, and would no doubt say, good on Bari Weiss for un-tilting CBS News from the Left and tilting it back toward the center.

Well. I won’t repeat my mantras here about journalism having a liberal tilt because it’s liberals who go into journalism, nor will I try, again, to show that Fox News and other right-leaning media are arguably worse because they don’t just tilt to the Right — they tend to mislead, distort, leave mistakes uncorrected, and just plain report falsehoods. I’ve covered that ground. (See the links above.)

I’ll just say:

Better truths from somebody on the Other Team than falsehoods from someone on Your Team. Better solid journalism from the Liberal Media than specious journalism from the Conservative Media. And I say that as a conservative (mainly).

Pelley did not just decry the removal of “the wall” at CBS — where management’s business interests allegedly Trump the work of the news department — but he also claimed he was instructed to “inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.” How so? He said Weiss wanted a 60 Minutes piece to make the anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis “look more violent,” and to describe Renee Good’s car as “driving toward the officer” who shot her, when the video showed different. (CBS News, in reply, says Weiss made suggestions to make the piece stronger, and that her points “had no political motivation.”)

If Pelley is telling the truth, this is pretty damning.

From Scott Pelley…to James Madison

Let’s give media expert Founding Father James Madison the last word.

Pre-Revolution, newspapers in the Colonies couldn’t criticize the king. Their “journalism” had to be pro-king. I’m sure President Trump would…. oh, never mind.

In an early draft of the First Amendment, Madison wrote,

…the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.

The language was later changed; the thought remained.

Madison knew that if the press was only allowed to report what the authorities liked to hear, it would not actually be serving as a “great bulwark of liberty.” He argued before the U.S. House that “the censorial power is in the people over the Government, not in the Government over the people.” What does that mean?

Writing at the moderate-Republican Ripon Forum about the Trump administration’s treatment of journalists — under the title, “James Madison would be appalled” — Katie Fallow and Jake Karr explain what Madison meant:

When the government provides access only to favored reporters, or only if reporting conforms to the government’s chosen narratives, it exercises a “censorial power” over the press that poisons our information ecosystem and inhibits effective self-government.

Amen to that.

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I assure you, I am a guy. I…I can explain.

Makeup: TV news.

Hot flashes: having no testosterone anymore.

My doctors took it away from me. They did it on purpose.

Testosterone…defeated.

The treatment of my Stage 4 (metastatic) prostate cancer is a testosterone-defeater. That’s my word for it, anyway. Testosterone fuels prostate cancer. So: suppress the ’rone, starve the cancer.

And start the hot flashes.

But before I describe that bit of fun, how about some testosterone humor?

Have you heard the one about…

I know. Cancer is serious. Believe me, I know that! But let’s try to crack a smile.

Cartoon: Man on the doctor’s exam table.

Doc: Have you ever cancelled your Twitter account because Elon Musk started allowing opinions you disagree with?

Patient: Yes.

Doc: Yep, you have low testosterone.

(Note: I did not reproduce the cartoon itself because I didn’t feel like paying the $110 for the rights to use it. I suppose if I had more testosterone, I would feel more like putting up a fight about it.)

Comedian Neal Brennan, noting that women have more estrogen than men do:

The worst thing estrogen will suggest is, “let's get some wine and go on Etsy.” Not that bad. Whereas testosterone…. everything it wants is against the law. It's like having a prison inmate living inside you.

(Note: I left out some funny lines by Brennan because I don’t use f-bombs. I suppose if I had more testosterone, I’d be more inclined to drop f-bombs.)

Take my wife…

My wife is a riot.

Angela is a strong personality, the type whom an outside observer — maybe the proverbial Man from Mars — might observe and might say, or be tempted to say, “I guess she wears the pants in the family!”

Hysterically funny, right? Actually, I don’t know if a Man from Mars would make that observation, since there’s a good chance they are not users of pants. In my sci-fi-saturated youth, when I drew Martians, they had no pants on. Sorry if that’s offensive, but it’s true.

And anyway, I would argue — weakly, and plaintively — that actually I wear the pants in the family. Angela might agree, I think. She would certainly say, and has said: “I have more testosterone in my body than you do!” And she would be right.

I looked it up. When I looked on my medical “portal” — that ridiculous online place where you can convulse in terror over test results for days on end before a doctor actually offers an expert opinion on them — I found that my current testosterone score, forced low by my meds, was a number lower than that of the average woman.

Angela is very funny, by the way — which I guess confirms a 2007 study that shows that more testosterone (which she has, over me) is connected to being hilarious.

But seriously…

I am thankful for the treatment scheme — Androgen Deprivation Therapy (ADT) and Androgen Receptor Pathway Inhibitors (ARPI) — and the way the shots-and-pills suppress my testosterone, thus sucking the life out of the cancer. At least for now.

(My thanks to Dr. David Chen, Dr. Daniel Geynisman and PA-C Victoria Wong at Fox Chase Cancer Center near Philly for their great care.)

As for the hot flashes…

They hit me several times a day, but only last about five minutes. I feel like a little oven has switched on inside, I break into a little sweat (especially on the forehead, the chest and back, and in another place or two), and I try to maneuver myself close to a fan or air conditioner register. Menopausal women are very familiar with this. It’s not fun, but it’s not the end of the world. And for me, it’s a small price to pay for a cancer treatment scheme that’s doing the job.

Having low testosterone does have other ramifications. Some of them — the ones having to do with, um, well — I won’t that mention here. One other side effect is fatigue. I was not a high energy guy to begin with, so I am currently operating in low gear and in need of a lot of naps. But that’s OK. I always was fond of napping.

Let me close with a good word from medical missionary . I had already written most of this piece when I discovered that Dr. Loftus — who teaches and practices family medicine at a mission hospital in Kenya — had written this week at on testosterone replacement therapy (TRT). This therapy, he says, is not indicated for most guys, but its use seems to be part of a trend: some men seem to be concerned, for no reason, about their testosterone levels and are using TRT to medicate their self-doubts. “It’s unlikely,” Dr. Loftus says, “that testosterone helps men who don’t have a measurable testosterone deficiency.” He asks some good questions about our desires for health and vigor:

As men, do we want to be healthy and strong to use our strength to worship God and bless others? Or is our anxiety about testosterone levels part of a desire for power, control, and sexual potency? Is our vision of masculinity shaped primarily by advertisements and podcasts? Or are we seeking to be conformed to Jesus Christ’s tender compassion?

I am thankful for God’s design, including the wondrous duties performed in the body by testosterone. If you’re a guy, your t- levels are almost certainly what you need them to be. (Although you should talk to a doctor if you’re concerned.) Me? I’m a quart or two low, and I’m running hot! But it’s OK. The heat is sporadic, and the Lord of the body knows what He’s doing.

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Was everything created by God, or is the universe eternal? Or did it pop into existence out of nothing?

Well, as most of you know, I’m a Christian — a Bible guy — so my answer is… it was created! Surprise! But there are still a thousand questions.

Even if you’re OK with the “created” answer, there are still many things to debate.

Many of my Bible-believing friends will think I am wrong in aspects of this post.

And that’s OK. In fact, a major takeaway for believers ought to be: let’s be clear where the Bible is clear, and have latitude and grace where it’s not.

To my non-religious friends reading this (or folks “exploring” faith): I want to implore you to consider my proposal — in case you hold Christianity at arm’s length — or some far greater length! — and to refrain from judgments about the faith based on popular descriptions of biblical Christianity that are eccentric, or tendentious, or otherwise not required by Scripture. (Example: that the universe is only a few thousand years old. No Bible passage says or requires this.)

Humans being human

OK, so my proposal. My way of looking at it. I think it makes the most sense. I could be wrong. Of course. I’m human. All interpretations of Scripture could be wrong, because they are human reflections on the text.

(Note: Christians believe the Holy Spirit helps us to understand, but that doesn’t mean our interpretive conclusions are infallible. We Christians believe the text is infallible, since it’s a self-disclosure of God, through human agency; but our understandings of the text are fallible.)

OK. With the preliminaries, caveats and hemming-and-hawing out of the way, let’s get going.

The points of my proposal are these:

1. God made everything that exists.

2. He endowed us with certain faculties so that we would infer his existence.

3. The Bible does not address the age of the universe; it’s a modern question that the Bible writers had no interest in answering.

4. God’s endowments, despite our sins and imperfections, allow us to study creation and make scientific findings (including discoveries about the age of creation) which do not conflict with Scripture since the Bible is not a science book.

5. Christians should have no fear of science; it is the study of what God made. Non-Christians should not shun the Bible based on popular interpretations of Scripture that are debatable and not required by Scripture. (They may have other reasons to reject the Bible, but this shouldn’t be one of them.)

There you go.

Enough there to irritate people of all persuasions!

Now, if you have time and interest, I’d like to offer just a little more under each point, to give more shape to what I’m asserting. Each item is the subject of many books. I am offering just a criminally-short note on each point. (I’m tempted to say, “I’ve read the books so you don’t have to.” But of course, besides that being snotty, it’s not true. I’ve read many books, but only a fraction of what’s out there. Besides…you should read them! As many as possible!)

1. God made everything that exists.

A very small minority of people believe the universe has existed eternally, or that it “popped” into existence by chance with no intelligence behind it. “It’s eternal” was once popular among scientists — until the mid-20th century discovery of the cosmic background radiation, indicating that the universe has been expanding since its “Big Bang” beginning. Not eternal. A sudden beginning out of nothing. If the universe existed eternally, it arguably would not have needed a cause. But, the prevailing view today is: Big Bang. Therefore: it needs a cause. “Furthermore,” asks scientist and believing Christian Neil Shenvi, “if all time, space, matter and energy came into being at the Big Bang, then wouldn’t the cause of the Big Bang have to be immaterial, outside of time, and outside of nature?”1

Then there’s the astounding “fine-tuning” of the many physical forces and constants, all “coincidentally” set, like dials on a machine, so that there might be life. This is huge. The evidence is so stunning that non-religious cosmologists have come up with an idea to explain it all: the “multi-verse,” a multiplicity of universes. (Yes, there’s a whiff of desperation in this.) The idea is that we just happen to live in the one universe, out of the zillions of them, that is “fine-tuned” this way — the only snag being that there’s no evidence for the existence of lots of universes, so that, ironically, this is more of a faith proposition that Christianity is.2 Ponder that.

2. He endowed us with certain faculties so that we would infer his existence.

I’m taking a shortcut here: rather than presume I can plumb the depths of Locke, Hume, Kierkegaard, et al — you’ll need 500 pots of coffee if you plan to go there in any depth — let’s agree that our cognitive faculties “work.”

We are equipped to observe the world and discern many truths. Interestingly, Scripture attributes this to our being made “in God’s image,” and says we rightly infer his existence (“[God’s] invisible attributes…have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” — Romans 1:20); we sense that we are not the explanation of our own existence:

• we wonder why we’re here, how something could come into being from nothing, even why there is something rather than nothing

• we worry about death, and what’s on the other side of it

• we sense what I would call our “ontological contingency,” that we’re not ultimate, and that something else is. The “necessary being.” The Explanation of it all.

Einstein: “I’m not an atheist… We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books.”3 I’m not saying Einstein went so far as to embrace Christianity. No. But he was a million miles from “material reality is all there is.” I’ll have to stop there.

3. The Bible does not address the age of the universe; it’s a modern question that the Bible writers had no interest in answering.

My “young earth creationism” (YEC) friends, who are many, will be unhappy with me…but my “old earth creationism” (OEC) friends, who are….almost as many… will be OK with me. (Or not, if they think my particular explanation is off base.) Perfect!

Genesis 1 does not mention when God made it all, but that he did — that he is the only and true Maker, the One who authoritatively writes the human story. Genesis 1 is not a piece of observational journalism or a documentary. There are artistic and literary elements in chapter 1 that mark it out as different from the narratives that follow. “Exalted, semi-poetical language” — that what’s the late Edward J. Young, a conservative Hebrew scholar, called the opening chapter of Genesis.4 As Tim Keller points out (see footnote #4), there are elements of Moses’s writing in Genesis 1 that show he did not want to be read in a literalistic way: repeated refrains, the existence of light before Day 4, the existence of vegetation (Day 3) before there’s an atmosphere, and how the order of creative acts in Genesis 1 differs from the account in Genesis 2.

The YEC account of things treats Genesis 1 as though Moses were writing a Scientific American article. He was not. The curtain goes up, at the start of Scripture, in a dramatic, artistic way. A more straight-up narrative style begins in chapter two.

4. God’s endowments, despite our sins and imperfections, allow us to study creation and make scientific findings (including discoveries about the age of creation) which do not conflict with Scripture since the Bible is not a science book.

Though we are flawed and morally transgressive, we can learn true things about the world. Such as that it is very, very old. There is no biblical reason not to accept such findings.

YEC leaders (who say the earth is only a few thousand years old) sometimes say that we in the OEC camp have compromised God’s truth to win the approval of man. Reply: That’s nuts! OEC folks, like me, may accept today’s science — but to curry favor with the world? Um….don’t forget: we believe in the Virgin Birth, the Trinity, the miracles wrought by Jesus, and his resurrection from the dead — doctrines that we might want to drop if we’re trying to persuade the world that we’re not crazy! We believe the stuff of the ancient creeds. No, this is not an attempt to be popular.

Speaking of the creeds: The age of the universe is a thoroughly modern question; the “Apostles’ Creed” and the other ancient creeds affirm those key doctrinal points I just mentioned: Virgin Birth, Resurrection, etc. All of the “big ones,” affirmed across the centuries. What’s not in the creeds? Any mention of the age of the earth, 24-hour days in the opening scene of Genesis, any of that. At the very least, we can say that belief in a “young earth” is not a crucial, first-order belief. Some in the YEC camp assert that it is. That is biblically, and historically, incorrect.

Actually, we can say much more. YEC advocates say we who accept modern science have “gone liberal” — that we’ve bowed to the findings of unbelieving scientists, that is, that we allow a source of authority outside of Scripture to dictate our understanding of Scripture. But this claim is refuted by history.

The early, pre-modern Christian church leaders did not, generally, hold to what we would today call a “young earth” interpretation of Genesis 1. Of course, for most, the age of creation was not a question they thought about; discoveries pointing to the universe being ancient, on the order of millions or billions of years, did not emerge until the 18th century. But a number of early church leaders saw that Scripture gave signs of vast age, or indeterminate age, or allowed for such.

Augustine (4th and 5th centuries A.D.) and many others ancient scholars held varying views of the “days” of Genesis and the age of creation — based on features of the text itself, long before modern science arose. The idea that YEC belief is a kind of litmus test for Christian faithfulness is a late 20th-century idea.

“It is indeed an arduous and extremely difficult task for us to get through to what the writer meant with these six days, however concentrated our attention and lively our minds.” — Augustine of Hippo (354-430 A.D.)

Also: sometimes it’s smart — a virtue and not a vice — to let an outside-the-Bible authority adjust and improve our interpretations of Scripture! Remember the whole Galileo and Copernicus thing? Most people, a few centuries back, held that the earth was at the center of the universe. They thought the Bible taught that. But discoveries about God’s world demonstrated those interpretations were wrong: the earth orbits the sun. If we didn’t allow outside sources — like the findings of scientists, many of whom were Christians! — to help us reconsider our readings of Scripture, well, I guess we Bible-followers would all be geocentrists today rather than heliocentrists.

It wasn’t that Scripture was wrong — it was the interpretation of Scripture that needed an upgrade. Science helped with that.

5. Christians should have no fear of science; it is the study of what God made. Non-Christians should not shun the Bible based on popular interpretations of Scripture that are debatable and not required by Scripture. (They may have other reasons to reject the Bible, but this shouldn’t be one of them.)

Science emerged in a Christian atmosphere. Galileo and Copernicus and their buddies were Christians of one form or another. To do science, said Kepler (1571-1630), was to “think God’s thoughts after Him.” We can rejoice in the discoveries about our universe and marvel at how they reflect the glory of their Maker.

Remember that interpretations of Scripture that are popular today, like Young Earth Creationism, are just that: interpretations. Not equivalent to Scripture.

Because the science increasingly shows the YEC position is untenable — which some young-earthers now admit (“Recent creationists,” write two recent creationists, “should humbly agree that their view is, at the moment, implausible on purely scientific grounds”5) — we can gratefully follow the findings of science. The work of the scientist is, as Kepler so memorably said, is the work of thinking God’s thoughts after Him.

And finally, since those findings of science do show that the world is old, many YEC advocates have to assert that everything was made with an appearance of age: i.e., Adam appeared to be, say, a 30-ish man when he was a only few hours old, trees were made complete with rings in them that appear to show they were old when they were not, etc. It was created as a “mature creation,” they argue. (This is also known as the “Omphalos theory.”6)

But this doesn’t work.

The appearance of age argument means we observe history that didn’t actually happen — fictitious history. The many indicators of great age, from many fields — geology, astronomy, you name it — are illusions. Not real. This suggests, I’m sorry, that God is a deceiver. What you see isn’t real.

This idea vaporizes the whole project of science — it says we can’t trust what we observe. Creation is not giving us true information. This idea is also unfalsifiable — can’t be proven or disproven — and therefore fideistic7 (just asserted, beyond investigation). The universe, as Bertrand Russell argued, could be only five minutes old, complete with the memories in our heads making it seem old! And finally — and this is no small thing — the appearance of age argument is “an admission that the evidence is against the young earth view.”8 Everything really does look exceedingly old.

Note to non-Christians who are still with me: You may be dubious about the claims of Christianity — those remarkable, earth-shaking claims encapsulated in the ancient creeds, those assertions about sin and judgment, about the resurrection of Jesus and his offer of eternal life — but I implore you not to be deterred by the notion that the Bible requires you to reject the findings of science.

Summing up

So, Rob, are you pro-evolution, too? And what’s your favorite of the many Christian interpretations of Genesis? (By the way, go here for a PDF — a neat 35-page booklet called “Christian Interpretations of Genesis 1” by the esteemed evangelical scholar Vern Poythress, which covers the options well.)

For what it’s worth: I hold, tentatively, to what’s called the “Analogical Days” view of Genesis 1: it is non-committal about the length of days in Genesis 1 because it sees the whole first week as God’s “work days” which are analogous to human days. I won’t go into all the arguments here — you’re welcome — but the view is explained well in the Poythress booklet I just mentioned, and in the terrific book by Old Testament scholar C. John Collins.9 The Analogical Days view has been held by Christian scholars including Collins, Herman Bavinck, R. Kent Hughes, William Shedd, and noted Old Testament scholar Franz Delitzsch. Other “old earth” viewpoints have been held by many, including James Montgomery Boice (my first pastor as a believer), Charles Hodge, B.B. Warfield, Francis Schaeffer, and many more.

As for evolution, and the Christian take on it, i.e., “theistic evolution” — that notion God used, and oversaw, evolution as a mechanism for developing the world — beats me! I’ve always been taught that this is wrong, biblically speaking. I do not hold this view myself; I think it’s a challenge to square with Scripture, actually. But the modern questions we have about processes God may have used in creation are, sadly, not addressed in Scripture. I hesitate to utter a definitive “no” judgment on whether Scripture is compatible with evolution when I know that more impressive minds than mine — like C. S. Lewis, B. B. Warfield, John Stott, Tim Keller, Billy Graham, et al — were evidently open to this view. (There’s debate about the extent to which each person embraced this view, I realize.)

Long post, I know. But it’s short and tiny compared to the vast literature on this. I just wanted to put the view I hold into a short, easily-digestible capsule.

Look: if I’m judging my new Substack adventure correctly, this post will get hundreds, and maybe, if I’m lucky, a few thousand views. The number of people who will agree with me, from start to finish: oh, maybe, nine or ten!! Which is OK.

I could be wrong. As I said in the beginning — in the Beginning, ha! — let’s be clear where the Bible is clear, and have latitude and grace where it’s not.

P.S. How Important is this?

A lot of people think this is important. But not only is this not a litmus test for Christian faithfulness….it does NOT rank high among important doctrines at all.

MY OWN WIFE could not have told you — I don’t think — that I hold to the “Analogical Days” view of Genesis 1. Or even what that view is! (She would affirm “old earth,” i.e., positive about science, and not YEC, that much I know.) So yeah, I love this issue myself — Angela would say because I love to argue — but it’s not a top-level doctrine. Nothing to divide over.

(Whereas, the doctrine of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead means everything. There is no Christian faith without it. And it secures my peace and happiness, and my hope for the next world. END.)

Tell me you're not averse to verse.  
Isn't it perverse 
      to be adverse to verse?  
I can't imagine anything verse.  

So, I would like to regale you on this happy Tuesday with some lowbrow and possibly obnoxious thoughts on humanness, especially as it relates to cancer, general decay of the body, and so on. Thoughts rough-hewn and awkward and punctuated with gratitude. Much gratitude.

Thoughts as diverse as the multiverse. In free-verse, and its converse: prose.

If the cancer is 
      at bay 
And the cares gone like ships 
      at sea 

      Well then....
 
I'll have more Cabernet 
and see what's on TV  

Now, a word about decay. I know that sounds inviting.

Bodily decay. Things internal are crunchy and infernal, when you get to be 68. Crunchy bones in the back.

The steroid epidural went in without a hitch. Just a pinch. It’s taking the edge off.

God knows what I need, what He determines for me, and doesn’t need my consultations and advice — even though, at one and the same time, He bids me ask him to meet my need! To implore Him, to keep knocking, ad hoccing, like a kid with a stocking, at Christmas, wanting it filled. He wants me to ask, and He is good.

The St. Jude’s ad is on again. Children, their hair missing, and parents, their eyes watering and voices quavering, their fear balanced with unease, which is not much of a balance.

Those ads. I wipe away a tear almost every time.

One of the greatest things — the very greatest things — about the future New Earth (of “new heaven and new earth” fame in the book of Revelation) is that there will be

no

more

sick children.

But:  though sadness abounds today, and the spine has stenosis
pretty bad actually 
And there's the "c" word again, 
momentarily held in check by amazing drugs, and I am reduced 
(am I reduced?)
to using our old friend Marie's cane (she doesn't need one where she is)
yet...
I am full of gratitude.  

If I understand Scripture right, I am not owed a long life, or pleasant, or successful,
or with tables full of good food, or other kinds of plenty or superabundance, or
a trouble-free existence, or crime-free or drugs-free or predicament-free, 
or any kind of peace and wholeness, much less
gratification or bliss -- 

None of that am I owed, sinner that I am, 

Yet -- glory!  And hallelujah!  
The God who justifies the wayward and the rebellious
and calls them His children
has inundated me with blessings, so that this flood leaves me gasping for air 
and flinging droplets off me like a wet dog, 

so happy am I, so stunned by His grace, just standing here like an idiot with a cane, 
blubbering, and pointing to 
Jesus, as it were,
to say Thank you. 

May all of my age and bone-decay and stumbles and even my cancer
somehow redound to His glory. 

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There was so much for an evangelical soul like me to like — to love even — about Rededicate 250, the big gathering Sunday on the National Mall.

I will tell you about those things in a second. But for the sake of my readers who

1. don’t care much about intra-evangelical differences, or

2. are passionate evangelicals like me and don’t understand why I would not give the event unqualified support,

I will try to draw some lines. I hope this makes sense.

Jesus = good

I did not attend the event, but I tuned in a few times. I clicked over at one point to see Christian music superstar Chris Tomlin singing about Jesus. I unequivocally endorse singing about Jesus.

I heard Jesus preached from the stage, and the Bible read. I unequivocally endorse Jesus-preaching and Bible reading. We have the right to free speech, and to the free exercise of our faith, and a grand history of the Gospel of Christ being preached openly.

Listen: I even endorse the preaching of the Gospel from people who may have political motivations! Why? Because the apostle Paul, writer of much of the New Testament, was so convinced of the inherent power of the Gospel to save people — since, you know, it’s a message from God — that he didn’t care if some people preached it with lousy motives! The message itself has power. “The important thing,” he said, “is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached.”

Just put it out there. Anybody! Tell ‘em Jesus saves! Just say his Name. God will worry about the outcomes.

Fused with — and confused with — party politics

This may seem to contradict my last point — you can preach Jesus out of mixed motives and it’s OK — but please: don’t fuse the Gospel with a particular party’s politics. Be glad, as Paul was, when Christ is preached publicly! Yes. Terrific. But keep the politics a separate thing. After all, I know Christians who are Democrats. Don’t you? Why make them feel excluded from the festivities? How are they to enjoy a celebration of Jesus…when it’s blended with a celebration of a GOP president and GOP policies?

(Maybe you, O Christian reader, couldn’t think of any fellow Christians who are Democrats. Just be aware that these people exist. Most black Christians are Democrats, for instance. And I know of quite a number of white evangelicals who voted Democrat in the last election, even though they are registered Republicans. You may think: but abortion! I understand. I’ll save a full discussion of this for another time, but consider this: Trump has turned the GOP into being effectively pro-choice; abortion numbers are up since Roe was overturned; and you should really should read this article by the late Michael Gerson, a conservative pro-lifer, to hear a careful rationale for when a vote against a Republican is the better choice, even if you’re pro-life.)

(More on Gerson later.)

The Rededicate 250 event was a worship service married to a Christian Nationalism rally. The worship part I dig. The second part is unbiblical idolatry.

I have written in some detail about Christian Nationalism here. Evangelicals who are patriotic and think America is the greatest nation the world has ever seen… are not Christian Nationalists. (Not necessarily.) I am a patriot myself. Christian Nationalists conflate faith with Republican politics, leading to confusion about what the Gospel is, and to a dangerous syncretism. Christians’ allegiance is to Jesus and his kingdom, which is “not of this world” (John 18:36).

To be clear: you can have that allegiance — faith and trust in Jesus for the forgiveness of your sins forever — without adhering to GOP political positions, or even knowing what they are.

I think pundit Andrew Egger has it about right:

Christianity and America have always stood both in harmony and in tension: The faith is in the country’s bones, yet the country has chosen from the beginning to hold faith and politics forcibly apart.

And, as far as I can tell, what Christian Nationalists want — privileging and promoting Christianity — amounts to an “establishment” of religion.

I like Egger’s suggestion, too: make these events like the National Prayer Breakfast, bipartisan in flavor and participation. That way politics is not front and center. Jesus is.

In-the-family concerns

From a within-evangelicalism perspective, I, and many Bible-believing friends of mine, would also have reason to keep events like Rededicate 250 at arm’s length.

Not only do the organizers push a MAGA-flavored version of evangelicalism as the favored way to believe, but this event, and ones like it, are driven, in large part, by strains of evangelicalism that are biblically problematic.

Behind the event is a growing movement of charismatic/Pentecostal leaders who make up the NAR — the New Apostolic Reformation. I have many friends and relatives who are charismatic (i.e., a more experience-oriented faith, usually including speaking in tongues and the possibility that God speaks directly to us, outside of Scripture) and you know what? Though my experience is different, I love those folks and their commitment to Jesus. I admire them for their passion.

But the NAR is a concern. , on this platform, has a brief analysis. The NAR, in short, is a movement that features a restoration of the church offices of apostles and prophets and their accompanying signs and wonders, plus an emphasis on Christians “taking dominion” in fulfillment of a prophecy called The Seven Mountain Mandate — that is, in the seven spheres of society (religion, family, government, business, education, media, and arts and entertainment). Paula White-Cain, President Trump’s spiritual adviser and head of the White House Faith Office, is associated with NAR leaders. NAR is influential, apparently, at the White House.

Space doesn’t permit a longer treatment of NAR here. Let me give you a summary comment by Taylor: “When Donald Trump entered presidential politics, [NAR leaders] were among the first to embrace his candidacy, offering prophecies and biblical reframings that cast Trump as a secular messiah anointed by God” who would “put conservative Christians in power over America.”

Nowhere does Scripture call upon Christians to take power in secular society. They are to be solid citizens in the lands where they live, living “quiet lives” (1 Timothy 2:2; 1 Thessalonians 4:11), “good lives” that are in submission “to every human authority” (1 Peter 2:12-13), full of “good deeds” that prompt non-believers to marvel and glorify God (Matthew 5:16).

Not to take dominion.

A final note

I said I’d come back to the late Michael Gerson. In the article I mentioned above, he said Christians in the abortion debate carry an additional burden:

They need to act in ways that do not undermine the reputation of the Gospel. This commitment needs to figure heavily in the weighing of social outcomes.

That applies not just to pro-life advocacy. Whenever believers are on a big public stage, like the one on the National Mall on Sunday, they need to realize that all they do and say reflects on Jesus and his Gospel. We give people exactly the wrong message when we take the Good News of Jesus and intertwine it with partisan politics.

How is so much of what we thought we knew… backwards or upside down now? Are we getting numb to the weirdness? To wit:

Terminate me

How is it that we are proceeding, full speed ahead, with AI models that might wipe us out? Shouldn’t we…maybe….put our heads together to prevent that?1 What are the chances AI will cleanse the earth of humans? Some experts say 10%, some even 20% or 25%.

Go ahead, Skynet! We’ll let you run things. What could go wrong?

Oh, and until the end comes, you can have our jobs.

Deaths — by the hundreds of thousands. Forget. Shrug.

Talk about numb. The post-mortems (so to speak) on the administration’s “DOGE” budget-chopping show the cuts to USAID have led to — get this — “hundreds of thousands of deaths” from infectious diseases and malnutrition in far-flung places.

Hundreds of thousands of dead people. A University of Minnesota report put the number at 762,000 as of January. “Including more than 500,000 children.”

Let that sink in. A half-million kids dead, thanks to the USAID/DOGE cuts.

It’s a headline for a few days. And then we forget.

If you want your heart ripped out further, see today:

Real Patriotism with Terry Moran

DOGE's Death Toll

Among the many questions that divide Americans so deeply right now is one that pains me to pose…

Read more

3 months ago · 414 likes · 75 comments · Terry Moran

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Funny “ceasefires”

How is it that today’s “ceasefires” feature so much firing? We shoot at them. Boom, they bomb a base or two of ours. “There seems to be a lot of firing for something that’s a ceasefire,” said CNN analyst Peter Bergen the other day. I’ll say.

We crushed Iran. We won. But also, they are shooting and making demands.

The commentator Fareed Zakaria asks a great question: “Why is the most powerful country on the planet unable to get its way with a much smaller, weaker country…?”

The president says we “totally defeated” Iran. But Iran has not buckled, and is making various demands and planning to control the Strait of Hormuz.

Some experts say the war is now "a checkmate." Mind you, I hope we win! But it’s not at all clear that we have beaten them into submission. You gotta have some submitting.

Siding with Putin

Russia has been Enemy #1 since I was a Cold War kid. But somehow — someone please explain it to me — the U.S., under Trump, has appeared, time and again, to be favoring Putin over a democratic ally that was “the victim of the worst cross-border aggression and war crimes since World War II” (Joseph Bosco)

An ally.

Why? Heck, Trump once blamed Zelensky for starting the war. How is this OK?

Oh, and Russia is helping Iran with intel to help kill Americans.

That rumbling sound you may hear? Reagan, et al, turning over in their graves.

(Also, Helsinki. So outrageous, you only need that one word, Helsinki. Shameful.)

Warring for Jesus

Listen, as a Christian, I’m glad that Pete Hegseth, the SecDef, is also a Jesus follower. But. He prays in the name of the Prince of Peace even as he explains our “no quarter, no mercy” war aims. But if many Christians, from the pope on down to me, have a different thought about the war, how does Hegseth know he’s in the right — that Jesus approves this war?

Pundit Frank Bruni: “He brandishes assertions about God’s will with the exaggerated brio of an electronics merchant pressing fliers on pedestrians passing by his new megastore: Have I got a holy war for you.” Pray for success in the war? Sure! God wants his children to ask for help. But don’t presume you are doing the Lord’s will. Even ancient Israel — a theocracy; we are not! — sometimes presumed in that way, and lost those battles. (See, for instance, 1 Samuel 4:1-11.)

Biological males in women’s sports

OK, I am keenly aware that some of my readers — some of my friends — think I have “gone liberal.” I have not. I am all over the place. Conservative on some things. Not-so-conservative on others. (You wanna say I’m mixed up? Go ahead.) How about transgender athletes and sports?

Most Americans, by far, think it defies good sense to let transgender women participate in women’s sports. About 75% see it that way. In some surveys, the number is above 80%. Biological males and women are made differently. Treat transgender women with dignity and respect? Of course. But we need to make distinctions, in the name of fairness and good sense. I’m with the majority.

Just the vax, ma’am: saving millions, but now eyed with suspicion

One of the greatest of human achievements: vaccines. In the last 50 years, they have saved more than 150 million lives and reduced or eliminated a bunch of diseases.

And now they’re increasingly opposed. I understand parents being cautious. Talk it over with your doctor. Just keep in mind: the impact of vaccines has been vast, and salutary, and wonderful.

Here’s an interesting article — on one of our federal government websites — on “Why People Fear Vaccines and Mistrust Science."

Pastor preaches John 3:16 near hospital. Gets prosecuted.

Now, to further buttress my conservative (and Christian) bona fides, I offer you this, via Fox News: a retired pastor in Northern Ireland was arrested and convicted of preaching a sermon on John 3:16 near a hospital where abortions are apparently performed. He was, police say, inside a “buffer zone” where speech is restricted (a prohibition on “influencing” or “preventing or impeding access”). Fair enough, I guess. That’s their law. But it raises concerns, at least to me.

We in the USA currently have avid free-speech-restrictors on both ends of the political spectrum, but I know that abortion-rights folks are particularly keen to shut down any Bible talk near women pursuing abortions. There are “free access” laws here, too, and preachers (and other normal Christian Bible-believers) should observe where the lines are drawn. But, slopes being slippery, I think it’s reasonable to worry about more generalized restrictions on preaching the Gospel. Heck, in the Northern Ireland case, the elderly preacher didn’t even mention abortion. Just salvation.

Mail-in ballots: the GOP says they’re great. Or horrible. Or something.

Just today, as I write this, I hear President Trump speaking (on the TV behind me) about voting by mail: “I call it mail-in cheating.” He wants it stopped. (He also just lied again with his claim that we’re the only country that allows mail-in voting.)

At the same time, I see ads all the time from….. the Pennsylvania Republican Party, in which the party says: “Vote mail-in!” The party’s website lists mail-in voting as number one among the three “safe, easy” ways to vote.

My head is exploding.

(Research shows mail-in voting is very safe.)

If AI doesn’t get us, the aliens will?

Where are the aliens? You’ve heard about those newly released files about UFO sightings. If they’ve been prowling and lurking for some time now, why don’t they show their faces (if they have faces…), or take over, or teach us to find peace in Iran and Ukraine? Maybe they can fight it out with AI and leave us alone.

With possibly billions of planets like ours out there, and billions of years to have gotten their spaceships gassed up, aliens should have been here by now. But there’s no evidence it ever happened. This is, as you know, a conundrum known as Fermi's paradox. Or…maybe the best guess is the Dark Forest theory: they’re all hiding.

And so it goes………..

It’s topsy-turvier today than I ever remember it. I could also write about how the GOP used to be “pro-life” but no longer is; or the sanitization of January 6th as a good and patriotic thing rather than being a violent effort to overturn an American election, the perpetrators of which have been pardoned by the president who said he was cheated out of winning2; etc., etc. But much ink has been spilled on those things already.

I have been thinking about a cheery opening for this piece….and there it is!

I am not on the verge of death — as far as I know. I am in pain, but not from my cancer — as far as I know. It’s my butt! It hurts like mad — butt and thighs — because, after several years of bliss in my rear end, I am enjoying a fiery revival of nerve pain. Sciatica 2 — The Resurgence. (Searing reviews so far.)

Knives in my flesh. Fire. Blowtorch. Lower back. And both legs.

My PT, Steve, smiled today when I told him it was like there were twenty tiny elves, or hobbits, underneath me, thrusting their tiny swords into my thighs. I guess he liked the imagery. (Maybe it should be: Sciatica 2: Cauldron of Fire.)

Anyway, this is almost comical to me: here I am with a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis, which is Kind of a Big Deal — and the Sovereign Lord decides I could use a posterior knife-and-blowtorch attack. I guess He figures I need a distraction from the other stuff.

But on to Death!

As I wrote recently — my most-read post by far…

… it’s wise to keep our final destination fixed in our minds. To think about how to be ready. I have admired the gracious and brave and even joyful way former Senator Ben Sasse is handling the approach of death. (See the link above. Or just Google Ben Sasse cancer.)

So, yeah, I thought some death talk might be appropriate after my last essay.

*****

I have enjoyed Woody Allen’s musings on death for years.

He’s against it.

And haunted by it. “I am not afraid of death,” he said. “I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

Life, he said, is a “meaningless little flicker.” It’s random and tragic. Great. Sad.

Way back in ‘77, Allen was a practicing nihilist. But, of course, a humorous nihilist. A favorite quote:

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.

I don’t know if he still sees life (and death) that way. He doesn’t answer my calls.

(Kidding.)

*****
Allen’s grim analysis actually does sound a bit like the Bible — at least the book of Ecclesiastes. Chapter 9:

The living at least know they will die, but the dead know nothing. They have no further reward, nor are they remembered. Whatever they did in their lifetime—loving, hating, envying—is all long gone. (Ecclesiastes 9:5-6 NLT)

Well, that’s cheery. Fortunately, that bit of hard reality is not all the Bible says about death. Not by a long shot.

*****

That Bible quote sounds rather like what the late Christopher Hitchens might say.

The brilliantly acerbic Brit was a powerful wordsmith; I loved his stuff. You should read him. He was a devout atheist, full of fire and wit in his debates with Christian intellectuals. He died of cancer in 2011. The year before he died, he was asked by a debater about his health.

Well, I’m dying, since you asked. So are you, but I’m doing it faster and in more rich and fecund detail.

I had to pick myself up off the floor. The man was a genius. Whether his after-death-life is going well, I can’t say. I can only hope to have my wits about me in this way in my final days.

*****

Actually, Ben Sasse is equally sharp and having fun — can I say that? Can you have fun with your cancer? Um. Well, Sasse told the Times interviewer, Ross Douthat, that the real advances in treating (curing?) cancer will come years after Sasse is gone.

Douthat: OK. So, you’re not worried about a scenario where you do all these interviews and then you have to come back on this podcast in five years and explain why you’re still alive?

Sasse: Oops, I lived. April Fools! [Laughs.]

I think my kids might have that fear, frankly.

God bless Ben Sasse.

*****

I’ll close with this. (It’s good.)

Some years ago, Harvard Law Professor William Stuntz died of colon cancer. The New York Times said he was “one of the most influential legal scholars of the past generation.” Stuntz was a believer, convinced he would go to Christ at death.

I want to quote Stuntz a few times here. Listen. (From a couple of different sources).

“It's a real mercy to know that I will die soon. Many people die suddenly, wholly unexpectedly, without any opportunity to prepare.”

[How has cancer, and its pain, changed you for the better?]

“I have become less arrogant, less confident of my own judgments and insights, and better at listening to others. As a result, I've become a better husband and father than I was. I love better than I did before. I am certain that's true in my family, and maybe even generally beyond my family. I think I am actually better at my job.”

“I would have thought that the knowledge that I am very likely in my last year of life would lead me to dwell on the dying. A certain amount of that is unavoidable. Death hangs in the air. It's as though I am living with an hourglass right in front of my face. You cannot look away from it. You cannot close your eyes to it. It's always there. But actually I think it has led me to dwell more on the living. It sounds really trite to say that things that seemed like very small matters seem really precious to me now. It's no novel thought -- but, in my case, it really is true…. I have always enjoyed my wife's cooking, and always enjoyed eating good food at a restaurant. But not the way I enjoy it now. I just love eating something good at a time when it really appeals to me.”

[Rob: Yes! I have been finding that small things are precious — and that food is conspicuously delicious! ]

[ Finally from Stuntz: ]

“The worst day in human history was the day of Christ’s crucifixion, which saw the worst possible punishment inflicted on the One who, in all history, least deserved it. Two more sunrises and the Son rose: the best day in human history, the day God turned death itself against itself—and because he did so, each one of us has the opportunity to share in death’s defeat.”

*****

End of extra post for this week. Think about death, and how to prepare. You can’t go wrong with Christ. See ya.

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Alert: Spiritual Stuff. Look, I get it. Many of you who are not religious will be clicking off at this point. But please stay, at least for a little bit.

Even if you’re the super-dubious type (let’s call you a “super doob” — a legit and noble category), it would be wise to give this a few moments’ thought, if only to comprehend how our friends and co-workers think about life. Why do I say that? Well, a Pew study shows two out of every three of us believe in the existence of heaven.1

That is: while a non-trivial percentage of my readers don’t think heaven is real… Pew shows us that twice as many think the non-heaven-believers are mistaken.

Mistaken about, well… a life or death subject. A big subject. A non-trivial subject. (Well, non-trivial if we consider that the subject of what happens after we expire might be a tad important.)

So, let’s go there for a minute or two. I’m sure you would agree that we should not simply dismiss our friends and neighbors as dumber than us, or more gullible.

(Note: there is every possibility, even a likelihood, that I myself am dumber than you! I grant that. I am a dues-paying member of the League of Average Minds. But it gives me some assurance to know that many believers in unseen realities — the big metaphysical stuff, like God, heaven and such — have been, and are, people of ginormous brain power. See: Newton, Pascal, Chesterton, Lewis — the Old Guys. And: present day brainiacs like genome genius Francis Collins, philosopher Alvin Plantinga, and historian Molly Worthen.2 Believers all. )

What is heaven, and where? Bonus question: why do Christians think that heaven, ultimately, is NOT a place of floating, disembodied people?

How can I do this concisely, without leaving you spectacularly unsatisfied? After all, libraries and Internets and such are full to the brim with writings on the Big Questions. It’s all deep and vast. So: I’ll shoot for brief, a skimming-the-surface approach, and we’ll see how we do.

First: People value what’s “beyond”

It’s reasonable to believe in transcendent things — things beyond the physical, material world. I say that because most people I know — and most people in that Pew survey3 — oppose the reductionist idea that the world is only what is physical. They’re saying, we don’t want our world reduced that way! There’s more to life.

It turns out that people look at truth, meaning and love, at the brute fact of existence and of morals and of mathematical truths and gratuitous beauty, and they say — a solid majority says — “Nope! Those wonderful invisible things are not useful fictions. They are real, and they make life meaningful.” (Well, they say something like that. Or they think it.) Clearly: some of the most valuable things in life are invisible, if somewhat mysterious, and make life sweet and grand; that you can’t detect them through the senses doesn’t make them any less real than rocks and flowers. Let’s file heaven in that category, to start with. Not implausible at all.

Second: Making our experience make sense

I’ll get to the Bible on heaven in a minute. But first, note that even if we didn’t have the Bible, it would make a lot of sense to infer an afterlife. If it’s plausible to infer the existence of God or a universal spirit or Mind from the created order — and a large majority do4 — it’s reasonable to infer heaven as the abode of God.

More than that, we have deep longings for things that aren’t always attainable in this life, such as plenary justice, complete satisfaction, and joy.5 Having desires doesn’t guarantee that the things desired exist, of course. But they are pointers. As C.S. Lewis argued, hunger might not prove that you have food available, but it surely points to the existence of food.

Lewis also famously said:

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.6 (Emphasis mine)

Then we have the interesting matter of souls or minds — the immaterial part of us. There is an immaterial part, as we all know; Very Smart People have struggled to account for the origin and workings of it, vis-a-vis the brain. Our sense of our inner life, our self-consciousness, our first-person experiences, etc., suggest our inner selves exist, distinct from our bodies. This is a significant observation on the road to heaven.

It would get way too long here to talk about dualism (that there are two co-existent realities, material and immaterial) versus monism (as the word implies, all is one substance or thing — nothing but physical matter, with no realm or “space” for the existence of God, souls, etc.). Suffice it to say that there are many strong arguments for the existence of souls/minds as distinct from our bodies7, and those dovetail well with our intuitions about these things. We are not merely physical entities, with “souls” just being mysterious emanations, or byproducts, of physical brain events (a view sometimes called epiphenominalism). Again, no time now for — nor am I equipped to give! — the philosophical arguments for that last statement. But just as most of our friends and neighbors are happy to infer, and even experience, God… so most, I think, would resonate with dualism: that our souls/minds are real and distinct aspects of us.

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All that to say: the existence of souls/minds (not to mention the existence of transcendent values, morality, numbers, etc.) opens the door nice and wide for us to plausibly infer a happy afterlife, where all is made right, justice is perfectly and finally served, and all the joys and hopes we’ve ever had are fulfilled.

(A professor of mine, for what it’s worth, posited that heaven exists not “above” us but in, or as, another dimension. Some current thinking about dimensions is….weird.8 )

Third: Of course the Bible talks about it

Super short: I was trying to come at the subject of heaven as something that it’s reasonable to deduce totally apart from the Bible. But I should say a word about the biblical revelation.

Heaven is pictured as the place where God dwells (“Heaven is my throne,” Isaiah 66:1). Jesus said we should pray, “Our Father in heaven.” Jesus, after his resurrection, ascended into “heaven.” It’s a place. Maybe that other dimension….

“Heaven” is mentioned hundreds of times in Scripture. It’s where believing Christians go when they die (2 Corinthians 5:8; Philippians 1:21-23, for instance). Long story short: we are “present with the Lord” after death, though our bodies go into the ground. That body/soul distinction.

Here is where I attend to my “bonus question”: are believers, for all eternity, just disembodied souls? Sometimes, in art and literature, we get the impression that in eternity we are just spirits with (somehow) white robes on and playing harps. But the Bible teaches Jesus will come again and remake the world. Our post-death disembodied state in heaven is temporary: when Jesus returns, the cataclysms of that moment (see 2 Peter 3:10!) will include bodily resurrections and the fashioning of a “new earth” for resurrected folks to dwell in, with God (see: 1 Corinthians 15:49-52 and Revelation 21).

So, nope: no floating, harp-playing souls. Eternity, in the biblical conception, is about us in new, non-corrupted, non-decaying bodies…on a glorious new earth. Not bad. Each day I spend in this old, crumbling body makes me long for that new one.

Finally: clarity on the biblical notion of how to get there

I’m a Christian, as you regular readers know. Some of you will not accept the Christian view of heaven, and how to be qualified to be admitted there, and that’s okay. But it’s good to be clear on what that view is. Briefly:

Popular though it may be to say everyone, at death, goes to heaven, the Bible speaks of our needing forgiveness of our sins so that we can be in God’s presence — in heaven. How do we find that forgiveness? Through personal faith (trust) in Jesus Christ. God the Father has his perfect justice satisfied by the death of Christ to “atone” for our sins so that we can be fully pardoned — like convicts who get their sentences overturned. We believe. We trust that this is true. Result? The promise of a happy eternity with God. “Whoever believes in the Son” — i.e., Jesus — “has eternal life” (John 3:36).

I could say more.9

See that footnote #9 I just put there? Take a look at that.

Another way the Bible talks about all this is speak of what God does to make us fit and ready for heaven. He “qualifies” the believer. “…giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints [i.e., believers] in light” (Colossians 1:12). Other actions God takes:

He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. (Colossians 1:13-14)

Pretty fascinating, these three verbs describing God’s actions: qualified, delivered, transferred. To get us to forgiveness. To grant us pardon. To get us to heaven.

Hope that helps. One dumb and feeble Christian’s understanding of heaven, and how to get there.

Agree with what you will; disregard the rest.

Herewith, bold truth claims and pithy sayings. (With PLENTY of pith to go around!)

Wife

My wife, Angela, is better than your wife.

Kids

My children — Jim, Elizabeth and Tet — and their wonderful spouses — Kelly, Trong and Dan — are among the most highly-ranked kids in the world, according to kid-ranking authorities. (Although I haven’t seen the new rankings yet.)

Madmen

If your hotel is having an event, don’t invite the President of the United States. Such events draw crazy people. The Washington Hilton, where a gunman tried to charge that ballroom, is the same place where President Reagan was shot 45 years ago. (My experience of which…I wrote about recently.) Reminds me of an amusing Bible passage, in which a pagan king observes King David feigning insanity: “Am I so short of madmen that you have to bring this fellow here?” Our own country seems to have no shortage of madmen.

Tucker

We’ve been knee-deep in political weirdness for a while, but it’s getting deeper and weirder. Tucker Carlson now says “sorry” about supporting Donald Trump! Apparently the Iran war is a bridge too far. “I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people, and it was not intentional.” But the conservative pundit spies some tactical opportunizing at work. (My word, not Matt’s.)

Mysterious

As an evangelical, I have to admit that I still find evangelical support for Trump to be perfectly mysterious. I mean, think of it: a list of sex-crime accusers; alleged hush money; grab ‘em by the you-know-what; found liable for sexual abuse; recent Trump-as-Jesus blasphemy. The contempt for Christianity just multiplies. On the other hand, some people I know contemptuously revile people like my Christian friends who voted for Trump; I do not. I love them. We make different judgments. Do they regret their votes? I don’t know. Again, different judgments. Have I done things I regretted later? You bet.

Gandalf!

In The Lord of the Rings, the hobbit Sam wakes up, surprised that he’s alive after the great quest to destroy the One Ring. He is also surprised to see Gandalf the wizard is also alive. Gandalf asks Sam how he feels. Sam, stunned, and “between bewilderment and great joy,” asks: “Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?” Gandalf says, “a great shadow has departed,” and laughs — a sound that “fell upon [Sam’s] ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known.”

And then, amid joyful tears, Sam says, “I feel like spring after winter, and sun on the leaves; and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I have ever heard!”

A day like that — a feeling like that — lies ahead. The book of Revelation promises a new heaven and new earth. John the Revelator hears a voice coming from God’s throne: “Behold, I am making all things new” (21:5). Imagine.

Rationale

From the long-time conservative political observer, :

In the media, I see bright, patriotic people making cases for the Iran war, saying what our goals are, or should be, and how they might be achieved. My problem is: I never hear any of this from Trump, Hegseth, or anyone else actually in charge. It’s all bluster, bravado, and bunk. Do you know what I mean?

And, um, the Iranian regime we have decimated…may not be decimated. President Trump says the war has achieved “regime change.” The bad guys are wiped out, and the replacements are more “reasonable.” But Farnaz Fassihi interviewed two dozen people in Iran for the New York Times, and the reality seems to be different:

In reality, the Islamic republic has not been toppled. Power is now in the hands of an entrenched, hard-line military, and the broad influence of the clerics is waning.
(The Times, 4-23-26)

Prayer

Prayed Scottish theologian John Baillie:

Holy God, to whose service I long ago dedicated my soul and life, I grieve and lament before Thee that I am still so prone to sin and so little inclined to obedience:

So much attached to the pleasures of sense, so negligent of things spiritual…

So greedy for present delight, so indifferent to lasting blessedness…

So brisk in the service of self, so slack in the service of others…

So eager to find fault, so resentful of being found fault with…

O merciful God, grant me again Thy forgiveness.

Amen.

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Some of the best parts of my past are under the ping-pong table. In dusty old boxes.

The older parts especially. The ancient photos. Naturally, much of our recent history is stored in invisible places. In pixels and clouds or something.

I’ll get to my grandmother in a second. And the cotton mills. And… a slave.

First, a note: I’m 68. I’m feeling good and pressing on — despite my adventures in oncology, as I wrote about last week. But as The End starts to loom a little larger on the horizon, I find myself rummaging in those boxes.

(Interruption: I say The End is on the horizon. Actually, I’m hoping it stays way out there in the distance, only appearing to approach but not actually getting any closer, like the running knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail…

Interruption #2: But of course I hope that in the end, The End does not suddenly arrive, as the running Sir Lancelot does in the video clip.)

Back to the boxes.

Rummaging.

Out, to the top of the ping-pong table, come photos by the hundreds. Color. Black-and-white. Life, frozen in sepia tones, evoking smiles, wonder and tears.

Arlen Specter. Huh?

Suddenly I’m reinhabiting scenes of drama and comedy. Revisiting vaguely familiar locales, squinting at vaguely familiar faces. Who’s that? Why is my father on stage, in a white suit, portraying… Arlen Specter?

Yep. 1967. My dad — then on WIP radio in Philadelphia — sang in a satirical stage show, portraying then-Philly mayoral candidate — and later U.S. Senator — Arlen Specter. For some reason. I never knew about this until I found the photo in one of those boxes.

The pirate

Oh, and real quick: Dad — before his radio career took flight in Philly and later, at WCBS Newsradio in New York — was a television pirate:

He was “Captain RC” — Royal Crown Cola sponsored the kids’ show — on WSPA-TV in Spartanburg, SC. His show came on after “Winky Dink and You.”

****

Marrying young, cotton mills, and dirt

Back to my grandmother. I never knew Ellie (Morgan) Waldrop. She died at age 36. Her marriage license — found in one of those boxes — says she was 15 when she married Clarence Waldrop:

But another record I found says she was actually 14 years and 11 months old. Oh my.

She and Clarence worked in cotton mills in upstate South Carolina. Dirt poor. Dirt floors… in their tiny shack of a house. My mother says they ate lots of beans.

My Mom’s notes emerge from a box. Childhood. A Tobacco Road childhood, among other families that worked in the mills and lived in “mill houses.” So, so poor. She and the mill kids were called “lint-heads.” Once, she wrote, Daddy managed to get a car. You had to crank it up to make it go. One day he cranked, got it started… and didn’t get into the car in time, “and we saw him chasing it into the peach orchard.”

One time, my Mom’s mom, Ellie, was pregnant. My mother — little Ruby Mae Waldrop — didn’t know the word “pregnant.” She told her friends that her mother was “percolating.” Everyone laughed.

One time, bloody sheets in the bathroom. Her little sister had been born. It was a hardscrabble life.

*****

Deadly flu and a relative who bought a man

On my father’s side: His mother, Bessie, hailed from Charleston, S.C. She married young, too — though not as young as my other grandma did. Bessie’s first husband died in the great flu pandemic of 1918. She and two little ones took a train upstate, to Greenville. Her sisters lived there, including “David.” She had a sister named David.

In Greenville, a relation told her to go back to Charleston because so many in the upstate area were dying of the flu. But, according to a record I found in one of those boxes, Bessie replied: “Everybody’s dying in Charleston, too. I might as well stay.”

Stay, she did. She married Jim Vaughn, my grandfather. He died before I was born.

The story of Jim and Bessie — we called her “Mama,” with the accent on the first syllable — it’s a fascinating tale. It’s a crime, I guess, for me to start it and not do it justice. Maybe more another time. But here’s a bit of it.

On Bessie’s side, a ways back, her grandfather went to Washington for a visit and saw the half-built Washington monument in 1857.

If I have done the advanced math and genealogy right, that was my great-great-grandfather, Robert, who saw the half-done monument.

Now the unfortunate part of the story. Robert’s son, Philip, joined the Confederate army in 1862. And, according to family records, this Philip — my grandmother Mama’s uncle — had purchased, in 1859, a piece of land — and a man. A note I have says he acquired a man named “Richard.” It’s a stunning note to read. This is my family, after all.

Philip died in 1863. A note, by my father I think, says Philip died of Civil War injuries. Or not. A different note says the cause of Philip’s death was “brain fever.” Maybe one caused the other. Who knows?

As for Richard…I know nothing about what happened to him.

*****

So, to tie some loose threads together, Philip, the slave-owner, died during the Civil War, decades before his niece, my grandmother Bessie (Mama), was born.

And I should note: Mama and Jim Vaughn, my grandparents, might as well have lived a hundred years after Philip, because they were known for their kindness to people of color. My Dad told me that Mama had no time for people mistreating, or thinking ill, of Black people. She provided food and other help to some of the African-Americans who lived nearby in Spartanburg, S.C. I would have loved to get her opinion on her uncle Philip and on the treatment of Black people in South Carolina in the generations prior. Mama died in 1988, long before I heard the story of “Richard.” I think I would have been proud of Mama’s more enlightened view of people, considering that they raised a family in the 1920s and ‘30s in the South.

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*****

What to make of all this? It’s fascinating — and strange and poignant and sobering. I’m sure your past is all those things, too. Rummage away, and see what you find.

I once told my Mom about a Bible verse I found impactful — a comment by King David, about his family. Mom was so struck by the verse that she repeated it in a number of notes in later years, with reference to our family. Here it is, from 2 Samuel 7:18:

“Who am I, Sovereign Lord, and what is my family, that you have brought me this far?”

A question we all, upon reflection, might ask Him.