The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast

Hey.I may not know you but I know what you’re thinking.I know you feel something breaking inside lately; an invisible fracture that only you’re fully aware of.I know the way you walk away from conversations with people you once relied on for wisdom and clarity and compassion, doubting your own sanity because you no longer recognize those things in them and worry you may be overreacting.I know the way you feel internally estranged from the friends, coworkers, family members, and neighbors you used to find affinity with, and you wonder if you’re losing your mind.I understand how you stare at the perpetual parade of horrible scrolling past you, from the second you wake up prematurely in the early morning until the stretched out nighttime moments you try unsuccessfully to fall asleep, and how you question the grip you have on reality.I know the disbelief you feel in the presence of loved ones and ministers and leaders who now seem to be speaking some strange foreign tongue that you can’t make any sense of anymore.I hear the nagging question you ask inside your head a few hundred times a day: “Is it me, or has a huge portion of this country lost its mind?”It isn’t you.You’re quite fine, and this is of course both good and terrible news—because of what it says about you and about the place you find yourself.The fact that you see how wrong this all is, means your faculties are intact, your mind is fully right, and your heart is working properly. It’s all confirmation that you still have a soul doing what souls are supposed to do: keep you deeply human in profoundly inhumane times.This is why you need to hold tightly to that soul, because it is more rare and valuable than ever.It’s why you need to embrace this holy unrest in the center of your belly; because it is the greatest weapon against the present epidemic of apathy.It’s why you can’t allow your right mind to make peace with such abject madness.If enough time passes, an otherwise healthy person can start to get used to sickness. They can slowly begin to convince themselves that almost any horrifying, toxic, painful, twisted reality is acceptable.Little by little they can gradually allow themselves to acclimate to the nightmare, to come to see it as normal.Either that, or they determine that they’re actually out of their minds and they collapse inside.This is a reminder that what is happening in America right now is not at all normal and that you are right to feel this disorientation.I need you to hear this, friend:You’re okay.You’re not crazy.You’re also in good company.Right now, there is a massive army of similarly walking wounded sharing this place with you; fellow exhausted souls who realize that none of this makes any sense—people concluding that for their health, they will need to create distance from people they once allowed proximity.There are millions of good people out here still looking to be the kind of people the world needs; those committed to doing no harm, burdened to bring something decent where it is missing.Many of us who see what you see:We can see that this movement in our nation is a bastardization of humanity, a rebellion against goodness, a mutiny against sanity.We can see that those sanctioning and defending and co-signing it are similarly unwell, equally disconnected from anything benevolent, similarly propelled by fear and greed and bitterness.And that’s why we need to keep resisting it.You need to push back against the surrounding insanity that tries to convince you that you’ve gone mad.You need to refuse to be gaslit by people when they try to diminish your worries, mock your anxiety, or tell you you’re being overly emotional—even when that person is the one staring back at you in the mirror.You need to press on, because in days when evil is normalized, goodness matters most.Right now, work to find your people, those who are as heartbroken and furious as you are, and begin find ways to care for human beings in duress, to organize against the legislative assaults, and to be strengthened by loving community.In times when truth and news are pliable, truth-tellers are worth more than gold.You’re not crazy, but these days surely are.You’re not upside down right now, friend—a good portion of this place is.Loving resistance is a world-turner.People of faith, morality, and conscience together, from every corner of this nation, will right-side it.Be encouraged.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

This President has been many things since descending an escalator a decade ago: a national embarrassment, a global punchline, an environmental disaster, a divider of people, a prolific murderer of the English language, not to mention countless human beings.But he’s also been a floodlight.He’s fully exposed millions of people who’d kept themselves carefully concealed, many of whom I thought I knew. I can see them now in ways I never could previously. It’s all out in the open.Intellectually, I always knew that racism was deeply embedded into the fabric of our nation. Still, I’d convinced myself that it had slowly but certainly begun to unravel, that we weren’t as hopelessly bound by it as our ancestors had been. As a pastor in largely white churches in the South over the past two decades, I told myself the story that the Church, like this nation, was changing. It may have been a combination of privilege, ignorance, and wishful thinking, but I truly thought that we were getting better, that the arc of the moral universe was again bending toward justiceI surely never imagined that so many people I loved, lived with, worshipped alongside, or worked next to were as afflicted with supremacy as they have revealed themselves to be. I never fathomed that so many people claiming to love Jesus would so resent foreigners, so worship America, and so abhor diverse humanity. The people around me were either really good at pretending, or, in my naivety, I was just willing to believe the lie.I saw the cracks in their facades begin to show when Barack Obama was elected; their carefully coded hate speech, their ever more antagonistic social media posts from fringe sources, their incessant, desperate search for something to be outraged about, their inability to give him any credit or acknowledge his goodness. They grew more entrenched in their positions, more tribal in their tone.But even then, they kept their prejudices and phobias close to the vest, never really tipping their hand, always dancing around the words without really saying them. The mask was splitting and sliding off, but they would not fully show themselves because it was socially unacceptable (they would call it “politically correct.”)Then he arrived a decade ago: someone who gave them what they needed to abandon the performance completely: permission to be horrible; someone who erased any semblance of decorum, any expectation of decency, any level of accountability. After so many years of pretending, they finally received white Presidential consent to be outwardly racist—and now, in his second coming, the dam of their suppressed bigotry has burst, and they are letting the toxic hatred flow freely.White pastors now lob it through incendiary sermons into their congregations, white politicians plaster it upon campaign billboards, white police officers send it out in group emails, white teachers wave it in front of their students, white civilians spit it out in viral videos at coffee shops and public parks, white terrorists parade it unmasked through city streets.And my white friends, family members, and neighbors are rejoicing in this Renaissance of open ugliness—and I never saw it coming, even if I should have.And this has been the most disorienting, stomach-turning, sickening part of this terrible season in America: the realization that I have lived near, worked alongside, and ministered around people who claimed to believe in Jesus while harboring such corrosive hearts—and that I was oblivious to it all. I am both angry at them and disappointed in myself.But now, their open contempt for immigrants, their apathy in the face of his corruption, and their callousness toward suffering people all testify to their hearts.And I suppose that is the small bit of gratitude I have for this malignancy of a movement here; the way it has fully revealed people—and this is an unwelcome but invaluable gift.I know what I didn’t know before.I can’t excuse the truth away.I no longer give them the benefit of a doubt that they have fully removed.My eyes are clear and open widely, and now I’m responsible for what I do and say in response to who they are.We all are.Regardless of what happens in the future or how the political landscape may change or who we have helming our nation, what has been revealed about us as is going to remain, and we’re going to have to deal with the unmasked, unearthed, illuminated hatred that we are this violently afflicted with.That might be this President’s only worthy legacy.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber., not This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

It feels like a good portion of this nation is on death watch right now.My social media feed is filled with photos and videos gleefully documenting the markers of his physical deterioration, with rising hope as his public appearances grow more sporadic, with almost giddy prognostications of his departure date from this place. People are posting their plans as if preparing for New Year’s Eve or a World Series Championship.I am not exactly one of those people.Yes, he has been an odious blight upon this planet and a cancerous presence to this nation. He is, without question, one of the single most objectively horrible human beings our species has produced.Setting aside the reality that his passing would elevate a successor who is smarter, shrewder, less impulsive, and potentially far more effective in accelerating this country’s slide into theocracy, authoritarianism, and economic devastation for everyone but the billionaire cadre of amoral tech bro vampires who elevated him to the platform to begin with.But I don’t wish for his death.I wish he’d never been born.If he departs this mortal sphere as I type this, it will do nothing to undo all the evil that his now bruised hands have wrought, to erase every vile thing his presence has exposed as he ascended politically.It will not rewind the years of those who lived in squalor and poverty in New York City, on whose backs he built his jittery, hollow empire.His death will not bring financial restitution to the thousands of workers and contractors left abandoned by the many bankruptcies that emancipated him from responsibility.It won’t give back wholeness and healing to the girls and women he violated in secret or maligned in public.It will not reverse the irreparable damage he has done to a political party whose members individually and collectively abandoned every legal and moral expectation to fall prostrate before him.It will not elicit repentance in a white Evangelical Church that parted ways with the compassionate, loving namesake of its faith tradition and fashioned a vicious, sneering, profane, God-mocking idol out of his antithesis and bowed down before it.His passing now could not allow us to unsee the repugnant grievance cult he unleashed here; the historically hateful movement of miserable people who’ve spent the last decade reveling in an unrepentant ugliness because he gave them consent.It will not remove the legion of incompetent, predatory, corrupt sycophants he poisoned our government with; people who have and will continue to dismantle and pervert our systems of care and legal oversight.And his death, as much as it would feel like an initial reprieve from the chaos he has engineered and the unfathomable suffering he has spearheaded, would do nothing to conceal the vile sickness he exposed within the people around us: the long-simmering racism, the scalding contempt for foreigners, the phobic hatred of human beings for their gender identity or sexual orientation.Long after he is gone, we will be left with what we now know about our family members and friends and neighbors; about the people in our churches, about the parents of our children’s friends; about the pillars of our communities, about those we trust to govern us, protect, and serve us.These atrocities, sadly, will all long outlive him.He lived, and his life has done its brutal, irreversible damage.And with that being true, I do not wish for his death; not yet.I hope and pray that he lives long enough to face legal accountability for his crimes; that he will not depart this place before escaping consequences for the willful disregard he has spent 80 years showing for the laws of our land, for the disparate humanity that has called this place home, and for the sacred and powerful platform he never deserved to begin with.I want him to be humiliated, to be broken, to see his vile empire crumbled, to see his name erased from the places he disfigured with it.I want him to live long enough to face a cell before he faces his maker; to rot in prison before he rots in the ground.And I want to live long enough to see it.That will be cause for true celebration.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Republicans are telling us something right now, America:They know they can’t win in November.They’re shouting with absolute clarity that they know they can’t.They’re declaring it through their unceasing attempts to gerrymander millions of people’s voices out of the political process.They’re confessing as much through nonsensical word salad press conferences, condemning mythical past election fraud with invisible proof and non-existent evidence.They’re telling us through unrelenting Fox News fictions about thousands of supposed illegal immigrants somehow voting Democrat.They are preemptively admitting defeat in the Fall as they eliminate voting sites, oppose absentee ballots, weaponize the Postal Service, and conjure up ever more restrictive voter ID requirements.Most of all, they’ve admitted they cannot win a free and fair election by making no attempts to construct a political platform of any kind to address the economic and social sicknesses of this nation (most of which they have authored), because they have no interest in governing, only in holding power.Trump and his GOP acolytes have never run on substantive ideas or concrete solutions. In ten years, they have produced no healthcare plan, launched no programs to improve wages, and crafted no legislation to help working-class people. They have made no attempts to give more people access to education, financial security, home ownership, or opportunity.They have been a violent, greedy, parasitic movement of systemic destruction: a toxic sludge of fear porn, billionaire sodomy, racist dog whistles, and human rights and environmental protection rollbacks.Republicans are evil, and they’re treasonous, but they’re not stupid. They have the data. They’ve seen their grim poll numbers. They’re aware that Donald Trump’s approval rating is in the lowest depths of the toilet of history.They know they are hopelessly underwater on astronomical grocery and gas prices, on multiple wars we have no business participating in, on partnership in multiple genocides, on the Epstein Files, on ICE’s unrelenting barbarism, on an America where no one outside of the tiniest fraction of the wealthiest people feels good about their prospects for the future.For all of these reasons, we need to stop pretending that November will bring some magical emancipation from these Christo-fascists and tech bro oligarchs. We need to prepare our collective response to their inevitable refusal to relinquish their stranglehold on our barely-breathing Republic.There is no time to waste in believing we only need to show up at the polls and wait for Election Night. Yes, we must continue to canvass and support candidates and drive people to the polls in numbers that theoretically are too great to manipulate—but we also need to understand that this isn’t going to be a clean transfer of power, because Republicans are going to fight it by any means necessary. January 6th will seem benign compared to what they have prepared.Back in June, Speaker (and soulless bootlicking coward) Mike Johnson declared: “If we were to lose the midterms, heaven forbid, these Democrats, y’all impeachment’s not even the big concern.”Johnson continued: “They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the cabinet, his donors and friends; half of you in this room will be targeted. I run the protection program. I’ll take care of you. We’re going to win the midterms.”There it is. There are only two ways November plays out: Republicans conjure a “win” at the polls through every kind of technological malfeasance at their disposal, or, they are victims of a political bloodbath at the hands of the people and then flatly refuse to abide by the results. The worst thing any of us can do right now is to operate under any delusions that we are going to experience anything resembling a normal midterm election. The time to decide how we’re going to respond to Republicans’ current and promised lawlessness isn’t the day after the election; it’s right now. Find ways to support election security in your local community.Connect with organizations who are already actively pushing back against Trump’s corrupt regime, like Indivisible, Common Cause, Flare USA, Democracy Forward, Democracy Docket, and Removal Coalition.Educate people around you who are still sedated on a cocktail of wishful thinking, ignorance, and American exceptionalism, so that they understand what is coming in November.Build partnerships across lines of ideology, race, theology, and preference, knowing that we will only survive this coming assault on our Constitution by leveraging our collective power, in both bodies and dollars.Talk to your families and friends about how you will specifically respond when Trump and his Congressional sycophants follow through with what they are forecasting.Republicans are telling us they can’t win in November, but that they must and will win.The rest of us, the people who truly love this nation and the people who call it home or wish to, need to believe them.How are you specifically preparing for November? What organizations have you connected to? What work, voices, strategies are you finding helpful? Let me know in the comments.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Growing up in the Church, I was taught that the worst thing one could be was a non-believer; that nothing was as tragic as a damned soul that condemned itself by rejecting God.The religion of my childhood drew a sharp, clear line between the saved and the damned. All that mattered was making sure someone found themselves on the better side of this line, and the Atheists, Humanists, and Democrats didn’t have a shot.In light of this supposed truth, the heart of the faith (I was told) was to live in a way that reflected the character and love of Jesus so vividly, so beautifully, that others were compelled to follow after him; that a Christian’s living testimony might be the catalyst for someone’s conversion. The Bible called it “making disciples,” and it was the heart of our tradition. As the venerable hymn declared, people were supposed to know we are Christians by our love.What a difference a couple of decades make.Just ask around, now.People outside the Church will tell you: love is no longer our calling card here in America. It is now condemnation, bigotry, judgment, and hypocrisy. In fact, the Christianity prevalent in so much of America right now isn’t just failing to draw others to Christ; it is actively repelling them from him. By operating in a way that is in full opposition to the life and ministry of Jesus, that counterfeit religion is understandably producing people fully opposed to the faith that bears his name.In record numbers, the Conservative American Church is consistently and surely making Atheists—or at the very least, it is making former Christians—people who no longer consider organized religion an option because the Jesus they recognize is absent. With its sky-is-falling hand-wringing, its political bed-making, and its constant venom toward diversity, it is giving people no alternative but to conclude that, based on the evidence of people professing to be Godly, God is of little use. This God may, in fact, be terribly toxic.And that’s the greatest irony of it all: that the very Evangelicals who’ve spent the last 60 years in this country demonizing those who reject Jesus are now the single most compelling reason for them to do so. They are giving people who suspect that all Christians are self-righteous, hateful hypocrites all the evidence they need. The Church is confirming the outside world’s most dire suspicions about itself.People rejecting White Evangelical Christian nationalism aren’t stupid. They realize that bigotry, even when it is wrapped in religion or justified by the Bible or spoken from a pulpit, is still bigotry. They can smell the putrid stench of phony religion from a mile away—and this MAGA version of the Church, frankly, reeks of it. People are steering clear in droves, choosing to find meaning and community and something that resembles love outside its gatherings.With every persecution of the LGBTQ community, with every unprovoked attack on immigrants, with every planet-wrecking decision, with every defense of a serial predator, with every regressive civil rights assault, with every attempt at theocracy by these professed believers, the flight from Christianity rightly continues. Meanwhile, the celebrity preachers and professional Christians publicly feign disbelief about the multitudes walking away from God, oblivious to the fact that they are the impetus for the exodus.And one day soon, these same Conservative religious folks will look around, lamenting the empty buildings and the irrelevance of the Church and a world that has no use for it, and they’ll wonder how this happened. They’ll blame a corrupt culture, or the woke liberal media, or a wholesale rejection of Biblical values, or the devil himself—but it will be none of those things.No, the reason the Church soon will be teetering on the verge of extinction and irrelevance will be because those entrusted to perpetuate the love of Jesus in the world lost the plot so horribly, and gave the world no other option but to look elsewhere for goodness, purpose, and truth.Soon, these Evangelicals will ask why so much of America has rejected Jesus, and we will remind them of these days and assure these people haven’t rejected Jesus at all.They just found no evidence of Jesus in them.In the comments, share the ways the hatred and hypocrisy of professed Christians have shaken your faith, driven you from the Church, or reinforced your opposition to organized religion.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

This mess we’re in? It has nothing to do with politics.The current President is a court-adjudicated rapist who recently paid nearly 6 million dollars in damages for sexual assault and defamation. His name appears tens of thousands of times in the Epstein Files, and he has been credibly accused by dozens of women of sexual assault and harassment.He is a 34-count felon, indicted four separate times, with 88 charges, ranging from fraud to election interference.The only reason he is not in prison right now is that he has assumed the Presidency and marshalled the vast resources of the office to pervert our judicial and legal processes.Despite all of this, we still have family members, friends, former friends, and neighbors who would vote for him again right now.In what universe, in what iteration of this nation over the last 250 years, would a being this bereft of human decency have been tolerated in office, let alone passionately embraced?In what legitimate political movement would rape and treason not be dealbreakers?The answer is none.This isn’t a political fracture.I wish it were, though, as that would be relatively easy to navigate.We are not a nation, as we’ve often thought, simply positioned on either side of the aisle working to craft reasonable, good-faith compromise somewhere in the humane middle. Sadly, that ship left the port a long time ago. We aren’t even contending with a blind political tribalism that sees party over country, as the GOP of a decade ago has long since been rendered unrecognizable, abandoning its calls for a limited Government in exchange for unabashed authoritarianism.The prevailing narrative of the last decade is that America has been fractured by political ideologies, bunkered down in disagreement on what path will most serve the common good. This is a dangerous fiction we need to discard once and for all.The dividing lines in America have nothing to do with party affiliation anymore.Just open up your phone, eavesdrop at the checkout line, or talk to your neighbor, and you’ll see the lines along which we now find ourselves:One side celebrates innocent people being assassinated in front of their children, without due process.One side rejoices in strangers going without food or medical care or housing, without knowing a single one of their stories.One side applauds the bombing of foreign school children and the destruction of entire populations.One side blindly despises other people for their gender identity, despite it having no impact on their lives whatsoever.One side reduces an entire population to terrorists and drug dealers to justify their swift eradication.One side conflates whiteness with righteousness.One side defends the protection of pedophiles.One side steadfastly worships a felonious, treasonous rapist.And none of this is about politics; it’s about when faced with the suffering and injustice in our path, whether we will default to compassion or to cruelty.America’s present divide reveals the orientation of our hearts as we move through the world, the story we tell ourselves about other people, and what we want our lives to be marked by.Will we be bleeding-heart empaths who err on the side of love toward all our neighbors, or callous, f your feelings sociopaths who rejoice in the pain of others because we’ve dehumanized them to the point that their lives are worthless to us?Will we see empathy as our highest calling as human beings, or as a character flaw needing to be discarded?One of the greatest lies we’re asked to accept as gospel is that all opinions are valid, that every position is somehow equally worthy of merit and deserving of consideration. We’re often led to believe that in every situation where an impasse is reached, the most humane response is to “agree to disagree”.Of course, we can disagree on all sorts of issues without that disagreement being a relationship killer, but there are some things that, as people of faith, morality, and conscience, we simply will not allow—and these things transcend politics.The days ahead are going to require us to dig beneath the surface skirmishes and into the bedrock of what’s really happening here so that we don’t waste a second fighting fruitless battles that miss the point entirely.Refuse to be gaslit and guilted for allowing “politics” to get in the way of your relationships because that’s not what’s happening here. This is an effort by people around us to sidestep conversations that call them to accountability for their beliefs, choices, and alignments.It’s time we stopped pretending that our current national crisis is political, as that only serves to distract us from the far more worrisome truth that we need to reckon with:We’re not politically divided; we are morally fractured.We are not fighting legislative battles but a war to stay human or abandon our humanity altogether.No election result will change that.No power balance in Congress will remedy it.No dictator’s expulsion will heal the brokenness of the people around us.The question is, what will?Do you agree or disagree that the divides here are beyond politics? What do you see as the path forward for our nation and for each of us who call it home? Let me know in the comments.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

To Our Loved Ones,To Our Grandparents, Parents, Uncles, Aunts, Cousins, and Older Siblings,We’re aware of what you think of us, either because you’ve told us during explosive, room-clearing conversations, over terse Cold War text exchanges, or in second-hand words passed through the people who now serve as the sole intermediaries between us.You believe that we’re lost.You believe we’ve changed.You think we’ve become radicalized.You think we’ve abandoned our faith, our families, and our nation, and you’re disappointed with us.And we need you to know that you’re largely responsible.Much of this is your fault.You say that we’ve changed, and we have: we’ve become the people you taught us to become when we were growing up.people who are deeply offended by inequity,people who look out for the underdog,people who grieve the suffering of others,people who find the beauty in the diversity around us,people who want others to have enough,people who are aware of how fortunate we are to live here,people trying to love our neighbors as ourselves,people who detest liars, predators, and con men,people who abhor bullies and bigots and braggarts,And the people that we’ve become, in large part because of the wisdom and compassion you poured into us as children, can’t fathom, as adults, how you’ve voted for Donald Trump three times and how you still support him now.It would have been unthinkable to those younger versions of us (and the younger version of you, for that matter), that you would have embraced this man: his cruelty, his depravity, his petty, vengeful, unloving heart.That’s not the way you raised us, and so whatever issues you have with us now, you need to understand:You made us this way.You have radicalized us into loving, compassionate human beings, and we can’t fathom how that can be a problem for you.We’re really proud of the people we are today, and grateful for the time you spent with us; the lessons you taught us about seeing all people as inherently valuable,about being a person of your word,about telling the truth even when it’s costly,about admitting your mistakes,about taking responsibility for your actions,about valuing people over money,about how we treat people, being what defines us,We were paying attention in history class.We were paying attention in Sunday School.We were paying attention around the dinner table.We were listening.We believed you.We did what you told us to do and became who you told us to become—and so now we care about the world, and we despise evil, and we live open-hearted and open-handed.And that’s why we’ve found ourselves standing here wondering how you’ve become people we no longer recognize, how you’ve embraced the embodiment of the ugliness you warned us to avoid, how you stopped taking your own advice somewhere along the way.You say that you only support the party or the policies and not the man—but we remember you telling us that we are known by the company we keep, that the ends don’t always justify the means, and that we can’t gain the world (or a Supreme Court seat) and lose our souls. Back then, you wouldn’t have tolerated those flimsy excuses for aligning with someone horrible, and we won’t tolerate them from you now.As children, we looked up to you, and that part of us will continue to love you dearly and be grateful to you.But as adults, we now see you eye to eye, and we grieve the loss of the people we imagined you were when you were teaching us how to be good human beings.By continuing to support this man, you have gone against everything you told us was important growing up: decency, honesty, fairness, maturity, and empathy.Either you were lying then, or you’re wrong now.Which one is it?The children we were and the adults we’ve become both want to know.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Hey, good human. (Yeah, you.)I wanted to remind you of some things that you might have lost sight of lately:The exhaustion you feel right now?The heavy sadness that you can’t seem to shake?The sense of dread that hovers over you like a drone?The Resting WTF Face you walk around with every day?The scalding rage bubbling just beneath the surface?This is all by design.This is intentional.This is the monsters’ master plan.The entire point of the curated chaos is to disorient you, to dishearten you, to choke the hope from within you until you stop fighting.All terrorism is ultimately emotional.Yes, they are rolling back decades of civil rights.Yes, they are trying to take healthcare away from tens of millions of our most vulnerable.Yes, they are waging legislative war on the poor and hungry.Yes, they are weaponizing the highest court against us.Yes, they are obliterating our systems of education and national security.Yes, they are purging brown-skinned people from our nation.But these stomach-turning atrocities are all just means to an end, and that end is to crush the spirits of good people like you, and you need to remember that.Your capacity to care for strangers is a threat to them.Your ability to have your heart broken by the suffering of others is a weapon.Your refusal to abandon the right thing, even when that makes your path more turbulent, terrifies them.Your decency makes you dangerous.A nation isn’t destroyed when its systems are bulldozed or its laws are perverted, but when its collective compassion is eradicated—and you and I are here in these dark, bleak, unthinkably painful days to protect it; to hold it close to our chests and to make sure that it survives.Fascists don’t win when they dismantle the scaffolding of government, when they wage war on the Arts and Sciences, or when they eradicate long-standing rights under the law.They win when good people give up; when they become too tired to push back, when apathy and hopelessness snuff out the spark inside them, when the emotional cost of giving a sh*t feels too high.They want you to become as nihilistic, miserable, and internally broken as they are—and so you need to refuse: over and over again.Look, I’m not going to minimize the horrors being conjured up by these vampires or ignore the scale of the sorrow they’re generating or peddle some toxic positivity that pretends everything is going to be OK.But I know that if you’re still reading this, you haven’t fully surrendered yet.Despite the 24-7 Category 5 s**t storm the monsters have been throwing at you for the past eighteen months, you haven’t completely packed it in, and I guess I just want to say thank you and to ask you to stay in the fight another day if you can.There is too much beauty at stake, too much of priceless value to lose, too many people whose futures are tethered to what we do right now.I’m not a blind optimist, and I don’t traffic in cheap hope. I’m not pretending the historical signs aren’t grim or that the existential threat isn’t very real.I just recognize that right now, some irredeemably terrible people are working incredibly hard to crush our spirits, and I’m stubborn enough to say, “To hell with that.” I won’t give them the satisfaction of my submission or my hopelessness.My life will be an annoying, brazen, defiantly joyful middle finger in their fascist faces, and if you still feel up to it, maybe yours can be, too.Good people, these monsters are trying to break you because when they do, they win.So, don’t let them.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Lindsey Graham is dead, and it gives me no joy.This is not a celebration; it is a lament.The moment any human being leaves this planet, it is almost always an occasion to mourn.When death arrives, it is a permanent interruption, an unexpected or unwanted end to a complIcated life in progress. There is an incompleteness that comes: work left undone, plans abandoned, journeys ceased. In nearly every case, in the wake of someone’s passing, so many possibilities die as well. This is no different.Lindsey Graham has passed away, and regardless of our politics, today we should grieve over the loss of the man and the leader he might have been, had he never crossed paths with Donald Trump.It is a day to wonder how he could have altered this nation for the better, the good he might have authored in the lofty position he occupied.It is a day to rewind through one person’s very public story and watch how a soul can be sold off in a thousand tiny moral transactions long before their body expires.Lindsey Graham’s moral collapse over the last decade has been staggering to witness:In 2015, he called Donald Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot" and a “jackass” who did not deserve to be President.In 2016, he said of the Republican Party, “If we nominate Donald Trump, we will get destroyed… and we will deserve it.”In 2021, following the January 6th assault on our Capitol, Graham seemingly cut ties with Trump, commenting, “All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.”And in June of 2026, just weeks before his sudden death, at a victory speech that preserved his Senate seat, Lindsey Graham gushed, "I want to thank the big guy, God, Trump comes later. Mr. President, you're not far behind God, but we're going to start with him.”That, in itself, should merit profound grieving across this nation.It’s difficult for younger people to understand how Lindsey Graham was viewed before Trump’s arrival. He was largely regarded as a reasonable, level-headed politician, always willing and capable of collaboration across the aisle. For those nearly twenty-five years prior, he forged friendships, built alliances, and crafted compromises in ways that became all but impossible for him in his final years.While campaigning in 2015, Graham famously said of Joe Biden: “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, you’ve got a problem. He’s the nicest person I’ve ever met in politics. As good a man as God ever created.”I grieve the death of that man; the one capable of seeing the humanity across the aisle, the one who was human first, politician second. Every one of us should. I think, deep down, we all do, because we know what it feels like to lose someone long before they die.We all have Lindsey Grahams in our lives: people whose humanity we have watched erode since the escalator descent of a morally vacant career criminal a decade ago.We’ve all looked on in helpless disbelief as their bedrock values began to shift, their hard moral lines were erased and redrawn, and their once soft hearts became calloused and closed.We have all had someone we love die a shell of who they once were, because of their allegiance to a serial grifter whose cultic hold slowly poisoned them. That’s why his death hits close to home.Lindsey Graham’s ethical implosion is perhaps more understandable than that of the people in our lives, as his proximity to Trump’s power (or the fear of that power being weaponized against him) was likely too great a temptation to withstand. The kind of wealth and influence he had access to probably seemed well worth the moral compromises and severed ties.For our family members and former friends, it’s much harder to make sense of how it’s all happened; how they were seduced and duped into such a sycophantic tribal allegiance to a man they’d have openly condemned a decade ago. That transformation isn’t as easy to unpack, and many of us will spend the rest of our lives wondering who the people we love might have been.This week, death took Lindsey Graham’s body. Trump took his soul and the man he might have been long ago.For most of us, that kind of grief feels all too familiar.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.Renee Good.Alex Pretti.Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez.These are merely the murdered whose names we know, the ones they could not conceal or cover over.They are four, once-in-history, never-to-be-repeated human beings assassinated by empowered sociopaths who feel no accountability to the laws of this land or of any higher laws. And for each of these, there are thousands upon thousands of human beings whose stories have been invaded, whose bodies have been violated, whose hearts have been stopped.They are the unseen fathers, favorite aunts, grandmothers, and older brothers brutalized in secret, abducted under the cover of darkness, pulled from their vehicles, viciously assaulted, raped, shackled like animals, and certainly worse.They are human beings living alongside all of us, who in these very moments are being held without charges, imprisoned without cause, denied due process, representation, healthcare, meals, and human decency—and not to make us safer, not to address illegal immigration, not for anything but to satisfy the bloodlust of racists and bigots.This should be the final straw for us, America.Compassionate human beings should not tolerate this.People who claim to be pro-life should be brought to tears.Those espousing family values should be fully incensed.Anyone with children of their own whom they love should be sick to their stomachs.Men and women of every faith should be unequivocally condemning this.People of conscience and morality should be unable to sleep.Good people ought to be fully heartbroken.This is a sharp line in the sand, and we all have to make our choice in this moment.There is no neutral middle ground here; no hedging or justifying or entertaining of both sides.There is no valid human opinion that makes this OK.You either permit the brutality or you don’t.You either make peace with the madness or you push back hard against it.You either assign equal value to people or you don’t.You either hear the cries of a child pleading for her family and realize we’ve lost the plot, or you declare this is the story you’re comfortable co-writing.I don’t want to hear about your politics; this is about your heart.What I.C.E. is doing under the guidance of this Administration is a human rights violation unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes.It is a direct assault upon the very bedrock of the human experience.It intentionally traumatizes people by violently severing the absolute most precious tether there is in this life: to safety in one’s own skin.To willingly and repeatedly violate people under the guise of legitimate government is an act of abuse on the most horrifying of scales; one that illustrates the inhumanity of the perpetrator and the dehumanization of their victims.There is no difference between this moment and all the others we see in the rearview mirror of history and look back upon in disgust.Our complacency is the same.Our apathy is the same.Our silence is the same.Our culpability is the same.This isn’t about the laws of the land (though even those are being ignored), it is about those higher laws: of human dignity, of an elemental regard for life, of a basic level of empathy.If we cannot come together around such things, we have no business pretending we’re a civilized nation. If we can’t transcend our theology and our politics to defend the most vulnerable among us, we forfeit our morality altogether.A country that endures this kind of disregard for human life does not deserve people to stand when its anthem is sung.It merits no allegiance from decent people.It discards its pretense of welcoming the poor and tired.It abdicates any moral high ground in the world.A country that allows this kind of cruelty cannot claim greatness, and worse, it jettisons its goodness.It cannot imagine that it is a place of liberty or equality or justice.America, we are in the glaring spotlight of History in these moments. We are crafting our legacy in real time.If we abide this, if we rationalize it away, if we ignore it, if we turn our heads from it, then we deserve the terrible place we’re creating, the moral cancer our children inherit, and the hell that is waiting for us.We need to come to our collective senses, to inhale deeply and then clearly speak in one voice, the words that will allow us to heal this shared sickness and be the best of ourselves:What I.C.E is doing to brown-skinned people is a crime.It’s a sin.It’s intentionally cruel.It is blatantly inhumane.It’s not pro-life.It’s not Christian.It’s not making America great.It is evil by any measure decent people use.And the good people here should not tolerate it a single second longer.SUPPORT THESE ORGANIZATIONS:Freedom for Immigrants - Advocate for the abolition of immigration detention: Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC) - Legal tools & policy advocacy Immigrant Justice Network - Coalition pushing for systemic reform: National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) - Legal services & defense: Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) - Advocacy, rapid response & legal supports: CASA - National immigrant community power organization: UndocuBlack Network - Advocates for Black immigrants: United We Dream - Immigrant youth advocacy network: Unión del Barrio - Latino-focused immigrant justice activism: The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. 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There’s a story we all tell ourselves about the kind of people we are. It’s a narrative we’ve spent a lifetime compiling.In those internal autobiographies, we all tell ourselves that we’re one of the good ones, that our presence on this planet is yielding something beautiful, something that will leave this place better than when we arrived. In those stories, we are the heroes, the helpers, the saviors, or at the very least, we’re decent people just doing our best.That self-reverential story has a way of bleeding over into the place we call home, the nation we claim as our own. There is a poisonous exceptionalism that most of us were born into; a curated mythology inherited by our parents, our politicians, our pastors that convinced us that as a collective, we were good or godly. Some of us live our entire lives believing we’re better than we are, that our nation is better than it is, until we are faced with irrefutable evidence to the contrary. Suddenly, we realize that we might be the villains, the terrorists, the monsters, the accomplices.We all grew up in this country learning of the horrors of the Holocaust, reading stories of Hitler’s unthinkable brutality against the Jewish people. We stared in disbelief at the images of walking corpses, emancipated from the concentration camps at the very precipice of death. We nearly vomited seeing jittery black and white newsreels of naked, indistinguishable human beings, stacked like cord wood. We read of an unrelenting barbarism against an entire group of human beings, whose only crime was existing in their skin.And when faced with this sprawling inhumanity that defied our ability to hold it all, invariably we all thought about the German people, and we all asked ourselves, “What kind of human beings would allow this?”We wondered what kind of morally broken people could stand by and watch generations of mothers, fathers, and children eradicated from existence, their communities razed to rubble, their cultures erased, their very humanity discarded.From the safety of hindsight and the buffers of our own false stories, we’ve interrogated ordinary Germans from eighty years ago, lamenting their silence and inaction in the face of such horrors; condemning them as, at best, gutless cowards, and at worst, willing collaborators. With stratospheric arrogance, we’ve told ourselves that we’d never have consented to such evil, that we’d have pushed back against it, that the abject terror unleashed on the Jewish people would never have happened on our watch.And yet, there is Gaza.Day after day, she testifies against us, documenting our indifference, recording our apathy, inventorying our inaction. She lifts our hands in front of us and shows us that her blood is all over them. She burns up the comforting fictions of our goodness. She reminds us how easy it is for a nation to abandon its humanity, silence by silence, justification by justification, averted eye by averted eye.Gaza is indicting the American people, and Iran and Lebanon are joining her (as are immigrant populations in the US). They are holding a mirror up to us as a nation, revealing exactly who we are— the truth about what we believe, about what we will abide, and what we will not stand for— and we should be ashamed and driven to our knees in repentance.It would be damning enough to declare that many Americans now are as reprehensible as many Germans in the 1940s, but that wouldn’t be accurate; we are far worse. We have access to America's and Israel’s every vile deed in the palm of our hands. Donald Trump’s and Benjamin Netanyahu’s sociopathy floods our timelines. With the swipe of a finger, we can traverse thousands of miles and see the annihilation of a people in real-time. Unlike the German people in the shadow of Hitler, we cannot even attempt to plead ignorance. Through tiny screens that we are rarely more than inches from, we are 24-7 bystanders to the slaughter of children, to the bombing of hospitals, to the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people. We know exactly where the money is going, the politicians whose empires have been funded by terrorism, and the scale of the mass murders our tax dollars are funding.And we are culpable for all that we allow or refuse to oppose.One day, eighty years from now, generations of children all over the world will ask what kind of people would have allowed the genocide in Gaza to happen.And it should break our hearts and boil our blood to know that unless we alter our course immediately and fiercely, we will be that kind. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

This sucks.There’s no way around it.Politically speaking, for those of us on the Left, losing a candidate who carried the Democrats’ hopes of finally unseating Susan Collins in Maine and shifting the balance of power in the Senate this late in the game and in this manner is devastating. There’s no spin here that can make this good news, at least not in the political arena.But from a human perspective, this is where we should be today as a movement and a people. This is where we have to be if we’re going to prevail as a civilized society, if we’re going to differentiate ourselves from the ever-deepening moral cesspool across the aisle that has grieved and infuriated us. We cannot allow power to become the end by which all means are defensible, and Platner’s campaign, had it proceeded, was in danger of beginning our collective slide into the abyss. We could easily have started down the steep and greased path toward becoming a people who choose the immediate intoxication of a political victory over the far more difficult and costly long game of staying human.As a growing list of troubling revelations about Platner surfaced in recent months, a concerning number of people on the Left began to do exactly what we’ve spent a decade lamenting about the Right: minimize the severity, engage in whataboutism, move the goalposts, and talk about the importance of “the win” over everything else.We know where that all leads, the way that cancer moves through the bloodstream, how ambition devours people from the inside, how it paves the road to a deeper excavation into the depths of inhumanity. Over the past ten years, we’ve watched in disbelief as tens of millions of our family members, friends, and neighbors have abandoned every alleged conviction and denied every professed value in order to engineer the ascension of a useful monster. They’ve shelved their morals, denied their religion, and imprisoned their better angels to secure a presidency. They’ve gained a world of SCOTUS seats and legislative carte blanche and lost their collective souls, and we’ve rightly condemned it.On the Left, there’s a sickening deva vu, as we’ve seen this movie before: a promising political candidate or sitting lawmaker voluntarily withdrawing or succumbing to public pressure to do so—all while the other side makes concessions, holds their noses, and banks more political victories. That cannot be who we become, no matter how we want to justify it, no matter how much good we aspire to do with the political capital we’re chasing, regardless of the story we tell ourselves of our lofty aspirations.We can’t say that we believe women up until the point at which believing women becomes politically costly.We can’t loudly crusade against a voting bloc for covering for a serial predator and then bear with the sexual sins of candidates who can lead us to the promised land of Congressional control.We can’t claim or hold moral high ground over the Right if we find ourselves ignoring the red flags, dismissing lawlessness, or turning a blind eye to brutality as they have become so comfortable doing. And while we don’t want to fall into a purity politics that sets an impossible standard for the people we choose to represent us, we can and should have dealbreakers, red lines that we simply refuse to cross because if we don’t, we will become exactly like the people we’re trying to dislodge from power right now.Given his past, Graham Platner should never have chosen to run in the first place, and there were disgraceful failures in the vetting process that should have disqualified him before his campaign ever began. Those are matters for another timeBut today is a good day to remind ourselves that these moments always feel like losses, but in the most important ways, they aren’t.As the Democrats scramble to choose his replacement and try to salvage a victory in Maine, progressives, liberals, and moderates who are crestfallen today need to remember that in the loftier spaces that transcend politics, this is still a win. Choosing not to align with indecency always is. The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Hatred is a slow poison.Once it finds its way into the bloodstream, it gradually begins destroying a human being from the inside out. It does its work almost imperceptibly, driving out critical thinking, eradicating empathy, and hardening the heart.Since October 7, 1996, hundreds of millions of the people we love and live alongside have been hourly exposed to a corrosive, cancerous toxin that has rendered them shells of the people they were before. We all have the stories of the people we’ve lost and the moments we realized they’d been polluted. A couple of years ago, my family and I walked into an older relative’s house unannounced. They’d been expecting us that day from out of town, but we’d arrived thirty minutes earlier than we’d planned, so we knocked lightly and walked in. The small TV on the kitchen counter was playing Fox News.When one of them came down the stairs, almost in the middle of greeting us, our relative walked hurriedly over to the sink, grabbed the remote, and turned off the TV, looking like a teenager caught watching porn by their parents.Suddenly, everything made sense. All the dots connected.Over the last couple of years, we’d noticed this couple changing. They’d become more and more outspoken on things like immigration and women’s reproductive rights and police shootings, surprising us with the intolerance and cruelty of off-the-cuff comments that seemed out of character for them. We questioned whether we were just being overly sensitive or projecting our fears onto them.But after the surprise peek into their viewing habits, it was clear: they were merely following the script. They’d been pulled into the false story. The indoctrination had begun. The poison had taken hold.Now, we could rewind over the previous months and see all the alarmist talking points in their words at family gatherings and on social media: open borders letting in floods of dark-skinned rapists, baby-killing Democrats coming to take their guns, terrorist Muslims bringing our demise, Transgender perverts lurking in public restrooms, and violent black men threatening police at traffic stops.Their growing tolerance for cruelty suddenly made sense.Their social media feeds became increasingly littered with fictional horror stories about vaccine dangers, LGBTQ people converting their children, space lasers, and immigrants eating pets: the kind of garbage they’d have easily spotted and rejected before.The moral alteration in an unthinkable expanse of people who call this place home has been stunning in its velocity and stomach-turning in its depths, and the worst part is that we can’t reach them in the ways reasonable human beings can be reached. Before Fox News, Franklin Graham, and MAGA propaganda, we could meet the people around us on the common ground of our shared faith in Jesus, our respect for the Constitution, the clarity of objective truth, or shared compassion for vulnerable people. Now, they no longer have use or tolerance for such things.The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ counter-cultural, counterintuitive manifesto of humility, gentleness, and love, has been replaced by venomous, incendiary Sean Hannity supremacist propaganda and Laura Ingraham white fear porn.The barrier-breaking, table-expanding hospitality of Christ has morphed into sneering Trump rally rant rhetoric about violent illegals and foreign predators, and callous “build that wall” refrains.These people used to know better. They were good-hearted, generous human beings who aspired to love their neighbors. They flatly rejected bigotry and defended vulnerable communities. They were people I could count on for rational, level-headed decency. They once instantly recognized men like Donald Trump as the antithesis of Jesus.But this is what happens when decent, intelligent people become radicalized: they get polluted by the things they watch and the sermons they sit through and the nonsense they read, and they surround themselves with an echo chamber made of equally deluded, equally terrified people, until one day they are the hateful extremists that they always used to warn you about.Those of us who’ve lost people we love to this curated pestilence should file a class-action suit against Fox News and Rupert Murdoch for thirty years of malpractice and murder: for the relationships they’ve destroyed, the deaths they’ve been complicit in, the betrayal of the public trust, and for purposefully killing the goodness in human beings who will never be who they might have been otherwise. We’ll never know exactly how our nation or the people around us would be different had this venom never been allowed into our systems, but it would have been a hell of a lot more compassionate, loving, and equitable. It would be a whole lot closer to anything resembling greatness—or better yet, goodness. It’s infuriating to know that right now, in nursing home common rooms, in car repair waiting rooms, on kitchen countertop TVs, and in the palms of their hands, they are being unrelentingly eaten alive, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it and rescue them.I still love my relatives, my former church members, my high school friends, and my neighbors, but I grieve what has happened to them. I lament the poisoning of their once-soft hearts, the way Jesus has been all but squeezed out of their religion. I fear that they’ll never fully recover from the corrosive narrative that has been continually injected into their brains about the world and about disparate people and about the expansive, lavish, audacious love Jesus calls us to extend.I only hope these moms and ministers and nurses and schoolteachers and football coaches and favorite relatives get a truer story or meet someone who wakes them up, or that they rediscover Jesus enough that they change the channel, turn off the TV, escape this hateful cult, and find the truth that truly sets them free:Donald Trump is filth.Hatred is a waste.Empathy is the antidote.The world is bigger than America.We are our brother’s keeper.Kindness is the better path.If they’re going to join a cult, I wish it were that kind.In the comments, share your stories of the ways Fox News poisoned someone you love, fractured your relationships, or polluted our Republic.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. 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The steady stream of vitriol I receive from professed Christians who identify as MAGA is understandable.As they fire off threatening texts, furiously tap out expletive-laden emails, and break into violent, performative histrionics on social media, I genuinely feel for them. They’re often getting some really bad news that blows up the story they’ve spent a long time telling themselves and depend on to validate and justify the way they treat other people and the planet.They’re coming face to face with the sobering reality that they are antithetical to Jesus. Worse than that, they aren’t hearing that news from me; they’re hearing it from Jesus.Few things confound and infuriate Conservative Christians quite like the simple, clear, unadorned words of Jesus as documented in the Bible they so loudly and frequently claim to love, believe in, and live by, but seemingly never read. It’s almost miraculous.Jesus said: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Matthew 5:9When you’re part of an antagonistic movement built almost exclusively on a self-righteous battle posture: on a theology and politics that require an enemy, an adversary, an encroaching danger, a culture war foe to be defeated—the idea of being a peacemaker really pisses you off. MAGAs don’t like peace. They refuse to coexist with it. They cannot abide it. It’s not a compatible idea.Jesus said: Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me. Matthew 25:45The poor, the outcast, the hurting, the hungry, the homeless, the lonely. Jesus said he literally inhabits the most vulnerable among us, and that the way we treat them is the way we treat Jesus himself. That’s gotta be a really disturbing reality when you spend so much of your time denying people healthcare and cutting social programs and assaulting voting rights and legislatively attacking people for their sexuality or their nation of origin or their pigmentation. The news that, according to Jesus, you devote a great deal of your life treating him like garbage tends not to be received too well.Jesus said: For God so loved the world... John 3:16The world. God loves the world. That includes the planet, the climate around it, the resources within it, the disparate humanity, and the expansive life upon it. No America First. No “Go back where you came from” nationalistic bluster. No, “Don’t Tread on Me” middle-finger defiance. If you love the world as God does, you fight for diversity, you welcome immigrants and foreigners, you demand environmental responsibility, you want more people to have a voice, not fewer. When America becomes your world, you’re opposing Jesus.Jesus said: “Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword. Matthew 26:52That’s the part of the oft-quoted story that gun-loving Christians never want to read: the part where Jesus reprimands his disciple who uses a weapon to defend him, reminding him and those listening that his people will not be a people of retributive violence, that they will be those who shun force and turn the other cheek and resist harming others and de-escalate conflict. That is a really hard truth for the NRA, God and Guns, Come and Take It crowd, who really want Jesus to be cool with their instigating, posturing bloodlust—and who have to hear straight from Jesus that he isn’t.‘Jesus said: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. Matthew 22:37-39Loving your neighbor. Jesus says unequivocally that this is the priority and the point, and the way we show our love for God: the way we treat other human beings. When Conservative Christians realize that this includes their Muslim neighbor, their transgender neighbor, their Jewish neighbor, their Liberal neighbor, their uninsured neighbor, their undocumented neighbor, their black neighbor—they usually don’t react very well. When you aren’t able or willing to practically or tangibly extend love to such a vast portion of your neighbors in any meaningful way, that is a difficult theological pill to swallow.Honestly, I feel sorry for people who want to be both Christian and MAGA, who think they can be devoted to Jesus and to Donald Trump simultaneously, who labor under the false assumption that their bastardized, territorial, self-centered white nationalist GOP version of Christianity is remotely of God.And I know that the actual words of Jesus are the most triggering of any they could be faced with, and so the venom these generate isn’t surprising, and neither is their scalding rage toward those of us who regularly share those words with them.I’m not saying this Republican theocracy built on power, exclusion, and subjugation that white Evangelicals are tethered to is anti-Jesus; Jesus is saying that.MAGA Christians really don’t take that well. It makes them want to shoot the messenger.That’s been going on for two thousand years.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Life is exhausting these days for lots of us, and I think I’ve figured out why.I think it’s having to sit through the pretending.You see, it’s bad enough watching over a third of our nation becoming fully indoctrinated into a sycophantic cult of personality of the very worst kind of person, to see once reasonable people abandon any semblance of benevolence toward diverse humanity.It’s rightly heartbreaking to see those we love so seduced by power, addled by racism, and deluded by tribalism that they’ve declared war on immigrants and vaccines and gay kids and the electoral process.And yes, it’s infuriating witnessing tens of millions of Americans having their minds slowly poisoned by Fox News to the point they defend a domestic act of terror at the Capitol or take the side of a murderous regime’s genocide or celebrate their neighbors being thrown into concentration camps.As wearying as all that is, it’s so much worse having them invoke love of God and country in the process.That’s what makes these days so difficult for so many of us: not merely coming to terms with the beliefs and prejudices and phobias of those we are daily surrounded by here, but having to contend with their constant projection about us and their refusal to simply own who they are. It’s the nonstop, hypocritical, farcical performance art.Good people are so tired of traitors masquerading as patriots, of the treasonous continually waving the flag, of hateful people peddling a God of love.They’re tired of human beings with no empathy pretending they care about the sanctity of life, of the loudest prophets of America First having the least regard for so many Americans, of the self-righteous sermonizers defending a serial predator.Where are the selflessness, generosity, and hospitality that were supposed to mark the lovers of God and country?Where are the lives that replicate the embrace of the poor, huddled masses affixed to the foundation of Liberty?Where are those who emulate the love of disparate neighbors at the heart of the Gospels?Patriot. Christian. American.These words have all lost their meaning: words that used to cost something to claim, labels that once came with even a modicum of transformation, and self-identifiers that had previously required a measure of evidence displayed in one’s life.The flag and the cross that used to hold such meaning to so many of us are now just stolen iconography wielded by the immigrant-hating wall-builders and the violent anti-abortion zealots.Using these words and wearing these symbols has become more and more difficult for us, as they now align us with the very antithesis of our moral convictions and guiding principles.People who truly love this country, those who earnestly seek a faith expressed in love, human beings who are burdened to make America worthy of the speeches and anthems—we find ourselves branded heretics and traitors and apostates, forcefully displaced from religion and country by these angry squatters who have taken up residence in them.True patriots should want all Americans to vote, they should oppose would-be dictators, they should yield to the Constitution, and they should demand a nation that is offered to everyone equally.Actual followers of Jesus should defend the vulnerable, they should give comfort to the sick, food to the hungry, welcome to the immigrant, and love to the least among us.And while the masqueraders and pretenders parade around in grand performative acts of love of God and country while willfully betraying both—the rest of us are going to have to fight to hold on to our nation and our religion, and to care for a world that needs desperately authentic people of faith, morality, and conscience who simply live a love that doesn’t need to declare itself loving.As far as patriotism and faith go, this nation needs the real thing again.How are you experiencing, wrestling with, and expressing patriotism or faith right now? Are you feeling the exhaustion I talk about here?Let me know in the comments.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

I am a lifelong aspiring straight LGBTQ ally. For the past few decades, I’ve worked to be a good listener, to be willing to have my blind spots revealed, to be open to changing a deeply held assumption, to be willing to reckon with my profound privilege. My journey over this time has placed me in the path of millions of beautiful human beings who’ve shaped my understanding of sexuality up close and from a distance: scholars, pastors, physicians, activists, artists, family members, friends, and strangers.What these disparate teachers have collectively helped open my eyes to is the vast expanse of sexual identity and expression; of the limitless ways in which human beings find their sense of self and their place in the world; how they experience safety, companionship, love, and pleasure. Yet, as much as I work to be a responsible ally to the LGBTQ+ community, I am fully aware that I will never be a member of that community. By virtue of my identity and orientation, I am forever operating with limited information. As well-intentioned as my words might be on matters of equality and justice for my LGBTQ+ friends, I will never be speaking for anyone other than myself, which is where I begin today.On the last day of Pride Month, author Matthew Vines published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he declares his identity as a gay man, as opposed to a queer man. Further, he alleges that the “queer” label and those who embrace it have contributed to decreasing support for the gay community, especially among Conservatives.Vines states in his piece that he believes the word queer “carries an adversarial charge that ‘gay’ does not,” as it has come to embody a broader, more politically engaged progressive activism; that it displays a confrontational posture that is essentially putting straight people off and rewinding the progress of the gay community. This feels somewhat shortsighted.Vines is a former Evangelical and author of the incredibly important book God and the Gay Christian, which eloquently made the Biblical case for same-sex relationships. It was a game-changer that helped foster vitally important conversations within the Church. As an LGBTQ-affirming pastor, when it arrived, it was invaluable in giving me a place to meet people in my churches for substantive conversations about sexuality. This all makes Matthew’s words in the Times concerning. He knows the Bible, and he knows the Christians who wield it like a hammer, and for some reason, he seems to be overestimating them.Over the last two days, I’ve been poring over comment sections, watching videos, and reading nuanced essays that reflect the diversity of the LGBTQ+ experience regarding the word queer. Some were raised in a time when it was a dehumanizing slur, and as a result, will always carry negative connotations and always be triggering. Others claim both gay and queer, depending on the context, choosing to speak to their individual experience and their members as part of a collective. Still others have come to embrace queer as a massive umbrella, embodying the sweeping scope of sexual identity and expression. Many others use queer to embody not just identity and orientation, but the vast intersectionality of all vulnerable, oppressed, historically marginalized communities. None of these perspectives is more right than any other, but each comes with costs.In the comment section of my friend, Pastor Brandan Robertson, a gay man wrote: Gay men don’t identify as queer. You need to respect that. We have nothing in common with nonbinary or trans people. It is insulting to have decades of fighting for gay rights coopted by communities that have nothing to do with being gay. Gay rights are not fringe rights.This is precisely the worrisome sentiment I find in Vine’s opinion piece: the idea that liberation ever happens in a vacuum. The truth is, gay men do have something in common with nonbinary and trans people and queer people (and every non-conforming human being): the Republican Evangelical Right despises them and wants to take away their fundamental freedoms simply because of their identity and orientation, just as much as it wants to take them from the noisier, messier queer people.This violent Christian Nationalist movement in America will not allow any non-cisgender-heterosexual expression, and Matthew seems to be in denial about that. Right now, this christo-fascist GOP regime is loudly targeting the transgender community because that is the easiest way to rally their phobic base. Articles like Matthew's seem to be throwing nonbinary and trans people under the bus, believing they are somehow preventing the acceptance of him in the minds of people that will never come.As someone who aspires to be a responsible ally, I respect every human being's personal perspective on these words and how they impact their own experience, Matthew Vines’ included. I completely respect his position regarding his own life and the way he wishes to exist in the world. I would never question that for him or anyone. We are all the authorities over our own humanity. I would never ask him to embrace queerness as a label any more than I would ask him to embrace heterosexuality.Yet, I do feel that his words about the queer community seem to be born out of the misplaced feeling that he can somehow evade the Right's disdain and their punitive violence by distancing himself from supposedly "less palatable" expressions of sexuality, but that seems myopic to me. As a white gay man, Vines may feel he is distinct from a black trans woman (and of course he is), but to the hateful Evangelicals steering us into theocracy, there is no difference whatsoever.To these phobic zealots, trans people are nonbinary people, are gay people, are nonconforming people, are lesbian people, are bisexual people. Further, they are immigrant people and black people and poor people and women. It seems as though Matthew is choosing to lean away from the collective liberation of all marginalized people in the hopes of finding safety in the sexual and political expression of least resistance.To all members of the LGBTQIA+ community, your voices here truly matter. How do you feel about Matthew’s Op-Ed, my reaction to it, or the label of queer? I would greatly appreciate your perspective. Thank you!The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

(Warning: this article contains depictions of sexual violence and may be triggering for survivors of assault)Donald Trump is a court-adjudicated rapist.This is not speculation.It is not conjecture.It’s not a Left-Wing talking point.This is documented, established fact.It was unequivocally declared by a judge.It has been repeatedly upheld in the courts.He is a rapist.And to any decent human being, that would have been a deal-breaker. It wasn’t for them.Donald Trump’s name is listed tens of thousands of times in the files documenting one of the most prolific and vile child trafficking rings in history, orchestrated by a man with whom he was a close friend and collaborator, one he traveled with. partied with, and corresponded with.For people with normal ethical standards, this would be a stark, uncrossable red line.For them, it proved not to be.Donald Trump has been accused by dozens of women of rape, sexual abuse, and physical violence, including a woman who testified before the FBI that Trump raped her when she was just 13 years old.For actual followers of Jesus, this would all be stomach-turning and condemned as the darkest kind of evil. For them, it hasn’t been.For tens of millions of our family members, lifelong friends, neighbors, coworkers, and classmates, none of this has mattered. His well-documented brutality has never been a liability.Despite a vast and reprehensible body of work, filled with proven sexual assault, alleged pedophilia, boasts about forced affection, credible accusations, and vicious public verbal attacks on women, he still receives their undying allegiance.Instead of joining decent humanity in dragging him and his accomplices into the raking light of legal accountability for their atrocities against the most vulnerable, they obfuscate, they feign ignorance, they move the goalposts, and they slander the victims.For all their performative sermonizing about protecting girls and young women, Trump’s supporters have shown through their silence, through their refusal to acknowledge reality, and through their steadfast adoration no matter how disgusting the revelations that they simply don’t give a damn.Unthinkable violence against children, sadistic degradation of women, absolutely monstrous allegations of assault; they’re all trumped by the pathetic cultic affection they have for a man who in any other sphere of life would be a pariah where good people gather.They have put political wins, Supreme Court Seats, and the cheap high they get off hurting people vicariously through him above the dignity and safety of other human beings. In the face of legal reckoning, he has received the protection of the highest seat of power in this nation, one they’ve helped him retain.They know what he’s done, and it has not dampened their passion.And this, perhaps as much as any moral or ethical malpractice they’ve engaged in to support him (and there has been so much), cannot be something we let them off the hook for, no matter what they say after he is no longer in power or no longer walking this earth.When time and justice catch up to him, when his cancerous regime is finally dismantled, and some kind of normalcy and stability return to our nation, their breathless worship of a violent, sadistic sexual deviant will be their legacy.One day soon, they will deny their affiliations, try to gaslight us into thinking we didn’t see what we saw, and plead ignorance of what has always been clear. We must never let them forget.He is who he is, and his supporters are who they are.Donald Trump is a rapist.He will always be a rapist.His supporters will always have passionately supported a rapist.They cannot be excused for that.They cannot be forgiven for that.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.GET MY NEW CHILDREN’S BOOK HERE! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Supergirl opened this weekend to disastrous box office numbers, but its fate was sealed long before that, and it has very little to do with the quality of the film or the performance of its cast. The second offering in the James Gunn-curated DCU didn’t burn up on its entry into theaters. It was killed by a thousand Kryptonite darts in the weeks and months preceding, by an increasingly crowded YouTube/TikTok/IG landscape of monetized fandom that, as in every other facet of media, now runs on vitriol and negativity. Supergirl became its latest and perhaps most predictable target.The film’s lead, House of Dragons alum Milly Alcock, was dogged from the moment her casting was announced, with a disturbing amount of venom hurled at her physical appearance (something that has reached a disgraceful zenith since the film’s release). Add to that a female screenwriter in Ana Nogueira (along with the rabid disdain for Gunn’s supposed “woke agenda” from aspiring alpha male online gatekeepers), and from the beginning, the Manosphere was simply not going to allow it to succeed.A fierce torrent of dudebro think pieces, panel conversations, and supposed scoops flooded social media, each one working to one-up the others with sky-is-falling histrionics, Yellow-Sun-hot takes, and click-garnering thumbnails. More than any superhero movie since the first Captain Marvel film, have performative fragile males worked so hard to poison public sentiment before a second of footage was released. Alcock especially has been hounded by criticism over her physicality and her perceived lack of enthusiasm on the press circuit (Serious, “Maybe you should smile more” vibes). YouTube accounts such as Nerdrotic Daily and Geeks + Gamers, whose stable of mortally insecure, insufferable incels have been among those most ruthlessly attacking the actress in an effort to grow their already massive viewership among other easily-lured young men weaned on Conservative sexism and toxic masculinity.And, then, of course, there are the legions of perpetually lathered-up, zealous Zach Snyder fanboys who have been sitting vigil for the last couple of decades, and who want so desperately for the DCU to fail so that they can once again work themselves into a public frenzy to restore their beloved auteur to the lofty place they believe he alone deserves.But it isn’t easily intimidated conservative men only, as plenty of female content creators gleefully joined in the incessant crepe-hanging over the last few months, proving that it isn’t just the guys who are capable of manufacturing misogyny or being driven to corrosivity by declining revenue streams and oversaturated online spaces. To curry the favor of their largely male audiences, many women in these spaces have face-shamed Alcock with juvenile AI-generated caricatures.And let’s be clear: art’s interpretation is subjective, and there’s nothing wrong with criticisms grounded in substance, or admonishments about straying from the source material ( as happened here), but that’s not what this is, as evidenced by the giddy celebrations of the film’s financial failure among the men largely filling these spaces.Supergirl is a flawed yet well-crafted comic book movie. Alcock, especially, does wonderful work embodying the titular character and deserves to get further chances to bring Kara Zor-El to audiences. While it by no means reaches the stratospheric heights of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, or the Russo Brothers’ Infinity War, it sure as heck isn’t Morbius, Black Adam, or Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, either.The sad truth is that even in comic book spaces that should be more evolved than other media landscapes, women actors, writers, artists, and directors still have to do three times the work to get a fraction of the credit, and in an exponentially expanding virtual landscape where the lowest common denominator is courted and women are targeted, we’re going to continue to see these stories play out.Supergirl is a perfect example of how toxic content creators have ruined the experience of anticipating and seeing a comic book movie, spewing out a steady stream of negativity, speculation, rumor-mongering, and doom forecasting.By constantly needing to compete in the oversaturated market, they build their brands on grievance, creating ever-more incendiary content and engendering so much hatred toward a film before it’s even out that it doesn’t have a chance to be received on its merits.Combine that with the reality that 90 percent of these creators are dudes or women trying to draw their gaze, and a female-led superhero movie faces impossible scrutiny.Supergirl didn’t fall, at least not completely. She simply burned up in the Manosphere.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

When the law fails the people, where do they go?When the highest court in a nation is compromised to the point that it disregards the law and becomes predatory toward its citizenry, what recourse does that citizenry have?What happens when the most powerful minority in a country weaponizes the very systems designed to protect its most vulnerable?America is about to find out.Despite his and his party’s relentless efforts, Donald Trump could not quite successfully manage a bloodless or bloody coup in the wake of the 2020 Presidential election, but it turns out they didn’t need to. They’d already done mortal damage to the Republic from the inside.Over the last two decades, through a perfect storm of Republican opposition, Democratic Party malpractice, a prolonged political imbalance in Congress, and the untimely death of a Justice, Trump and his party have commandeered the Supreme Court and are rapidly rewinding the clock of human and civil rights here to a place that would have been unthinkable to many, just a decade ago.With only a few months before the most pivotal midterm elections in our lifetimes, the reproductive rights of women, the fates of hundreds of thousands of immigrants and naturalized citizens, environmental protections, the marriages and freedoms of LGBTQ people, and the viability of elections are all near or at the precipice. The velocity and scale of the losses are beyond what most people’s minds can fathom.Every day people ask me what we can do to stop the coming flood of fascism, and far wiser human beings than myself struggle with answers, especially if November doesn’t manage to catalyze the majority into the voting booth in numbers that we haven’t seen before. If the theocracy being built right now is solidified in Congress later this year, we will be in uncharted territory that none of us can predict or imagine. It may require personal sacrifices, legal consequences, and relational schisms that our nation hasn’t had to face since the Civil War.So what are we who are here and grieving all this, supposed to do with our grief and our outrage over what this nation is and what we fear it could become? The answer is: everything we can.People of faith, morality, and conscience each need to take stock of what we value here, of the freedoms we still do have, of the people and causes we care about, of the kind of place we don’t want it to become—and live boldly, fully, and passionately in light of all of it.We also need to make our presence felt by these treasonous, compromised Justices who have chosen to abandon the law, abdicate their responsibility, disregard the common good, and do the bidding of a traitorous, felonious wannabe dictator. Within the limits of what is lawful, we should never allow these people to have a moment’s peace in public. Short of anything illegal or violent, they should become pariahs in the places decent, patriotic Americans gather, and their shame should be preserved by all of us and by the history books.November is not yet here, which means there is still time to write a better story if we are willing to spend ourselves on behalf of that story; to stay in the small and the close and to embody the America we believe is worth fighting for and the nation we dream of living in.If we recognize our interdependence, disparate Americans need to move together despite our relatively small differences, to push back an existential threat to all of us. In the face of a Supreme Court that no longer operates in the interest of the law or the people, and of a political party whose collective soul has long been sold, the rest of us need to do our best to dissent. We need to embrace what is within our hands: our relationships, our work, our resources, our energy, our economic influence, our shared voice, our shared vote—and to leverage those things in the cause of life, liberty, and happiness as best we can and hope that these things are enough.And if they prove not to be, we’ll need to wake up on that unimaginable day and keep fighting.Humanity is worth it.The planet is worth it.And the America that still could be is worth it, too.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

F*ck the fireworks and flip the flags.For actual patriotic Americans, this July 4th isn’t a party; it’s a funeral.There is nothing to celebrate here.We shouldn’t be singing right now; we should be grieving.We should be sitting vigil for the country we could have had but may never see.We should be mourning over how little independence has trickled down to the people in the streets.We should be lamenting how commonplace hatred has become in this supposed “sweet land of Liberty.”Most of all, we should be mortified that no matter how it happened, Democracy has all but died on our watch here.For these reasons, we are the United States of Embarrassment.As our nation nears the quarter millennium mark, we have collectively failed those who came before by allowing the ascension of the very fascism millions of our forebears courageously fought, bled, and died driving back into the sewers of history.The moral cancer they defeated on the other side of the planet, we have allowed to make a home here.Mass abductions by government-deputized goons are not relegated to some ancient, jittery black-and-white newsreels from half a world away; they unfold in live-streamed phone videos from the streets of this alleged land of the free, showing masked, traitorous cowards draped in the colors they aren’t worthy of wearing.Death camps are not the crumbled carcasses of a foreign failure of humanity that serve as memorial sites, cautionary tales for decent people; they are the newly christened pride and joy of monstrous men and women who have the stratospheric gall to costume themselves in the flag that actual courageous lovers of this nation wore as they expired on our behalf.The grim propaganda military parades of unrepentant sociopathic dictators aren’t trapped in the amber blocks of discolored textbook photos; they are real-time travesties disgracing our National Mall.And all of it: the breathtaking brutality against our most vulnerable, the unthinkable Constitutional assaults, the collective moral collapse of an entire party, and the disregard for the laws of the land, is packaged in a facade of patriotism that would be laughable were it not a deadly, sinful, vomit-inducing farce.This is the paradox that decent Americans find themselves in.Our essential liberties have never been more at risk, our electoral process never more assailed, our national sovereignty never more tenuous, our elemental freedoms never more in doubt. And yet, the patriotic fervor by this felonious, soulless narcissist, his twisted cadre of cosplaying Christian ghouls, and their allegiance-pledging, flag-waving surrogates has never been greater.This is by design.Weaponized patriotism is an intoxicant for easily manipulated people whose identities are shaped by those they hate, the neighbors and strangers they’ve been convinced are threats to be eradicated and dangers to be sent away.With enough star-spangled rhetoric, rockets’ red glare spectacle, and red, white, and blue dog-and-pony distractions, you can make such people believe that they are winning, even while they are being led down the parade route and straight into the slaughterhouse.And so this year, the anthems will play, the flags will wave, the bottle rockets will ascend, the M-80s will go off, and Fascism will quietly enter through the side door while everyone is distracted by the spectacle. Everyone, except for those of us who still remember what the hell this beautiful experiment was reaching for to begin with.This is why these songs of freedom will indeed ring hollow this July 4th, because those of us who love this country realize how far we are from incarnating the glory of the songs we will be unable to sing.We will be grieving, not because this country deserves better than this party and the amoral monster gorging himself on our citizenry, but because right now it does deserve them; because we wish it to be something far greater than their ceremonial patriotism, ornamental religion, and phony pro-life zeal they wear when it benefits them.We see what a farce this all is: watching a joyless, mindless death cult led by rapists, racists, and career criminals making a mockery of an America whose diversity, plurality, and liberty they despise and are actively eliminating.So yes, we’ll be loving our country fiercely this July 4th and beyond by not letting it remain what it currently is and by opposing the fraudulence of their performative love of country.We will be working and protesting and loving and building and caring and voting and pushing it to become a place deserving of the festivities and the fireworks.When freedom rings for all of us, then we’ll sing, and then we’ll celebrate.Until then, we will grieve the death of what might have been.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.ORDER MY CHILDREN’S BOOK TODAY! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

We’ve seen this movie a few hundred times before.This green, murky, algae-besieged pool on the National Mall is simply the latest sequel to the grotesque and now predictable ten-year body of work from this arrogant, incompetent, prolific bed-shitter.The script is always the same:1. Sense an encroaching political reckoning, be hounded by a damning news story that refuses to die, feel public support among your once-rabid but shrinking base waning, feel the winds of public opinion shifting.2. Identify a problem that does not exist (or greatly exaggerate one that does), forecasting doom, prophesying disaster, and declaring the sky to be imminently falling, trafficking in misinformation, hyperbole, and abject lies.3. Approach the invented emergency not with the care and expertise of those most equipped and trained to address the supposed threat, but instead, impulsively unleash a legion of the most inexperienced, least qualified, most morally inverted accomplices to wreak havoc.4. Pull from among the vast, bottom-feeding cadre of grifters, convicts, and career sociopaths you’ve surrounded yourself with and become beholden to, rewarding them with the undeserved spoils of power and wealth, with no accountability or oversight.5. Watch with perverse glee at the ensuing chaos of poor planning, bad decisions, wild overspending, and the wanton disregard for science, humanity, and common sense.6. Continually declare a situation fully under control, while costs skyrocket, consequences metastasize, irreparable damage is done, and preventable destruction takes place.7. Attempt an ever-more ridiculous and costly series of completely useless, if not downright mess-exacerbating solutions to the consequences you claim were impossible to foresee, though predicted by anyone with a fourth-grade reading level.8. When the grim and embarrassing reality of your total failure can no longer be distracted from or covered by propaganda, pivot to blaming your political adversaries and dissenting citizens, cultivating conspiracy, stoking division, and perpetuating discord.9. Watch as your cultic disciples fall over themselves in an effort to praise you for ending a crisis that you are the sole author of, celebrating the end of disastrous firestorms you set to begin with, basking in the adoration of the ignorant and hateful who’ve long ago abandoned critical thinking.10. Begin preparing the next manufactured emergency to avoid the accountability and criticism that are coming for your latest curated disaster.The Reflecting Pool debacle is not an aberration, and sadly, it is not going to be the curtain call for our lame duck wannabe dictator. It is simply the latest example of this vile, unrepentantly horrible planetary punchline doing something wasteful, stupid, and unnecessary, and trying to claim victory after spending vomit-inducing amounts of taxpayer money, only to leave everything much worse than it was before he arrived.This 14-million-dollar exercise in governmental malpractice is tame by comparison to the other vast atrocities in his portfolio: the obscenely expensive and deadly wars of distraction, the Gestapoesque thugs unleashed as a diversion from his depravity, the stifling concentration camps housing unthinkable horrors, the nonsensical tariff wars with our allies, and the demolition of the White House campus.The only small comfort is that, unlike a hundred other preventable disasters he has dragged this nation and the planet into for his own gain and self-preservation, at least there in the thick, green sea teaming with algae and dotted with garish blue paint iceberg slabs, no one will starve, or be tortured, or be murdered by a missile we paid for.This time, we got off easy.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

You can tell a lot about people by the things that outrage them.As I write this, it’s Juneteenth, and all over America, from neighborhood social media sites all the way to Congress, profoundly bothered white people are engaged in wild histrionics over the fact that our nation acknowledges the event as a holiday.Of course, this anger is a confession of sorts. It’s also an ironic and sad reminder that in the hearts of so many who call this place home, little has changed in 161 years. That’s the entire reason we’re here.Juneteenth marks the day on June 19th, 1865, when Federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to declare the emancipation of all Americans, of every slave now being free. It shouldn’t even have been necessary. The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued two and a half years earlier by President Lincoln. Freedom under the law had arrived, yet because of the geographic fractures created by the war, many strongholds of institutionalized racism existed. Texas was the final area of this nation to surrender to this particular bend of the arc of the moral universe toward racial justice—and someone had to forcefully bring them the news they’d refused to come to terms with: the war was over.Enslaved black people had been free for nearly three years, but this news had been withheld from them by a group of white Americans who did not want them to know that they were free and did not want them to be free. The truth was being held captive by people for whom racial equality was not a destination they wanted us to collectively reach, and so they fought to prevent progress and suspend national renovation.Today, we might look at much of Texas and wonder if any time has actually passed, if the news of freedom ever reached some folks at all. 163 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, there are still people there and in Wisconsin and Iowa and Tennessee, and all over this country, who are trying to rewind the clock of national progress to a place where black people’s freedom is not a reality. There remains here an ignorant army of white bigots fighting to return to supposed American “greatness,” where the rights of people of color to live freely and determine their destination and have their voices heard are yet a long way off.White supremacy is still working to ensure that black liberation is not complete. On this collective journey toward a just and fair nation, one where the universal worth of every human being is honored, the disheartening news is that we clearly are not all free yet.But the good news (and it is very good news), is that we are not passive passengers on this trip. Each of us has proximity and agency and the expansive space of our choices. We have our individual wills and our circles of influence and our daily decisions and our social media profiles to usher in the news of equality’s truth.Not only that, but we have our collective voices and our shared resources and our chosen communities to incarnate a place where more people experience the reality of their liberation.161 years after the events of Juneteenth, in cul-de-sacs, on city streets, and in the halls of Congress, racists are still working tirelessly to silence people of color in the name of saving America, and the rest of us cannot give them an unimpeded path, especially those of us who share their pigmentation.We need to continue marching into the fortified strongholds of racism and to the last holdouts against justice; in our homes and neighborhoods and schools and churches, and then to the polls. We need to declare unequivocally that all people are not yet free and deserve to be free. We need to forcefully confront the perverted theology, poisonous politics, irrational fear, and unacknowledged privilege that maintain this sickening status quo.Until this happens, the cancer of racism will remain, and slavery will not be only in our shameful past, but in our grievous present and our uncertain future.Every human being here deserves to find joy and to be truly free in their shoes and their skin and their heads, and until we see that day, the work of good people remains unfinished.May we be a nation where racists and bigots finally realize they have lost the war for good.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Dear Former President Barack Obama and Former First Lady Michelle Obama,History has a way of revealing the truth, eventually.Like the sun gradually coming up over the horizon and burning away the darkness concealing everything around it, the unfolding years chase away the noisy bombast of social media rhetoric, knee-jerk think pieces, and in-the-moment emotion, leaving us with the unvarnished reality of people and their lives.This will be true of you, and your service, and of the mark you have left upon the world, too. Your beautiful, brilliant body of work will testify loudly on your behalf far beyond these days, and in this way, your legacies are secure, both individually and as a couple.But what may be less apparent looking back from the distance of time will be something that is less easily quantifiable: character.Over the past two decades, I’ve watched you.I’ve watched you absorb a billion body blows from your critics—brutal words that run far deeper than policy or platform; monstrous thoughts assembled within poisoned minds long before you served a single day in office.I’ve watched you hounded by the Molotov cocktails of thinly veiled or overt racism claiming to be objective opposition.I’ve watched you and your children attacked with a ferocity and cruelty that defy any sense of decency, and that certainly have no precedent.I’ve watched your birthplace called into question, your personal faith ridiculed, your patriotism mocked, your gender contested, and your very humanity discounted.I’ve watched you endure the incessant, bitter venom of those for whom the color of your skin was always going to be a problem.And through all of it, I’ve watched you be the better humans, always going high despite their sickening depths.In the face of a sustained, spitting, violent, raw-throated hatred, you’ve never responded in kind.You never allowed yourselves to be defined by the bigotry of your enemies, and you never dehumanized them or let them win by becoming them.This, Mr. and Mrs. Obama, is perhaps your greatest legacy: the way you retained your dignity in the midst of the most undignified behavior of your adversaries.The truth is, good, honest people here understand that the White Evangelicals, Republican leaders, and far too many of our white family members, friends, and neighbors were simply never going to be okay with a couple of color leading them and succeeding—and yet you have done both.Two decades later, those same people still strain to bait you into a reciprocating bitterness so that you would fulfill their toxic prophecies of you, while you simply continue to do what you do with nobility, compassion, good humor, and steadfast, unapologetic conviction.You live the tangible love for neighbor that so many of your professed Christian critics preach but rarely model.As a father, I realize that my children are always watching me, always taking cues from the way I treat people, from how I respond to adversity, from how I care for those in pain, from how I face mistreatment. I know that for them, my words will always be secondary to my conduct; that how I live will always trump what I say.This is where I find my deepest gratitude for you both in these days, and I know I’m not alone. There are tens of millions of Americans who feel the way I feel.Today, as much as ever, your unceasing humanity is spurring us on to speak and move and work for the inherent value of all people, regardless of the cost or the wounds or the attacks from those who would deny it.We are chasing equality and justice together, unfettered by the words of our detractors.We are trying to live fiercely yet honorably.We are working to stand upon principles and never upon people.We are seeing the way you continue to live and are moved to live similarly.You are still pointing us to our highest ideas and appealing to our better angels.So, please forgive me if I speak informally right now, and if I use words so often brandished sardonically by your detractors to try and ridicule the work you’ve done and the life you’ve lived and the grace you’ve shown.Without a trace of irony or sarcasm, let me simply say:Thanks, Obamas.CLICK THE PHOTO TO ORDER MY FORTHCOMING CHILDREN’S BOOK!The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

At the close of the Trump Administration’s garish, bloated, masturbatory performance art on the White House lawn, UFC fighter Josh Hokit proceeded to punctuate his match by offering a monstrous verbal assault on former First Lady Michelle Obama, targeting her gender.His head wrapped in an American flag and flanked by Joe Rogan, the bottom-feeding patron saint for mediocre white men who’ve failed up in Trump’s America, Hokit expelled a sickening slur that encompasses the racism, misogyny, and queer-phobia the entire MAGA ecosystem runs on.After pretending to vomit on himself (or purposefully doing it), during his weigh-in a day earlier, the 28-year-old proceeded to gleefully regurgitate the kind of reckless, moronic moral sewage that Trump has cultivated and curated over the last ten years, the kind he himself has regularly trafficked in. It was unprovoked, vicious, and embarrassing.And it would be easy to dismiss Hokit as a professional buffoon, a jacked-up, brain-battered, ignorant caricature with no connection to reality, if not for the fact that he’s pretty much a typical MAGA man, without the skin-tight leotard, greased-up pecs, and proximity to a president. Guys like Hokit are everywhere.Have a conversation with any random group of guys still supporting Trump, whether in your neighborhood, a local bar, or online, and you’ll find similar violent contempt for women, for immigrants, for trans people. Sit down with garden-variety America First dudebros, and you’ll likely have a front-row seat to the kind of fragility and aggression that explain precisely why a male loneliness epidemic should exist.That the same performative males who never shut up about protecting children and women are so silent on the Epstein files and still so emotionally tethered to a sexual predator like Donald Trump reminds us how morally adrift they are, how rudderless they have become. Or worse, maybe it reminds us that this is exactly who they are because they willfully choose to be. Either way, it’s a national manhood emergency.The urgent crisis of MAGA masculinity isn’t revealed by a performative clown like Josh Hokit; it’s revealed in the guys who are defending him in comment sections right now. It’s revealed in the dudes who laugh off his abject filth as a supposed “joke” that the oversensitive Left can’t take. It’s revealed in men who spend their days echoing his verbal diarrhea around their wives, girlfriends and children.The toxic manosphere may be headlined by guys like Trump, Rogan, and Hokit, but it’s the massive undercard of tens of millions of perpetually enraged, emotionally unsteady, podcast-addled disciples that should alarm the rest of us. It isn’t just the poisoned minds of the guys at the top that are cause for alarm, but the trickle-down ignorance that has reached our families, friends, co-workers, classmates, church friends, and neighborsLast week, I walked past a few conservative guys in our neighborhood having a typically louder-than-necessary front porch conversation. Normally, when I pass by, I crank up my earbuds to drown out the steady torrent of liquor-lubricated, nonsensical, right-wing talking points sure to be loudly propelled into the ether, but on that night, I heard the word “transgender.” I decided to listen in, knowing that it wasn’t going to be good. It wasn’t. There was little to differentiate their words from Hokit’s. They reflected the same uninformed phobia, the same irresponsible slurs, and the same dehumanizing hatred the fighter hurled at Michelle Obama from the White House lawn. Black women will tell you that they are no strangers to slurs like the ones Hokit hurled at the former First Lady. Queer people will confirm that the UFC fighter is not an aberration. This attack isn’t an isolated exception; it’s the consistent party line.And this same tired charade is playing out all over this country right now. MAGA America has created an entire generation of terrified white man-children who are so intimidated by diversity, so threatened by competition, and so convinced that they’re oppressed that they lash out with a violence that has no regard for its repercussions. Conservative men’s lives are riddled with pleas for attention, signaling, overcompensation, and an insatiable need to be reassured. For all their baseless attacks on women they claim are men, they’re the ones with the identity crisis.So, yes, we can see Hokit for what he is: a paid provocateur whose mindless, incendiary comments were intended to incite anger. Still, we can’t ignore the fact that his intended audience is larger and closer than any of us should be comfortable with.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

What in the white trash hell was that?How did we get here?I’m not talking about the perfect storm of corruption, toxic religion, and white nationalism that has resulted in the unthinkable ascension to power of one of the most reprehensible, festering sacks of organic matter to ever leave his putrid slime trails on the planet.Greater minds can unpack the complex historical and social explanations for the inexplicable sequel given to the greatest single collective electoral error in our history.What I want to know is how, at the precipice of our two hundred and fiftieth year as a Republic, have we devolved into the disgraceful public urination that took place at our nation’s Capitol.If you took every stereotype of the Ugly American, the most monstrously exaggerated caricatures of us as a people, the absolute worst clichés of this nation at our most base, most ignorant, and most vile, and you fed it into an AI program with the prompt: “Make something truly disgusting.”—this is what you’d have ended up with.We should be the United States of Embarrassment today. There should be nonpartisan vomiting and facepalming all across this nation after witnessing this wasteful, 60-million-dollar, star-spangled, asinine, white supremacist dudebro circle jerk on the lawn of the People’s House, our house.Watching this garish Temu Roman Colosseum cosplay filled with grifters, predators, and criminals should infuriate every single American who has a shred of self-respect or love of country left. In any other iteration of our country, this would not stand. Knowing that their taxes were funding an opulent, violent, phobic birthday party for a cognitively failing serial pedophile would propeled our proud and patriotic forebears into a complete overthrow of those in power.In a time when people have to choose between paying their rent, or affording routine healthcare, when families can’t afford groceries or to fill their gas tanks, when we’re funding foreign genocides and domestic concentration camps, when we’re told we can’t afford to house or feed or care for the most vulnerable—this should make our blood boil. More than that, it should wake us all the hell up: conservative, moderate, or liberal; Democrat, Independent, or Republican; straight or queer, well off or struggling, native born or immigrant, to the reality that we are all being played.The billionaires (and the trillionaire) are mocking us all right now; dismantling the systems and protections designed to care for each of us, ignoring the Constitution, discarding morality, hoarding the wealth that was meant to be shared, devouring our natural resources, turning us against one another—and giving us a sweaty, bloated 60-million-dollar middle finger to us in the process.November should be a reckoning for these narcissistic vampires once and for all, but we shouldn’t wait that long. Last night should be enough. This should be the final straw for every human being who calls this place home, rousing each of us out of whatever apathy, denial, political tribalism, wishful thinking, or American exceptionalism that has kept us on the sidelines.The white trash, classless stupidity on the White House lawn last night was a microcosm of the prolific mockery of America that this President and his accomplices have made for ten years now. These people believe that we’re ignorant, that we’re lazy, that we’re too distracted and soft to give a damn about the fact that they’re fleecing us, that all we need is a the easy high of fireworks and faux patriotism to lull us into inaction.If we allow them to prevail, we’ll have proven them right.Who are we going to be, America?The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Growing up, I was taught that knowledge was power.Lately, I’m beginning to believe differently.On many days, I think it’s hazardous.Right now, knowing is actually part of the problem.We’re all suffering from information poisoning. The more we know about what’s really happening in this country: the depths of our fractures, the audacity of our leaders, and the failing of our systems the greater our sense of despair can become.Our noble efforts to stay informed are locking us into an emotional state of fight, flight, or freeze that isn’t helpful or sustainable; our sober situational awareness is destroying our mental health.I confess to envying people who, by nature or by choice, don’t have a clue what’s going on: people who’ve opted out of knowing anymore. They don’t read the news; they’ve checked out of social media, and they avoid or refuse to believe any information that conflicts with the story they tell themselves of everything being fine.I know that attempting to live inside such a heavily redacted reality is an irresponsible act of privilege, but they seem so happy in their blissful bubble of not-knowing. They rarely feel the dread I experience on a regular basis. They don’t lose a minute of sleep worrying about the stuff that keeps me up at night. They’re never visited by the grief that feels like such a constant companion here in my heart.Some days, I want to be like them; care-free, weightless, and fully unburdened because of all they choose not to know, but that’s how we got here. This current national disaster is the byproduct of millions of people who’ve spent a decade refusing facts or data or truth when those things carried discomfort. The sedatives of denial and distraction do nothing to change the truth. They don’t make us any safer. They don’t decrease the peril our nation is in. They don’t help any of the people who are in danger right now—which is all of them… all of us.The only way through this historic, catastrophic s**t show is to face and confront reality, as ugly and disheartening as it is, and try to change that reality, alongside people who also care deeply because they too understand how sideways it’s all gone.Too much exposure to the scale and velocity of the suffering, and we’ll eventually sink beneath it, physically or emotionally breaking down; too little exposure, and we end up complicit in the damage.The challenge is to live somewhere safely between a constant, complete immersion in the terrors that will surely overwhelm us and completely checking out to avoid the reality of how jacked up everything is. With the relentless sensory media flood around us, we need the discipline and restraint to know the difference between awareness and self-harm. I don’t want to know how bad it is anymore, but I do.I don’t want to grieve the horrible reality anymore, but I do.I don’t want to care anymore, but I do.This may not feel at all good, but it is still a good thing.Some things that may help you stay in balance:- Limit daily media exposure, setting time constraints and certain times of day, and stick to them.- Spend some time each day in silence, nature, rest, exercise, and in community to offset the heavy information you're absorbing.- Try to mark off time first thing in the morning and just before bed so you can begin and end the day grounded and centered on the agency you always have.- When taking in the news, continually ask yourself: what of this is mine to carry and what can I and should I let go of?Knowledge of the urgency of our situation may indeed be a hazard, but it is still one of the most powerful weapons we have in the fight to stay human in inhumane times. Right now, knowing what’s happening will help us know who we want to be in the middle of it.Be encouraged today.What strategies are you using to be selective in the way you take in information and care for your mental health in the process? Let me know in the comments.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Hey, New York Knicks Fans,I know you’re waking up today disappointed that you won’t get the sweep you were hoping for, that you’ll need to postpone your long-delayed celebration at least a few more days. I realize this wasn’t the script you’d written in your head for Game 3, and this morning you’re probably not in the mood to hear about moral victories. Still, I need you to hear something: the game may not have gone your way, but you won last night.You won with the thunderous chorus of boos you rained down upon that cognitively-addled malignant narcissist from every inch of the Garden’s hallowed ground.You won with the glorious middle finger curbside receiving line you greeted his street-clearing, party-trampling motorcade with.You won as you showered him with expletive-laden, f-bomb defiance, denying him the cheap ego stroke he disrupted a multitude in desperate search of.You won as you loudly and unequivocally reminded him once again that he will never be as respected and beloved as Barack Obama.You won by not letting him suck the oxygen from the room or the spirit from your souls.As he has done for decades, he once again returned to your beautiful city to manufacture chaos, squelch joy, and center himself, and as you have done for decades, you told him where to stick it—and a weary nation thanks you. You were all of us, last night: pissed off, fed up, and sick to our stomachs of this needy, repugnant, self-obsessed megalomaniac. You stood as our repulsed proxy, saying to his face what every truly patriotic American dreams of saying. I’ve always marveled at your city’s courage in the face of tragedy, your unflappable resolve through unimaginable adversity, and your absolute refusal to take any s**t from a two-bit tyrant like him. You’ve never rolled over, never surrendered, and never backed down from a fight, and the rest of America watched you last night, and we were cheering you on like one of our own, because you are.As a former longtime Philadelphia resident (and confessed Sixers fan), I’m rooting for your Knickerbockers, but more than that, I’m rooting for you and your city. I think most of this nation is. You are the fierce, radiant, beautifully diverse place that has always persevered through the darkest seasons of this nation, and last night you reminded us that we’re going to make it through these incredibly black days, too. You pointed us to something bigger than sports last night, and we’re grateful.As he quickly dozed off, crestfallen and embarrassed after failing to command unearned respect and undeserved adoration, you all did what you’ve always done: you carried on.And yeah, in the books this will go down as an “L” for your team, and that’s gotta sting this morning. Still, I hope you find some comfort in knowing that in the eyes of tens of millions of patriotic Americans throughout this nation who have had it with this self-absorbed professional parasite, you won.So, NYC, from the vast, thankful multitude this morning who were lifted by your truly inspiring performance last night: f*ck Trump, f*ck ICE, God Bless America… and Knicks in 5.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Hey, America.I get it: this feels like it’s never going to end, like this oppressive darkness will never lift, like the disorienting chaos of these days is now our default setting. This is understandable. For the last decade, we’ve been living in dog years, friends; pummeled by a century’s worth of Constitutional crises, systemic failures, war crimes, and human moral collapses.The atrocities have accumulated, the legislative losses have piled up, and perhaps, most of all, the list of people we loved and once respected who’ve abandoned compassion and reason has grown beyond what we can fathom.To put it another way: we’ve been knocked on our asses for ten straight years, and that’s gonna leave a mark on our nation, on our relationships, and on our psyches.We are collectively experiencing the PTSD of a prolonged daily existence that our nervous systems were never designed to sustain. That kind of unceasing emotional trauma has rendered all of us deprived of hope, physically exhausted, and a hair’s breadth from a breakdown.In light of all of this, we can be forgiven for believing that we’re never getting out of this, that our Republic is cooked, that 250 years will end up being the lifespan of our flawed but once-promising experiment in liberty.But we’d be wrong.Our present condition is not permanent, America. One way or another, a shift is coming.He is not long for this earth, and he is not long for the presidency. One day, soon, either nature or the Constitution is going to take him, and when it does, there will be rejoicing throughout this planet that we have not seen in 80 years. Humanity will feel the cathartic jubilation it should feel when tyrants meet their demise, and whether he ends first in the ground or in a cell, we all need to make sure we’re here to celebrate together. We cannot be so overwhelmed by the recent sorrows and current threats that we slip into apathy and resignation; that we allow ourselves to be gaslighted into believing our presence counts for nothing, that our work is fruitless, that our efforts are wasted.We need to remember that the toll of proximity and the lies of the present can distort reality.We’re here right now, on the bloodied and broken ground with our faces pressed into the jagged, unrelenting horrors on our timelines and in our neighborhoods. Presently, it’s impossible to rise to 30,000 feet and see that our current struggles, though formidable, are not unprecedented. Humanity has always persevered beyond the evil visited upon it. If we lean on History, she will remind us that all violent regimes crumble, all malevolent movements dissolve, and all tyrants fall, and this will be true for this nation and the monstrosity in front of us. Our job as decent human beings is to allow our individual and collective presence to hasten the arrival of such times. It may feel illogical, but we are closer to ending this nightmare than we imagine. As quickly as it arrived, it can be driven out if, instead of throwing our hands up and accepting our shared fate in these moments, we transform all the despair and the anger we’ve amassed into a fierce and unrelenting resistance. But that is the caveat here: we cannot wish this hatred away, and we cannot do nothing and hope it extinguishes itself. Violent, power-mad, parasitic people never voluntarily abdicate power once they have it; courageous, compassionate humanity has always needed to work together to take it from them.We can be that beautiful plot-twisting presence right now.And no, the ugliness his ascension has unearthed in our neighbors, the unthinkable damage he has done to our systems, and the cruelty he has authored will not magically disappear with his death or imprisonment, but there will be a massive gap left. The terrible status quo will be interrupted. Through the polls or through protest, instability will come to this seemingly unstoppable behemoth.As they always do, time and effort will ensure that what is right now will not always be.Friends, our calling as empathetic humans, good citizens of this nation, and caretakers of the planet, through sustained effort, personal sacrifice, and steadfast, focused fury, is to make sure that the nation we become will be greater than the nation we are, and far sooner than if we had never been here.Take heart, America, we will outlive him.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Well, it’s Pride Month, and once again this year, my timeline is filled with performative, pearl-clutching, straight, professed Christians, outraged at the supposed rainbow-bedazzled queer assault on the institution of marriage. This year, they’re even trying to meme-manifest a “Nuclear Family Month,” which is about as asinine an idea as advocating for “White History Month” every February. Of all the Conservative Christian commentary you’ll ever hear, this is among the most ridiculous: that LGBTQ people marrying somehow devalues a straight, heteronormative couple’s marriage, like a foreclosed house down the street driving down property values in the neighborhood. Marriage isn’t a community exercise or a collective endeavor; it’s a lifelong agreement between two people before the Law and before friends and loved ones as witnesses. It is a legal document, not a spiritual covenant (unless that couple claims faith). The fact that we don’t get to superimpose our religious beliefs on anyone else’s partnership is only a problem for people who also believe they get to police other people’s bodies, bathrooms, and sexual activity.The two people making their vows to one another are not beholden to anyone but their spouse in honoring, nurturing, or preserving that union after their wedding day. Married people don’t have a Board of Directors or a group of spousal shareholders to answer to here. They have their husband or wife, and the family they create together. They alone get to govern their agreement.I’ve been married for 32 years now, and during all that time, exactly two people on the planet have had a direct impact on the strength and sanctity of my marriage. Every single day, my wife and I work together diligently to have a vital, honest, loving relationship, and we’re the only ones who can make that happen or keep it from happening—period. The idea that anyone else’s marriage affects ours is fairly ridiculous to both of us, and it should be to anyone fully invested in honoring their own marital vows.Ultimately, this isn’t about theology; it’s about the fading fine art of minding your own damn business. For years, I worked as a personal trainer in a boxing gym, and at first, many new clients came in worried about being embarrassed in front of other more fit, more experienced people. I assured them by reminding them that when those people are on the floor, they are so focused on what they’re doing and working so hard that they don’t have the time or energy to be concerned about anyone else; they’re just trying to survive.It’s too bad more straight Christians don’t seem to give half as much time to attending to their own marriages as they do to overseeing others’. Maybe they wouldn’t be failing 42 percent of the time.Interestingly, the same folks claiming that gay people are damaging marriage aren’t nearly as vocal about the rampant infidelity, abuse, and divorce out there in so many heterosexual Christian marriages. Magically, they don’t view those people as a threat to the Institution and are quite able to separate themselves from the greater married world when it suits them.A Facebook acquaintance recently lamented the fact that “the queer agenda is tearing apart the family unit”. I wondered whose “family unit” he was referring to. I know it isn’t mine. My family unit is pretty spectacular and secure because it exists independently of those outside my house, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or any other possible variable. I have authority and direct influence regarding only one family unit on the planet. That’s how this life works.To all the perpetually outraged straight Christian couples out there this PRIDE Month, a few reminders for you:Even if you believe that same-gender marriage is sinful or immoral, claiming that it does any sort of residual collateral damage to you or your spouse or your family says more about the fragility and possibly fraudulence of your relationship than it does about the LGBTQ community as a viable threat. As much as you claim you want to protect the family unit, the reality is that queer people have family units, too: caring, imperfect, loving, flawed, beautiful ones. They daily navigate complicated relationships with siblings, parents, children, spouses, (and, even, In-Laws). They live lives together in deep community marked by all the compassion, frustration, intimacy, laughter, heartache, and richness that you share with your family.If you can’t admit and respect that, and if you find yourself somehow threatened by any other person’s pursuit of happiness or expression of family, that’s likely a you problem. There’s something incredibly troublesome when we as people of faith require others to believe what we believe, or worse, when we act as if their refusal to believe what we believe or practice what we practice in any way diminishes our faith experience or somehow taints our religion.Straight Christians, when you got married, you didn’t make those flowery vows to all married people, before or since. You didn’t profess your undying love and commitment to an institution. You didn’t expectantly join the ranks of a club or fraternity or corporation. You didn’t get married to Marriage.You pledged to a person, promising to love your spouse as faithfully, passionately, and completely as you could for the rest of your life. That’s all you are obligated, expected, and most importantly, qualified to do.The bottom line is that if your marriage is adversely affected by anyone else’s marriage (straight or queer), you probably have a pretty crappy marriage.That should be cause for great worry, and it’s probably something you should pray on.Outside of your spouse, the only person who can really damage or devalue your marriage is you.So, Happy Pride Month, and Happy Mind Your Own Damn Business Month.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

I’ve been trying to place the heaviness within me these days; the nagging sickness that resides in the pit of my stomach every morning, regardless of what I do to try and push it away.It isn’t merely the growing nihilism that comes from realizing how quickly the bedrock of our Republic is dissolving. It isn’t just the black despair from watching the rapid and seemingly inexorable erosion of human and civil rights.It isn’t only the leaden grief that comes from witnessing so much unnecessary suffering, so much preventable pain, so much manufactured chaos. Along with all of that, I think the real heart sickness comes from realizing my complicity in crimes against humanity.As a taxpaying American, I am partnering in the genocide in Gaza. I see the breath-stealing videos of Palestinian children torn apart by AIPAC-funded drone strikes, of elderly people executed by IDF soldiers, of Israeli political leaders applauding the barbaric destruction of Gaza, and I know that my taxable income is funding the carnage. As a taxpaying American, I am murdering the people of Iran, Lebanon, Cuba, and Ukraine.Watching our leadership waging or permitting deadly, wasteful, and unprovoked wars of greed, distraction, and geography all over the planet, and knowing that I am in some way aiding and abetting them is cause for mourning.As a taxpaying American, I am starving people to death in New Jersey.The tortured souls languishing inside the hellscape of Delaney Hall, forced to eat maggot-infested food, denied basic healthcare, shown no human comfort, enduring a deadly squalor that has no reason to exist other than the cruelty of the sociopaths who constructed it with the resources of my life’s work. As a taxpaying American, I am assaulting girls and young women in Texas.Realizing that the horrors inside an inaccessible compound in San Benito and the unthinkable brutality that is being visited upon the most vulnerable and helpless there do not happen without my unwitting, yet still real, financial assistance.As a taxpaying American, I am viciously terrorizing immigrants.Watching a masked Gestapo-esque army of perverse monsters relentlessly hounding my black and brown neighbors in the places they work, study, worship, and raise their families is made all the worse by the knowledge that the sweat of my brow is fueling them.As a taxpaying American, I am violently persecuting queer people.It breaks my heart to know that despite my work to try and be an LGBTQ ally and to advocate for the inherent worth of every human being, my taxes are bankrolling the homophobic and transphobic legislative assaults on transgender teens, on gay couples, on marriage equality. Like most people who call this place home, I was weaned on a story of this nation that was part curated myth, part racist whitewashing, part genuine aspiration, and part American exceptionalism that steadfastly refused to admit culpability for inhumanity. The central narrative I inherited from my pastors, teachers, parents, media, and politicians was that the United States was a place that, though terribly flawed, still endeavored to be a brilliant beacon for the vulnerable, hungry, and hurting of the world.It may have been a mix of ignorance, privilege, and wishful thinking, but I bought into the lie, and it’s sobering enough to realize that this story was never true. That’s enough of an existential gut punch.And it’s another matter altogether to realize that for your entire life, but profoundly in these present days, your work and creativity have funded the very hatred, inequity, and brutality you’ve spent a lifetime intending to eradicate.There’s a futility that comes from when that truth settles in; when you are a person of peace who is subsidizing war. I think that’s what’s so hard for so many of us right now. We’re trying to fight for and with our country simultaneously.I know that we are not powerless in these moments, but I confess that the road out of this is unclear. All I can say for certain is that as a taxpaying American who loves humanity and who hates the nation we have become, it’s hard living with so much blood on my hands.Note: Of course, we aren’t willfully participating in these atrocities, but it’s impossible to divorce ourselves from what our leadership does in our name, and this is the struggle so many of us find ourselves in.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

June is Pride Month, and straight people who consider themselves allies to our queer neighbors need to understand the implications for us in this iteration of America. Yes, allyship is about rainbow flags, social media posts, and parade events, but it’s about a hell of a lot more than that. To be a true LGBTQ ally right now means visibly and forcefully pushing back against the quickly metastasizing hatred throughout this country; the toxic flood of intellectual ignorance, archaic dogma, phobic fear, and inherited stupidity all being curated by the MAGA Republican Party. The ACLU is currently tracking 530 anti-LGBTQ bills across the United States.They range from healthcare barriers to school sports bans to curriculum censorship to forced outings in schools to so-called religious exemptions to drag bans to attacks on expression and visibility for the queer community.These proposed draconian laws amount to a government-sanctioned, legislative legitimizing of discrimination, designed to silence, erase, and punish human beings for their gender identity and sexual orientation. They represent a rejection of science, a discarding of common sense, and the complete, perverse consummation of the sickening marriage between Church and State.As with other historically marginalized and oppressed populations in this country (people of color, immigrants, women, Muslims), LGBTQ human beings are seeing their hard-fought legal protections vanishing in recent months. Long-decided laws protecting them are being furiously challenged. Malicious theology targeting them is taking hold in churches. They are being painted as immoral existential threats and bathroom-lurking monsters for gullible, easily-manipulated, hate-addled Americans who have abandoned the Golden Rule, discarded the Constitution, and rejected the call to love their neighbors.At the highest levels of leadership in our government, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, nonbinary, non-conforming human beings are being slandered and dehumanized, fomenting the mindless rage of their cultic base.And it is into this swirling storm of prejudice, disinformation, and rising violence that we who imagine ourselves friends and advocates of queer people are being called to step this Pride month. We are being invited to do far more than simply throw on a t-shirt, attend a drag show, or share a think piece on social media, as nice as those things are. In these perilous days for LGBTQ human beings, to be a straight ally is to risk profound turbulence within our circles of influence. It’s intentionally stepping into the path of verbal and physical violence. It’s loudly outing oneself as a human being who will not permit hatred in their midst. It’s being willing to make bigots uncomfortable. If we end this month without finding ourselves in a difficult conversation with an uninformed family member, without experiencing a coldness from our transphobic neighbors, without bringing tension to our churches, without facing the insults and threats queer people sustain just for waking up and living, we will have failed as allies.The fight against LGBTQ discrimination is not the fight of the LGBTQ community alone. They should not have to continually make the case for their humanity, or incessantly fight to be treated with dignity and decency, or to brave the taunts and brutality of the deceived and dumb around them. We should be fighting alongside them.Straight allies need to be a fierce, steadfast, unflinching obstacle to those who still somehow believe that anyone else’s gender, orientation, body, or marriage are any of their damn business.In our churches and schools and workplaces and town halls and neighborhoods, we need to show up for our queer friends by placing ourselves between them and the emboldened bullies who think that they will face no resistance.It’s time that would-be LGBTQ allies in the United States stood up for the people we claim to love by making their hateful assailants know what it’s like to be outnumbered, to be reminded that they are not going to drag this nation back to the Stone Age on our watch.Pride has always been a protest as much as a celebration. And for those of us who truly aspire to stand with the queer community, it must be a clear declaration of war against the emboldened bigots who believe they can erase queer human beings from this nation, a war they will not win.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

As someone whose life’s work is words, I confess that I’m increasingly at a loss for them. And even in the moments when the words do come, they almost immediately feel obsolete. It’s become nearly impossible to wake up and comment on any specific human rights atrocity, any precise illegality, any single bastardization of the Christian faith, any individual act of Congressional malpractice. In the time it takes to assess one unprecedented act of governmental malfeasance, stop the spinning storm inside my head, and string together something resembling coherent thoughts, a half dozen infuriating, nauseating, heretofore nonexistent abominations will have already swallowed them up.This is, of course, by design, yet knowing this doesn’t make it any easier to navigate.There’s very little that comes with any surety these days. The only thing I am certain of as I watch and listen and walk through this season alongside my 342 million neighbors is that there is mourning in America.The grief is ever-present, sitting like a boulder on our chests, crushing our hearts and rendering our breathing shallow. A heavy dread hovers in the background of our nervous systems, leaving us continually ping-ponging between fight, flight, and freeze.We vacillate wildly from heartbreak to outrage to hopelessness, battered by manufactured crises, curated madness, and genuine emergencies.And that’s just the damage coming from above, from the repugnant legion of sociopaths and predators who’ve hijacked the very sacred halls that their treasonous foot soldiers desecrated on a January afternoon. In any other iteration of our nation, those helming it would at least have feigned decency, offered some ceremonial lip service of unity, and provided a modicum of care for its constituents. Those days feel like a lifetime ago. The entirety of a Presidential Cabinet and its gutless Congressional coconspirators have abandoned any allegiance to the Constitution, to morality, to the common good. They are professional parasites, voraciously sucking every bit of progress and promise from this flawed but beautiful beacon of Democracy that the world once aspired to emulate. Bearing this alone would all be difficult enough. It would be a Herculean task to endure such prolific brutality from our alleged leadership and remain tethered to sanity.But then we look to our left and to our right; to the people around us who are, at best, silent enablers of this violent historic farce, or, at worst, willing collaborators. We inventory the ever-expanding list of human beings we share holiday tables with, make small talk with over the fence, work, study, and worship alongside, and once felt an easy affinity with, mourning the blackened hearts we’ve come to realize they harbor.And perhaps most devastating of all, there are the people who raised us to be human beings of empathy, who taught us to love our neighbors, who instilled us with a respect for the Rule of Law, who called us to lean upon our better angels. Over the past ten years, we have watched them abandon every ideal and precept they passed down to us, jettisoning God and Country, while continually broadcasting their supposed allegiance to both. We now find ourselves ridiculed, shunned, and demonized for becoming the very loving, open-hearted, generous humans they told us to become.The wreckage of this relational warfare is everywhere:In the room-clearing arguments, the protracted emotional cold wars, the social media disconnections, the text chain ghostings, the slow but now undeniable attrition of affection, the silences and empty holiday chairs. These are as heartbreaking injuries as anything this white supremacist vampire colony at the Capitol has thrown at us.I don’t know quite what to say to those of you reading this who grieve America as we approach its 250th year, because on most days, I’m not even sure what to tell myself. I wish there were words in our lexicon that I could string together that would magically lift the burdens from your shoulders, quiet the chaos in your mind, and swiftly usher peace into the warzones of your heart. All I can do today with any honesty is to name the grief and hope that will bring some comfort. Naming it helps me.In fact, perhaps, that shared sorrow is the connective tissue that will hold us all together as we endure this impossible to fathom or describe nightmare. Maybe, our collective tears over the America that is will water the seeds of the America we can still be. This morning, despite the losses that seem endless, I cling to the hope that we, the multitudes who lament how far we’ve fallen as a nation, will find a way to pull us from the seemingly endless darkness we’re immersed in and into the dawn of better days.To every American mourning, know you do not grieve alone.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

AI is inevitable.Well, at least, we're certainly being led to believe it is.The message is everywhere right now.It’s coming from tone-deaf University commencement addresses,from soulless techbro vampire startups,from morally bankrupt data center builders, from myopic local politicians,from woefully lazy journalists,and from massive organizations that have gutted their creative departments. They want us to believe that the mighty horse of progress has left the barn; that the inexorable march toward the future has begun, and we’re either gonna figure out how to ride it or be trampled to death trying to stop it. I’m calling BS on that.Yes, artificial Intelligence’s existence is guaranteed, but humanity’s response to it is still well within our hands, and that response will determine whether we allow our ethical and moral convictions to bear on the technology or remain silent and be swallowed up.Will we value the already-fragile environment enough to fight the fatal blow the current proposed proliferation of data centers presents?Will we continue to cheapen the work of human creators, whose art we’ve gradually been conditioned to believe we should get for free?Will we allow ourselves to be lured into the seductive shortcuts and quick solutions generative AI provides, or will we honor the creative process and the slower road to discovery?Artificial Intelligence evangelists insist that we’re afraid of this technology, but they’re misreading the situation and our response. I’m not afraid of generative AI; I’m morally opposed to it, and there’s a big difference.I don’t resist progress, but I do resist technological movements that pillage our natural resources, devalue human beings, harvest their creativity without compensating them, and enable talentless parasites to profit from the work of billions of flesh-and-blood people, who since the dawn of time have spent themselves on behalf of their art.Pushing back against the unethical rise of Artificial Intelligence isn’t as complicated as we’re led to believe. Some steps you can take right now:Stop sucking up thousands of gallons of drinking water just to turn your dad’s texts into a song for a 90-second Instagram reel.Turn off the AI assists on your search engines and email portals.Stop using ChatGPT, Claude, or other platforms to find information you already have near-immediate access to.If you’re a student, stop trying to cheat your way to knowledge and experience. Enjoy the long, often meandering but ultimately fruitful road of study, failure, and exploration.If you’re in charge of a creative project for a business, church, or organization seek out actual qualified, experienced human beings who’ve devoted their lives to their craft; investing in people who’ve earned their expertise and their price tag.Find out where data centers are being proposed in your area, and show up at town halls, board meetings, politicians’ offices, and wield your power as a resident and taxpayer.Stop using generative AI to make a meme that’s no one’s going to care about thirty seconds after they’ve seen it.Use your brain instead of your thumbs. A few quick prompts will give you immediate ideas which can be seductive, but it’s fool’s gold. Part of the creative process is to sit with the empty page, the frustrating silence, and the blinking cursor; the invaluable times when the wrestling and the waiting force you to go deeper than an Internet search.Partner with advocacy groups to hold CEOs, executives, employers, developers, and lawmakers accountable to the human beings in their midst. Financially support artists whose humanity feeds your soul. If you reject the threat of AI to creativity, one of the ways you can fight it is to support flesh-and-blood creators. If there are bands, writers, comedians, journalists, painters, jewelry makers, small businesses, or songwriters who make life more beautiful or bearable, please tangibly partner with them as you can. If financial support is not possible, please leverage your social media platform to share their work and help them break out of the prisons of the algorithms.Artificial Intelligence, like any new technology, can either be a useful tool or a deadly weapon. We shouldn’t be afraid of progress, but we should be very worried about sacrificing one another and ourselves on the altar of that supposed progress.AI’s replacement of humanity is not inevitable, but the greed, ignorance, and short-sightedness of human beings are, which means we’re all going to push back against it with urgency and ferocity to ensure that we don’t gain some time and a little ease, and lose our souls.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a fully human, non-AI, reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Picture someone you love who died serving this nation, or even someone you’ve never met.Imagine them wherever they took their final breath on this planet: Jumping into churning, frozen foreign seas in a screaming storm of artillery fire.Shivering in a filthy trench in the terrifying blackness of an insect-blanketed jungle floor.Leaping from a fire-engulfed plane into a disorienting maelstrom of explosions.Crouched in the blazing sun within the crosshairs of a sniper perched 500 meters away.Slowly withering away from malnutrition in anonymity and solitude.Try to place yourself in the company of one of the hundreds of thousands of eldest sons, sisters, husbands, fathers, wives, best friends, and favorite uncles, who, with a courage and selflessness we will never fathom, placed themselves in the path of bullets, bombs, torture, and brutality in the cause of America.Now, imagine telling those brave servicemen and women just before they gave their very lives for this nation, that it would one day be placed in the hands of a treasonous felon with abject disregard for the laws of this land; a man lacking a single noble impulse or patriotic thought.Imagine breaking the news to those beautiful souls facing certain death, that five or twenty or sixty or one hundred years later, America would be helmed by a billionaire insurrectionist who would ridicule their bravery, make a mockery of their sacrifice, and place those who followed them in harm’s way, by allowing a disgraced TV personality to oversee them.I wonder if they’d have reconsidered their path, if they’d have declared themselves conscientious objectors in his coming war on the Constitution, if they would have abandoned the road that would bring their lives to a premature and violent termination.Given their unfathomable courage, I don’t imagine they would, but as someone standing here today and living through this historic farce, I sure as hell wouldn’t have blamed them. We have allowed ourselves to have our freedom suffocated by the very fascism our forebears leveraged their very beings trying to defeat.Watching our current service members being unnecessarily placed in peril in Iran, used as disposable pawns in a reckless and illegal war of distraction by a morally bankrupt parasite, should be enough to make any actually patriotic American sick to their stomachs. As we witness our children being carelessly thrown into half a dozen conflicts around the world designed to pad the portfolios of billionaires and swallow up oil-rich real estate, we should be mourning our shared failure as U.S. citizens.By allowing our Military to be at the whims of this traitorous felon, we have failed our veterans; squandering their service and wasting their sacrifice. Donald Trump’s seditious presidency, his undeserved occupation of the Oval Office, and his very repugnant presence in the highest seat of power in America are a slap in the face of those we honor on Memorial Day who died so that we could endure. His kleptocratic Administration, populated by grifters and foreign assets, serves as a massive middle finger to the millions who lost years and careers and futures and limbs trying to protect a Republic that is now teetering on the edge of the abyss.And whether on Memorial Day or Veterans Day or Independence Day, or any day we wake up with such a small, cowardly, petty disgrace of a man leading this nation, we should be livid at the insult he is to those who truly loved and love America. We should collectively grieve our part in this mockery that is being made of their sacrifice, and openly and loudly stand in opposition to him as a way of properly honoring them.With our voices and circles of influence and financial resources and votes, we should stand on the front lines of our lives to continue their brave, sacrificial work of protecting this beautiful but beleaguered nation.It is the very least we can do for them, knowing they did the most they could do for us.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show is over. After 11 years and over 1,800 episodes, the final installment aired this week to great fanfare and emotion. The show’s premature demise was, of course, the direct result of Donald Trump’s eggshell-fragile ego and his complete inability to withstand criticism of any kind. The joyless, narcissistic Man-Child-In-Chief has always despised people like Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and Jon Stewart; guys who possess a comfort in their own skin that he will never know, a razor wit that will always escape him, and an easy humanity that he is simply incapable of. Though he positions himself as an overconfident Alpha Male, his raging insecurity and naked resentment have always exposed him as a terrified fraud who knows he doesn’t measure up.Trump has spent an embarrassing amount of time and energy during his two presidential terms trying to silence and de-platform any members of the media who do not bend the knee and kiss the ring: leveraging his social media platform, weaponizing the FCC, and begging his billionaire buddies to purge the airwaves of dissension or critique.With his surrogates now overseeing CBS, the thin-skinned wannabe despot was finally able to shutter The Late Show, something his similarly morose disciples have hailed as a kind of righteous victory. In reality, though, all it really did was illustrate why MAGA will always lose: it is a misery movement of deeply unhappy human beings.Colbert began his series finale with a poignant, heartfelt monologue, addressing the home and studio audiences simultaneously about the genuine gratitude he felt for those who have traveled this journey with him.Speaking about the small army of collaborators responsible for making The Late Show possible five nights a week for over a decade (writers, booking agents, crew members, musicians, artists), the host described their collective endeavor as ‘The Joy Machine,’ saying: ”We call it the Joy Machine, because to do this many shows, it has to be a machine, but the thing is, if you choose to do it with joy, it doesn’t hurt as much when your fingers get caught in the gears.”Manufacturing joy. When you hear Stephen Colbert deliver that simple, elegant mission statement, you can rewind through those 1,800 shows and realize that this is exactly what he and his team have been doing all along. The Late Show helped us all face the terrifying, infuriating, grief-worth reality around us by making sure we stayed emotionally buoyant enough to laugh at the absurdity of it all. Colbert, leading by example, never let his hateful adversaries win by becoming them. It has been his resiliency and optimism that have made him the perennially sanguine counterpoint to Trump’s unceasing nihilism.Continuing, the host said of his team:“I cannot adequately explain to you what the people who work here have done for each other and how much we mean to each other.”Joy. Gratitude. Affection. In just over two minutes, Colbert exhibited the kind of quiet, confident humanity that the current president has never had access to.Over the last decade, though he has quite literally never shut up, Donald Trump has never expressed any kind of genuine appreciation for other people, never centered anyone but himself, and never offered humility of any kind. He has never been anything but a sad, insult-hurling, grievance-wielding malcontent who will never find peace in this life because his self-hatred will not allow it.And this unrelenting unhappiness is something his followers are similarly afflicted with. It’s the reason that, although they have their president in the White House, a chokehold on Congress, a compromised Supreme Court, and a near-complete monopoly on the media, they are all still miserable. They continue to be in perpetual war with the world, and the rest of us need to pay attention.Yes, while Colbert’s cancellation is certainly a sad milestone, another tangible sign that we are approaching the throes of authoritarianism, we can take heart in being reminded that in inhumane times such as these, victory is found in holding onto our humanity. We are not fully defeated when we lose platforms, have rights stripped away, or face corrupt power’s persecution, but when we forfeit the love of life and of the people around us, that Trump and MAGA’s misery movement have long since discarded.Trump can continue to abuse his office to attempt to silence criticism. He can leverage the power of the presidency to try to steamroll dissenters. He can marshal every resource at his disposal to remove voices that ridicule him, and his hateful acolytes across this country can celebrate all of it. But none of these things will deter those of us who refuse to fall prostrate before him. They will not break us down or shut us up.We will continue to traffic in laughter and beauty and connection. We will continue to dance and dream and create.We will continue to give and celebrate and embrace.We will not become as miserable as the people who seek our demise. Friends, be encouraged, be courageous, stay human… and let the Joy Machine roll on.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

It’s morning here in America, and for many white people who fancied themselves as “woke,” it’s been a rude awakening.A lot happened while we were sleeping.Our prolonged repose actually began in November of 2008.Back then, we basked in the warm glow of what seemed like the dawn’s long-delayed arrival. Reveling in the once unthinkable reality of a black President, we all grew comfortable, nestling into a seductive complacency that only the blind spots of privilege and ignorance provide.The unfettered joy of that moment became a slow-acting emotional sedative that slowly squeezed the urgency from us, gradually dulling our senses and clouding our judgment. Day by day, naive jubilation numbed us into believing we may have finally arrived together at Martin’s glorious mountaintop, that the arc of the moral universe had bent permanently toward justice. If we had taken the time to ask black and brown people, they’d have warned us not to fall asleep, but we didn’t.Instead, we believed that the aspirational “we shall overcomes” that rang out over decades had become a fixed and unchangeable present. We exhaled too deeply; collectively, settling into that cozy space where the heart rate slows, and the limbs and eyelids grow heavy; where, without realizing it, slumber suddenly overtakes you: one blink awake, the next blink asleep.And for the next eight years, we sleepwalked through the world, physically here but not fully present, not entirely lucid, not truly seeing; caught between the actual and the unreal worlds, between the real nightmare and the imagined dream. Yes, we still planned and marched and campaigned and worked, but we did so slightly sedated in the haze of bad stories, willful ignorance, and wishful thinking.Meanwhile, the bigots were the ones who really woke up.Shaken violently from their sleep in November 2008 by the reality of what decades of irrational fear, inherited racism, and perverted theology taught them was the absolute worst place they could find themselves, they began to mount a fierce counterattack.They created news outlets and social media platforms designed to filter out everything except that which would fully trigger terror within the hearts of their intended targets and would-be allies:fantastical stories of a pervasive and coordinated Gay Agenda coming to convert their children;of violent, heavily armed, brown-skinned drug gangs overrunning our borders;of godless, abortion-mad progressives having indiscriminate sex without concern or care;of Muslim terrorist hordes infiltrating our neighborhoods and bodegas;of America-hating Democrats coming for their jobs and flags and prayers and guns.And we were still sleeping.They played the long game of local political wins, incrementally gaining footholds in the spaces where legislatures are commandeered, supermajorities are formed, districts are redrawn, courts are polluted, and democracy is slowly suffocated. And on we slept.The bigots leveraged thousands of Christian pulpits, where every seven days they’d wildly stoke the fires of people’s phobias and fears, weaponize the Scriptures against queer people and migrants and Muslims, and pervert the expansive Gospel of Jesus into a gated white community of rabid nationalism. Sermon by sermon, the opportunistic pulpit predators enlisted them all into service as passionate soldiers in the Army of the straight, white, American, male Lord.And we kept on sleeping.And then, in 2016, to inculcate the terror fully, they propped up an amoral sideshow carnival barker as their chosen one; a barren, narcissistic, empty husk of a man with no discernible moral convictions of his own. They recognized they could use this breathing void as a flesh-and-blood avatar to embody their grievances and perpetuate their phobias.The bigots erected a vile, blustery false idol of greatness and whiteness around which their easily-manipulated rank and file would fall prostrate; a shameless grifter who would daily dig into the putrid muck to find an ever-deepening moral bottom. In the sleep-induced state we were in we thought it was a joke at first. We laughed ourselves back into a dreamworld where everything would be fine and where decency would prevail and where the system would work; so much so that one hundred million of us slept all the way through an election cycle.You’d have thought that would be our ultimate wake-up call. Yet, somehow, over the next decade, despite horrors and abominations never visited upon America, though we imagined ourselves rightly woke, we still could not coalesce and leverage our voices and our influence enough to avoid our nation making this grievous, likely fatal error a second time. And here we are perilously close to theocracy, a hair’s breadth from authoritarianism, within inches of our Republic’s collapse, and still, I wonder if we’re fully awake now.I wonder if we’re ready to cast off the cobwebs of our complacency and enter fully into the bloody fray in front of us.I wonder if we’re willing to rouse ourselves into lucidity and step into the jagged trenches of the fight of our lives and for the disparate swath of humanity that we’ve let down.I wonder if we’re prepared to face our culpability and admit our failures and make amends with our time and our resources and our votes. I wonder if we have the intestinal fortitude to face what is ahead and what it will require from us.Or maybe we’ll just find another way to anesthetize; distracting ourselves with retail therapy and mindless scrolling, soothing ourselves with false hope, sedating our systems with American exceptionalism. Will we somehow find a way to again retreat into the comfortable places and once more grow so tired that we’ll nestle back into a deadly slumber?I wonder if there’s still time to undo the present nightmare.The only way we’ll have a chance to know is if we wake up and stay awake.It’s morning in America.There’s mourning in America.Time to rise and shine.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

I see scared people.There’s a niche panic rising across America right now, a collective desperation among an increasingly jittery demographic who call this place home; people who, up until recently, have been continually handed limitless opportunity and prosperity without ever needing to do much beyond the bare minimum of showing up. This pigment-specific terror shows up in a myriad of ways: in bottom-feeding dudebro podcast rants, in antagonizing racist influencers, in performative banners at baseball games, in violent xenophobic town hall tirades. You can see the distinct male-pattern hysteria in shamefully gerrymandered maps, in DEI program elimination, in truck and bicep overcompensation, in sky-is-falling megachurch sermons, and in shocking civil rights rollbacks.Throughout this ever-diversifying land, mediocre white men are petrified, and for good reason: America is passing them by, and they know it. As you can imagine, they’re not taking it well, either.Recently, I was contacted by a staff member at one of my host churches in advance of a speaking date there. She’d received a call from a man with a thick southern drawl, who said he wanted to know why they’d invited someone like me to their congregation, saying, “You know he supports white genocide, right?” Who knew? I certainly didn’t.After my emotional, anonymous Aryan admirer was rightly dismissed, I wondered if the call soothed him at all. I wonder if it stopped the sinking feeling in his gut that he carries around every day, if it quelled his rising and quite warranted sense of Imposter Syndrome, if it quieted the ubiquitous rage always bedeviling him and men like him.Something tells me it didn’t help. He’s likely beyond real comfort at this point. Most of these guys are. They’ve watched more and more people gain access to what they’ve been assured all their lives was their sole birthright, and this progress feels like persecution. And so, rather than leveling up, widening their understanding of the world, or, God forbid, looking in the mirror, they’ve created a new coping narrative that tells them everyone else is the problem. It’s the immigrants. It’s their black and brown neighbors. It’s transgender people. It’s women. It’s Muslims. It’s the Liberals. It’s the media. It’s the ever-present ghost of President Obama residing rent-free in their heads. Convinced that the entire world has conspired against them, they are responding with a steady torrent of emotional outbursts and mindless violence.In fact, living in the United States right now is what I imagine is what it would have been like observing dinosaurs in the days leading up to their extinction: seeing a frantic-but-surely-doomed species wildly thrashing and flailing about, all while being rapidly obscured by the shadow of a massive meteor of evolution plummeting toward them. Uninteresting, nondescript, base-level white guys who, for the past 250 years, have been the beneficiaries of every privilege and advantage their pigmentation and pronouns afford, are watching time, progress, and the inexorable demographic changes coming to swallow them up.Entitled, builder-grade man-children who’ve had the run of the house since exiting the birth canal into a land their great-great-grandaddies stole, subjugated, and murdered for, are starting to read the room and recognize that they are perilously close to losing their free pass to prosperity. After having failed up from the day they were born, they are facing the grim prospects of finally having to participate in a meritocracy, and they’re looking to drive everyone else out so as not to be humiliated by just how poorly they measure up when competition appears. It turns out that spending every waking moment buffered by privilege rots your brain, steals your ambition, and renders you incapable of doing the work to grow, evolve, or improve, which is why generations of low-melanin underachievers are now scrambling to cram for an exam they’ve always been handed the answers to. Having spent decades in the cloistered cocoon of white American maleness, these emotionally stunted, barely literate, Chud The Builder acolytes never learned how to apply themselves, never needed to do any real introspection, and certainly never were expected to earn their keep. This is why these Confederacy nostalgics are trying to resuscitate Jim Crow, scapegoat immigrants, and rewind the clock to a nation where their numbers ensured their dominance, but it’s all gonna be for not.If free and fair midterm elections happen here, the shifting populations and changing mores will prove their worry was justified, and the balance of power here may tip away from them for good. But even if a final, violent campaign of malfeasance and illegality allows them a few more days with the unearned spoils of this land, it will only be postponing the inevitable. As the playing fields here level and the pool of participation widens, they are naturally becoming obsolete, proven to have little to offer a world that no longer falls in line or bows in reverence. The days when this nation was their participation trophy are coming to an end, and instead of lashing out, they should turn inward. Instead of picking up protest signs and arms, they should try picking up a book. Instead of playing the victim, they should ask themselves why educated, hardworking human beings feel like a threat.This white fright isn’t unwarranted, but it is misplaced. It isn’t a targeted attack; it’s a self-inflicted wound. There is no coordinated effort to replace unremarkable white men in the United States, but an evolving, increasingly diverse nation is transcending them. And they have no one to blame but themselves.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Trump-Supporting Christian, maybe you can help me clear something up.You see, I used to think I was a Christian.I was raised in a Christian home and went to a Christian school. After a few meandering spiritual wilderness years, I attended a Christian seminary, became a Christian pastor, and served in Christian churches for most of the past thirty-five years of my life.I’ve read and studied and preached the Scriptures extensively, led community Bible studies and student retreats and overseas mission trips, ministered in tiny rural chapels and massive gleaming megachurches.As a result of these decades immersed in the Christian tradition both personally and vocationally, I thought I had at least the gist of Jesus.Now, I think maybe I’ve been doing this wrong all these years.For my entire life, I assumed something that perhaps I shouldn’t have: I thought Christians were supposed to care about people.Not necessarily agree with them or believe what they believe or even like them, but see them each as specific and unique image-bearers of the divine, to want and to work for Shalom for them: wholeness, happiness, peace, safety, rest.I grew up believing that one of the markers of a life emulating Jesus was a heart capable of being broken at the distress of other human beings around you: when they are hungry and hurting, when they are homeless and afraid, when they grieve and feel alone, when they believe they are unloved and forgotten, when tragedy befalls them, and when injustice assails them. These things are supposed to move the needle within us if Jesus is present.And in all my years of criss-crossing the Gospels in both study and reflection, I never once found a Jesus who piled burdens on already burdened people or rejoiced in their despair or tossed off insults and told them to go back to where they came from.I never read about a Jesus brandishing a “Don’t Tread On Me” bravado in the face of dire need.I didn’t see him lecturing the poor and the afflicted to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”I never found him inviting war or celebrating bloodshed or reveling in loss of life for any reason.I didn’t encounter him trolling people who expressed sadness, worry, or struggle.I didn’t see Jesus tossing off a defiant middle-finger contempt for those who came seeking refuge in him.I saw no arrogance that inflated his worth at the expense of someone else’s.I never once encountered a Jesus who celebrated others’ suffering.Which is why I simply can’t fathom Christians who are cruel and yet, I see so many of them right now.I watch you continually boasting about “winning” alongside a loveless, lawless, serial predator.I witness you repeatedly falling prostrate before the least Christlike person I’ve ever encountered.I see you actively harming the most already marginalized among us.I listen to your anti-immigrant chants of “mass deportations” and “send them back,” and I just have to ask you:“Do you care about people?”“Do you actually love your neighbor?””What is the point of your faith?”“Just what Jesus do you claim to follow?”I’m not talking about the beliefs you profess, the platitudes you proclaim, or the verses you parrot back, but the manner in which you treat other human beings: how you love or do not love your neighbor.I see countless proudly unloving people claiming to be Christians, and it’s baffling.If you profess to be a follower of Jesus, I’m not concerned with your politics, and I don’t care about your doctrine.I’m not interested in the Scriptures you can recite or the prayers you utter out loud.Show me a working theology of empathy.Show me that you actually give a damn about people: not just Republican people or American people or Christian people or white people, but the disparate parade of human beings in every way you encounter them, in every condition they arrive, with whatever backstory they’ve lived through.If you tell me you’re a Christian, be someone who (like Jesus) looks at the crowds and has a compassion for them that propels them into proximity with their pain.Because if you aren’t deeply burdened to live from a place of expansive, sacrificial, selfless love toward your neighbor, not moved to alleviate anguish or reduce suffering, not compelled to leave people better than you found them, honestly, I’m not sure what the point of calling yourself a Christian is.That’s what all my reading and prayer and ministering and living as a Christian have yielded: following Jesus should leave me more compassionate, not less. It’s really that simple.As far as I can see, it’s ridiculous to say I care about Jesus while not caring for the people placed in my path. I am called to live the greatest commandment, not to make any single nation “great.”I think most people walking the planet understand this, whether they’re Christians or not.They, too, get the gist of Jesus, and they see there is no bullying or malice or violence there. They recognize the disconnect between love and enmity when it shows up in the neighborhoods and on the timelines and in their living rooms, and they smell the putrid stench of hypocrisy a mile away.I believe in a God of abundance. I can’t comprehend a Christianity that sees others as in competition with me for jobs or healthcare or a home, because an infinite maker has infinite resources, and because I’m supposedly trying to emulate a Jesus who was the greatest expression of that abundance.Jesus told those who followed him that whatever they do to the least of these, they do to him.So maybe I’m wrong, and maybe I need to regroup on this whole Christianity thing.I thought we were supposed to care about people.I thought we were supposed to love our neighbors.What am I missing?The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

(This message is for David Byrne. If you’re not David Byrne, feel free to scroll away.)Dear David Byrne,(I hope it’s OK that I call you David.)You don’t know me, but I was row G, seat 112 at your performance in Durham on Monday night.(By the way, this is not a concert review, but more of a thank-you note, and a bit of a confession.)As you’re well aware, things here on the planet have been less than optimum lately for compassionate human beings. The cruelty has been unrelenting, the hatred never far away, the grief ever-present. Like most people, for a while now I’ve been getting up every day, doing my little bit, making my contribution, trying to bring a little light to the dark places where I can, but honestly, I haven’t felt like it’s amounted to much lately. The losses have piled up, the suffering has accumulated, and it’s left me feeling listless and lost. Fortunately, Me From A Few Months Ago had the foresight to know that Last Monday Me would need to find himself in that theater, on that night, in that seat, with my wife and daughter next to me, surrounded by a few thousand other similarly worn down souls.The house lights faded to black, the curtain opened, and there you were, bathed in white light, flanked by three of the unthinkably talented cohorts you’ve been traveling with over the past year, whose faces are so familiar now they felt like old friends.And in a millisecond, what struck me was the absolute silence in that space, as if an exhausted multitude had collectively leaned in to try and hear the whisper of hope beneath the ugly, hissing din of these days, and it came in the form of your voice, singing:Everyone is trying to get to the bar. The name of the bar, the bar is called Heaven.Tears welled up in my eyes and I heard myself exhale loudly. It’s been a while since I’ve done that. As the song ended, you turned and faced an image of the earth, saying, “There she is: our Heaven; the only one we have,” and I remembered what this is all for, the gravity of these days, the urgency of living in such perilous moments.Seconds later, you launched into “Everybody Laughs” and the full band assembled from the wings, we all rose to our feet, not in obligation but in the involuntary pull of hearts that have been starved for jubilation, and we danced ourselves alive again.I often talk to people about art as activism, as a catalyst for social change, as inspiration and release, but there, for those two hours, I was reminded of art as medicine for the soul; the way words and melodies and voices and similarly-intentioned people can do the miraculous inside a human heart.A dozen times throughout the night, I’d catch myself thinking, “I wish she could see this,” or, “I wish he were there." But then I would quickly reply, “But you’re here, now. Be here, now.” You and your glorious ensemble didn’t give us an escape from the world outside, but the chance to hold all of it together: the grief and the fear, the celebrations and the sorrows. We appealed to our better angels while not turning away from the demons inside or around us.Yes, the night was (as I had been promised by many online), a joyful, life-affirming collective artistic experience like few in my life, but it was more than that for me. It was a reminder of what humanity is here for, it was the road back to a version of me I’d lost, a lifeline in a season that has often rendered me lifeless. I so wish the 8 billion other war-weary human beings on the planet could have found themselves in that theater, as I think it would have altered the trajectory of our shared journey. Yet, looking around at the radiant faces of the thousands surrounding me as the curtain closed and the houselights came up, it was clear that none of us were leaving as we arrived. I know i wasn’t.I share this with you because even with all the success you’ve had and the places your gifts have taken you, I imagine, like the rest of us, you also have moments when it doesn’t seem like the work you do makes a difference, like the effort isn’t changing anything, but I wanted to let you know that this isn’t true. In fact, David, that’s what I left the theater with on Monday: the assurance that doing my little bit matters, too, that it isn’t for nothing, that the efforts and offerings of every single weary but defiantly joyful person dancing around me haven’t been wasted.I realized that we were a beaming, dancing microcosm of the billions of people on this planet who still wake every morning, courageously making the case for kindness in the small and close of their lives, people who are excavating goodness out of the broken rubble left in hatred’s wake.One of the many lines I carry with me from the night is, “We're only tourists in this life, only tourists, but the view is nice.”Sometimes the view is nice.Sometimes, it is breathtaking.The path of my 56-year life led me to row G, seat 112 on that Monday night, and it was exactly the place I needed to be. I know you didn’t plan this entire tour for me, but it sure felt like it, which is the true gift of the artist. So, thank you, David, for reminding me why my being here matters, why each of us matters, why the world, as ugly as it can be, has too much beauty to give up on.I’ll keep getting up every day, doing my little bit, making my contribution, and trying to bring a little light to the dark places where I can.I hope our paths cross again, maybe on a future tour stop or another theater, but if not, then hopefully at the bar called Heaven.I hope you’ll let me buy you a round.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

According to their latest propaganda performance art piece, The Trump Administration has announced a new “counterterrorism” strategy, targeting what they call “violent Left-Wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists.”Not the Patriot Front or the Proud Boys. Not Neo-Nazis. Not the Evangelical thugs crashing Pride parades, health clinics, and civil rights protests. Not homegrown, white, Conservative males (who comprise the lion’s share of our mass shooters).They’re coming for Americans who oppose fascism. Let me say that again: An American presidency is openly declaring war on Americans who oppose fascism. If there’s ever a moment that should finally rouse the last of us out of the thick haze of laziness, wishful thinking, and American exceptionalism, it should be this one.Career sociopath Sebastian Gorka, the administration’s senior director for counterterrorism, who authored the declaration, promises that they are setting their sights on what they describe as those whose ideology is “secular, anti-American, radically pro-transgender and anarchist.”Let’s unpack that Right-Wing code language, a bit:Secular, in other words, those people not fully indoctrinated into the extremist Evangelical fundamentalism that mocks empathy, worships war, eradicates vulnerable people, and pines for Armageddon so their Conservative White Daddy God can return.Anti-American, as defined by a cadre of lawless grifters whose contempt for the Constitution is complete; traitorous insurrectionists with no allegiance to its precepts and no desire to uphold the elemental freedoms and inalienable rights it promises.Radically pro-transgender, meaning anyone who believes that people’s bodies, bathrooms, and healthcare decisions aren’t anyone’s damn business but their own, and that queer people should be allowed to live in peace from Evangelical theocracy. Anarchists, in other words, ordinary people who will not quietly comply with a brutal regime of supremacist White House squatters who are dragging this nation backwards, toward the days when women and people of color were legislatively and legally erased.Here’s the thing, friends, if opposing fascism amounts to terrorism, we’re now all facing a fascist regime, and we’re all going to need to respond to it the way Americans have for the past 250 years: we’re gonna have to fight it.I am anti-fascist, and I’m willing to bet that you are, too.This is not a declaration of membership in some non-existent group that our leadership has declared a phony holy war on, but a collective statement of intent. We are not claiming affiliation with an imaginary organization, but testifying to our purpose here in this beautiful land that we love dearly.We are fiercely, steadfastly, unapologetically anti-fascist, because Americans are supposed to be and have always been.We’re anti-fascist because that’s the whole reason this nation exists to begin with, the oppressive crucible of coercion that our freedoms were first born out of.We’re anti-fascist because the hundreds of thousands of our forebears who courageously fought and died on foreign soil were anti-fascist.We’re anti-fascist because up until recently, every single president we’ve ever had marshaled our nation’s military and economic power to defeat fascism, not to traffic in it.We’re anti-fascist because fascism is a mortal threat to free speech, to freedom of expression, to body autonomy, to cultural diversity, to life, liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness for every human being who calls this place home or wishes to.And simply by virtue of the fact that we are anti-fascist Americans, we are dangerous to this Administration, which actually says more about them than it does about us. We haven’t lost the plot here; they have.So, yeah, Trump and his sycophantic hate-mongers can run this false flag high up the partisan propaganda flagpole in the hopes that their fear-addled, easily manipulated, increasingly uninformed, miserable rank-and-file fall for it, and some of them may.But the rest of us: the vast, sprawling, disparate majority see through the facade and will not have our gaze diverted away from their criminality and inhumanity, and we will not shrink back in the face of their desperate, blustering bravado. We will not relent in our daily, unwavering, nonviolent opposition to authoritarianism, to theocracy, to illegality, to unconstitutional overreach, and to State-sponsored brutality.The Trump Administration needs to understand that the lion’s share of this nation is anti-fascist; that’s what Americans are supposed to be, it’s what most of their ancestors were.If they want to declare a white extremist holy war and take the side of fascism, I say, “bring it on.”And the decent, compassionate, truly spiritual, actually patriotic people here will remind them how Americans respond to violent authoritarian regimes.History is recording these days, friends. I want to go on record as being anti-fascist and fighting its attempts to destroy this flawed but beautiful experiment in Democracy.I hope we all do.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Yesterday, a friend I hadn’t seen in a while sent me a text saying, “I miss you, John!”Immediately, I replied, “I miss me, too!”Like many truthful things, the reply arrived housed in humor but left a terrible lingering aftertaste of regret.I was joking, but I also wasn’t lying.I wonder if that resonates with you: the grief of remembering the person you used to be before this sickening season began; of wondering what in the hell happened to that previous iteration of yourself?When I think about the millions of people I’ve crossed paths with over the last decade doing this work, there is such a through line of loss. Whether it was saying goodbye to the idea of God or country or family, to a belief in the goodness of people, to their sense of optimism about the future, to relationships with people they once felt fully at home around, they have been attending a long-running funeral that never fully ends.But of the legion of lamentations they’ve shared with me, the greater mourning I have sensed in people is the loss of their former selves.There is a cost to enduring the unceasing storm of Constitutional crises, acts of treason, atrocities against vulnerable people, and cultic indoctrination of tens of millions of people we share a nation with.In our earnest and valiant efforts to confront this incessant ugliness, we have been transformed, and often not for the better. Oh, sure, these days have helped us clarify our convictions, distill what truly matters to us, and enabled us to tap into the strength and perseverance we’d likely never have discovered otherwise—but they’ve also rightly beaten the hell out of us in the process.As I consider the person I was a decade ago and compare him to the person in the mirror (well, aside from looking thirty years older), I can’t help but notice the latter doesn’t laugh as easily as the former. He is far less naive about his friends and family members, finds it far more difficult to give people the benefit of the doubt, and he doesn’t see the horizon of history as wide open as he used to.I begin to grieve that version of myself and feel a bit guilty for losing the earlier one along the way, but I also know exactly how it happened:He had to watch his former church friends collectively sell their souls to a vile, profane, serial predator, as if he were the Second Coming.He sat at dozens of holiday tables listening to uncles and in-laws deliver well-rehearsed racist rants as easily as breathing.He scrolled through hundreds of hours of the most asinine and baseless conspiracy theories about face masks, vaccines, rigged elections, and Democrat child trafficking networks.He overheard his white neighbors of stratospheric privilege, rambling about the dangerous immigrants supposedly overrunning our town.He began countless days reading about incomprehensible Supreme Court rulings, the passing of mindbogglingly hateful legislation, and the political victories of sociopaths and criminals. All that s**t leaves a mark.And as I inventory ten years of exposure to senseless cruelty and prolific discrimination, it suddenly makes perfect sense what happened to that previous incarnation of me: he gradually faded away in the face of too much hatred winning too many times.So, today, I am missing and mourning that younger, more hopeful version of myself, and I’m also worried that even this tired-but-not-ready-to-give-up iteration of me will also burn up in the inhospitable atmosphere of this national sickness, yielding someone whose heart is harder and whose sense of belonging in this place is even more tenuous than it is today.But future me is none of my business, because today is waiting on me.Right now, all I can do, all any of us can do, is to wake up within the day before us and appeal to the better still angels within our reach, to wield the damaged but still functioning humanity in our possession, to access all the goodness, courage, and faith we can still muster. If there’s any blessing in lamenting the version of ourselves and of the nation we’ve lost over the last ten years, it’s in realizing we can’t afford to squander a day, waste a moment, or allow a single act of inhumanity to go unchallenged.I miss the person I used to be before this nightmare began, but I’ll be damned if I let these heartbreaking days and the people authoring them take any more.In the comments, share the things you miss about your former self, and how you’re trying to hold on to the hope you still have.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

A few days ago, I opened my Threads feed and was greeted by the post of a young woman, featuring a couple of resolute carseat selfies, along with the caption:I AM….. PRO ICE PRO Military Pro Law Enforcement Pro Trump Pro Charlie Kirk Pro Voter ID Pro Accountability [sic]Immediately below that post was another, absolutely identical to the first, except for a different account handle.I continued to refresh my feed, greeted again and again by the same image, the same quote, yet from different accounts. (I’m currently at 26 and counting, by the way.)Scrolling through my timeline, this morning alone, I encountered, not only five more greetings from my now ubiquitous brunette, shapeshifting female MAGA warrior, but at least four other different versions featuring other white women, supposedly also declaring their love for their Predator-In-Chief, his barbaric ICE foot soldiers, and MAGA’s anti-immigrant, anti-Black, Anti-Democracy agenda. A cursory glance at my newsfeed, and no one would blame you for thinking a massive number of young white women are inexplicably assembling around a court-adjudicated rapist and likely serial predator, whose misogynist regime is trying to take away women’s body autonomy and voting rights.And it’s all a mirage, just like everything about this President, his Administration, and their barbaric, yet rapidly shrinking white supremacist movement, but it’s an exhausting mirage.Being gaslit will wear you the hell out, which of course, is the plan.I think we all need to collect ourselves and understand what’s really happening here.We need to inventory the emotional and mental toll of being inundated throughout our waking moments with an endless stream of repeated lies, Right-Wing propaganda, bot proliferation, and Conservative algorithm manipulation.It’s critical that we don’t allow ourselves to be defeated by an alarming, terrifying, and infuriating fiction. We are not outnumbered.Donald Trump’s current approval rating is hovering between 28 and 36 percent, depending on the source, and his support is never going to rise from here. This is his absolute ceiling. His covering up of the Epstein Files, the lawlessness of ICE’s domestic terrorism, his starting of an unnecessary, sickeningly expensive war with Iran, stratospheric gas prices, and a cratering economy that has been in a tailspin ever since his disastrous tariffs began—these are mortal wounds to Trump and his party, and they know it.Republicans have known since 2024 that the window was going to be incredibly short; that their policies have been wildly unpopular, their base has been dwindling, and that their quickly-collapsing, cognitively-addled, lame duck wanna be dictator has been steadily losing his capacity to bulldoze criticism and manipulate reality. Trump’s broken campaign promises regarding transparency around Epstein, his vow to end wars, his asinine boasts to bring gas and food prices down, his wasteful ballrooms and national mall desecrations are not playing well with the former faithful who can barely keep the lights on or put food on the table.The MAGA arrow is pointing down, and nothing can prevent that.Friends, what this all means is that we are the majority and it ain’t even close. Well over two-thirds of this nation despise this Christo-fascist regime, their assaults on black and brown people, their endless persecution of the LGBTQ community, their attacks on free speech, the Arts, diversity, and Democracy.A massive portion of America is disgusted with their coddling of the wealthiest one percent, their pillaging of the Public School System, their poisoning of Health and Human Services, their polluting of the CDC, and their absolute refusal to address affordable healthcare or housing.We have the numbers. All we need to do is start acting like the majority. If we can all transcend our wars of preference, our purity politics, and our relatively superficial differences, we can defeat this minority movement. If we wield our collective power and unify our voice in November, it won’t matter how much they gerrymander, how difficult they make it to vote, or the violence they resort to in order to try and intimidate us.The United States isn’t in hopeless peril; we’ve all just been fooled into believing the myth of our impending doom curated and amplified by those who have nothing else but lies, spin, fake followers, and paid rally crowds. Donald Trump’s entire life, his supposed success as a businessman, and his disastrous presidencies have been fool’s gold; the smoke and mirror illusions of disinformation and media malpractice. Beneath the partisan propaganda and the prolific gaslighting, MAGA is in its last days. It is a crumbling, self-devouring, rapidly evaporating niche movement of a small percentage of this nation who are being swallowed up by time and progress.Don’t be disheartened by your newsfeed or distracted by the bombast of the propagandists.The vast majority is anti-MAGA, anti-Trump, and pro-Democracy.Let’s act like we know. The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Mother’s Day.For many people, that means flowers, handmade cards, Sunday brunches, and waves of laughter. It means celebration, and gratitude, and warm embraces, and great rejoicing. It means resting fully in loving and being loved.But not for some people.For some, it only means tears.For some, it just hurts.In the hearts of many, this day is a bitter, unsolicited reminder of what was but no longer is, or a heavy holiday of mourning what never was at all.Maybe it is such a day for you.It might bring crushing grief for the empty chair around a table.It might come with stinging regret over a relationship that has been severed.It might be a day of looking around at other mothers and other children, and feeling the unwelcome intrusion of jealousy that comes with comparison.It might be yet another occasion to lament the mistakes you made, or the words you didn’t say, or the kindness you never knew.It might be an annual injury you sustain.Consider this a personal love letter to you who are struggling today; you whose Mother’s Day experience might be rather bittersweet, or perhaps only bitter.This is consent to fully acknowledge the contents of your own heart without censorship or guilt or alteration.If you are hurting, then hurt.May you feel permission to cry, to grieve, to be not alright.May you relieve yourself of the burden of pretending everything is fine, or faking stability, or concealing the damage.May you feel not a trace of guilt for any twinge of pain or anger that seizes you today, because it is your right to feel.Above all, though, may encouragement come even in your profound anguish.May you find in your very sadness the proof that your heart, though badly broken, still works.Let the pain you are enduring reassure you that you are still capable of caring deeply, despite how difficult it has been.See your grief as the terrible tax on loving people well, and see your unquenched longing for something better as a reminder of the goodness within you that desires a soft place to land.If on this Mother’s Day you are struggling, know that you are not alone.May these words be the flowers that you wait for, or the call that won’t come, or the conversation that you can’t have, or the reunion that has not yet arrived.Let them be hope packaged and personally delivered to the center of your heart, and may they sustain you.In this time of great pain, know that you are seen and heard, and that you are more loved than you realize.Be greatly encouraged today.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

To all the white Republican professed Christians across this country:To hell with you.To hell with you, as you have the unmitigated audacity to fill churches throughout this nation on Sunday, after celebrating the silencing of your black and brown neighbors all week, as you’ve applauded the erasure of six decades of civil rights progress.To hell with you as you stand before the Cross, singing songs of adoration to a non-white Jesus who you’d have complete contempt for were he to make his home in your neighborhoods or your voting districts.To hell with you as you sit in pews, pretending for an hour that you give a damn about the teachings of Christ, while spending the other 167 hours falling prostrate before a sneering, racist, amoral creature who is their very antithesis.To hell with you and your performative social media displays of showy piety, posting scriptures about love for neighbor, care for the least of these, and a God who so loves the world that you’ve obviously never read a f*ckin’ word of.To hell with you for collectively selling your souls to a monstrous rapist-felon, all for a few Supreme Court seats, Republican majorities, and a less-diverse community.To hell with you disregarding Jesus’ mandates; for refusing to protect the stranger in your midst, for letting masked thugs brutalize foreigners, for partnering in the character assassination of entire communities who do not share your pigmentation.To hell with you for not standing with the Birmingham protestors, the Selma marchers, the lunch counter sitters, and the underground railroaders, aligning instead with the cross burners and the Jim Crowers and the lynch mobs and the men who turned firehoses on children.For all of these things, to hell with you, figuratively, but literally as well.Because if the hell you incessantly preach, the hell that you threaten the entire world with, the hell you wield like a hammer against the vulnerable and hurting in your path—if that hell exists, you will certainly find yourselves there.There would be no human beings on the planet more deserving of merciless eternal torment than you, who have so betrayed your faith’s namesake, violated human beings made in God’s image, and participated in the silencing and erasing of black people in this nation.In your breathless zeal to create your heaven on earth of a white gated community where no one’s humanity but your own is honored, you’ve made it hell for so many, and done it all with perverse joy.You have desecrated your faith tradition, turned generations away from the Church, and done it all in the name of a God whose love you are bereft of. As a former pastor who stood before many of you on Sunday mornings, I grieve who you have become. I regret that I was not clearer from the pulpit on the sins of our traditions’ racist past. I deeply lament that I did not do enough to prevent you from finding yourself on the side of such brutality.For the rest of this life, other grieving, sickened, and ashamed white people of faith and I are going to confront you, oppose you, and make you into the pariahs you deserve to be. We’re going to call you out every single time you try to pass the buck to God for your ignorance, hatred, greed, and white supremacy.We’re going to continue to hold the teachings of Jesus up to your face to reveal you as the frauds and charlatans you are.And we are going to find our place in the disparate congregation of humanity who will not give your hatred a home.So, enjoy the blasphemous farce of your worship services, Bible studies, and prayer gatherings. Revel in the phony theatre of your whitewashed, cosplay Christianity. And savor the cheap high of your perceived victory at the expense of people of color.May you meet your Maker one day, who will certainly not be white, and may you get what you deserve.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

I’ve seen this movie before. It doesn’t end well.As a Christian for most of my life and a pastor for nearly three decades, I’m quite familiar with the Old Testament story: supposedly faithful people fashioning an idol made of gold and cravenly bowing before it, in complete contempt for the God they claimed to believe in because they had lost their collective minds and souls.This new American reboot is a little on the nose.It’s also far more tragic.We’ve had a few thousand years to get it right.We shouldn’t be here.Watching the collective soul-selling of my fellow Christians here in America over the past ten years has been something that has grieved me more than I can measure or accurately describe. Particularly disheartening has been watching ancient religious history repeating, and worse: to realize that nearly every national sickness here in America is coming from professed Christians:The silencing of tens of millions of black and brown votes, the violent persecution of immigrants, the shielding from accountability for a cadre of sexual predators, the incessant legislative assaults on women's and trans people’s body autonomy, and the brazen parade of white nationalism in churches throughout this nation.If Jesus’ feet were on the planet, this God-mocking death cult of white supremacy would be the first table he’d flip.As someone still aspiring to a life of faith and still trying to speak into my religious tradition, it’s sobering to admit that we’re not here as a nation in this brutal battle for the elemental rights of all human beings, if not for people claiming to be devoted to the same Jesus I’ve grown up trying to emulate.As they both literally and figuratively pledge their undying adoration to some golden-veneered, bastardized counterfeit idol of their pigmentation, I’m left to wonder what I’m to do now:Do I attempt to redeem this thing I have found such meaning and beauty in, or do I resign myself to the fact that these phobic cultists have commandeered it for good, and it is beyond repair in the eyes of those outside of it?Do I make an exodus from my homeland of origin and begin down a new spiritual journey, while knowing it will be nearly impossible to differentiate myself from the sycophantic idol worshippers because they have permanently co-opted the trappings of my tradition?And how can I show the world an alternative spirituality that is supposed to leave more compassion, more diversity, and more justice in its wake, while these delusional power-mad hypocrites eat up market share, because otherwise decent, loving human beings are walking away from organized religion for good, because they are fully exhausted?The questions far outnumber any helpful answers, and my prayers seem to slip into the ether without reply.Having read, studied, and preached the story doesn’t make watching it repeat itself any easier.I know that in the Bible, religious people ended up abandoning God and mindlessly worshiping a golden calf, so it shouldn’t be surprising that so many today are now bowing down to this orange jack*ss. It’s just more terrifying seeing it this close.It was a lot easier to view the tragic story in the distant rear-view mirror of history in a land thousands of miles away, and not in the windshield of the present here in the country I call home, with the sycophantic cultists so close and prevalent.While they whirl around the gleaming, empty shell, celebrating themselves and their imagined righteousness, shouting ‘God bless America,’ I’ll be here, sitting with a mournful truth that makes me sick to my stomach:God didn’t bless America; God wrecked America, or at least these self-identified White Republican God-followers and their spray-tanned messiah are doing their best to wreck it, and I’m not sure how we fix it.One thing I know for certain: I will not join them in their mindless, fevered dancing around the graven image of a racist, morally-bankrupt, Bible-defiling, felon-rapist.I will not bow to this empty, shimmering monstrosity of white Christian nationalism nor comply with its efforts to mandate its perverse cruelty onto the rest of us.I’ll stand with every person in this country who rejects a religion of coercion that seeks to harm and exclude.Together, with our work and our lives and our votes, we will tear down this homegrown golden idol of whiteness, throw it into the fire, name it as the vile blasphemy it is, and drive this hateful blight back into the hell it came from once and for all.That will truly bless America.That will make it great.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

It’s easy to be brave in the past, when it doesn’t cost you anything.At some point in our journeys, we all found ourselves sitting in a classroom in middle school or high school and learning for the first time about pivot points in human history; days that precisely altered our collective story in beautiful or terrible ways. Like wide-eyed archeologists, we excavated past moments of great consequence, unearthing those times when ordinary people found themselves in the crucible of surrounding chaos and were faced with a choice: condemn inhumanity or partner with it. Back then, reading what felt like ancient textbook parchment stories of unthinkable carnage, gazing at blurry, stomach-turning photos of open genocides, watching jittery newsreel footage of a barbarism that defied words, and witnessing the very depths of human cruelty, we all invariably asked ourselves the question: What would I have done?Would I have been willing to harbor my Jewish neighbors in my home or given them up to certain death for fear of drawing the wrath of the monsters hunting them?Would I have taken up sides against my own flesh-and-blood, in order to defend the inherent worth and freedom of strangers?Would I have had the courage to stand between terrified black school children and the dogs and water cannons, or would I have turned away, pretending I didn’t see anything and retreating into the protective bunker of my privilege?Would I have defied unjust laws and risked beatings and imprisonment in order to affirm the higher laws of love and justice?Would I have stood alone in the path of a tank, selflessly leveraging my very body for my countrymen? Would I have been willing to confront a weaponized military, braving the bruises and bullets of a corrupt fascist regime, or would self-preservation have kept me home or rendered me silent?Would I have been strong enough to stand in the streets and put my very life on the line for people I’d never met? Who would I have been when everything went to hell?And regardless of how we may have answered those questions back then, that was all theoretical; just an interesting, yet ultimately hollow intellectual exercise. The conclusions we came to there, nestled in comfort, were, at best, a declaration of the people we aspired to be. They were bold, overconfident promises made while sitting in the safety of the future and with the benefit of hindsight.This is different.Today, we no longer need to ask what we’d have done in the face of evil’s ascension, of Democracy’s destruction, and humanity’s peril; we only need to ask what we’re doing right now. There is no mystery anymore, no imagination required, no detached speculation about how we’d have responded when courage was called upon. These dark and horrifying days are revealing the naked, inarguable truth in real-time; they are showing us who we really are. There’s a story we all tell ourselves about the kind of people we show up as every day, the things that matter to us, and the impact of our lives. In those carefully curated narratives, our cause is always just, our motives always pure, our convictions always in stone. There in those stories, we are invariably the human rights warriors, the unflinching revolutionaries, the ordinary heroes. And most of us are watching our convenient fictions burning up in the blazing light of our actual current decisions. Many of us are finding we may not be as brave as we’d have told ourselves we have been back in those classrooms.Friends, these days, as heartbreaking and terrifying as they might be, are revelatory. There is no more wondering who you and I are. Who we are right now, in these chaotic moments, facing these present tribulations, that is who we are. Think about the story you’ve always told yourself about who you hope you’d be and what you hoped you'd do when it all hit the fan, and decide if your choices align with that story. Is the person you hoped you’d have been in Germany one hundred years ago, the person you are as you encounter these words?Because one day, decades from now, hundreds of millions of children will gather to read about these very days, about this precise version of America we are living inside, about you and about me. They will learn of monstrous men, of malevolent regimes, of perversions of justice. They’ll read stories and watch videos of fascism’s violent rise, of an authoritarian’s sociopathic sadism, of hatred’s prolific Renaissance in a past that seems forever ago. And those children will learn of the choices ordinary people made when faced with evil, whether to collaborate with or confront it all, and they’ll think about you and me, and they’ll ask themselves:What would I’d have done?The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Dear White Evangelical Church,I have some good news and some bad news.The bad news is you’re dying.If you’re paying attention, you’ve probably noticed the symptoms.Your buildings are slowly clearing, your pews gradually emptying, your congregations visibly aging away, your voice carrying less resonance than it used to.The reasons for this are complicated and interconnected, but here are a few broad strokes:You’re dying because of your hypocrisy.People see the ever-widening chasm between who you say you are and what they regularly experience in your presence. They see the great disparity between the expansive hospitality of Jesus and the narrow prejudice you are so often marked by.They see Christ’s deep affection for the poor, hurting, and marginalized, and either your quiet indifference or your open hostility toward them.They’ve listened to you preach incessantly about the immorality of the world, the dangers of greed, the corrupt nature of power, the poison of untruth, the evils of sexual perversion—and watched you willingly align with politicians embodying all of these.They see that you are so often the very kind of malevolent ugliness that you forever warned was coming to assail the world.You’re dying because of your willful ignorance.People are tired of your war on Science.They are sick of your arguing with Biology.They are exhausted by your attacks on women.They are disgusted by your justifications of racism.They despise your narcissistic nationalism.They know the Earth is round.They know it is billions, not thousands of years old.They know dinosaurs walked it.They know that it is warming rapidly.They know people here don’t choose their sexuality or deserve their poverty.They know whoever and whatever God doesn’t appoint Presidents or hand out weapons or attack people with tornadoes.You’re dying because of your devotion to cruelty.People watch you dig in your heels against others because of their gender identity and their sexual orientation; the way you continually exact violence upon them, the way you try to blame God and the Bible for your mindless bigotry.They’ve seen your intolerance to other religious traditions: how you vilify anyone who finds spirituality and meaning outside of your precise expression of Christianity, how you so easily disregard the faith stories of those who don’t mirror your own.They’ve watched you so revel in being the bully to those you were originally called to protect.You’re dying because of your complicity in violence.Good people have seen you so often be a haven for misogynists, domestic abusers, sexual predators, and white supremacists, who more often receive protection rather than condemnation.They’ve heard your explicit silence in the face of a brutal and rising flood of open racism, of hostility toward immigrants, of anti-Semitism, of attacks on Asian people and Muslims.They see your pastors and leaders misuse their positions and leverage their influence to victimize the most vulnerable and make them scapegoats for discrimination.They’ve watched you be the last, hateful holdout in matters of gender equality, racial diversity, sexuality, and theological difference; lagging behind almost everyone in the world in the kind of goodness you say you aspire to.It’s easy to be fooled into believing you’re well because you have the political power of a presidency behind you, because you can temporarily impose your will on this nation. But this frantic flurry of cruelty is actually the death rattle of a doomed and dying thing. The empty bombast and blinding lights of your megachurches are a hollow rally that may momentarily anesthetize you, but they cannot stave off what is coming.Yes, Evangelical Church, the bad news is that you’re slowly but surely expiring as you are now.The good news is that in your passing, something else is being born.Rising in these days is a sprawling movement of disparate people, not bound by denomination or tradition or nation, who want to create something redemptive and life-giving here, who don’t care what it’s called, who gets the credit, or what building it happens in. Its makers are conscientious objectors in your unending holy wars, choosing to step away from you in order to create loving spiritual communities, grow deeper in personal faith, escape tribal partisan politics, craft a healthier planet, reflect the character of Jesus, and hold onto their souls.These newly emancipated sojourners are creating something of compassion and generosity and hospitality; a radically inclusive faith that opens the table, a spirituality that welcomes the world, a religion that does no harm: a working theology of love. These open-hearted human beings are unearthing the beauty buried beneath heavy layers of rigid dogma, ornamental religion, and institutionalized discrimination.The soul is leaving a body that no longer serves it, and you are that body.The bad news for you, White Evangelical Church, is that you are certainly dying.And it’s very good news for the rest of us and for a Jesus you have long ago murdered in your midst.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Hey MAGAs and Trump Supporters,No Cinco de Mayo for you.Seriously, y’all need to sit this one out.No one wants to see you ICE-supporting, immigrant-slandering, landscaper-harassing fascist bootlickers in local Mexican restaurants throughout this country, cramming your faces with tortilla chips, pounding half-price margaritas, and pretending you haven’t spent the previous 364 days making life hell for the Latino community.We’ve had it with you hypocrites.You don’t get to both literally and figuratively patronize people you continually demonize, recklessly paint as illegals, drug dealers, and gang members, and spread dangerous disinformation about, just because you feel like doing a little overeating, some day drinking, and suddenly cosplaying as decent human beings.Now, most Mexican restaurant and bar owners aren’t going to say this because they’re too kind hearted and welcoming a people, but I’ll say it: you career bigots who’ve stridently celebrated this racist president for the last decade, have a hell of a lot of nerve showing up and expecting the rest of us not to call you out on the dehumanizing stereotypes you traffic in all year long.You need to own the garbage you believe and broadcast about our Latin, Central, and South American brothers and sisters, and the violence that you are complicit in by your votes, your rhetoric, and your silence.Over the last year and a half, Latino business owners, day laborers, construction workers, teachers, and families have been terrorized, beaten, threatened, improperly detained, jailed, and kidnapped by masked thugs, and your repugnant spray-tanned savior has been the author of it all. Brown-skinned children have been ripped from their parents, couples have been separated, grandparents have been bloodied, church services have been invaded, and entire communities have been thrown into chaos—and you have applauded every second of it. You sure as hell didn’t speak up or show up to defend or support them in the streets or online, lest you feel the slightest bit of turbulence in the places of privilege you call home. We’ll all had to listen to your rambling racist nonsense in front of our houses, at our family gatherings, at work, at the gym, and pretty much everywhere you show up. We’ve endured your incendiary memes and your asinine jokes and your baseless partisan hit pieces. We’ve absorbed the sewage you spill at town halls, school board meetings, and on neighborhood social media apps. So, please, pardon the rest of us for not wanting to have to eat our lunches this Tuesday with a side order of your staggering hypocrisy, and for asking you to show a little consistency.You don’t get to and drive up your local taqueria with a Build That Wall bumper sticker on your F-150 and expect us all to give you one day of amnesty just cause you’re in the mood to get smashed. I’m sure there are tons of good ol’ boy-owned meat-and-threes, or maybe a nice Applebee’s that’ll do you just fine.It’s just a little bit disengenous for you to mock and ridicule and vilify a group of human beings all year long and think that we’ll all develop 24-hour amnesia.And, MAGAs, the same goes for every day after Tuesday, as well. You can complain about diversity, atta boy ICE, cheer voting rights rollbacks, lament foreign cultures, spot off about everybody needing to “talk American”, and you continue to fall prostrate before for your Racist-In-Chief.But don’t show up in places where people gather to celebrate disparate humanity and the cultural richness of this planet, and hope we’ll ignore your red baseball hats, your white nationalist propaganda, and your efforts to make this nation into a white gated community.If you’re planning on making an appearance this Cinco De Mayo, let us give you a hearty preemptive “adios!” Have lunch somewhere else.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

It’s been said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.Right now, I’d say that it’s stepping into a new day and expecting Republicans not to do something horrible.It happens to all of us.We wake up in the morning, eventually check our phones or turn on the news, and are greeted by some new abomination: an unprecedented legislative assault on a central pillar of our Republic, the dismantling of long-established civil rights, a heartbreaking act of violence against the most vulnerable among us. We encounter a legion of novel nightmares authored by the same people whose brutality from the previous day we’ve not yet recovered from, and we are somehow surprised. Despite a decade of their daily atrocities, despite their prolific portfolio of inhumanity, despite their seemingly inexhaustible disregard for legal and moral law, their malevolence never fails to rattle our nervous systems and boggle our minds anew.Each day, a sickening sense of deja vu sets in as we find ourselves freshly outraged, as if these moral abominations are out of character for these people, as if they might have reached their capacity for cruelty overnight, as if they’d suddenly had their sociopathy satiated and will magically relent. Good people, we need to stop doing this.This is who they have been; it is who they are. There is no moment of clarity coming, no soul awakening, no tearful repentance. They’ve long passed that possibility. To still be tethered to something as monstrous as this man and his movement is to have permanently abandoned the fundamental humanity required to feel empathy or possess self-awareness. We need to stop wasting time hoping his supporters will suddenly call upon their better angels, as they killed those off long ago. Yesterday, a distraught member of our online community said over Zoom, “No matter what we do, no matter how much we fight, it seems like nothing gets better. Every day, things are worse.” I think she was hoping I would disagree with her. I assured her that this wasn’t going to change anytime soon, because the people in power have no current external or internal obstacles in their path. They are not ethically bound by the Constitution and possess no regard for the rule of Law. They have commandeered the highest court in our nation and hold zero compunctions about violating the inalienable rights of other human beings.They also realize that their time is incredibly short, despite appearances to the contrary. They’ve been paying attention to the elections over the last 16 months, and they know the public sentiment against them is rising swiftly. They live with the Sword of Damocles hovering overhead: the unforced errors of a sexual scandal that will not go away, a costly, unwinnable war, and an economy they have singlehandedly driven to life support. There is no way back; there is only the way down. All they have left is destruction.Right now, Americans need to make peace with the fact that the news will continue to be bad. We are going to witness an ever more desperate and violent descent into the depths of the malevolence that broken human beings are capable of. These people are going to wake up every day, as in this one, singularly driven to damage as many people as possible as quickly as they can, and we should prepare ourselves by not being pulled into disbelief as they do.We cannot waste a single second being shocked by their depravity, or hoping they will tire of violence, or expecting them to be anything other than who they have shown us they are. Instead, our energy should be better spent keeping our heads down and getting on with the work before us, of building a broad coalition of resistance, of taking our strategic stands where we can, of leveraging our economic power, of caring for those being targeted, and creating a compassionate community that curates decency and love for neighbor.We need to stop being surprised by Republicans’ inhumanity and to go about the work of being human.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Recently, I was on a Zoom call with some of my Substack subscribers. We were processing our own miniature State of the Union, which at the time we deemed somewhere between sky-is-falling and Armageddon. The conversation (which, as you can imagine, was decidedly nihilistic) turned toward the suggested bright spot found in the prospect of some of Trump supporters finally being roused from the ten-year stupor of their cultic adoration enough to see with lucid assessment that they have tethered themselves to a monster.Some suggested with tentative optimism that after a confounding, infuriating decade of sycophantic devotion, they might put aside their fierce tribalism and join the rest of the reasonable people in opposing this rapidly unfolding coup.At first, I co-signed such a possibility as a sign of hope, but quickly realized that it was misplaced optimism. That’s probably not what we’re going to see at all.The fact of the matter is, with very few exceptions, people who voted for Trump in 2024 (many for the third time) and who do begin to come around enough to move them to action, will not have had their humanity awakened watching his and his Administration’s illegal weaponizing of I.C.E. against immigrants, both documented and undocumented.They will not have tapped into heretofore unaccessed reservoirs of compassion for LGBTQ people facing unlawful and unprovoked legislative and personal attacks by his surrogates in Congress, school board meetings, and in the streets.They will not have had their hearts broken by the abject horrors of the Epstein Files and moved to demand the unredacted contents be revealed so that accountability for every monster and justice for every survivor would come.They will not have had some kind of miraculous Road to Emmaus spiritual awakening, realizing how many ways Trump has already violated the poor, withheld food from the hungry, visited injury on already suffering people, or urinated on the teachings of Jesus.They will not be overtaken by some newfound responsibility as global citizens and feel a sudden rush of affinity for the persecuted people of Ukraine, or Gaza, or Iran, or Cuba.No, the moment that will trigger any kind of oppositional response to Trump by Trump supporters is when the pain becomes personal.As they abruptly lose their jobs, see their companies move overseas, watch their 401(k)s evaporate, reckon with the skyrocketing grocery and gas prices, find their own voices silenced, see their healthcare options dissolve, they will miraculously find themselves becoming the resistance.Their rebellion will not be born out of true contrition for their damaging alliances, or genuine regret for being complicit in empowering a fascist, or a sincere desire to partner with the disparate human beings already united in saving our Republic and our planet.When MAGA Americans finally realize that they, too, are victims of the criminality and predation they initially hoped would only be for those despised others (the immigrant, the gay, the brown, the black, the woke, the blue staters), then it will be a bridge too far. When their feet are finally put to the fire they wished upon so many others, suddenly immorality and overreach will be objectionable.The moment they are jarred awake by the sobering truth that their whiteness and their party affiliation and their church attendance and their red hats won’t save them from the disaster they have helped create, then and only then will they care in the slightest bit.I’d like to be wrong but sadly, I don’t believe I will be. And though it will still be a small consolation to see a larger swath of this nation find out that this president’s sociopathy will spare no one, it would have been nice if they’d been internally transformed by love for their fellow human beings instead of just for themselves.The real victory would have been if they’d been moved by self-examination and not just self-preservation.I could have celebrated their empathy but I can’t celebrate their selfishness.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe