A Break from the Ugliness

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As you might expect, I watched the recent interview with the three jurors from the Clancy trial. An NBC 10 Boston reporter sat with them last week.

It wasn’t long into the interview that my stomach started to turn, if only because the three women seemed so much more concerned for the pathology of Lindsay’s crimes than the crime itself. For example, considering the sheer brutality of the murders, my heart sank when one of the three jurors, Kellie Farina, spoke disappointedly, almost condescendingly, of the lone juror (a black man now getting doxxed by the media) who refused to agree to a not-guilty verdict. She said, “He had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.”

Of course, for the relatively sane among us, that seems to be the quotation getting all the attention. Go figure. It really is dreadfully backward.

And then, even with Farina’s comment still hovering like sulfuric fog, another of the three, Roni Carlson, said, “I wish we would’ve come through for Lindsay,” as if Lindsay truly was the victim during those terrible moments in the basement with the exercise bands pulled so tightly around each of her children’s throats that their necks pretty much collapsed.

But if I remember the order of things, I’d barely gotten to these comments before tasting the first bit of my stomach’s sour. Another of the three, Paula Devlin, described the resistant juror as “arrogant.” More precisely, she said, “He was very arrogant. He really did not take anything that anybody said.”

When I heard that, my first instinct was to open Facebook in my nearby laptop’s browser and start tapping into that little gray space beside my profile picture that reads, “What’s on your mind, Christopher?”

What’s on my mind, you ask?

Well, first, I typed out Devlin’s exact words for context. By the way, is it me, or is the name Devlin eerily ironic—as if hell’s ambassadors are just toying with us? It’s like the fiends, normally keeping to the shadows, aren’t as interested as they used to be in hiding their identity. It sort of reminds me of the antagonist in the ’80s film Angel Heart. Literally Satan, he went by the name Louis Cyphre. Get it? Yeah, Lucifer. “Devlin” looks and sounds like something you’d see on Satan’s license plate when he’s out and around doing what he does.

Deviling. Dev’lin’. I wonder.

Anyway, after sharing Devlin’s words, I continued with a short bit of commentary. I wrote something like, “Arrogant? He held fast and wouldn’t surrender the case’s essential truth, which is that three children were murdered.” I ended with, “Courage looks an awful lot like arrogance from the devil’s side of the room.”

Now, you’ll notice above that I used the words “with something like.” That’s because I was only remembering what I wrote. If you scroll through my personal page, you won’t find the comment anywhere. I didn’t post it. As soon as I wrote it, I deleted it and closed my laptop.

Why?

Well, the day before I watched the interview, I shared a short piece on my personal page about needing a break from observing, analyzing, and commenting on these kinds of things. I admitted that even with my practice of posting and ghosting—which means I write something and then leave it behind, avoiding all comments entirely—the ugliness still finds a way through. Believe it or not, people read what I write, and no matter what it’s about, someone almost always seeks me out just to insult me. They find my email. They use Private Messenger. Some have even chased down my cell phone to text me. The twisted devotion in all this is rather astounding.

Of course, I’ve long understood that both praise and hatred are swirling in this territory. People who write for public consumption should expect both positive and negative reactions. But that doesn’t make any of it any less tiresome, especially since it’s not like I get paid to do it. Maybe if I made a few bucks here and there, it would be easier. But I don’t.

That said, and perhaps more importantly, I wrote in that short piece that no human being is meant to be pierced with hatefulness so frequently. I understand that life’s occasional conflicts can lead to hostile words. I mean, things happen, and unkind words are spoken. But I’m pretty sure none of us are designed to be verbally accosted multiple times a week all year-round. And for over a decade and a half, which is about how long I’ve been doing this.

I know this might sound like whining to some. I’m just telling you this has become my “normal.” And some days, it’s just too much.

Add to all this that it’s not as easy as it used to be. I’m having some trouble with my eyesight, which is making everything you’re reading right now so much more difficult to produce. What used to be relatively easy to tippety-tap onto the screen is becoming considerably harder. Sermons take longer. Preparations for almost anything I do as a pastor take longer. This takes longer. I used to just wake up on Sundays and start writing these things. I started this one on Friday and finished it this morning.

But enough whining. Although what I’m describing explains what happened immediately after I deleted the comment and closed the laptop. Instead of writing something, I finished listening to what remained of the half-hour interview clip, and then I picked up my daughter’s guitar, which was leaning against the back of a chair nearby, and started playing.

It’s an interesting guitar, actually. Evelyn found it lying on the side of the road not far from the high school last autumn. It was pretty beat up. The strings had snapped. A few tuning pegs were missing. It was cracked in places—punctured and scarred from whatever had happened to it before she found it. Nothing about its condition suggested it had any particular value anymore.

Still, she brought it home, and we tried to find its owner. We posted about it in different forums and waited to see whether someone would claim it. No one did. After a couple of weeks of waiting, with a mind to get rid of it, I eventually took it outside and leaned it against the trash can.

The next day, before rolling the cans to the street, I reconsidered and carried it back inside. I ended up spending some time over the Thanksgiving weekend doing what I could to repair it physically. I fixed the cracks and sanded the body. Eventually I painted it black. I replaced the tuning pegs and even added a rosette around the sound hole, with a new pickguard beneath. Essentially, I worked through everything that needed attention until the ugly guitar destined for a landfill—something somebody lost, or deliberately tossed on the side of the road—became an instrument again.

Admittedly, it struggles somewhat to keep a tune. But it’s been through a lot. And I’m certain it was likely never a virtuoso’s choice to begin with. Still, after some love, it’s singing again. And it’s really quite lovely.

I reached for that guitar after I closed the laptop. In fact, because Jennifer was away for the weekend in Rogers City, and I knew she’d be coming home soon, I decided to spend the next few hours listening to and working through a few Zach Bryan songs to play for her when she got back. She and Evelyn are both huge fans. So, I spent a little time strumming along and whispering lyrics, at least until my fingers, mouth, and memory began cooperating with each other.

There was something wonderfully refreshing about it. I wasn’t analyzing another ugly thing happening somewhere in the world, all the while anticipating the responses I’d almost certainly get from ratchety folks, whether actively or passive-aggressively, offended that I think Clancy deserves a millstone rather than a diagnosis. Listening and strumming and half-singing, I wasn’t wondering which stranger would eventually hunt down my contact information or find their way into my private messages. I was sitting with something I’d restored, learning songs for someone I love more than anything else in the whole world.

When Jen got home, after visiting for a while, I grabbed the once-broken guitar and played a few of her favorite songs. Evelyn, who’d just gotten home from volleyball practice—and who adores such moments—joined us. She even pulled out her phone and set it beside me to record a few, memorializing the moment for herself. One song they wanted to hear, “I Remember Everything,” I didn’t know it particularly well, so I wasn’t especially confident about how it would go. Strangely enough, it turned out pretty nicely. I suppose the thing about guitarists is that once a song gets going, often you can anticipate the next chord and fall right into it.

Now, with all of this in mind, looking backward to remember that humans aren’t meant to experience loathing in steady streams, I’m even more committed to the premise. I also think that escaping the ugliness requires more than closing the laptop and refusing to look at the screen for a while. Ultimately, the space left open has to be filled with something good and beautiful.

It’s true there will always be another cultural event to dissect. There will always be another “something” begging for commentary rendered through the Gospel’s lens—which means I will undoubtedly end up back in the saddle, likely sooner than later. Indeed, certain things deserve to be said, and there are times when silence carries a much heavier cost than the hatred I know I’ll receive.

Still, there’s something worth remembering about those moments with the guitar. I could’ve spent those hours immersed in another of this world’s messes, writing about one more broken thing that too many others seem hesitant to approach. I chose instead to take something that had already been broken—something I had repaired with my own hands—and I used it to make music for my wife, and I suppose my daughter, also.

I guess what I’m saying is that, yes, sometimes we should speak about ugly things. Some moments require someone to say what’s being left unsaid. But maybe there are also those moments when the better answer to a wrecked world is to just turn off the screen, pick up something broken, and make it beautiful again.

If you want to hear a couple of those moments, I’m happy to share. Evelyn texted me two of the recordings she made. Again, she set her phone right next to me, so the guitar you’re hearing is the one in my hands—the one left for dead on the side of the road, but now beautiful.

I uploaded the recordings. You can listen to them here.

https://cruciformstuff.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/sito-thoma.mp3

https://cruciformstuff.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/ire-thoma.mp3

Culpability Obscured

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Did you hear about the student at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne? Josiah Junkin is his name. He’s a former vicar in the South Wisconsin District of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS). He was arrested a few weeks ago. August 20, to be exact. He was charged with molesting a two-month-old girl. Reports say he did this while changing the child’s diaper. Once investigators got involved, it seems he admitted to molesting the child more than once. And if that wasn’t enough, investigators took pictures of pages in Junkin’s journal, which apparently was a recovery resource from the “7 Pillars of Freedom” sex-addiction program. In the journal, in his own words, he knew that what he was doing was wrong, and that it could get him arrested if anyone ever found out. Still, he continued. He also managed to continue scribbling into his journal disturbing fantasies about children, some involving sexual violence.

Of course, this is all still pretty fresh, so it remains only a criminal allegation. Still, he did confess to the crime. And it seems they have some pretty grotesque pages from his journal. They even have testimony from his wife.

Someone asked me on Wednesday afternoon what I think should happen to him. I answered that he’s entitled to due process. But that wasn’t the question, was it? Just know I say things like that on my wife’s advice. It helps me avoid saying what I’d really do to him if I were in charge. He hurt children. Anyone who hurts children should be very glad I’m not king of the world. I’d definitely build a millstone factory.

Maybe I should ask you. What do you think should happen to him? Although before you answer that question for yourself, I should mention that the first news report I read described Junkin as a “Lutheran church leader.” Interestingly, in the comments that followed, some LCMS folks insisted Junkin shouldn’t be called a leader in the LCMS because he wasn’t ordained. He was a vicar, being supervised by an ordained pastor.

I was intrigued by that weird clarification. In context, it felt a bit like they were trying to shave off an edge of the story. I mean, yes, Junkin was a vicar. But common sense says that a store manager is supervised by a district manager and so on, and yet both are leaders in the business. Vicars are supervised, and yet they’re placed into the life of congregations to preach, teach, visit shut-ins, lead activities, and do so much of what a pastor does. Relative to the Church, that’s leadership in any ordinary sense of the word. Add to this that the South Wisconsin District said Junkin was assigned a substantial role in church planting in Viroqua, even describing him as the person who would “captain” the process. That’s leadership language. On top of that, Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, my alma mater, described him as a church planter and evangelist.

So, yeah, insist on the distinction between a vicar and ordained pastor if you want. But let’s not pretend the word “leader” doesn’t apply. It does.

I bring this up because I’m interested in the instinct that prompted the comment. My opinion? I think something horrific happened, and because it hit close to home for some LCMSers, before the smoke really even cleared, they were reaching for a qualification. In other words, they were looking to put a little room for an explanation between the horror of what happened and the church body to which they belong. Maybe that impulse is understandable. Sometimes the instinct to circle the wagons is stronger than the will to face the trouble squarely.

I think I’m right about this because I experienced it somewhat recently. I wrote a short piece a few weeks ago about how it hurt to see Stephanie White, the coach of the Indiana Fever, and also my cousin, get bashed so publicly for what she said—or maybe didn’t say—about the men-in-women’s sports situation. I never said I agreed with her. In fact, I’m pretty sure I said I didn’t. But the point was that it hurt to watch her get pummeled, if only because she’s family. And I admitted to wanting to help her however I could. I was instinctively willing to soften her situation.

Now, I’ve distracted you long enough. What should happen to Junkin, an LCMS vicar who sexually assaulted a two-month-old baby? And before answering, consider that the evidence more than suggests he’s a profoundly troubled man. His own writings betray a serious mental illness. Does that affect your first reaction? Does it make you want the charges dropped? Does it make you think that because of his mental illness he is no longer fully culpable and prison would be unfair? Does his form of crazy make the baby any less violated, or his actions any less his actions?

My guess is that most folks are answering no to all these questions. Whatever was wrong with Junkin, something in us still insists that a line was crossed and that crossing it must have serious consequences.

Now, keep your answer about Junkin in your pocket for just one more minute.

Lindsay Clancy was mentally ill, too.

I won’t relitigate the case here. Anybody and everybody knows she’s the mother who killed all three of her children—five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and eight-month-old Callan. She strangled them with an exercise band, pulling so hard that she collapsed their throats to mere inches. There’s no question about whether Clancy killed the children. She admitted to it. The question being debated right now by the same anyones and everyones, even after the mistrial, is whether she was criminally responsible and therefore deserves punishment. Her attorney argued that her mental illness—postpartum psychosis—removes her responsibility.

So now, the instinct. Interestingly, Clancy has attracted an extraordinary amount of sympathy. Women had been showing up at the courthouse wearing pink in a show of support. Her defenders point to her history of psychiatric treatment, medications, and the possibility that she experienced postpartum psychosis. For Clancy’s supporters, these things have become the controlling facts of the case. They’re insisting Clancy was sick, and regardless of what she did, the whole dreadful scene must be viewed entirely through the lens of her mental illness.

Okay. Now take Junkin back out of your pocket. He’s sick, too. Apparently, profoundly so. A mentally healthy man doesn’t molest children. A mentally healthy man doesn’t scribble out sexual fantasies about children, let alone his imagination about violent sexual encounters with kids. Whatever diagnosis eventually gets attached to Junkin, something was obviously very wrong with him. That said, I haven’t seen or heard anything about anyone lining up to support him. I haven’t heard anything about anyone wearing matching shirts for Vicar Junkin.

Why not? I guess that’s at least part of the question bothering me. In Junkin’s case, mental illness is being used to explain his culpability. In Clancy’s case, it’s a magic eraser. It’s presented as something capable of swallowing her culpability whole. In other words, it seems for Junkin, the thought is, “Yes, he’s mentally ill, but he still did it, and that makes him responsible,” while, for Clancy, it’s, “Yes, she did it, but she was mentally ill, so she’s not responsible.”

For me, the only thing that helps any of this make sense is the instinct I mentioned.

With Junkin, some LCMS folks saw an ugly headline striking close to home and immediately reached for something to soften it. Stephanie is my cousin, so I felt extra sadness for what she was enduring, and rather than steer into her wrongness, I was willing to soften it. With Clancy, the instinct is the same. For the countless women supporting her, the postpartum aspect is personal. Some have endured postpartum depression and anxiety, or they know someone who has. And so, they reached for the qualifier “Clancy was mentally ill.”

But again, while that qualification may be true, it isn’t the point. The point is there’s at least one two-month-old girl that we know of at the center of Junkin’s story. Who knows if there will be more. With Clancy, there are three dead children—Cora, Dawson, and Callan. If anything, the children in both circumstances must be first and foremost in our consideration. I mean, in the truest sense of the word, justice begins with what was done to the victim. Maybe that’s part of what it means when we say a criminal must be brought to justice. In a moral sense, the offender is brought back to the scene of the crime—to the place where the victim still exists relative to the offense—and made to answer for the harm. The offender is brought there to make things right, not to be diagnosed.

Now, before my critics start piling on, of course, of all people, Christians ought to understand compassion for broken people. Mental illness is a real thing. Seasonal affective disorder is real, too. (Wink wink.) Empathy for folks with these conditions is good. Indeed, we should pray for Junkin. We should pray for Clancy. We should pray that whatever is diseased in either of them is treated. Most of all, we should pray for their repentance. But we’re not praying for these people while wearing moral blinders. Along with repentance, we’re praying for justice. That’s because Christian love understands reconciliation and divine forgiveness while also recognizing that, for certain crimes, prison doors sometimes need to be slammed shut and electric chair switches need to be flipped (Matthew 5:25-26).

If Junkin did what he confessed to doing, his mental illness doesn’t make the baby less violated. Clancy strangled her children. Postpartum psychosis doesn’t make Cora, Dawson, and Callan any less dead. Junkin’s and Clancy’s mental illness may help us understand why they did what they did. But it doesn’t exonerate them.

And perhaps more to my point, neither does our proximity.

So, in the end, I guess at least one thing I’m saying is to keep an eye on that tendency. When something hits close to home, whatever you do, don’t let your proximity to the villain obscure your sightline of the victim.

People Who Go To Church Are Happier

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Every year, about this time, I write something about summer’s departure. The folks here at Our Savior, the people who know me best, have come to expect it, if only because I know I can tell them such things. I keep very little hidden from them. They’re family. And it’s right around this time of year that I start to feel something they’re already expecting me to re-explain.

In one sense, I suppose people do certain things because the calendar says it’s time to do them. For example, when summer ends, you cover the patio furniture, maybe bringing a few deck items into the garage. While you’re in there, you may do a little cleaning. You notice the sun going down earlier. Maybe you start prepping your gardens. Or you finally decide to give the snowblower the lawn mower’s parking space.

If you’re me, you begin writing what amounts to a eulogy for June, July, and August.

I was talking with Jennifer about it on Wednesday. We were sitting on the front porch together watching the sunset. I confessed I’m starting to feel it. And by “it,” I mean the dread.

I tried to explain why the transition from summer to autumn is so difficult for me, even though I know the person I’m confessing to absolutely adores autumn. Yes, she’s one of the sensible people. The sensible people can look at the changing season and say Autumn is beautiful. Because it is. The trees are magnificent. The air is crisp. It means warm fireplaces, favorite blankets, cider and doughnuts, sweaters, and evening bonfires.

Yes. I know. But none of that helps.

Trying to explain the sensation to Jennifer, the closest comparison I could think of was being told by someone you love that she doesn’t love you anymore. I told her it feels like summer has sat across the table from me and said she’s leaving. But there was no fight. There was no scandal. I didn’t mistreat her. If anything, I showered her with devoted affection every single day. And yet, there she is, looking at me with that terrible calmness people sometimes have when they’ve already made up their mind before any substantive conversation could begin. She’s packed her things. She already has another place to go. And although I keep pointing out all the reasons she should stay, she’s not even listening anymore. In fact, even as I’m still pleading, she’s already gotten up from the table and is gathering the last of her things.

And here’s the worst part. I’m a sucker for her abuse. She’s going to come back to me. She does every year. And when she does, she’ll embrace me, and I’ll fall in love with her all over again. But then August will come, and once again, she’ll push me away.

For the record, I’m a relatively even-keeled guy. But this is my personal crazy. And just know, I do what I can to fight it. Indeed, I’m committed to resisting the seasonal sadness. I’ve tried sun lamps. Although to no avail. I have a fake palm tree in my office that somewhat helps. I’m looking at it right now. But notice I said it somewhat helps. Because there it is— pretending. Its green plastic leaves and its tropical ambition—all a manufactured defiance against Michigan’s very real autumn.

Jennifer bought it for me for Christmas a few years ago. It’s supposed to make the room feel more like summer. And, to a point, it works. Until I remember it’s fake.

Now, I’ve probably said enough on the topic already. But you need to know that what’s coming this Tuesday will make matters worse. Tuesday is when our church’s school begins its academic year. Most schools have already started, but ours hasn’t, which means I’m still living in a kind of disputed territory. Summer has filed for separation, but the decree isn’t final yet.

Tuesday is when the arbiter arrives. He’ll bring a bunch of papers issuing formal decrees that divide the property and mandate schedules and locations and times and so many other things. He’ll set the documents before me, and I’ll read them. The morning’s easier pace goes with summer. High-speed mornings and crowded, inflexible schedules, those come to me. The longer, unaccounted-for evenings, those go with summer. So do bare feet on the deck, open windows, and laugh-filled strolls up and down the hill in my side yard with my grandson in the wagon. Summer also gets custody of the fireflies and the croaking bullfrogs in the pond. She also gets to keep the strange freedom of stepping outside, even after a long day of visitations and meetings and whatever, and discovering by the sun’s position that there’s still an entire day waiting for you. The arbiter grants me darkness when I wake up and darkness before I leave the office.

The next thing you know, there I am, standing in the driveway while summer drives away with more than half of everything.

I know this all sounds so overly dramatic. But seasonal melancholy has never cared much about proportionality. And I warned you what to expect. Every August, my heart folds its arms and says, “I want July.”

But now, something else you should expect from me: the Gospel.

There’s a Christian difference between sorrow and despair. Christians are allowed to grieve departures. We are allowed to miss what’s good. We’re even allowed to cry about it. Jesus Himself wept at a tomb, even as He knew He was about to reverse the reason for sadness.

What I’m saying is that the answer to all of this is by no means that I just need to convince myself that I secretly love November. I don’t. And I likely never will. I’m built for summer. I’m wired for hot, sunny days. The answer is to remember “the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof” (Psalm 24:1). In other words, August belongs to Him. He also owns November. He owns the shortening days. The long ones belong to Him, too.

But there’s still more.

Christ, who is God in the flesh, is “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). No matter the season, He doesn’t pack His things when the leaves start falling. He doesn’t somehow love me in June and lose interest in October. Or maybe better said (because I know plenty of folks who struggle with the kind of depression that extends well beyond any seasonal boundaries), my emotional condition at any given moment does not determine God’s feelings for me. In other words, when my corrupted and sinful heart tells me that everything is getting darker, colder, and farther away, the Holy Spirit works in me the knowledge that God’s promises remain exactly where He put them. In fact, He labors in ways to point me outside of myself to what’s actually true. He points me to Christ crucified and risen. He points me to my baptism. He points me to His Word. He points me to His wonderful supper. There, His verdict on everything has already been rendered. I am forgiven, redeemed, beloved, and most importantly, His. My sadness doesn’t make Him any less faithful. His promises remain true when the sun is shining at nine o’clock at night, and they remain true when it sets at 4:30 PM.

By the way, did you know studies have shown that people who go to church are happier? I wonder why that is. Oh wait. Could it be that the One who made us actually knows what we need?

I just looked back at some peripheral research I did for my doctorate. Believe it or not, I looked into this stuff. And the numbers are pretty remarkable. Gallup conducted a study on happiness levels among churchgoers and those who attend infrequently or not at all. They discovered that 67% of Americans who attend worship weekly describe themselves as “very satisfied” with their personal lives. If you remove the qualifier “very,” interestingly, the number jumps to 92%. In other words, nearly everyone who attends worship weekly reports being happier with life. Even better, more than two-thirds are willing to add the word “very.”

And by the way, it goes beyond simply asking people whether they’re happy. Harvard did a more generic survey a few years ago concerning long-term health data. They found there was 30% less depression in the church-going population. There’ve been a few other longitudinal studies that have found faithful church attendance equals less anxiety, hopelessness, and loneliness, while also being associated with a stronger sense of purpose and the ability to explain why that is.

Of course, statistics are not the Gospel. Not to mention, I know full well that Christians get depressed. I just spent the first half of this morning’s write-up telling you about how hard autumn is for me. Besides, I’m a pastor. I know darn well that Christians suffer terribly. I know darn well that Christians sit in pews with tears in their eyes and sometimes cannot explain why they hurt.

Now, I know correlation, as statistical science rightly reminds us, does not by itself prove causation. Still, I have to smile a little at the numbers. That’s because I know God’s heart. He loves me. And so, He gathers me to Himself in worship. A very important byproduct is that He puts me beside other sinners who need His merciful love just as much as I do. We receive His Word together. Even better, He gives us brothers and sisters who notice when we’re missing. In the liturgy, He gives us words to confess, prayers to pray, hymns to sing—all sentences we can speak when we simply cannot find the right words on our own. And in the middle of all of it, Christ is present. That’s the promise.

And so, the researchers come along with clipboards and spreadsheets and discover that, strangely enough, people immersed in all of this seem to fare better. Go figure.

So, to wrap this up, yes, summer is leaving me again. And yes, I’ll likely write another article next year that sounds an awful lot like this one. I’ll complain that the sun is setting too early. I’ll bristle at the thought of Michigan’s forthcoming cold. I’ll probably say something reminiscent of the arbiter who arrives every year to divide the possessions, and I’ll remember I’m getting the shorter end of the custody stick.

But am I really? Because I am keeping Christ. Or more accurately, Christ is keeping me. And unlike summer, He has promised never to leave me nor forsake me (Hebrews 13:5).

So, yeah, summer may leave. But she does so beneath a promise far superior to the season, which is that Christ doesn’t leave. With that, Ecclesiastes 3:11 makes a little more sense to me: “He has made everything beautiful in its time.” That includes Michigan’s autumn. And why? Because Christ is the beauty in every season.

Hold Fast to What’s True and Push Back

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If you visit with my weekend message every Sunday, you’ll remember that I was in the emergency room last week. At about one o’clock last Sunday, I made the trip because my eye had swollen shut.

Essentially, for the last few weeks, I’ve been dealing with an unrelated issue involving the gel inside my eye pulling away from the retina. Apparently, this can happen with age. However, there’s a possibility that the process can cause a retinal tear, so I went to see a retina specialist, and now I’m paying close attention to any changes in my vision.

That’s the background. It isn’t the actual story.

Let me start by saying that if you’ve never had a retina specialist inspect the deepest recesses of your eyeballs, blessed are you. It’s not a pleasant experience. It’s thoroughly intrusive. There are instruments. There’s pressure. There are moments when you wonder whether the doctor is deciding whether he wants to examine your retinas from the front, or simply push your eyeballs through the back of your skull and inspect them from the other side. And the thing is, you simply hold still and endure it because that’s what you’re supposed to do.

After the examination, my eyes were irritated—my left eye more so than the right. I also had a few blurry spots in that eye. I assumed this was the result of the examination itself, not to mention that’s the eye that had already been having the most trouble. Either way, the doctor had just spent considerable time poking, prodding, pressing, and otherwise doing things to both eyes that I absolutely did not enjoy.

So, I figured whatever was irritating my eye would get better with time.

A few days later, something resembling a stye developed beneath my eyelid. I didn’t know it was there. Not yet. The irritation continued. Then the swelling started. I later learned that something had apparently been torn during the examination, and the area had become infected. Again, I didn’t know that at the time. All I knew was that my eye was becoming increasingly useless.

Now, I couldn’t get an immediate appointment with my regular doctor, so I went to an urgent care in Fenton. The PA looked at it and said it was probably just a stye. Okay, fine. Drops were prescribed. But before walking out the door, I asked about getting an antibiotic, too, because by then, I had begun to suspect that something else was going on. And for the record, I’m hardly a person who goes fishing for antibiotics. I can barely remember the last time I needed them. In fact, I rarely make trips to the doctor for anything. Most everything that ever happens to me can be solved with a two-fingered pour of Scotch. But in this case, I had a distinct sense that something more than whisky was required. And so, I asked. I was told antibiotics weren’t necessary. Use the drops. Apply warm compresses. Give it twenty-four to forty-eight hours. It would get better. So, I did exactly what I was told, and I did so religiously. But it got significantly worse.

Two days later, I called my doctor’s office and more or less begged them to find a place for me. They gave me an appointment for the following morning, which was Friday. Again, I explained the entire history. I explained the retinal examination. I explained the irritation that followed. I explained how the swelling progressed. I explained that the drops were not helping. Same conclusion. It’s probably a stye. This time, I was prescribed a different drop—something stronger.

Again, I asked about an antibiotic, just in case. Again, I was told no. Again, I was told to continue the warm compresses and give the new drops twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Again, I went home with the new drops and did exactly what I was told. And again, it only got worse.

By early Sunday morning, the situation had changed considerably. I woke up and couldn’t see out of the eye because it had swollen shut. I could barely force it open to use the drops. The swelling had spread around the eye socket, and I was beginning to feel pain along the bone beside and beneath the eye. The entire area had become extremely sensitive to the touch. I woke Jennifer and told her I was going to the emergency room.

Now, get this. The woman in scrubs at the check-in desk, after I explained why I was there, tried to talk me out of checking in. “It’s probably just a stye,” she said. “I get those all the time.” She asked to see the drops I was using. She recognized them and suggested I just needed more time for them to work. She said her styes, with the same drops, usually went away on their own after about ten days or so. At one point, she told me that looking at me was almost like looking at herself when she had one.

Needless to say, it was late, and I was already exhausted. My eye was swollen shut. Every medical professional before this had already told me I had a stye. And now, before I had even officially checked into the emergency room, its gatekeeper was essentially telling me the same stupid thing—and was trying to talk me out of checking in.

I nearly left. I really did. I almost walked back out to my car, went home, and kept fighting whatever was happening to me with the stupid little drop squirter and warm compresses. And why? Well, forget the pressure building in my eye for a moment. There’s a strange psychological pressure that develops when enough people with medical credentials keep telling you the same thing. Eventually, you begin wondering whether you’re experiencing what you’re experiencing, that maybe you’re the unreasonable one. Am I overreacting? Maybe the “experts” are right and I just need to give the drops another day—or as the lady at the check-in desk insinuated, ten more days.

But I’m telling you, I knew something was wrong. With that, I insisted that I be seen by someone.

The first doctor who came in was a student. I gave her the entire history, beginning with the retinal examination and continuing through the visits, the drops, the compresses, the swelling, and the increasing pain. She examined the eye and then left. Eventually, another doctor came in. (By the way, is there a class in nursing and medical school devoted to not writing anything down? I gave the same history again and again and again at every visit along the way.) With that, a similar examination. But this time, something was different. At one point, the second doctor said something along the lines of, “I’ve never seen a stye actually do what this one is doing.” I didn’t like the sound of what she was saying. And yet, her words were sort of reassuring, if only because someone had finally acknowledged something other than what everyone else had been saying all along.

She said she wanted to do a little research. And then she left. Eventually she returned with the ER’s supervising physician.

Keep in mind, all of this occurred over several hours. If you’ve ever been to an emergency room, then you know time operates very differently there. Entire civilizations can rise and fall while you’re sitting beneath fluorescent lighting waiting for someone to tap on the door or curtain and say, “I’m Doctor so-and-so. What’s brought you in here tonight?” Again, is anyone writing anything down?

Anyway, the supervising doctor examined me, performed a few tests, and then, suddenly, there it was. This wasn’t simply a stye. She was certain I had preseptal cellulitis. The infection was spreading through the tissue around my eye, and it had progressed to the point that it could become orbital cellulitis, which is considerably more dangerous. If you don’t get on it right away, you can go blind. This is to say, I needed an antibiotic. Like, days ago! And as if that wasn’t enough, she said the drops I had been using so diligently were actually making the situation significantly worse. Go figure.

Now, jump ahead a few days. After I set the drops aside and started slamming down a proper antibiotic, the swelling had almost completely disappeared by Tuesday. I could open the eye normally. I could see through it. The blurring was, for the most part, gone. Although there’s something else I should at least mention. We had some leftover antibiotics in our medicine bin from one of the kids’ prescriptions. After my visit to the doctor’s office, and before the emergency room visit, I had already started taking them. As it turns out, they were the same antibiotic the ER eventually prescribed. A slightly smaller dosage, but still the same stuff. I’m betting that those first few punches are why things were already turning around by Tuesday. And that only reinforced what had been bothering me all along. I knew something wasn’t right.

Now, to start wrapping this up, as with everything, there’s a lesson here somewhere. I suppose first, I should acknowledge that doctors know plenty of things I don’t. But that said, I’ve never been one to surrender my reason, senses, and judgment entirely because someone in authority has spoken. It’s just never proven to be a very good idea. Then came COVID, and that instinct stopped being theoretical. And not just for me. So many learned there’s a distinct difference between respecting expertise and abandoning your own capacity to think, observe, question, and make judgments.

I suppose next, you should know I had a brief conversation with the first ER doctor about my job as a pastor—because, making small talk, she asked what I do. Unsurprisingly, I wandered into how frustrated I was about everything happening at the moment, but at the same time I didn’t want to be rude, becoming the ratchety patient no one wants to deal with. I told her that Christian sensibility often leaves guys like me somewhere between arrogance and passivity. What I meant was that conviction can rather easily become egotism: I know what’s what and I refuse to accept anything other than what I want. But humility has its own danger. A Christian can become so reluctant to assert himself, so determined to avoid conflict, that he begins distrusting what is plainly in front of him and allows dangerous falsehood to slip through unchallenged.

Remember, I almost walked out of the emergency room. I’d been told the same thing so many times that I was beginning to distrust what I could quite literally see happening to my own face. And so, maybe the lesson in all of this is that humility never requires us to pretend we don’t know what we know. It doesn’t require us to ignore the evidence in front of us or surrender our judgment whenever the opposition speaks confidently. Christian humility starts with recognizing that we can be wrong. But it also recognizes that everyone else can be wrong, too.

After this whole episode, I’m convinced that this is one more reason why Saint Paul wrote, “Test everything and hold fast to what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). For as humble as Christians ought to be, we’re not supposed to switch off our brains and obey whoever happens to be standing before us. I mean, just think about the Bereans. They were praised because they listened to Paul himself and then searched the Scriptures to see whether what he was telling them was true (Acts 17:11). Indeed, they didn’t reject the teacher. But they also didn’t surrender themselves to him. Not yet. First, they listened. Then they tested what he said, measuring it against the truth of God’s Word.

That’s a faithful Christian posture toward every earthly authority, if ever there was one. Show respect to the office. Receive good and honest counsel with gratitude. Be humble enough to admit when someone knows more than you do. But never—ever!—confuse humility with surrendering your responsibility to seek and maintain truth.

In the explanation of the First Article of the Apostles’ Creed in Luther’s Small Catechism, Luther writes that God “has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members, my reason and all my senses, and still takes care of them.” This is to say, God made you, and He gave you the necessary faculties (eyes, ears, senses, and the like) for feeding a reasonable mind capable of discernment. And then, later in his explanation of the Third Article, Luther insists that “the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true faith.” This means that, yes, our reason and senses are gifts from God. And yet, they are not chief. For the Christian, they are ultimately steered by the Word, the means through which the Holy Spirit establishes faith and keeps us anchored to what is really true. Indeed, God’s Word stands above every human authority, and it is by God’s Word that every human claim must finally be measured.

It even helps keep our own claims in check, because just as pride can make a person unteachable, blind agreement for the sake of a person’s authority or celebrity can also lead people away from plain truth.

So, to all of this, I say listen carefully. Think clearly. Ask questions. Test what you’re being told. Be humble enough to be corrected, but courageous enough to say, when necessary, “I hear what you’re saying, Doc, and I think you’re wrong.” And through it all, let faithfulness to Christ and His Word remain the goal. Because in the end, the Christian’s task isn’t to defend his own opinions or surrender to someone else’s. It is to hold fast to what’s true.

Excommunication? Yes.

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I spent the early hours of this morning in the ER. Unfortunately, it couldn’t be avoided. I’ve been dealing with trouble in my left eye for the last few weeks, and somewhere along the way, it appears a retina specialist injured it badly enough that it became severely infected. It has only gotten worse over the last week, and, as it turns out, two different eyedrop prescriptions from two separate but equally concerned visits were making things worse. I woke up early this morning realizing that a trip to the ER was unavoidable. Hopefully, I have what I need now. And, as it would be for any grossly disfigured, pirate-like person, I didn’t want to leave anyone waiting on the plank. So, after some rest, time with God’s Word, and prayer, I started tapping away at something I’ve been thinking about all week and was determined to get out.

Maybe you heard the news about Governor Healey in Massachusetts? If not, maybe I should actually start with something else first. And by something else, I mean a definition of excommunication, if only because some Roman Catholics are calling for Healey, a confessing Roman Catholic, to be excommunicated. I’ll get to the reason for the calls in a moment.

In the meantime, let me just say that excommunication is probably one of the most misunderstood practices of the Christian Church. For the most part, people hear the word “excommunication” and imagine punishment. But that’s not excommunication’s point.

Excommunication exists for repentance, absolution, and restoration. Jesus establishes the pattern in Matthew 18:15–20, showing Christians how to move patiently from private admonition toward gathering the whole Church’s engagement. But the process only progresses step by step as the sinner refuses to hear God’s Word, repent, and amend. Still, even in the final step—excommunication—restoration remains the goal.

All of this is to say that excommunication is the Church, in love, refusing to allow an impenitent sinner to exist comfortably in dangerous falsehood that leads away from eternal life to eternal condemnation. For the sake of the faithful, it also means guarding the Church from pretending that open, persistent, and unrepentant sin is somehow compatible with a faithful Christian confession.

Now, back to Governor Healey.

Healey, a Catholic, gleefully signed legislation last week eliminating the state’s previous legal restrictions on abortion after 24 weeks. Under the new law, abortions will be legal right up to birth. You read that right. As it is here in Michigan, a full-term baby can now be aborted in Massachusetts, too. The state’s Catholic bishops had already condemned the measure, even going so far as to call it a “gravely immoral” measure. Of course, that’s a sanitized description. I’d call it state-sanctioned barbarism.

I’ve implied the appropriateness of excommunication for Christians who openly defend and support abortion. In fact, I can think of a couple of folks in the past who transferred from Our Savior to other local LCMS congregations because I spoke those words out loud. I remember my District circuit visitor at the time mentioning the Johnson Amendment, seemingly in passing, and implying that I might be offending someone’s civil rights. I found the argument strange. Why? Because, ultimately, he didn’t ground his position in the Word of God, but instead said something more like, “You’d better be careful what you say about the state, because the state says so.”

That said, forget for a moment that God’s Word seems to matter very little to folks in these situations and instead consider that too many are way more confident than accurate with their Johnson Amendment invocation. Essentially, under section 501(c)(3), churches and other tax-exempt organizations are prohibited from financial partisanship. This means churches cannot use the congregation’s money to intervene in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to particular candidates. An easy example is that it can’t donate to or print materials on behalf of a local candidate or party.

What the Johnson Amendment does not say is that churches must become politically mute. Churches remain free to preach and teach concerning anything and everything under the sun. They may take positions on political issues, ideologies, legislation, public policies, and whatever, even when those issues divide candidates. And that’s good, because almost everything in our world is, in some way, Christological, and as such, the Church has both the freedom and the responsibility to engage with it, while also shepherding God’s people through it.

Still, remember that excommunication looks like punishment to the onlooking world, even though it isn’t. Add to that the misunderstanding that many interpret the Johnson Amendment as protection against political persecution or punishment, and we have a problem. But the problem only exists when a person gets both excommunication and the Johnson Amendment wrong at the exact same time.

Regardless of the fact that nothing, not even the U.S. Constitution, supersedes God’s authority, the Johnson Amendment does not say that a church must suspend its doctrine whenever a sinner happens to hold public office or the sinner’s dealings are labeled “out-of-bounds” politically by the culture. The Johnson Amendment does not erase the Lord’s instructions in Matthew 18. In fact, the IRS itself recognizes this by identifying a “formal code of doctrine and discipline” as one of the essential characteristics associated with churches.

Therefore, excommunication cannot be called a political punishment when exercised rightly. The Church is not saying, “You voted incorrectly, so we’re going to hurt you.” The Church is saying, “Through your actions in the public square, you are persisting openly and unrepentantly in something God calls sin, and because we love you too much to lie to you about it, we cannot pretend everything is fine. Repent, be absolved, and amend the sinful life.” And this would be the same process for everyone, whether the sin was committed in a voting booth, at a governor’s desk, in a bedroom, or wherever.

In short, the IRS’s concerns revolve around dollars. It can regulate a church’s use of finances in the public square. But it does not administer the Office of the Keys—the Church’s authority from Christ to forgive and retain sins among its Christians in the public square.

Looking back at everything I’ve just written, I need to be clear, especially for the usual suspects who are likely already preparing to email or message me privately. Understand that I’m not at all suggesting that to be a Christian, one must be a registered Republican. All political parties are imperfect human institutions, and there are plenty of things within the Republican Party that Christians can and should criticize. However, we shouldn’t pretend the two major parties occupy morally equivalent ground on matters about which God’s Word speaks clearly.

They just don’t. Not anymore. Not in 2026.

For one, the modern Democrat Party is nothing like what it used to be. It has committed itself institutionally to dreadfully ungodly positions concerning abortion, human sexuality, marriage, and a whole host of other platform planks that stand in direct contradiction to Christian teaching. And these are not obscure planks buried somewhere on page seventy-three of a policy document. They’re the defining commitments of the party—its principal talking points. On the other hand, while the Republican Party is often just as embarrassingly imperfect on other topics, when it comes to the fundamental moral questions, it remains the only major American political party whose stated positions leave any meaningful room for Christian conviction in the public square.

So, again, to my critics, I would never say that voting Republican makes someone a Christian. Salvation does not come through a ballot box, and the GOP is not the Kingdom of God. But what I am saying is that if Christians care at all about faithful engagement with the world around them, they forfeit the right to pretend that political choices occur in some morally sterilized chamber where God’s Word no longer applies. I’m also saying that at some point, continued political association with official platforms that stand in opposition to God’s Word becomes more than association. It becomes advocacy. It becomes cooperation. It becomes the deliberate lending of oneself—opinions, voice, vote, money, influence, public service, and so much more—to perpetuate things God has strictly forbidden.

That’s where I think the question of church discipline becomes unavoidable.

If a Christian willfully persists in sin, the Church needs to act according to the Lord’s mandate. If throughout correction, the person remains steadfastly impenitent, even as the goal of restoration remains, the door of heaven is closed until he repents. That’s why the Church calls this the Office of the Keys. It means the authority Christ gives His Church to forgive the sins of the repentant and to retain the sins of the impenitent—to open the door with the Gospel and, when necessary, to close it until repentance comes (Matthew 16:19 and 18:18, as well as John 20:22–23).

There’s no doubt in my mind that this applies when the sin has been folded into someone’s politics. If a Christian knowingly and willfully supports and/or makes possible the destruction of unborn life, openly celebrates the mutilation of healthy bodies in the name of gender ideology, or publicly advances other teachings fundamentally contrary to the Christian faith, the Church cannot simply shrug and say, “Well, that’s your political opinion.” Labeling something “political” isn’t a baptismal font. It doesn’t wash the sin away.

So, I suppose the harder question, then, is not whether someone has a D or an R beside his or her name. The question I’m suggesting we consider is whether political loyalty has become an actual loophole that allows, first, for a Christian to deliberately, publicly, and unrepentantly participate in what Christ confesses to be sin, and second, for a pastor to be absolved of having to deal with it like all other sins.

I think it has become just such a loophole. And I think we need to close it, regardless of the fallout, if only because the topic itself is not complicated. In Confessional Lutheranism, we already know that no matter the real or hypothetical scenario, everything must be observed through the lens of God’s Word. That also means, regardless of person—regardless of someone’s job or political office or opinions or whatever—no exemption from Matthew 18 exists for anyone. We all fall under its authority.

In Healey’s case, Massachusetts’ own Catholic bishops have already identified the moral character of what occurred. If they’ve pursued correction according to the Lord’s mandate, and still there has been no repentance and amendment of the sinful life, then Healey should be excommunicated. She used the authority entrusted to her to oppose Christ’s holy Word, then celebrated the moment and smiled for the cameras while doing it, proving her willful rebellion.

In the end, some folks will read everything here and immediately start tallying sins. “But what about this Republican position? What about that Libertarian one?” The question is not whether other sins exist or whether the Church has failed to confront them consistently. The question is whether clear, persistent, public impenitence should simply be ignored. I’m saying it shouldn’t.

Of course, the devil is remarkably skilled at taking what is objectively true and smearing it with enough subjectivity that, before long, God’s Word becomes “your interpretation,” or “your opinion.” That trick has been working for a very long time. Once that happens, the next move is kind of predictable. Rather than asking what the Church is obligated to say and do in all circumstances according to God’s Word, people start asking what the Church is permitted to say and do in certain contexts according to the government’s allowance.

But just remember, the Church’s responsibility to respond to anything doesn’t live or die according to the government’s rules. I can promise you that faithful adherence to the Johnson Amendment’s tax-exemption concerns will not be a part of the Last Day’s calculus. There’ll be no IRS agent seated beside the throne of Christ.

Besides, the Church should never be more concerned about its 501(c)(3) status than its call to bear the Office of the Keys. One comes from the heart of Caesar. The other, from the heart of Christ. Only one survives the grave.

Socialism Simplified for Christians

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If you hadn’t heard, Michigan was pretty much ground zero for something disturbing last week. Essentially, our primary elections signaled that the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are no longer flittering around like gnats at the political margins. They’re gathering in plague-sized formations and moving toward the center of the Democrat Party’s power.

For starters, and just to name a few, Abdul El-Sayed won the Democrat Party’s nomination for the U.S. Senate. No, El-Sayed doesn’t call himself a democratic socialist. However, the DSA supported his candidacy, and plenty of prominent DSA members appeared at his events and celebrated his victory as a win for the DSA movement. Search the name “Hasan Piker.” You’ll see. And, of course, it makes sense that guys like Piker would be there. El-Sayed shares Piker’s and the DSA’s platforms. His economic vocabulary and class analyses are indistinguishable from what the DSA is selling.

But El-Sayed wasn’t the only attention-getter last week. There are a few more names worth remembering.

William Lawrence, a progressive activist knee-deep in the socialist movement, won the Democrat Party’s nomination in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District. Donavan McKinney, a candidate formally endorsed by the DSA, defeated the incumbent Congressman Shri Thanedar. Yousef Rabhi, another DSA candidate, defeated Ann Arbor’s twelve-year incumbent mayor. And, of course, there’s Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. She easily won her primary.

I did some digging on Friday. Interestingly, the DSA had a little more than 6,000 members in 2015. Just last month, the organization announced it had reached 120,000 members, making it the largest socialist organization in American history. And it seems to be picking up serious steam. Its candidates won races all over the country—places like New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Washington, and others. But here in Michigan, they did really well. They proved they’re not just a bunch of disenfranchised weirdos gathering in obscure spaces to argue over mimeographed manifestos. They’re also not a specter of campus curiosity inevitably destined to fade after graduation. It’s a movement. They’re actually out and around. They’re winning nominations and getting elected. Not only that, but they’re raking in cash from big donors. With that cash, they’re directing campaigns, staffing organizations, and, unfortunately, taking serious ground in American politics.

On one hand, I’m not surprised. Much to the American citizenry’s discredit, we exist in a perpetual “It’ll never happen” mode. That’s definitely true for many in the Church. “Gay marriage will never happen.” Then it did. “Transgenderism will never become mainstream.” Now gender confusion is an epidemic among children. Strangely, we tend not to believe the radicals when they tell us plainly what they intend to do. And then they do it, and it’s too late.

The DSA has told us what they intend to do—like, right on their website. Read for yourself. But here’s the thing. Its platform is more than the carrots of tax rates and wages and healthcare being dangled before the belly-serving masses. Socialism, as a system, reaches into religion, private property, education, medicine, marriage, sexuality, childhood, and pretty much everything relative to family life. It reaches into these places because its fundamental assumption is that every sphere of human existence answers to the state.

Now, keep in mind, while both are antichristian, there is a difference between Marxist socialism and regular socialism. Marxist socialism openly renounces and abolishes God, criminalizing religion altogether. Plain ol’ socialism—the kind sweeping across America this very minute—doesn’t abolish and replace God on day one. It simply begins the essential process leading to it, arriving and wearing a much friendlier face in the meantime. It talks about fairness and compassion. It’s likely you already know its most popular slogans: Diversity, equity, and inclusion! But in the end, socialism isn’t a different road than Marxism. It’s a catechetical increment of Marxism. It’s the first few miles of the same highway.

In other words, before socialism can become full-blown Marxism, it must first train people to accept the premise Marxism requires—which is that government should control more, and the individual should control less. From there, no sphere of life exists beyond the state’s reach. This includes the Church. Ultimately, this means plain socialism is not an alternative to Marxism. It’s the necessary stage that prepares a nation for it.

And so, regardless of a starry-eyed DSA member’s best intentions, and despite socialism’s countless other conflicts with Christianity, this is where the contradiction draws an absolute line in the sand for believers, even as I’ve so strangely heard the term “Christian socialist.” Plainly, a Christian who actually believes the inerrant, immutable, and inspired Word of God cannot embrace socialism without surrendering something essential to the one true faith.

Christianity confesses an authority above the state (Exodus 20:3). Socialism doesn’t.

So, again, while a socialist government may permit Christians, at least for a time, to gather, sing hymns, receive the Sacraments, and speak privately about Jesus, a telltale sign of its trajectory is its irritation when the Church steps into the public square, points at the state, calls it to task, and says, “You are not the highest authority. We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). Socialism won’t tolerate such things. And by the way, remember this key indicator when your pastor or Christian friend tongue-lashes you for offending the supposed Church and state divide, insisting that the Church must not engage in the political realm. Kindly remind them they’re aligning with one of the most basic socialist principles.

Christian engagement in the public square offends socialism in the worst way. It’s a stick in the spokes of the socialist machine because it understands and confesses biblical truths that the machine cannot accommodate. For example, it understands that the state doesn’t give children to parents. God does (Psalm 127:3). It confesses that the state doesn’t define marriage. God does (Genesis 2:24 and Matthew 19:4-6). It goes to the mat arguing that the state doesn’t create male and female. God does (Genesis 1:27). It will not back down from saying that the state doesn’t grant human life its value. God does (Psalm 139:13-16). And it would never agree that the state owns the fruits of a man’s labor. God gives property and commands its faithful use (Exodus 20:15 and Acts 5:4). These are all basic doctrines of the Christian faith.

For me, this is also where the biblical doctrine of the Two Kingdoms becomes essential. God established both Church and state, but He gave them different tasks. The Church makes Christians. It bears and brings Word and Sacrament ministry to a world in need of rescue. The state has no hand in this, except to say that it accommodates the Church by bearing the sword (Romans 13:4) to restrain evil and preserve civil order so that the Church can, as Saint Paul insists, “lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way” (1 Timothy 1:2). He continues, telling us why it’s good for the government to maintain a civil context in which the Church remains unhindered in its task to preach and teach the full counsel of God’s Word: “This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (vv. 3-4).

The Two Kingdoms (separation of Church and state) doctrine does not silence the Church in the public square. On the contrary, it reveals the cooperative nature of the two in its cleanest form. But more importantly, it absolutely requires the Church to be ready and willing to push back hard against Caesar when he crosses boundaries God has established.

The state has a divinely ordained purpose (Matthew 22:21). But when it claims authority over every sphere of life, demanding in these spheres what only God is owed—which socialism clearly does—the Church must answer as it always has.

Caesar is not Lord. Jesus is.

Pleading the Fifth. Oh, the Irony.

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As you can see, this message—which I normally write and send on Sunday morning—is arriving a few days early. I’m leaving for the west side of Michigan tomorrow morning and won’t be back until Sunday evening. For anyone who cares, Jen and I plan to attend worship at Our Savior Lutheran Church in Grand Rapids. Maybe we’ll see you there. By the way, it’s not like I won’t have internet access. I will. It’s just that I’m not one to log into my online accounts using hotel Wi-Fi. So, I figured I’d just send something along today.

I suppose the obvious thing worth talking about is the Fauci hearing that happened yesterday. Did you watch any of it? I had it on while I was in my office. But I mostly listened to it while I was out and around. Admittedly, I found myself becoming uncomfortably angry, more so while watching than listening. And why? Because there Fauci sat beneath the Senate hearing room’s lights, confronted with this exhibit and that exhibit—all the facts—the documents, diary entries, prior testimony, and obvious contradictions in the record. Through all of it, Fauci remained relatively stoic, offering the same answer over and over again:

“On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”

Apart from being sworn in, this was the only thing he said throughout the entire hearing. It was his answer to every question, even those intended to expose the absurdity of his refusal, such as what day it was or what color the floor was. Interestingly, Fauci told CNN during an interview back in 2022 he would be “very happy to testify before any congressional oversight committee.” He insisted that he had “nothing to hide,” could “explain and validate everything” he had done, and would “cooperate fully.” Apparently, that willingness expired yesterday. I read that he invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times. It felt more like a thousand to me.

Now, before I go any further, I’m going to offer the only qualifying statement I think Dr. Anthony Fauci deserves. (Eh-hem. That’s me clearing my throat.) Invoking the Fifth Amendment is not legal proof of guilt. The right against self-incrimination belongs to every American. It belongs to the innocent. It also belongs to the guilty.

There. Now to the obvious.

Yes, the Fifth Amendment is a shield against compelled self-incrimination. But I appreciate what Senator Rand Paul pointed out at the beginning of the hearing. The Fifth Amendment doesn’t erase facts. It doesn’t erase recorded testimony. It doesn’t erase the exhibits sitting on the table right in front of Fauci during the hearing. I would add that it also doesn’t certify a man’s level of honesty. It most certainly doesn’t require any onlooking American to pretend they cannot see what they’re seeing. It doesn’t require us to ignore why the Fifth Amendment shield is being raised. That’s because it also doesn’t erase common sense or basic human discernment.

Quite simply, to any normal human being, a man who repeatedly refuses to reconcile documentary evidence with countless statements he’s already previously made under oath doesn’t imply innocence. It suggests guilt. Again, any normal, thinking human being knows this. The logic plainly suggests that when Fauci won’t even acknowledge what he has already confidently acknowledged in the past, the visual here becomes that he was lying before, and now, he fears where admitting to what he previously said might lead.

Unfortunately for Fauci, with each invocation, the spectacle only got worse. And regardless of the Democrat committee members who attempted to run a block for Fauci by misdirecting the hearing’s aim with wild tangents, all the normal people watching knew that while Fauci kept silent, the evidence was talking. The documents were talking. His diary was talking. His previous testimony was talking.

Now, add the pardon to the calculus. Biden (purportedly) gave Fauci an unprecedented presidential pardon. It’s unprecedented because it was extraordinarily broad, covering all offenses related to anything he did between January 1, 2014, and January 19, 2025. It’s also unprecedented because it was preemptive. By definition, the word “pardon” requires an offense that needs forgiving. And so, pardons are ordinarily given after someone has been convicted. But Fauci was never charged for anything, much less convicted. So, why did he need a pardon?

That makes all of this look even worse.

Personally, I think Fauci made a mistake by accepting the pardon. Whatever legal protection it provided, it also created the unmistakable impression that he needed protection from something. Now, with the documentary record already contradicting so much of what he has said, every substantive answer risks exposing him further. And so, all he can really do is drone on and on from behind the Fifth Amendment to keep from colliding with evidence that already suggests conduct serious enough to warrant presidential pardon-level protection.

But regardless of Fauci’s tap dancing, I’m guessing most Americans can see right through it. Most Christians I know certainly can. But then again, Saint Paul instructs us to “test everything” and “hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). That means, innately, we’re not required to surrender our God-given reasoning merely because an authority pleads the Fifth confidently. In the end, when testimony contradicts documents, and today’s claims contradict yesterday’s, recognizing the contradiction is not uncharitable. It’s Godly discernment. Discernment already knows that Fauci’s unprecedented pardon cannot protect him from perjury committed during a Senate hearing held on July 29, 2026. Fauci knows this, too. He knows Wednesday’s words create Wednesday’s liability. And so, he’s pleading the Fifth Amendment to keep from being convicted for previous lies spoken under oath.

It angers me to see him use the law to get away with all this. But until someone offers a lawful workaround, I’m more interested in the glaring irony hovering like a fog above all of this.

Set aside everything else that was said in the hearing and remember that no one present argued against Fauci being the architect for the COVID response. The Republicans criticized him for it. The Democrats praised him, calling him a hero. And yet, both agreed he was responsible for the framework that ultimately suspended the constitutional rights of hundreds of millions of Americans.

Of course, he didn’t design every community’s procedure. He didn’t need to sign every closure order. He didn’t need to lock every church door personally. The architect doesn’t need to swing the hammers on the job site. There were plenty in government in every community ready to swing hammers for him. The point is that his pronouncements and nearly omnipresent authority in all things COVID-related supplied the moral, scientific, and governmental cover for those people to do what they did.

2020 wasn’t that long ago. I remember all of it. I remember even the littlest things—like being shamed by a church member for posting a video showing how smoke particles, which are bigger than COVID, moved right through the masks Fauci was demanding we wear. I remember when I heard about a surfer in California, the only guy on the beach, who was arrested for being out on the waves during the lockdowns—and the horror!—he was on his board at an empty beach without a mask! I remember how Parks Departments around the country put makeshift wooden caps on outdoor basketball hoops to keep anyone from using them. I remember how so many businesses here in Michigan went bankrupt while establishments that performed abortions, sold liquor and lottery tickets, or in some way kept state revenue flowing were deemed essential. I remember how the government strangled religious liberty. I remember how unelected officials appointed to health department boards somehow presumed to decide that the preaching of God’s Word, the reception of the Sacrament, and the consolation of fellow believers was non-essential. I remember how churches were labeled super-spreaders and how Christians were forbidden from gathering for public worship. I remember how countless clergy stood in empty naves and sanctuaries preaching into cameras.

Unfortunately, I also remember how easily so many pastors and churches went along with this nonsense. I remember how more than a year past the lockdowns, at least 40% of Michigan’s churches were still closed, and how for many that were open, they still refused to admit Christians to worship without a mask. No mask, no entry. I remember how they called this love for the neighbor. Candidly, it deserved, and still deserves, another name: heresy. Any church that imposed a human rule barring believers from the in-person preaching of God’s Word and the reception of His gifts crossed an uncrossable line. They obstructed the First Table of God’s Law—the command to love God with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength (Commandments 1 through 3)—while pretending to uphold the Second Table’s command to love the neighbor (Commandments 4 through 10).

But Romans 13! But Dr. Fauci and the CDC!

Despicable heresy.

Beyond even these dreadfulnesses, don’t forget that Fauci’s framework and influence also kept families from elderly parents and grandparents dying in nursing homes. Forbidden from entering, they could only press their hands against windows while their loved ones died without familiar voices, a pastor’s prayers, or the touch of someone who loved them. And then those same families were obliterated by ideology. They argued over masks, vaccines, travel, holidays, and whether grandparents could hold their grandchildren. Here in Michigan, Governor Whitmer offered incentives that encouraged neighbors to report one another. We were “loving thy neighbor” when we regarded one another as biological threats and reported those not wearing masks or sitting within six feet of others at Thanksgiving dinner.

And have we forgotten Fauci’s recommendations for schools? Have we forgotten the generation of children who spent their formative years behind masks, never once receiving a hug from their teacher or seeing that same teacher smile? Countless struggled through remote classrooms well into the 2020-21 school year while school administrators pretended that a glowing rectangle was an adequate substitute for human presence. In our school here at Our Savior in Hartland, we kept the masks off, preserved the classroom as a place of genuine human contact, and refused to teach children that every face, breath, and touch was a threat. Interestingly, we were fine. No one got sick. And no one died. Of course, we had to deal with threats from local health officials on occasion. Still, the gratitude of our parents was overwhelming. Again and again, they thanked us for allowing their children to remain children.

Unfortunately for too many school communities around us, anxiety and depression only deepened. It’s also no surprise that suicide rates went through the roof nationally. The children were taught to fear everything—faces, voices, touch, singing, playgrounds, classrooms, and one another. Then the adults who taught them these things acted surprised when loneliness and despair flourished.

I could go on and on about everything I remember. I certainly did back when it was all happening. In the meantime, the point here is that Fauci openly and regularly defended stripping so many rights away, and he did so with the language of necessity. America’s constitutional rights had to yield. Questions had to wait. Dissent was dangerous, and opposing speech was villainized and punished. But obedience was called compassion. All the while, those being crushed beneath the rules were expected to accept that Fauci and his experts were doing what was best because they simply knew better. “Trust the science” gradually began to exclude a person’s right to examine the evidence, and instead began to mean, “Do what you’re told.”

The irony here is that now, suddenly, Anthony Fauci is quite fond of the Constitution’s protections. Now he wants its shelter from those in power sitting before him in the hearing. He wants the Fifth Amendment’s centuries-old insistence that the state may not compel a man to furnish his own harm. He wants precisely the kind of constitutional protection that the rest of us—the ordinary Americans—were told was reckless, selfish, and uncaring.

Fauci is entitled to invoke the Fifth Amendment. But he and his lawyer are fooling themselves if they think the revoltingly obvious disparity is going unnoticed. When Americans pleaded for their constitutional rights, Fauci’s answer was effectively, “Obey.” But when Anthony Fauci fears for his untouchable status, his answer is immediately, “I have rights.” The Constitution, it seems, was negotiable when it stood between the government and ordinary folks. It became sacred the moment Anthony Fauci needed it personally.

I’ve already gone on long enough, which I freely admit happens sometimes. I suppose I’ll simply return to where I started. I began by saying the more Fauci repeated his Fifth Amendment statement, the angrier I got. But here’s the thing. It’s okay to be angry. Saint Paul says pretty plainly, “Be angry” (Ephesians 4:26). Of course, the whole verse is, “Be angry and do not sin.” That means we can be angry, but we ought not let the anger steer us, dominating our every action or emotion, even when it seems like the villain is getting away with murder. Our anger must lead us into faithfulness. That means speaking the truth, maybe even disobeying the government sometimes to resist evil, seeking justice, and praying for an evil doer’s repentance. It may even mean trusting that when Fauci ultimately gets off scot-free—which he probably will—the One who comes again in glory to judge both the living and the dead, Jesus Christ, will do so in perfect righteousness.

Men may conceal the truth, governments may abuse their authority, and earthly justice may arrive slowly or not at all. Nevertheless, Christ is still in charge. Nothing is hidden from Him. The Constitution may or may not actually restrain rulers. Strangely, in this circumstance, it may even protect someone who appears worthy of what happened at Nuremberg. But in the end, it’s Christ—not Fauci, not the government, and not the spirit of the age—who will have the last word. I’m counting on it. I hope you are, too.

Politics = Unavoidable

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The 69th Regular Convention of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod gathered in downtown Phoenix last week. Delegates worshiped, elected officers, considered resolutions, debated amendments, called questions, cast votes, and did all sorts of parliamentary things you’d expect at a convention.

I did not attend. I watched closely from afar. Very closely. And I stayed in close contact with various folks on the floor. Quite a few, in fact. So many, I spent most of last week doing things I absolutely despise: texting and private messaging.

That said, and regardless of anyone’s relationship with my denomination, I suppose what I want to say this morning crosses all denominational lines. Essentially, even as so many of the usual suspects did all they could to insist that the LCMS’s churchly proceedings were somehow above or insulated from the politics of the civil realm, I can promise you that the event was political from the moment the first delegate arrived.

I know right away that using the word “politics” makes some Christians, especially Lutherans, uncomfortable. Politics has become a word that people use when they want to end a conversation. A pastor—or even a pew-sitting Christian—addresses abortion, marriage, education, sexuality, religious liberty, crime, or whatever from the Christian perspective and someone complains that they’re “getting too political.” Even some Christians are quick to respond in this way. I heard pastors actually say that kind of stuff from the convention’s floor microphones.

It’s no wonder that after my online commentary concerning an amendment that would add Charlie Kirk’s name to a resolution—an amendment that was voted down—I received no small number of Lutherans telling me that the Church and politics must never mix. Like, at all. Some, just to stick the knife a little deeper into the apparent loss, expressed a sarcastic sadness that the Charlie Kirk amendment was only voted down by a slim margin rather than unanimously rejected by all. Others spoke out, saying that if the LCMS ever started speaking directly into the political sphere, they’d leave the fellowship.

Curiously, a handful of the objections came pre-wrapped in assurances that the speakers appreciated Charlie and even agreed with much of his politics. They simply did not want the Church to say his name.

For the record, all of these responses are typical of the “absolute separationist” personality. An absolute separationist believes the Church should remain entirely removed from political questions and public affairs, leaving such matters entirely to civil institutions. Of course, these folks tend to insulate their real reasoning with statements like, “A Church engaged in politics is in jeopardy of losing its actual mission.”

That certainly sounds virtuous—that is, until you actually try to live beneath absolute separationism’s maxim.

By definition, politics is the ordering of our common life in this world. It concerns authority, law, justice, public responsibility, institutions, and the decisions that determine how people exist in community together. If politics is entirely removed from the Church’s calculations (as absolute separationism hopes to achieve), then the Church makes a dangerous assumption about Christian life in a world whose hostility toward the Gospel is hardly theoretical. A Church operating beneath that assumption pretends that laws, institutions, and public decisions exert no pressure upon her mission or determine how openly she may carry it out.

And so, I return to what I said at the beginning, which was that the LCMS convention last week stood in politics’ shadow before anyone stepped to a microphone, whether the separationists are willing to admit it or not.

For starters, the convention met in the Phoenix Convention Center, a facility operated as part of the government of the City of Phoenix and supported by public tax dollars. In fact, I learned on Friday morning that the city maintains an actual convention-center department. It negotiates contracts and regulates the building’s usage. And beyond the facility itself, don’t forget everything else the local government provided. Police and emergency personnel stood ready. Roads, airports, public transportation, utilities, parking structures, and all kinds of civil mechanisms carried anyone and everyone associated with the event into and through to its conclusion.

All of this is political stuff, and it made the LCMS convention possible.

But what if different political winds were blowing and no Christians were present in the public square to represent the Church? What if all Christians suddenly embraced the absolute separationist ideology that the Church ought not mingle in politics or represent its concerns there? A local government could become overtly hostile to Christianity and refuse the rental contract. It could prohibit the Synod’s teaching about marriage or human sexuality. It could declare portions of God’s Word discriminatory. It could censor convention publications, arrest speakers, restrict travel, seize property, or surround the building with armed men.

“That’s ridiculous, Reverend,” you say. Tell that to Päivi Räsänen. Finland’s Supreme Court convicted her over the continued publication of a church pamphlet addressing marriage and sexual ethics. I just read last week how she’s prohibited from even visiting certain countries. Political hostility to Christian teaching is hardly a hypothetical exercise.

“But the Church can continue with or without a convention or a convention center.”

Yes, Christ has promised that much. And yet, the point is relatively simple. Good or bad, politics is, in truth, an “unavoidable” that determines a great many things. In a way, the LCMS acknowledged the unavoidable nature of politics when it adopted the resolution titled “To Condemn Political Violence and Encourage Participation in Public Life.”

So many wanted Charlie’s name erased from the resolution lest the LCMS dabble in politics. Even as I might have cried, I laughed instead. The title itself tells you everything you need to know. Its thrust is toward and into politics. It announces that politics has the potential for truly dreadful behavior. And while the LCMS initially embarrassed itself by voting down a relatively microscopic amendment to at least name the man who inspired the resolution—Charlie Kirk—still, whatever reasons the nays may have offered, their votes could not erase what the resolution itself admitted. They unwittingly acknowledged that evil politics—politics left unchecked against God’s established moral order—empowers the wicked. It creates widows. It creates orphans. It creates fearful communities.

Thankfully, Charlie Kirk understood that Christians cannot abandon the public square. He spent his life urging believers to speak, organize, vote, persuade, and refuse the lie that separationism leading to political silence is somehow a higher form of faithfulness to Christ. It isn’t. And a voting delegate who refuses to admit this, especially when it comes to what happened to Charlie, has already somehow missed the fact that the Fifth Commandment just walked into the room. Martyrdom or not, God forbids murder, including the assassination of people because of their political views. And yet, who enforces the restriction? The Church? The Church names the sin and forms the conscience. But the magistrate restrains the murderer and bears the sword. The same commandment lives in both spheres of Church and state.

The same is true of nearly every modern political question. Before any of them became political, they were already Christological. Life, marriage, authority, justice, truth, mercy—they all belong to Christ before any legislature, court, party, or candidate could take them up. Christ owns the whole world, and His people have no reason to surrender any part of it as though it were outside His authority or beyond the reach of Christian vocation.

I’ve said it a thousand times, and I’ll keep on saying it: Caesar doesn’t somehow take ownership of something just by placing it on a ballot or talking about it during a legislative session.

And one more quick thing.

Lutherans should know this better than anyone else because Lutherans already possess a theological vocabulary capable of handling it. We are inheritors of Luther’s Two Kingdoms doctrine, which, of course, he lifted straight from God’s Word. We own the church-and-state framework that even the Founding Fathers commended as the best extrapolation of the concept.

As Lutherans, we confess that God rules through two kingdoms. Through the right-hand kingdom, He establishes and ordains His Church to preach and teach the Gospel, forgive sins, gather His people, and create faith. Through the left-hand kingdom, God establishes and ordains earthly government to restrain evil, preserve order, punish wrongdoing, and protect earthly life. The distinction preserves the Gospel from coercion. It also prevents civil government from pretending it plays a role in saving souls.

But nowhere in this biblical distinction is Christianity removed from public life. Rather, the Bible, and therefore the Two Kingdoms doctrine, teaches that Christians live under both kingdoms at the same time. It also teaches that they often interact with one another, accommodating and upholding each other in certain ways, each helping the other maintain its divinely ordained purpose.

I already pointed out the convention itself was an example of how the left-hand kingdom touches the right-hand kingdom. In other words, the Church cannot avoid dealing in political things. But even with that example, I don’t just mean that she must deal in legal contracts and pay taxes for this or that. I don’t even mean she must occasionally push back when laws threaten life, redefine marriage, corrupt children, punish Christian confession, or reward wickedness. I mean she must already be active in holding the civil government to its ordination. She must already have a hand in shaping the entirety of the political landscape. She doesn’t do this to make the government a theocracy. We are not Dominionists. Ultimately, she does it to preserve a society that supports her purpose. She must be allowed to preach and teach the Gospel unhindered.

To do this, at a minimum, the Church must carry political things to her people. She must teach her people about the issues and how to engage faithfully with them in the civil realm.

For as much as the absolute separationists would hope, the two kingdoms are never completely sealed away from one another. And to believe otherwise—to pretend politics does not intersect with the Church or that it is someone else’s or another institution’s sole concern—is to miss the fact that politics has already entered the sanctuary, the home, the school, and the lives of God’s people. And a pastor’s silence relative to politics doesn’t safeguard the Christians in his care. It simply allows Christians to receive their teaching from another source. And trust me. The world has a truckload of catechists vying for the opportunity. The world is more than happy to teach Christians what they should believe about life, gender, morality, justice, freedom, and all kinds of other topics deemed too political by some.

Now, I’ve already gone on long enough. But before I finish, no, the Church must never become an auxiliary of a political party. I’m not arguing for that, and I don’t know any confessional Lutherans who are. Admittedly, too many in mainstream evangelicalism do drift wildly in that direction. But regardless of what you’ve heard about Charlie Kirk, I know for a fact that was not his argument. He did not believe that the Church should surrender her doctrine, worship, or mission to a political party. He simply urged Christians to bring their faith into public life, and then he demonstrated it.

I suppose I’m compelled to clarify this, not only because I knew Charlie, but because the warnings raised against naming him at my own denomination’s convention—that doing so might make the LCMS look as though it officially endorsed one party over another—were wildly misinformed opinions likely learned from very bad sources. In short, they pinned Charlie to a position he didn’t hold.

Actually, I guess maybe I’m not done yet. Forget about the Dominionists in mainstream evangelicalism for a second. I know plenty in the LCMS who go in the extreme opposite direction, treating political withdrawal as though it were the quintessential mark of confessional purity. Interestingly, some of the delegates who resisted naming him seemed to think they had insulated themselves from this criticism by first offering a testimonial. They appreciated Charlie Kirk. They agreed with much of his politics. Some even admired his courage. Then came the ecclesiastical disclaimer: his name still had no place in the Church’s mouth. It was the familiar rhetorical maneuver by which someone cites a favorable association as proof that the conduct now under examination cannot possibly mean what it plainly means.

Yes, the Church’s proclamation belongs to Christ alone. Her sacraments belong to Christ. Her hope rests in the resurrection of Christ. But you’ll never convince me that politics exists beyond the Church’s concern, especially when her members still live in cities, counties, states, and nations. Laws govern them. Their children attend schools shaped by elected boards. Their livelihoods are affected by public policy. Their church properties depend upon civil protections. Their unborn children live or die under political decisions. Their freedom to confess Christ publicly can expand or contract according to the people elected to office.

As I told someone very plainly yesterday on the phone, no, politics will never save the Church. But only a fool would believe that the Church’s absolute retreat from politics doesn’t somehow give the state the room to build the machinery by which the Church is persecuted.

The Furnace

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Actor Neal McDonough will speak at our “The Body of Christ and the Public Square” conference this fall. I must say I’m genuinely excited to welcome someone who has spent decades working successfully in Hollywood without compromising his Christian faith or his conservative convictions.

Folks closest to me know I have long wanted our conference to feature someone active in the entertainment industry who can speak honestly about what it means to remain faithful while immersed in a world that, for the most part, is opposed to Christianity. I’ve said before that when it comes to persecuting the Christian faith, Hollywood shares a lot in common with Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace.

So far, as a writer who has bumped into Hollywood, my experience has been relatively good. That said, I’ve also learned from those in the know that it’ll take very little of my confessional Lutheranism or conservative leanings to see it come undone. The furnace’s flames are definitely there. They come through contracts, casting decisions, lost opportunities, ridicule, and the quiet warning that life would be easier if one would simply stop being so serious about what he believes. Interestingly, it seems the pressure is rarely presented as a demand to deny Christ outright. More often, it’s an invitation to sacrifice just enough to remain welcome.

That’s what makes Neal McDonough’s story so valuable. Of course, like everyone else in the world, he’s had his troubles. If I recall correctly, he struggled with alcoholism. However, unlike so many others in Hollywood, Neal hasn’t moved from marriage to marriage. He’s been married to his wife, Ruvé, for nearly twenty-three years. A strong marriage was essential to his survival. When he struggled, she was there. And he was there for her. With that, they’ve raised five children together, and he has been remarkably public about the boundaries he maintains to protect his marriage. Among them is his longstanding refusal to kiss another woman on screen who isn’t Ruvé, let alone participate in sex scenes.

Compared to so many others in Hollywood, he holds a hard line on things like that. One would think he’d be considered honorable for it. And yet, the decision has cost him.

Watch one of his interviews. Or read some of the articles about him—especially the ones that lean toward ridiculing him. You’ll learn that he has, indeed, been pushed aside, ultimately losing work, because he wouldn’t cross the lines his Christian conscience has drawn. He has also acknowledged that his personal restrictions probably explain why he has so often been cast as a villain rather than a leading man. It’s not that he couldn’t fit the role. It’s just that Hollywood doesn’t really care if the villain gets a leading lady. The villain is there for the audience to hate. The villain is only there to challenge the seemingly better man, the one who saves the girl, and then, as a reward, gets to sleep with her. Although I suspect most moviegoers don’t even pick up on that distinction. Most audiences have been conditioned beyond the ability to imagine a leading man who believes that sexual fidelity is as important as stopping the villain.

Now, think about that.

In an industry that celebrates nearly every imaginable boundary being broken, one of the truly rebellious acts by comparison is a husband refusing to pretend that his wedding vows have an “except while filming” clause.

Neal is probably right about such convictions having cost him roles, a whole lot of money, and the professional standing that comes with all of it. Still, he pushed through and remained in the industry. He didn’t retreat into silence. He certainly didn’t accept the premise that success required surrender. He found ways to work within his convictions, and the Lord has blessed him with A-list success.

Considering our forthcoming conference, that’s precisely the kind of encouragement our attendees need as we consider our own levels of engagement with the world around us.

For Neal—a man working in one of the most challenging fields for Christians—the answer has not been withdrawal. It hasn’t been accommodation, either. Thankfully, he knew the dangers of those actions early on. He knew that faithfulness often meant being called to enter difficult places without allowing those places to enter him. As it meets with our efforts, Neal will be a great addition to our lineup because our primary purpose is to teach that the public square doesn’t need Christians who have mastered the art of blending in. It needs Christians who know how to be who they are in Christ while holding the line.

Neal can help us understand what that looks like in a unique way, one that deals with real-world consequences. He can speak from the position of his career being at stake. He can talk about what it means to protect a marriage in a culture increasingly hostile to marital fidelity.

Again, Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace comes to mind. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego didn’t survive the heat because they found a way to compromise with it. They survived because, while refusing to bow to Nebuchadnezzar’s lies, the God in whom they’d placed all their trust preserved them. They didn’t know if He would act to preserve their earthly lives. They said as much before the guards threw them into the flames. Still, they knew God was faithful and that He would keep them for eternity. Trusting Him, they refused to compromise.

I often say that the Good Samaritan story is the account of our age. Perhaps the account of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego is a better fit. Of course, most folks reading this will never stand on a Hollywood set. Most will never face a studio executive or watch opportunities disappear because of Christian or conservative conviction. As I said, I’m a little closer to these things lately, and at the same time, I’m fully prepared for it to unravel.  So far, so good. In the meantime, most of our furnaces look more like classrooms, businesses, courtrooms, congregations, family gatherings, and a host of other settings.

But the thing is, no matter the setting, the challenge and its temptations remain. Bow just a little. Keep your head down. Stay quiet. Chalk it up as wisdom when you compromise this or that part of the Christian faith. Convince yourself there’ll be time for faithfulness soon enough. Until then, let the danger pass.

I admire Neal. I’m glad he’ll be with us. He’s a crisp example that you don’t have to win the rooms you’re in. But faithfulness is essential while you’re in them.

As we prepare for this fall’s conference on October 3, my hope is that Neal’s words will encourage everyone in attendance to enter everyday life with courage. As it meets with Christian conviction, I can assure you that the world doesn’t need a quieter Church. It certainly doesn’t need a Church that spends itself to blend in, doing everything it can to look and act like the world around it.

The world needs a Church that’s holy—set apart and standing out as immovably distinct. Simply put, it needs the faithful Bride of Christ, a body of believers who know all too well that the furnace is already burning, and yet, regardless of the world’s threats, they have no intention of bending the knee in adoration to anyone but the divine Groom, Jesus Christ.

God Bless America

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I’ll start by saying the same thing I say every year when I return from vacation. I love vacations, but it’s good to be home, even if only to sleep in my own bed.

As you may already know, the Thoma family has been in Florida for the last two weeks. Every year, we rent a home just a little southwest of Orlando. For the most part, we go to the same place every year. And even though we’re about 15 miles from everything “Disney,” we never go to the parks. Perhaps we might, if Disney could only return to what it once was before it bought into the viral delusion. There’s nothing creepier than being greeted at a theme park’s entrance by a bearded Cinderella.

We also don’t do a lot of sightseeing, either. The main point of our getaway is to do just that. To get away. And so, we swim, eat, play games, and shop. That’s pretty much it. Well, add to the list that we spend a day hunting for shark teeth in the Gulf.

We were in Florida on July 4th. With this year being America’s 250th birthday, we decided that rather than going to a local event, we wanted to see a fireworks display worth remembering. Jen looked online and found a list of the must-see opportunities. We chose the display at SeaWorld, and it was by no means disappointing.

For starters, the amphitheater where we planted ourselves was packed. People were shoulder to shoulder, filling every available space. I’m no fan of crowds, especially sweaty ones. However, I’ll admit it was nice to see so many wearing their patriotism so openly. For once, in the strange way a crowd can become one from many—truly “E pluribus unum”—everyone seemed caught up in the same spirit of gratitude and celebration for this great country.

The last time I experienced that kind of national unity was just after the events of September 11. Except then, it wasn’t celebratory. It was something else entirely.

Anyway, SeaWorld’s fireworks display was extraordinary. The sky lit up. The music swelled. Everyone cheered.

I should mention that before the fireworks began, a DJ orchestrated a dance party on the stage at the front. The rest of us—the ones who preferred to stay and protect our seats for the forthcoming fireworks—we all sang along to the familiar tunes. It’s funny how you know the Michiganders in the crowd when Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” plays. My daughters were sure to play their part. Of course, being from Illinois, when the line about being born and raised in South Detroit lands, I give my wife a wink before the very next line, which is one that reminds everyone singing he wanted on the next midnight train to anywhere but Michigan.

But then came something I absolutely did not expect.

Near the end of the fireworks, there was an incredibly moving rendition of “God Bless America.” It is no understatement to say I was shocked to hear it. America knows the song. But it seems she’s been more interested in keeping everything the song delivers tucked away quietly.

But there it was. And no one was looking around at others concerned. No one was apologizing for it. People took off their hats. I certainly removed mine. And I sang, even if only quietly. I’m pretty sure the man sitting on the stairs beside me with his daughter and her light-up hat was singing, too.

I don’t know the artist who sang that particular version—a female country singer, I think—but whoever she was, she nearly brought me to tears. My lip certainly quivered a few times.

I’m guessing this happened because in the current climate of our country, where almost anything openly patriotic, let alone Christian, is treated as divisive—and often embarrassing—the familiar song was being offered so openly and received so warmly.

I did see a few folks get up and leave. But for the most part, no one seemed offended. No one actually melted under the weight of the words “God” or “America.” In fact, most appeared moved by them.

But here’s something that came to mind the very next morning while driving my family to church.

It sure seems as though America still knows how to call on God when the fireworks are overhead. But then it seems she readily forgets how to kneel before Him when the show is over.

As I said, this thought came to me the next morning—Sunday—while driving to church. We traveled there using the same roads that had been congested almost every day of our vacation so far. Except that morning, they were, for the most part, bare.

I should add that the church lots we passed on the way, at least ten, told the same story. They were relatively deserted. The church we attended was reasonably attended, and I was grateful for that. Still, the difference between Saturday night’s patriotic celebration and Sunday morning was incredibly hard to miss.

Just the night before, thousands stood together while “God Bless America” filled the air. The next morning, many could not find their way to the God they had just asked to bless and preserve them into the future.

I was nearly moved to tears the night before. I felt the same sensation on Sunday morning, but for an altogether different reason.

Just so you know, I’m not sharing this to bring you down from any patriotic high you may be experiencing because of the gravity of this year’s Fourth of July celebration. But I should at least be honest and admit it’s written from a place of grief.

I learned that most Americans are likely still okay with God. Just not all of Him. Sunday morning reminded me that they prefer He keep to the anthem. I suppose it’s okay for most when He stops by to bless the nation, protect the troops, or sanctify a national holiday. I suppose folks are fine with Him giving moral weight to the things we already love.

I suppose what I mean is this.

Be sure to celebrate, but as you do, keep in mind that God is not a patriotic accessory. He’s far more than a line in the Pledge of Allegiance or “God Bless America.” He’s not limited to your mood at the end of a moving fireworks show.

I had another thought while driving.

If we are prepared to sing “God Bless America,” then we should also be prepared for the harder roads God often uses to deliver those blessings. We should be ready for Him to knock us to our knees. And when He does, we should be ready to repent.

I think that’s the part most prefer to skip.

We want God to stand respectfully behind the American flag and the freedoms it symbolizes, but we don’t want Him standing there in judgment over our pitifully self-centered hearts. We want God to bless us even as we somehow twist the word “liberty” to mean we are free to murder unborn babies. We want his nod of acceptance while we do the same with “the pursuit of happiness,” using it to justify confusing His natural law.

In the end, too many simply want Him to smile and wave at us from a distance—a distance we certify when we avoid time in worship with Him.

All of that said, the God who hears a nation singing “God Bless America” is also the God who looks to those seeking faithfulness to Him when there is no crowd, no spectacle, no music swelling over fireworks, and no patriotic feeling to carry the fast-fleeting moment.

Sunday, July 5th, told me a truth that Saturday night tried to hide.

Again, I was glad “God Bless America” was sung. I was glad people joined in. I was glad that a massive, and typically left-leaning organization like SeaWorld, actually inserted God into the evening rather than erasing Him. Whether or not they did it on purpose, it was a moment for Americans to remember, even imperfectly, that our blessings do not come from ourselves. They don’t even come from the brilliance of our Founding Fathers. They come from God.

People who know that—and actually believe it by faith—are the ones who know that the truest way to sing “God Bless America” on Saturday night is to do so planning to be with Him in His house on Sunday morning.

Everyone else is not really asking God to bless America. He’s just one more guest they’ve invited to the fireworks display. And like all the other invited guests, they expect Him to leave when it’s over.