The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast

Hey Ed Sheeran,Well, you’ve had quite a busy week.You’ve caved to your billionaire buddy Robert Kraft, you’ve deferred to the pearl-clutching Pink, you’ve fallen in line behind your promoters, and you’ve kowtowed to a handful of football stadium owners and allowed rapper Macklemore to be booted from your tour for saying the words “Free Palestine.”I can imagine how traumatic that must have been for your audience, the emotional scars they must be carrying right now by being asked to see the Palestinian people as deserving of dignity and self-determination…. the horror.My newsfeed is absolutely littered with news stories, think pieces, and video critiques lambasting you for what people are saying is your cowardice, your selfishness, your obvious racism, your thinly veiled Zionism.And with the fierce media firestorm raging all around you right now, I wonder if anyone’s considered your feelings, what it’s like to walk a mile in your custom Air Jordans.I mean, this couldn’t have been an easy decision for you. In this economy, a guy with a net worth of 400 million has to stay on the road to keep the lights on, right? We can’t have you missing any meals out here, can we?Oh, sure, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been brutally murdered, once vibrant cities leveled to dust, and an ancient culture violently erased. Yes, generations of human beings have been assassinated, starved, tortured, and burned alive. And yeah, children are being raped and shot and ripped from their mutilated parents in these very moments, but the show must go on, right? Can’t let a little gen*cide stop the party.So what if a few thousand miles away an entire country is being wiped off the map with the taxes of your fanbase, you got a gig to do, merch to move, a few more homes to add to the mere three dozen or so you’re being forced to make do with.You’ve dismissed Macklemore for having the audacity to choose integrity over the paycheck, for giving a damn about thousands of brown-skinned people who can’t buy concert tickets or boost your streaming numbers, and you’re going to bravely carry on with business as usual, playing the part of the happy, humble white savior of soccer moms and suburban preteens everywhere.You’ll continue packing out stadiums, basking in the breathless adoration of a mix of the uninformed, the lazy, and the heartless; people who either don’t know what’s going on in Palestine or who simply don’t care enough to be inconvenienced enough to opt out (though you could inform and inspire them).And you’ll get up there awash in spotlights and the intoxicating roar of an army of the most privileged people on the planet. You’ll wear that grinning everyman facade you’ve perfected. You’ll joyfully churn out your loops and whirl around in the middle of a massive sea of humanity (the largely white kind, the kind whose worth and safety might actually matter enough to you for you to get “political,” as you did with Ukraine, btw).I’m sure it’ll be a blast… but not the kid-killing IDF kind.But I wonder if the crowds at the shows will sing loud enough to cover the screams erupting from the rubble of Palestine. I wonder if the stratospheric tour revenue will be worth the suffering you’ve ignored to get it.Maybe I’m being too hard on you. Maybe you’re really struggling with this. Maybe you’re going to have a change of heart and show some courage and something resembling a spine, and allow your humanity to take the lead. Maybe I’ll end up apologizing to you for underestimating you. I would welcome that, because it would mean you decided to leverage your privilege to save the lives of people who are being treated like animals.But right now, Ed, for a guy who’s made a fortune with words, it’s your silence that is most telling. You are choosing to say nothing, and there is a cost to that, too. Unfortunately, you won’t be the one paying the highest price.Maybe you are what your critics say you are. Maybe you’re a coward, or worse. Maybe the people of Palestine aren’t worth the show guarantees you’d have to part with to stand up to the bullies and Zionists. Maybe it isn’t that you’re not willing to take sides (because you have been), but that the Palestinian people don’t fall within the borders of your empathy or the comfort of your courage.I suppose no matter how successful and powerful someone gets, every person has their price, and yours was a 10-city tour.The Palestinian people deserve our discomfort, Ed. They deserve to be on our breath because the voices of white people can carry their cries to people in the world who need to hear them, despite how uneasy it makes them—or us. That turbulence is where our humanity gets to prove itself. It’s just really sad that with the size of the stage and the reach of the microphone you’ve been handed, and with the voice you’ve been given that could resonate so loudly on behalf of imperiled human beings, you have such moral laryngitis now.Enjoy the rest of the tour, Ed… knock ‘em dead out there.Free Palestine.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

We’re all worried about a Tuesday in November, 50 days from now.It’s the place our minds and hearts are solely fixed on.Right now, our energies are understandably marshaled and our hopes pinned to this singular day ahead, as if at the end of it we will have some resolution, some sense of closure, as if healing and rest will finally come.But what if things don’t go that way?At a recent tour stop, a visibly exasperated woman asked me, through a breaking voice, “What if everything goes wrong on Election Day? What do we do then? If we lose, where will the hope be?”You may be asking yourself that, too.I’m not sure, but I imagine hope then will be wherever it is for you now.Regardless of what happens on that Tuesday in November, whatever propels you into the voting booth needs to push you to your feet when the sun comes up the next morning. Because no matter the outcome and whether you feel vindicated or devastated, whether there is calm or chaos, many things will still be the same:You’ll still be surrounded by systemic ills, relational fractures, and national discord. You’ll still have seen every grotesque reality that’s been uncovered over the past ten years.You’ll still be walking shoulder to shoulder with weary, wounded human beings who will be looking for compassionate people to see their suffering and to move toward them.You’ll still have a specific front row seat to a place filled with terrors and traumas, and you’ll be the only one with your unprecedented ability to be what that world needs.So where will hope be if it all hits the fan on that Tuesday in November?It will be you and me, finding whatever it is that pulls us out of the crippling funk of grief and sadness and disbelief we’ll want to stay in, and back into the fray of living.It will be found in our faith convictions and our personal burdens; in our activism and our advocacy, and in the stuff we’ll still believe in.It will be found in us deciding what matters most in this life, and whether or not it still matters enough to defend and protect it even if the threats seem greater than they are even now.Hope will be in the sunrise on Wednesday and how you decide to meet it.In that way, the day after that Tuesday in November is actually pretty important, too.On that day, there will still be hungry people needing to be fed, strangers seeking refuge, outsiders needing welcome, hurting people looking for the healers.No matter what happens, win or lose, you and I will need to place our energies and fix our gaze on the ways that we can choose gentleness, peace, and generosity, far away from the ballot box.Soon, we’ll experience one of the most pivotal, consequential moments in our lifetime.We’ll have a chance to allow our voices to be heard and to transform the very planet we’re standing on, as well as the one we leave to people who will follow us.We’ll get to leave an inheritance to those we love, and a legacy for those we’ll never know.That particular Tuesday, we’ll get to let our lives impact the lives of countless human beings with one simple, yet profound act that we participate in. It will be our sacred opportunity to speak precisely from our deepest convictions, to let our hearts clearly resound into the world, and to know that we can be the difference in the day. In the face of a deafening fear that would gladly overwhelm us, we’ll get the chance to let love have the last, loudest word.This is beautiful news. But the even better news is that we have that opportunity well before Tuesday, and we’ll have it long after it as well.As you read these very words, you have it.Every single moment we’re here, you and I get to be agents of equity and justice. We don’t have to wait for an event to choose such things, and we can’t be fooled into believing they have an expiration date either.As you move through these days, don’t miss the countless opportunities you have, with every seemingly infinitesimal decision to elect hope, well before you ever step into a voting booth, and long after you walk out into the day.So, yes, please canvass and organize and work and volunteer and protest and vote, and give everything you have to give. But regardless of the results of the election, remember that you always have that choice.Yes, that Tuesday 50 days from now is vitally important in ways that are difficult to comprehend and impossible to overstate.Wednesday is, too.Today is just as critical.This day is the most important day of your life.It 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

I’ve been a pastor for nearly three decades.I’ve been a Christian for most of my life.Throughout that journey, I took the words of Jesus seriously: his calls to love my neighbor, to care for the most vulnerable among me, to welcome the stranger and the alone, to give my overflow to ensure everyone had enough.I aspired to his compassionate heart that fed disparate multitudes, that healed the wounds of the suffering in his path, that shunned retributive violence, that declared solidarity with the hungry, the overlooked, and the forgotten.In the words and stories of the Gospels, I found a generosity that compelled me to live with an open hand, an empathy that moved me to learn the stories of people around me, and a gratitude to see prosperity, opportunity, and geography not as birthrights to be hoarded, but as blessings meant to be shared.The Jesus I know from those pages and those stories was moved with compassion, not contempt, when he saw the crowds in front of him.The Jesus I know warned of the ways wealth and power could poison and harden the heart, distorting the lenses someone viewed the world with.The Jesus I know didn’t blame the poor and the sick for their condition, but the broken systems and power structures that kept them there.The Jesus I know said that his followers would be known, not by their showy professions of faith, by worship service attendance, the volume of their virtue signaling, or by the titles they affixed to themselves—but simply by their ability and willingness to love the people in their path.The Jesus I know from the New Testament would violently upend the table of Christian Nationalism, as it was far smaller than his love of the world.He would be furious with the weaponizing of religion so many of his alleged disciples traffic in.His heart would be broken by their refusal to see their disparate neighbors as deserving of safety, care, and dignity.He would be sickened by the perversion of his teachings into a gated community of white supremacy.And a lifetime of scriptural study, prayer, and reflection tells me that the Jesus I know would challenge his disciples to drive MAGA’s hateful movement back into the hell it sprang from—and Christians who care about the teachings of Jesus need to.When 81 percent of White Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, they enabled this violent circus of unrelenting chaos, and on a Tuesday in November, they could end it once and for all.With their votes, White Christians could reject the nonsensical conspiracies, the immigrant dehumanization, the masked thug armies, the capricious wars of choice, the tax-funded genocides, the wall-building taunts, and the abject lies.They could condemn the persecution of the poor, the pillaging of the planet, the mockery of the suffering, the protecting of the predators.With their voices and votes, they could stop the bleeding of a nation besieged by leaders who show complete loathing for the very people they are entrusted with protecting. In a single day, people of faith in the Jesus in the Gospels could step into the polls throughout this nation and end the reign of the most loveless, heartless, hate-addled regime in our nation’s history—and all they’d need is Jesus.I’m not talking about the heretical marriage of Church and State that seeks to mandate theology and legislate a religion of coercion for everyone else; I’m talking about choosing morality over party, virtue over muscle memory.I’m talking about followers of Jesus wielding a faith that does no harm: that refuses to exclude, that will not co-sign ethnic cleansing, that will not consent to concentration camps, that will not allow the poor and the sick and the disabled to be cast aside, that will not let the foreign and the different be preyed upon.I’m talking about professed Christians actually embodying the loving, inclusive, generous namesake of their faith, and declaring with absolute clarity that they will not allow this place to be home for racism, safe harbor for bigotry, or a soft place for phobic violence.The unrelenting mayhem that Trump and this regime have thrown this nation into isn’t just an existential threat; it’s a collective sin that flies in the face of everything Jesus’s life and ministry stood for. Christians could stop this madness at the polls, and they don’t need approval of a church or their pastor or their grandfather; they don’t need some blind allegiance to a political party they were taught they need to align with; and they certainly don’t need to empower a hate-addled, failing serial predator whose corroded heart is among the blackest on the planet. No, to end this national nightmare and make a collective stand for actual table-setting, wound-mending, belly-filling, stranger-welcoming love, all they need is Jesus.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

How did this happen?For as long as America is remembered on this planet, people will try to understand these days through the lens of time and distance.Authors, sociologists, criminologists, cult experts, political scientists, and brilliant minds in future generations will attempt to explain how tens of millions of once-reasonable, sane, seemingly goodhearted human beings betrayed their love of country, their spiritual beliefs, and their moral convictions. Volumes will be written about how otherwise rational adults passionately embraced a man who lived with complete contempt for them, how professed Christians sold off their souls and fell prostrate before the vile, hateful antitheses of Jesus.Hundreds of years from now, a myriad of creative theories will be proffered as to how a court-adjudicated rapist convicted of 34 felonies successfully used every available legal and illegal method to avoid accountability for engineering an insurrection in an attempt to overturn a free and fair election, as well as for the stealing and sharing of classified documents.The greatest scholars of their times will strain to explain how a career criminal, serial predator, and bankrupt businessman hijacked an entire political party, a compromised Supreme Court, and a complicit media to not only evade justice of any kind for his crimes, but to be rewarded with the presidency a second time despite them.And no matter what history records, they won’t have a prayer of truly explaining it—because we’re living it right now, and honestly it makes no damn sense to any of us. Oh, sure, we can rattle off a few likely motives and contributing factors, but ultimately we’re still left incredulous.All the available research, carefully sifted data, well-researched think pieces, and late-night talking-head commentaries don’t explain once rational, otherwise decent, educated people fully taking leave of their senses: people we’ve grown up and shared our homes with, people we’ve worked and worshipped alongside: older relatives we spent decades aspiring to become, ministers we once respected for their compassion, old friends we knew until we realized we didn’t.Nothing adequately explains their complete rejection of Science, medicine, and objective truth.Nothing fully accounts for their complete embrace of the most nonsensical conspiracies.And nothing, from racism to ignorance to poverty to partisan media to irrational fear, will ever fully justify throwing your nation away for objectively speaking, one of the worst human beings to ever walk the planet.There’s no satisfactory answer coming to those in the future, and certainly not to those of us who are presently horrified that what we spent a decade trying so hard to help our nation avoid is coming to pass right now.And at this point, the how’s and why’s really don’t matter anymore, anyway. We’re simply left with the what, and that what is that America as we’ve known it up to this point is no longer anything we can count on seeing or experiencing again. Few of the systems or safeguards or rules of engagement are relevant.With three branches of Government, a cadre of billionaires, a negligent media, and a shrinking but still terrifying number of unwavering cultic sycophants willing to kill and die for him, the damage we’ve already seen to our Republic is impossible to fathom; the cost in human and civil rights losses beyond what we can measure.And as we rocket toward an election that will likely determine the fate of our Republic, these monstrous, treasonous predators are marshaling every possible method to prevent a free and fair election. They are carving up maps, assailing the courts, commandeering the Postal Service, culling polling sites, and openly attempting to obstruct, silence, intimidate, and disenfranchise voters. They are threatening to have ICE at the polls or cancel the election altogether in the name of safety.And should these methods fail, they’re preemptively promising that they will, without proof, treat any losses as election fraud, and refuse to honor the results, thrusting this nation into a chaos it has never endured.And none of that matters. We still need to defeat them. If we are who we say we are, and believe what we say we believe about goodness and democracy and liberty, losing is simply not an option.This means we need to clear our calendars to volunteer, organize, and canvass.We need to contribute financial resources to candidates in every local race.We need to meet every one of our neighbors, and physically get them to the polls.We need to leverage our social media and our circles of influence to make sure everyone understands the urgency of the moment.We need to reach across every political, social, theological, and ideological line and consolidate our numbers and our collective power to defeat an extremist fringe minority.And, we need to prepare for how we will respond as a people, should these emboldened fascists (as they are forecasting) refuse to honor the will of the people. Yes, it’s all likely about to hit the fan in ways we’ve never known or seen, and the rest of us need to decide that we’re not going to go quietly, that we’re not going to easily cede an inch of ground, whether legal or moral.I don’t have a clue what’s coming in the wake of the election or how to best prepare, and I’m not sure any of us truly do.What I do know is that I’m not letting these monsters win.I refuse to allow this loveless, heartless, rotted-out husk of a man and his deplorable disciples to engineer a hostile takeover of this nation, and I hope you won’t either.I don’t know what the future will record about these days, but I damn sure know that right now, with my voice and my influence and my time and my work, I won’t make it any easier for this wretched fraud and those who conspire with and worship him to write the epitaph for America.Today and every day we’re here, may we stand together and raise a strident middle finger to their hateful parade as it passes by, because we will never join it.We cannot let the monsters win.HERE’S A GREAT WAY TO FIGHT BACK! CLICK THE PHOTO::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 feel like I’m losing my mind.”That thought runs through my head more than I’d like to admit these days.As someone who has navigated the past three decades with a mental illness, I’ve gotten used to the crushing despair that visits from time to time, sometimes staying for a few bleak moments before departing as quickly as it came, other times moving in for weeks or even months, derailing recent progress and swallowing up my tenuous joy.I have endured the darkest nights of the soul, and I’ve passed through protracted seasons of utter hopelessness.Yet, as difficult as those times have been, they were always the exception; brief or extended detours from an otherwise manageable and often even enjoyable existence. I could usually be certain that, despite their ferocity, these internal storms would eventually pass and a more stable default would settle in.I’m not sure I can say that anymore. In fact, if I set aside the weight of others’ personal and professional expectations of me, the facades of competence I work incredibly hard to maintain, and the worries of judgement, disappointment (or worse, pity) that may or may not come, I gotta say there’s a 24/7 sh*t show going on inside my head.A pervasive, insidious, and increasingly loud sense of dread is pretty much ubiquitous now. It sits alongside me in traffic as I think about my neighbors abducted from their workplaces and children lying under rubble half a world away. It hovers over my shoulder as I am hit again and again by an unrelenting flood of suffering flickering wildly through the screen in the palm of my hand that I can’t seem to put down. It sits like a massive stone upon my chest at night, as I inventory the nightmares of the day, and wait for sleep to come, knowing it will likely not be restful.It greets me in the morning with a sudden jolt of panic, the second I happen upon the horrors du jour curated by powerful people who seemingly cannot be stopped.I do my best to beat those stubborn black thoughts into submission or at least soften their jagged edges with the well-worn stockpile of coping strategies I’ve used and endlessly recommend to others: meditation, therapy, prayer, volunteering, exercise, nature, travel, fasting, medication, journaling, community, touching grass. Yet, if I’m honest, these have become an exercise in diminishing returns, rarely offering more than a short respite from the feeling that things in my head are not improving anytime soon.And far from some nebulous, undefined source, I can precisely pinpoint the disparate authors of my despair:It’s the unthinkable cruelty that appears to be contagious.It’s the seemingly inexhaustible capacity some have for hurting fellow humans.It’s the apparent apathy of so many others.It’s the brokenness of systems that seem beyond repair.It’s what feels like the irreparable relational fractures that have been revealed.It’s the burning of the planet, the disregard for the vulnerable, and the mockery of empathy.It’s the realization that no one is coming to save us and we may not even be willing to save ourselves.These are quantifiable, tangible realities; or at least they point to those things. This isn’t some negative mindset that positive thinking will magically remedy. I can’t manifest my way out of it or speak it out of existence. This is terrifyingly real, and knowing that actually helps a bit. It’s a comfort to realize this is not all in my head.Look, there are things I know to be true about the hell we are all living through right now:I know that I am not responsible for carrying all of it. I know I can only stay in the small space of my agency. I know that there are tens of millions of people working tirelessly to push back against the same darkness I am.I know that all evil empires fall, that every malevolent regime is temporary, that things are never as black-and-white as they might feel.I can know all of these things with great certainty, and still feel like the sky is falling.I’m still functioning, still doing my work, still making plans, still finding moments of joy, still stepping into the trenches of the fight, still creating, still endeavoring to “live well as the greatest resistance”, but there remains the lingering grief over how much has been lost and the sad realization that we didn’t have to be here.I think feeling that is less a sickness and more a sign of humanity.Please hear me: this is not a cry for help, an invitation of sympathy, or a solicitation for solutions; maybe more a plea for solidarity.It’s the difficult admission of a far-from-ideal mental state that I wish I didn’t find myself in, in the hope that I’m not the only one whose head is a scary and disorienting place right now.You don’t have to have a diagnosed mental illness to feel this. These days are making otherwise mentally healthy people emotionally sick, and making ill people much worse. We’re all playing hurt, which I guess is the point.Maybe you might encounter these words and suddenly recognize the symptoms of a lingering sorrow that you haven’t been able to shake, a fear that does not relent, and a rest that does not come.Maybe if we all admit how not well we are, that will be the healing we need to keep going for one more day.Is your head a mess these days, friends… or is it just me?I’d love to hear your thoughts 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

MAGA Republicans are telling us something right now, America.The message they’re sending is unmistakable.With every panicked, desperate move, they are speaking with absolute clarity.There is only one reason they continually gerrymander themselves a more favorable playing field.It’s the same reason they eliminate voting sites.The same reason they’re casting doubts on voting by mail.The same reason they remove active voters from the rolls.The same reason they continue to attempt sleight-of-hand legislation to sneak in more restrictive voter ID laws:The reason they do all of these things is that they are mortally terrified of American voters.We are their greatest threat.We are their only outstanding obstacle to unabated rule.We are the single remaining line of defense Democracy has left here.We, the People, are the last-gasp breath of a dying Republic being slowly suffocated beneath the weight of institutionalized racism and disdain for the poor and contempt for diversity.Donald Trump and his enablers do not want Americans to speak.They know they represent a tiny and rapidly shrinking minority.They know they are hopelessly underwater on the economy, on ICE, on Iran, on Gaza, on climate change, on foreign policy, on human rights, on healthcare, on just about every issue, which is why they have no platform beyond obstruction and demolition.They know that if the voices of the people are heard, we will, in one glorious, sprawling, clarion choir, declare them fraudulent and malignant and unequivocally undeserving of stewarding this nation a single day longer.And they know that if they lose their current, tenuous stranglehold on this nation, they will likely never get it back, as the swift current of changing demographics will soon swallow them up, taking with them the unearned spoils of privilege that once seemed permanent.They know that this could well be their last moment of unmolested barbarism, and so, like cornered, wounded animals, they are frantic and flailing and violently trying to save themselves.Which is why we need to show up now: in numbers that cannot be manipulated, in a show of strength and resolve that is simply unalterable, in a moment so immune from pollution that it will be undeniable. We need to leverage the networks of our local communities to make certain that every single voter is physically able to vote early, in person, or through a drop box location.We need to throw aside our petty semantic squabbles, our minor skirmishes of preference, our purity politics, and our litmus test deal breakers, because these things only dilute the full potency of our collective presence—and that is what these fascists want. They want us to not only have to overcome their malfeasance, but also our fatigue, egos, and apathy as well.Because that is the great truth of these days and they know it: that despite their every attempt to stack the deck and tip the odds, despite every clandestine legislative maneuver, despite this President’s unapologetic efforts at perverting the system—we still have the numbers and we can still save this flawed but promising experiment in liberty. We alone can find out what it might be capable of if the full expanse of humanity was welcomed at the table for the first time.We can see if the old parchment promises can still yield a new promised land of equity for everyone, without caveat or condition; if it still has enough life and liberty and happiness for all of us to have a full helping.I think that would be something beautiful to behold. I think it might alter the history of this planet, and I think it’s worth whatever is required between now and November to see it.Friends, this is not about defeating people who have voted and normally would vote Republican. They are not the enemy. This is about defeating this President and these MAGA Republicans, who have no love for America or Conservatism or Jesus, who are historically corrupt and uniquely parasitic, and who threaten good people of every distinction.I firmly believe that decent and disparate people of every political leaning, religious tradition, and value system can navigate those real and profound differences if we create a space where that is the sincere desire and honest objective. But this cannot and will not happen with this President and with these minority extremist leaders in power, and it’s as simple as that.Losing this nation is not an option, no matter how much hell they throw at us in the coming weeks, on election day, and in the wake of the results.Yes, these MAGA Republicans are fully terrified of us, America.Until, and if necessary, after the election, let’s make them right to be afraid.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 vote is loud.Whether that vote is cast joyfully or with trepidation or begrudgingly or without all the information or as a protest, it makes the same bold statements:This is my choice.I am with this person.I consent to their conduct.I co-sign their actions.I endorse them.A vote doesn’t have qualifiers or caveats or escape clauses. It simply says Yes or No.And as we’re witnessing a rapid and expansive dismantling of our nation’s systems, a complete mockery of our Cabinet positions, a pervasive chaos enveloping everything from our social services to our healthcare to our Military to our essential needs to our standing in the world, the one question I keep wanting to ask those of you who voted for him is:Is this really what you wanted?Did you want prices on groceries and gas to rise stratospherically as he taunts our long-time allies?Did you want a senseless and unwinnable war of choice in Iran that is depleting our financial resources and throwing the world into unnecessary turmoil?Did you want to live under an oppressive police surveillance state, to have every intimate aspect of your life monitored by the Government, to have surrendered any sense of privacy or personal freedom?Did you intend for immigrant families to be terrorized in their workplaces, schools, and homes, with no regard for due process or for legal and human rights?Did you vote for the Epstein Files to be hidden from view, protecting the absolute most vile predators and pedophiles?Did you vote for the selling off and destruction of protected natural lands, for concentration camps, for screaming, water-guzzling data centers swallowing up your community? Did you vote for the elimination of programs that provide veterans their benefits, poor children a school lunch, the elderly their hard-earned retirement?Did you want us alienated from the world and removed from every global humanitarian and diplomatic partnership we have participated in for decades?Did you vote for massive, opulent ballrooms, gaudy vanity arches, ego-stroking building alterations, and wasteful reflecting pool renovations?Is this what you voted for?Because if this isn’t what you voted for, you need to be vocal now.Silence is not a luxury anyone can afford in days like these. To be silent now, after voting so loudly, is irresponsible and unhelpful.Your silence doesn’t protect refugees or avoid disastrous Cabinet appointees or pay treatment bills for the now uninsured.It doesn’t shield marginalized communities from hate crimes or protect America’s farmers or care for the disabled or challenge the President’s flagrant nepotism.Your silence doesn’t encourage lawmakers to push against their party even if they feel they should, and it doesn’t show solidarity with activists in the streets spending themselves to advocate for equality and justice.It doesn’t discourage the President and his spokespeople from rolling out an unrelenting stream of lies or attacking those doing real, Constitution-guarding journalism.It doesn’t hold those in the highest levels of power and influence accountable for disregarding every procedure, rule of law, and safeguard established to ensure that every citizen is protected from those governing them.Your silence doesn’t do anything right now but allow you to divorce yourself from your vote, to avoid any accountability for the man you’ve chosen, and to perpetuate the erratic, reckless, criminal behavior that is endangering every human being here.What this means, friend, is that if you are indeed regretting your vote in any way, this would be the time to stand up and say so. Millions of us are out here doing the work of pushing back and speaking for the marginalized and poor and disregarded (including Trump voters), and we’re marching, and we’re calling our elected officials, and we’re busting our butts to keep our Constitution intact.And all the while, the narrative the President is selling is that this is a partisan, Liberal Media-created mirage. He’s attempting to manufacture a political civil war via social media to divert attention from the insidious stuff happening right now that should be horrifying all of us.And every day you say nothing, our Republic is more and more vulnerable, more and more compromised, more and more in danger of losing the very essence of its freedoms and liberties.All this to say, I’m really sorry for your embarrassment or your guilt or your feeling foolish, but even more concerned about your silence.I hear that many people are leaving MAGA, that they are tired of this waste, this recklessness, this greed, this incompetence. Maybe you’re one of those people. I just hope you won’t leave quietly.Your vote in 2024, for whatever reason you cast it, was loud.And if you regret that vote or if you don’t consent to what you are seeing from this man and this Administration, your volume and your vote now is necessary, too.Please join those of us who are resisting together because we love America more than a political party, because this isn’t about any of us; it’s about all of us.Please speak, and speak loudly.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

Mornings are strange these days.The sedative haze of sleep slowly begins to lift, and my conscious mind starts taking inventory and assembling the data and reporting back its initial findings:I’m in bed… I’m awake… I’m alive… It’s Wednesday…But most of the time, that’s about as far as I get when I am suddenly assaulted with another, far more sobering realization:I’m in America…… s**t.And, in a disorienting few seconds, I’m violently ripped from any sense of peace or rest by the lengthy litany of atrocities from the previous day: the Constitutional crises, the acts of unthinkable brutality, the falling away of systemic safeguards, the metastasizing mass of sycophantic cultists.A jolt of adrenaline comes flooding in as my barely awakened body senses imminent danger without me needing to do a thing other than remember the lawlessness of our President, the complicity of his party, the bent knees of the billionaires, the genuflecting of the Church, the capitulation of the Press, and the snarling brainwashed rabble of once-reasonable, decent human beings with whom I used to feel at home.And just like that, mere minutes after returning to the waking world, I want to go back to sleep, already exhausted, already disheartened, already grief-stricken.It gives me absolutely no joy to say that on most days now, I hate waking up in this country. I confess to regularly daydreaming about being an expat: of putting new roots into foreign soil and reclaiming somewhere else what it feels like we’ve lost here.I find myself imagining what it would be like to greet the day in another country, someplace where racism wasn’t celebrated, where empathy wasn’t a character flaw, where corruption wasn’t so prolific, where hatred didn’t find such safe harbor from its leaders and their disciples.Yet, I know the reality is that some of this is me lamenting the devil I know: that while seeing America with a microscope and the rest of the world with a telescope, my vision is not as clear as it could be.Yes, there are certainly a myriad of places on this planet where gun violence is not ubiquitous, where predators are not protected, where illness does not bring bankruptcy, where Science is not assailed, where religion is not legislated, where diversity is not reviled, where education is not under siege, and where democracy is not evaporating. But these places have their own dangers and demons, and both time and proximity would surely reveal them.So, while I do hate waking up in this country and I do dream of waking up in another one, perhaps it isn’t about my geography changing but about me changing the geography I find myself in.Maybe I don’t want to wake up in another country but in a more just, more beautiful, more compassionate version of this one; an America that embodies the greatest of its aspirations, one that more fully becomes what the songs and anthems promised we could be, one that would be worth someone else inheriting.I’m not going to pretend I’m sure that such a place is still possible. It may be that the systemic damage we’ve sustained in the last eighteen months is irreparable. Our collective bloodstream may be so poisoned with tribalism and prejudice that we cannot recover. The unholy marriage of Church and State may indeed be too far along to drive a wedge between.But I suppose that’s why they call it a dream.And while I am beginning yet another day here exhausted, disheartened, and grief-stricken, I am going to find a way to step out into it and do all I can with the light and the hours I have before darkness and sleep arrive.And if millions of us all do the same, maybe one morning in the future (maybe in November), we will find ourselves greeting the dawn not with sadness but with jubilation, not with dread but with hope.Right now, I hate waking up in this America.I want to wake up in a better one.Do you struggle with the reality of the nation you wake up in? Is it difficult to find the resolve to keep going? How are you holding the tension between wanting to leave and wanting to stay and fight? 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

Well, Trump supporters, I have to admit, you sure won this one. Your guy really handed our rear ends to us this time.I can see why you’re pounding your chest and dunking on us liberals on social media about this Lake America business. You all finally put Canada and all of us woke idiots in our places. I mean, sure, you can barely afford groceries at this point. And yeah, even if you happen to be able to, there’s a high likelihood that what you eat will kill you, shred your stomach lining, or leave you with explosive diarrhea. No worries, though; at least you’ll be able to get the absolute bare minimum of healthcare that you’ll need to get a second mortgage on your house to afford, providing you aren’t underwater on the first one.Hopefully you don’t miss any work, though, because your PTO is basically nonexistent, but hey, you get to taunt all us leftist losers with a big ol’ “Lake America” middle finger. That’s gotta cushion the blow of the stratospheric bills that you’re going home to (Enjoy filling the gas tank on your F-150, by the way).The important thing is that you’re winning.Yes, our Federal Government has weaponized our armed forces against entire cities, inciting violence, disrupting the local economy, and terrorizing innocent human beings for exercising their freedoms of speech, expression, and assembly.No matter, those elemental, Constitutionally guaranteed personal liberties and many others are essentially null and void at this point anyway.And sure, the separation between Church and State has now been rendered nonexistent, with a religion of compulsion now being legislated for tens of millions of people who do not adhere to those teachings.And yeah, our Government is enabling not one, but two violent, genocidal eradications of entire populations.Our systems of education, human health, and national security are under the control of unqualified, ill-prepared, and mentally unstable grifters whose allegiances are to a person and not our Constitution.The President has declared war on half of the population of this nation, using the power of his platform to perpetuate lies, stoke division, sow chaos, and escalate conflict.We’re also now alienated from nearly all our global allies, and decades of carefully crafted partnerships have been destroyed in a matter of months.And yes, your kids will be more susceptible to preventable illness, the food you’ll be eating will have fewer safeguards, your wages will continue to decrease, and your personal freedoms will gradually vanish.But the bottom line, MAGA friends, is that you’ve won the war over a body of water’s branding (too bad you can’t say the same about the never-ending war in Iran that you’re currently paying out the nose for).With your party controlling the presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court, America must now be as great as you’ve been telling us for years that it would be, and so you have no cause to be concerned or reason to be miserable.You must be happy right now with the economy, your paycheck, your healthcare premiums, food safety, the level of gun violence, the wars of choice you’re funding, and the prospects you have for growth, health, career advancement, and financial opportunities.So, congratulations, Trump supporters, you’ve renamed a lake—and all it’s cost you is a functioning government, a working democracy, human rights, national peace, economic stability, affordable groceries, affordable healthcare, qualified leaders, and global standing. Personally, as a card-carrying Lib, I feel fully and completely owned.I’m sure all those poor Canadians your guy stuck it to this week feel truly defeated, as they retreat to their peaceful nation where they have affordable groceries, excellent healthcare, a living wage, national pride, global respect, and leaders who aren’t felons and rapists. I hope your Lake America t-shirt makes you feel like the winners you are…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

For the love of God and all that’s good and beautiful, haven’t you had enough, America?Enough book bans,culture wars,bathroom bills,family separations,poisoned food,renamed lakes,unrelenting surveillance,tax-funded genocides,and wars of choice?Haven’t you had enough of terrorized refugees,billionaire techbros,hospital room ICE raids,protected predators,ignored lynchings,kleptocratic malpractice,legislated religion,and of being helmed by a lecherous, drug-addled, vile, barely literate serial predator and career criminal?Haven’t you had enough of brutal assaults on the rights of women,on immigrants,on transgender teens,on unarmed black men,on affordable healthcare,on free speech,on our Military?Have you had enough of relentless attacks on the poor,on the disabled,on the environment,on peaceful protestors,on the electoral process,on the US Postal Service,on objective truth,on empathy,on diversity as an idea?Haven’t you had enough nonsensical conspiracies,denials of Science,mockery of expertise,ignored climate change,silencing of doctors,stoked racism,polluted courts?Haven’t you had enough cruelty,enough bigotry,enough criminality,enough divisiveness,enough malevolence,enough hatred,enough ugliness?Haven’t you had enough needless suffering,enough unnecessary death,enough Constitutional crises,enough curated conflict,enough manufactured emergencies,enough presidential tweet tantrums,enough intentional chaos?Maybe it’s just me.Maybe you’re fine with it all; maybe this is good enough for you; maybe you’ve resigned yourself to this dystopian white nationalist fever dream as inevitable. I sure as hell haven’t.I’ve had enough of this frenetic circus of sociopathy over the past ten years to last a thousand lifetimes. I’m sick to my stomach of the nation we are, and I’m in-the-marrow-of-my-bones tired of being embarrassed of and grieving over the place I call home.I want something better.I want equity pursued.I want bigotry shouted down.I want justice escorted in.I want compassion to trend.I want kindness to go viral.I want diversity to be celebrated.I want the poor, tired, huddled masses to breathe again here.I want ceremonial American “greatness” to give way to actual common goodness.I want to stop being at the mercy of sadistic, hateful human beings who have contempt for everything and everyone.What the hell do you want for this place, and are you willing to do whatever is necessary to get it?November is coming, and there’s no way to overstate the reality that this is the last stand for all of it, for all of us. What we do over the coming weeks will initiate our rebirth or write our epitaph as a Republic.You and I have this moment to end what we’ve had enough of and to usher in what we want to see more of; to demand what we cannot live without and to condemn what we will not abide.We have this moment to create a home for ourselves and our children, and for other people’s children, for everyone who lives here and for all those who dream of living here.We have this moment to leave something for the vast multitude on the horizon of history who will inherit this place; this moment, between the America that is and the America that could be—and for better or for worse, will be.And it is all in our hands.Regardless of their gerrymandering and suppression and intimidation and lawlessness, We The Pissed-Off People can wield our numbers to defy and defeat them together.We simply have to decide to put aside our purity tests and our excuses and our infighting and our minor differences and our apathy, and do the damn work together instead of bickering, complaining, and distracting ourselves into fascism.No politician is likely to move people who are still inexplicably undecided; those still stuck in laziness, hopelessness, or ignorance; those who still aren’t planning to use their voices.Only you can do that.Only you can reach people in the trenches of your relationships with them: in your home and your neighborhood and at your school and at work and on your timelines. You can be the difference in the day.What have you had enough of over the last ten exhausting, disorienting, heartbreaking years?What do you want to leave for those who will follow us?What will you do in the coming days in response?America is not in the hands of a politician or a preacher or an athlete or a celebrity; it’s in our hands. Yes, it’s true, no one is coming to save us. The only question left is, will we save ourselves?In the weeks ahead, may you leverage your voice, your time, your resources, your circle of influence, your network, and your community, and may you do all you can to transform the America that is into the America that could be.This will be the dawn or the death of the nation we dream of making.In November, may we wake up in that hopeful, beautiful, glorious place of possibility again.I have had enough of this divided, corrosive, violent, failing America.Have 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

Hey MAGA, a quick word.I see you out here today, trying to claim Dolly Parton as your own, as if she were one of you, as if you and she were kindred spirits, as if your heart and hers were aligned.Just stop it.Dolly was far too kind to tell you this while she was alive, so I will: you and she had little in common. Oh sure, from a distance, it might seem that way, but get a little closer and dig a little deeper and the differences could not be greater…Dolly loved people, all people. Unlike you, she loved without qualifiers, catches, caveats, or conditions. Her love did not come with strings or theological hoops or political litmus tests. In Dolly’s no one had to stand outside or prove their worth or earn her decency. Dolly loved America, real America.She wasn’t about that flag-waving, Don’t Tread On Me, America First, Christian Nationalism, Send Them Back nonsense you continually peddle as patriotism. Her America was diverse, open-armed, inclusive, and kind; a place where everyone deserved to feel at home.Dolly was a Christian, a Jesus Christian.Her deep and abiding faith did not need to be loudly broadcast or worn as a costume. It did not seek to bend anyone to its will. It was not something she wielded like a hammer in forced compliance. Her faith simply and clearly showed up, in an unrestrained love for neighbor that reflected the open-handed, open-hearted compassion of Christ that you mock as toxic.Dolly believed in family, every family.A faithful, passionate supporter of the LGBTQ community, Dolly’s advocacy of family was not confined to some rigid, White Evangelical monument to straightness and whiteness. She understood something in the core of her being you never will: that love cannot be limited and will not be hemmed in.Dolly Parton was not MAGA in any way; she was its beautiful counterpoint. She was a vaccine-supporting, nature-preserving, book-loving, trans-defending gay icon, and nearly everything she stood for flies fully in the face of the cruel, sneering, exclusionary narcissism of your vile, bloviating, spray-tanned messiah and his hateful movement, which you so joyfully partner in.Dolly Parton showed respect to every single human being who ever had the good fortune of being in her orbit, whether at arm’s length or from thousands of miles away.She left everyone feeling seen and heard and loved and respected, regardless of orientation, pigmentation, nation of origin, or any other qualifier. She never saw anyone as an enemy to be defeated, never attempted to gatekeep blessings or opportunity, never demanded that someone earn her decency, and never dehumanized a single soul.Dolly was an American, a Christian, and a human, but using those words alone does not guarantee similarity or affinity. In the specificity of a life lived, that’s where patriotism, faith, and humanity reveal themselves. As they say, God is in the details. Yes, you should aspire to emulate her and endeavor to replicate the generosity and unconditional love she so easily moved through this life with.And you’re welcome to show her respect and gratitude; in fact, you should.But please, don’t try to claim her as yours today, MAGA.She simply wasn’t.Note: By the way, Dolly loved you as much as she loved anyone, because that’s who she was. She respected you, believed you should be free to be exactly who you are, to believe that you believe, and to support who you support politically, but that doesn’t change the reality that your support of MAGA Republicans’ platform runs counter to so much of what Dolly stood for, cared about, and gave her money and time to. 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 one hurts like hell.This planet has lost so much with the passing of Dolly Parton that it’s difficult to even find a foothold for the grief, a place to begin to process all that she was and all that she gave us.In the coming days, there will be countless, well-deserved tributes devoted to her seismic songwriting and singing career, her formidable business acumen, her indefatigable optimism, and her easy, infectious joy.Dolly will be rightly eulogized for the effortless grace she moved through the world with, for the gentleness she extended to every person in her path, and for the humility she somehow managed to hold onto despite reaching near-sainthood status among fans, admirers, and peers alike.Her life and career have and will provide an inexhaustible treasure trove of lessons for those of us who remain—and for those on the horizon of history who will not have had the great fortune to live here while she did. Far more eloquent people than I will find ways to capture in words her ineffable spirit and the limitless wisdom they will glean from her in matters of faith, songcraft, and empire-building.All I can say is that Dolly Parton knew how to be human better than just about anyone I can think of.For me, one of the biggest takeaways of Dolly’s passing is the way she reminded us what wealth and influence can do when they are in the hands of someone whose life is oriented outward, someone who remembers what it is to lack, someone who values being human over being a billionaire.With a staggering personal portfolio of publishing royalties, tour revenue, licensing deals, business ventures, property investments, and the spoils of a lifetime in the highest echelons of the entertainment business, Dolly Parton could have had more with very little effort.She could have followed the lead of the Musks and the Bezoses and the Zuckerbergs and the Ellisons. She could have hoarded her fortune, growing more narcissistic and tight-fisted. She could have partnered with the legion of malevolent power-holders, motivated only by the insatiable allure of more. She could have exploited the influence she acquired to amass even greater fortune.Instead, Dolly Parton spent her life giving her wealth away.She started the nonprofit Dollywood Foundation, marshaling her resources and influence to fight illiteracy in her beloved Tennessee community.She created Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which to date has donated over 300 million books to children all over the world.She raised money for the American Red Cross and HIV/AIDS-related charities. She helped fund cancer centers and hospitals. She donated a million dollars during the throes of COVID to expedite vaccine development.She provided wildfire relief following the Great Smoky Mountain Wildfires, financially supported victims of Hurricane Helene, and worked to preserve the American Bald Eagle.Living in a country music ecosystem often populated by homophobia and racism, she risked losing financial opportunities and fan support by advocating for the LGBTQ community and for people of color. Over and over again, Dolly Parton reminded us that money and power do not alter character but reveal it. She leaves this planet as an enduring folk hero and a universally beloved national treasure because she never allowed her lofty place in the culture, her legend status as a performer, or her considerable riches to make her forget where she came from or why she was here. We’ve gotten so used to seeing the wealthiest people on the planet being the least compassionate, the most unapologetically cruel; rejecting their better angels and courting their inner demons. We’ve watched them partner with despots, devour the vulnerable, and pillage the planet to further the gap between themselves and the disparate humanity they end up in contempt of.Dolly Parton was the antithesis of this. We could always count on her to get it right, to do the decent thing, to model dignity, to always pass the good human test. That’s why her loss hits so hard, and why we owe it to her to remember what she taught us about the point of being here: to stay human.Whether we have five bucks to our name or we’ve amassed a small fortune, whether we toil in obscurity or receive the praise of multitudes, Dolly Parton’s life stands as a reminder that we are not our achievements or our accolades or our net worth. We are not our career successes or our social standing or the kudos we merit.As she so eloquently testified for 80 glorious years, the measure of a life is in what we do with what we are entrusted with, how we treat people around us, and the person we are in both lack and abundance.Among the countless roles and titles at which Dolly Parton has so excelled, her single greatest performance was as a human being. That has made her among the richest people to ever grace this planet. Share your memories and gratitude for Dolly in the comments.If you loved, respected Dolly and want to celebrate her extraordinary life, please support her Imagination Library.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

Some days I wonder if this nation can be saved.I know what I’m supposed to believe.I’m supposed to believe that America is still in its infancy, that it is a beautiful but complicated idea, that we simply haven’t become what we can and will become. I’m supposed to remember that history is cyclical, that all barbaric regimes are temporary, and that every evil empire invariably falls.I’m supposed to hold fast to the dream that we will emerge from this scalding present crucible, transformed and made better by the conflict.I know that I’m supposed to believe that we have still not seen our best days yet, and that when we eventually do, it will be worth all the struggle we’ve endured to claim the nation our forebears dreamed of.In the past, I’ve often believed that. I’ve written it. I’ve preached it.Now, I’m not so sure.250 years into our collective lifespan, we are as afflicted with systemic racism as we’ve ever been, white nationalism has completely infected the entirety of one of our political parties, and we are teetering perilously close to extremist minority rule that will in effect, permanently silence the voices and votes of the vast majority.With every bit of the planet’s accumulated information now literally in the palms of our hands, too many of our people are still believing easily disprovable falsehoods, still falling victim to nonsensical conspiracies, still vulnerable to baseless lies about their neighbors. Even with the benefits of hindsight of our shameful and bloody history, a toxic cocktail of overt racism, neanderthal theology, intellectual ignorance, and self-preservation has rendered a large swath of America hostile to Science, terrified of diversity, and irrationally violent toward vulnerable people.And perhaps worst of all, a substantial portion of this nation remains emotionally tethered to one of the single most reprehensible human beings on the planet, despite a decade of prolific lawlessness and unrepentant moral filth. His ineptitude, narcissism, predation, and criminality have not proven to be dealbreakers but selling points.How are decent, reasonable people supposed to work with this?How do we find common ground with those who insist on dehumanization of those who are different?How can we engage in constructive conversation or honest dialogue with people whose reality is so arbitrary, whose truth is so malleable, whose moral goalposts are forever shifting?How can we forge a new and more equitable America, while so many Americans live perpetually backwards, pining for a bygone day when fewer people had a voice or a vote?How can we coexist with those who would rewind this nation to a time when women, people of color, and LGBTQ human beings had their value determined, their options dictated, and their futures defined by straight, white men?If our families and friendships and workplaces and churches and political systems are all still this saturated with supremacy, can an interdependent community of disparate humanity with equitable access to life, liberty, and happiness ever be a reality here? Romanticism and misplaced optimism aside, is America as we envision it still possible, with MAGA’s poison having infected its bloodstream?It may of course still be possible, yet with every year I think it becomes less and less probable. The longer we live as a nation with these untreated collective cancers of heart and mind, the greater opportunity they have to metastasize exponentially and the less chance we have of eradicating them for good. History reminds us that the more we abide brutality and tolerate discrimination, the more normal they become, the more difficult they are to excise. Our present normal is not sustainable if we’re ever going to grow into something truly beautiful.I want this nation to become what the songs and the anthems declare we can be, but I’m not sure we all share that desire. I think many of us want the ugliest atrocities of our past to be our future, and that may be a disease too invasive to be healed of for the rest of us.There’s an old saying: when the horse is dead, dismount.The ride may be over for America.Maybe this horse is beyond saving.Yes, I’ll show up again today, leveraging my time, my resources, and my voice in the cause of equality and empathy; to do all I can let freedom ring and let justice roll down like a river, though I admit, it feels like a fool’s errand. Still, I want to know I left this life doing everything I could to help us get well, and that’s what will propel me back out into the fray once again.I’m waking up in this America that is, and will be fighting like hell to craft the America that could be, as futile as that sometimes seems.For ten interminable, exhausting years, MAGA has been an invasive, insidious national cancer. I wonder if we can survive it. What about you? How do you view the damage of the last decade? Do you see our demise as a foregone conclusion, or do you feel hopeful that transformation can and will come? 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

Friends, these days will kill you if you’re not careful.As we find ourselves fully engulfed in the Category 5 s**t storm that is a second Trump term, two things are irrefutably clear: it’s much worse than we thought it would be, and it’s gonna get much worse before it gets better.At this point, even the most pessimistic post-2024 election predictions have woefully underestimated the scope and velocity of the carnage to our systems of protection, our long-established structural institutions, and the elemental freedoms we’ve counted as givens.The emotional whiplash of a relentless stream of diabolical Executive Orders, unrestrained sociopathy, stratospheric economic malpractice, and pathological attacks on vulnerable people is enough to level even the most measured and otherwise imperturbable among us.In other words, our nervous systems weren’t built for this very special kind of homegrown hell.What that means, in rubber-meets-the-road practicality, is that all the normal tried-and-true avenues of self-care may likely prove insufficient.Even if you are somehow able in this disorienting, perpetual state of national emergencies and existential crises to actually keep a strict regimen of sleep, good nutrition, hydration, exercise, meditation, prayer, time in nature, relational connection, artistic pursuits, therapy, and limited media exposure—you might still feel like you’re about a millisecond from completely losing it in any given moment. (I know that I am.)Now, you definitely don’t want to abandon the above practices, as they’ll surely help tether you to health and sanity, but I want to suggest that you might want to philosophically make other alterations in light of the gravity of these days; some new daily commitments you can make to yourself to navigate the nightmare. Consider these:Burn bridges to toxic people. It’s a noble thing to want to reach across lines of tribalism and to try and stay connected with those whose opinions differ from ours, but there’s a limit to what is healthy, or called for, or even hunamly possible. Recently, our friends, family members, neighbors, and co-workers have revealed with great clarity who they are, what is stored up in their hearts. At this point, it’s perfectly fine to determine that some people, even people we know well and love, are morally incompatible with us.Have the damn dessert. Yeah, we all know that as a rule, emotional eating is a bad idea and that intentionally overindulging won’t be good long-term, but given the number of historic implosions happening right now and the uncertainty of so many things, it’s a good idea to treat yourself to some comfort food or a libation or some small sensory pleasure, to remind yourself of the beauty found in simplicity. (Now, what wine pairs well with the fall of a Republic?)Stop procrastinating away happiness. If you’ve been postponing a dream trip, holding off on writing your novel, or putting off a new project, cut that crap out, now. It isn’t trivial to attend to such things when disaster hits, but essential. One of the greatest forms of resistance is to live fully, joyfully, and creatively. Yes, it may all be hitting the fan right now, but you can put on a poncho and press on. Don’t wait for permission to really live, because fascists will not provide it.Ask anything and say everything. One of the blessings of destabilizing, consequential moments like the ones that we’re in is that they help us clarify who we are and precisely what is worth living for; the causes and people that matter to us. Over the last two years you’ve likely learned a great deal about yourself, or you’ve been reminded of stuff that you forgot. And if things are all going sideways anyway, it’s a great time to be exactly who you are without apology or editing.Stop giving a damn what people think. Repeat after me: someone else’s opinion of me is none of my business. Unbelievably, there are still people who are so addled by some toxic cocktail of denial, wishful thinking, ignorance, and American exceptionalism that they insist on tone policing those of us who are sounding the alarm and announcing the sky’s plummeting toward us. Those people do not deserve your time or emotional bandwidth. Refuse to be burdened by their expectations or bound by their sensibilities; you have a nation to save.Please understand that I’m not minimizing what we’re going through collectively and what you’re enduring individually or what’s ahead for all of us. These are sobering, harrowing, dangerous times, and we will be pressed up against threats and worries many of us have never faced before. That’s all the more reason to live the hell out of single every day.So yes, friends, please take good care of your physical, spiritual, mental, emotional, and relational health by adopting practices and patterns that can provide a buffer between you and the terrifying hellscapes on your timeline, outside your window, and in your head.But beyond that, in what feels like (and may indeed be) the worst-case scenario, make it a priority to radically care for yourself by refusing to compromise or deny yourself simple pleasures or postpone your dreams or silence your own voice.The world may indeed be falling apart, but we don’t have to.What are some self-care rules you’ve adopted recently that you’d add to my list? Please share 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. 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The Christian Right has been right.For decades they tried to tell us that the sky was falling, that devils and demons were walking among us, that the end of all we love was so very nigh. For decades they lamented our imminent moral devastation, trying to prepare us (as good prophets do) for the quickly encroaching enemy coming to enslave decent people to their sadistic religious perversions.They pounded their pulpits with ferocity and thumped their Bibles with abandon, forecasting this country’s certain doom at the hands of violent, self-righteous extremists, and we refused to listen. We rolled our eyes and dismissed them as conspiratorial cultists whose hold on reality was tenuous, at best. And yet, they had it right all along.It turns out that every single one of their raw-throated, brimstone-breathing prophecies was true:The wolves would come to devour the innocent in the name of their God.There would be a twisting of religious texts to justify vile evil of every kind.Women, LGBTQ people, and immigrants would be terrorized by a radical minority claiming divine authority.Marginalized, oppressed, and vulnerable human beings would be discarded, hounded, and brutalized.Good people in America would be preyed upon by opportunistic monsters wielding scripture like a hammer.These sage Evangelical prognosticators had everything about the approaching disaster correct—except its source. Conservative Christians neglected to predict the actual genesis of this great decimation, and all they had to do was look in the mirror. You see, it isn’t and will not be some supposed Islamic horde running amok through our nation with a violent, theocratic religion of coercion meant to enslave people to their draconian moral code. Radical Muslims are not an existential threat to our nation, bringing some punitive pestilence upon this nation. They are not here waging an unrelenting holy war on those in America who do not share their beliefs.The real religious extremists have already breached the border.The thick, black shadow of theocracy is already upon us.White Christian Nationalists are here right now.Evangelicals are the greatest existential threat to this diverse nation, and it isn’t even close.For years the Christian Right has been warning us about Godless hordes coming to destroy America, and it turns out this was true; it’s just that the words were autobiographical.As a longtime pastor and lifelong Christian, I’ve had a sick sense of déjà vu watching politicians professing to be followers of Jesus dismantling every program designed to care for the vulnerable and the hurting, seeing the way the corrupt are being awarded greater power, watching empathy vanishing and hatred skyrocketing, witnessing people legislating their antiquated theology upon everyone else.I’ve heard this story a million times before; proclaimed from pulpits on Sunday mornings, unleashed in religious social media rants, and shouted through bullhorns on street corners—with one notable twist. I knew this was coming, or at least I should have. We all should have. These harbingers of doom were absolutely right to warn us, and ironically they were the approaching pestilence. In the sickest kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, they were the plague of these days that they have long said would come.It would be the Christian preachers and the evangelists abandoning the compassionate heart of their faith tradition, perverting the words of their scriptures for their agenda, and selling their souls for a high place overlooking the world. They would be the very false prophets they told us that we should like hell run from. These supposed disciples of Jesus would be the ones to betray him with a kiss and send him to a bloody, undignified end.We are approaching an election, and the monsters need a distraction. They need to press into the irrational fear of those who are not awake and alert enough to see clearly, and Islamophobia is on the menu.Don’t be fooled by White Evangelicals who are spending every waking moment dehumanizing and demonizing our Muslim brothers and sisters. Pay attention to where America is right now, to what is happening here in this moment in the name of God, to the oppressive marriage of Church and State currently being consummated, to the unthinkable harm being done this very day by professed righteous soldiers in the army of the Lord.Yes, the Christian Right was right; evil was going to viciously assail America, terrorize the lives of good people, and make a mockery of God. It was just going to be an inside job.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

Ignorance is not a compelling argument at this point.We’ve all heard the theories for the last ten years: people still supporting Donald Trump are unwitting victims of the partisan media and Evangelical alternate reality that they’ve been raised in and are still captives of. We’re told that they’re continually surrounded by bad theology, fake news, and endless conspiracy, and so they aren’t bad people; they just aren’t seeing what we are seeing, and we need all to be more understanding.We’re a decade into this madness. This just isn’t acceptable anymore.There isn’t a sufficient excuse for being an adult so sheltered from facts and so truth-deprived that you can’t see Trump’s complete sociopathy and you can’t discern the existential threat he and his party are to this nation.His supporters aren’t being asked to dig beneath some complex, brilliantly crafted ruse perpetrated by Conservative media and religious conglomerates working in concert. If you can read Trump’s own social media feed or listen to the bile he spews in front of the cameras at female reporters and political opponents, and not be fully disgusted to the point of vomiting, you aren’t a reasonable human being. Either that, or you are willingly choosing to engage in wild intellectual and theological gymnastics to avoid a reality that makes you uncomfortable, intentionally avoiding some really vile stuff that he and his collaborators aren’t even attempting to conceal anymore.I’m fully convinced that nearly everyone still supporting Donald Trump knows he is a reprehensible human being; guilty of high crimes against this nation, atrocities against women, and war crimes around the globe. But they can’t admit to themselves or anyone else they made a mistake, and so, in an act of self-preservation, they are doubling down again and again.They’re not stupid; they’re just willing to let America die on the altar of their pride, which may be far worse.Being an adult means being responsible for ferreting out what is real and what isn’t, and for making good decisions with the available information. This is what we demand from our children, isn’t it? We only let their ignorance be an excuse for so long, and then we remove that option because we expect them to be smarter than that at some point. And if we realize that they are smart enough to know better, then it becomes an indictment of their character.If grown men and women aren’t willing or able to sift information and choose wisely because of their media choices or their circle of friends or their mental effort, thenet result is the same: they are enabling and protecting reprehensible behavior that places people in great danger.If Fox News creates your reality, you’re going to be hateful toward lots of people: Muslims, LGBTQ people, immigrants, people of color, refugees—and on and on and on. And if you’ve been on the planet for a few decades, you should have developed the critical thinking not to allow a network that brokers in fantasy and fiction to be your baseline for truth. That’s a you problem.If The Religious Right defines for you what it means to be a Christian, your Christianity is going to look nothing like the actual teachings of Christ. It’s going to be an angry, violent thing devoid of compassion and gentleness. That isn’t your preacher’s fault, it isn’t Franklin Graham’s fault, and it isn’t the Devil’s fault. As a thinking Christian who supposedly reads the words of Jesus and reflects on them regularly—you should see through this sham in a hot minute and soundly reject it.If the brazen, unapologetic racism and xenophobia and misogyny on display right now is too subtle for your sensibilities, and if Nazis marching through town squares, supremacist politicians, and election interference fall beneath your radar, you either intentionally have your head in the sand or it isn’t on straight to begin with—and either is a crisis.Many of my white Evangelical friends supporting Trump aren’t as much stupid or unaware as they are cowardly. They held their noses in 2016, voted in anger or haste or error, and then quickly got out of the politics business, choosing to escape the consequences of their decision on other people. So Newsmax and the Conservative Christian Church have become convenient places of sanctuary for people with privilege wanting to hide from the results of their vote.Again, they aren’t ignorant of reality; they just are opting out of it altogether. If it is stupidity, the affliction is highly selective, extremely localized, and very convenient. And if that’s the case, are we supposed to expect in year eleven or twelve they’re going to finally have a magical epiphany and part with him?It’s time we stopped giving adult human beings the benefit of the doubt, simply because we think they’re not smart enough not to be fooled by religious shysters, fake news peddlers, and political snake oil salesmen. If that is true, then they’re also not smart or mentally capable enough to be presented with objective data or compelling arguments and to filter them responsibly. They are, practically speaking, unreachable with rational measures.I’m tired of having to treat people like children when they aren’t capable or willing to see what even a child can see, what my children can see. They know hatred and bullying without needing to read a think piece or do online research or unpack layers of religion and history.I’m over justifying bigotry and racism and the horrible stuff happening in the country, and giving people who perpetuate it a pass because they supposedly don’t realize they’re supporting a monster—when most of the watching world seems to get it.In a time when information is available at our fingertips and when conversation and study and exploration are limitless, I’m through excusing supposed adults for not being able to make a decision that is based in reality, simply because they’re in some hateful, self-righteous, nationalistic bubble. That’s their fault, not ours.I don’t hate these people, but I’m also not going to coddle them and encourage their ignorance anymore because lots of people are damaged when that happens.Sooner or later we adults all have to own our supposed stupidity–and choose to be wiser.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 the Ministers in America,I’ve been where you are.For nearly 30 years, I stood in the pulpits and on the platforms where you now stand.I know the difficulties of the work you do that many people don’t think about: the collective expectations of the people you serve, the incredible pressures that come from both above and around you, the number of opinions you have to respectfully sift through. And I know the tumult that often creates within you.I understand the dizzying high-wire walk of trying to carry your personal convictions as well as the virtues and values you’re entrusted to steward as part of your position, and I’ve felt the fierce internal whirlwind when those things don’t align.And I also know how easy it is to find your voice gradually silenced, to grow beholden to a congregation or a denomination; to let the practical fears of losing your job or your health insurance or your livelihood slowly force you to make tiny concessions, usually without even realizing it.I’ve felt what it feels like to soften your delivery, to edit your messages, to start talking around issues that you know will create conflict or bring turbulence or slow things down, and how tempting it is to rationalize why this is simply part of doing ministry.And above all, I know that you didn’t begin this work wanting to become a compromised people-pleaser with watered-down words, unspoken passions, and feet of clay.Because of this, I need to ask you: why exactly did you begin this work?What is preventing you from doing the one thing spiritual leaders are here to do: letting your faith speak unequivocally, pushback, conflict, and retribution be damned?What is keeping you from centering the poor and the outcast and oppressed in that way that Jesus calls his followers to do? Like him, you are here to be Good Shepherds: loving caregivers to the harassed and helpless sheep in your care and the fierce opposition to the wolves who would devour them, wherever they show up and however much influence they have.It feels like those ministers are a swiftly dwindling species nearing the brink of extinction; like courageous prophets speaking truth to corrupt power are rapidly disappearing.I’m afraid that we are running out of Christian leaders who will stand against the hatred having its renaissance here in the name of God—and I need you to prove me wrong.The American Church needs you to prove me wrong.The American people need you to.Immigrants and trans kids and Muslim families and young black men need you to.This weary, beleaguered, terrified nation in the throes of Christian nationalism needs you to draw deep from your reservoirs of faith, to clarify your calling again, to ask yourself why you do what you do.And after doing that, it needs you to find your singular voice and to speak in such a way that the heavens shake and powerful people stagger and sleeping people are roused awake to the urgency of the moment.All faithful people here need to be reminded what that faith requires of them, so that they can be similarly courageous where they are.Non-religious people here need to know that believers aren’t all wall-builders and book-banners; that many are moved by their better angels to acts of beauty and kindness and generosity, not exclusion and cruelty.This world has enough ministers who’ve been content to stay silent and become complicit in the weaponizing of religion and the ascension of bigotry. We don’t need any more of those. America is at capacity for sanctified cowards who forever straddle the fence of neutrality.I would never be cavalier with your life or your work. I don’t know your ministry setting, your family situation, your financial condition, or your faith journey. All I know is that if you consider yourself a spiritual leader of any kind, the one thing you have, the only thing of real value, is your authentic voice birthed by your spiritual convictions: not your church’s, not your supervisor’s, not your loudest church members.’Your singular, irreplaceable gift is your personal burden to heal and help and lead—and your willingness to make that burden known without dilution.The voices of the religious frauds and performative hypocrites are deafening right now. They are drowning out the compassionate, fiercely loving voice of Jesus, and it is your calling and your responsibility to be a steward of that voice. If you refuse to do that, no matter what reason you give to justify it, you have no business calling yourself a minister.You don’t need to speak in a way that intentionally harms, that willfully divides, or that resonates nationally, but you can speak to the small world entrusted to you, and with unmistakable clarity you can plead for mercy, demand justice, advocate for compassion, and beg for audacious love to be what believers are known by in these days.Sunday is coming, friends.May you greet it with courage.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 Karoline,Well, here we are, or more accurately, here you are.I’d like to say I’m surprised, though that would be a lie.We all saw this coming for you (well, those of us not indoctrinated into a treasonous predator’s mindless death cult). Like Pam and Tulsi and Kristi, and countless women before, you were destined to find yourself here.This was always how this was going to end: with you finally understanding that you were never of any value to him, that you were always a tool; simply another expendable woman that he used for his pleasure and unceremoniously discarded.This is the inevitable reality when one tethers themselves to a monster. Good people tried to warn you from the very first day you stood in front of a podium and confidently spoke words that were bereft of truth and harmful to millions, but once you sign away your soul, you have to ride the thing out to the end.I wonder how you ended up here. I wonder if you know.I wonder, if in the quiet places, away from the lights and the bombast and the attention, you can now rewind through your story and see the thousands of small moral failures that led you to this place; the endless stream of seemingly insignificant concessions that began to overtake you. I wonder if you can look back and see precisely where you lost the plot of the faith you so loudly profess; how you completely abandoned the compassionate, kind, loving Jesus of your religion and instead, willfully lied for a living on behalf of serial predator.As you stood before the American people day after day, trafficking in untruth, justifying brutality, and celebrating prolific violence, all while wearing the cross of a dark-skinned foreigner who preached love for neighbor, did alarms of hypocrisy go off inside your head, or were the money and proximity to power too loud for you to hear?But more than anything else, Karoline, I wonder if you feel like whatever you got for your soul was worth it. Did eighteen months of rented importance, racists’ applause, and the public praise of a despot profit you enough to justify all that you sacrificed to get it?When you realize that History has recorded every lie you uttered, documented each act of treason, and preserved each word of effusive praise for a war criminal, does that worry you at all? When your young children grow up and learn that their mother was the strident mouthpiece for one of the most despicable human beings to ever walk the planet, will all of this have been worth it? I can’t answer that for you—but from where I’m standing, it wasn’t.It wasn’t worth the people beaten, abducted, and murdered by ICE.It wasn’t worth the lives of children blown apart in Gaza and Ukraine and Iran and Lebanon.It wasn’t worth the grief of families who’ve lost healthcare and their homes and their businesses, and their livelihoods.It wasn’t worth the pain of trans teenagers, Latino mothers, and black men who’ve been terrorized by their neighbors and their Government.It wasn’t worth a nation riddled with conspiracy, decimated by tribalism, and assailed by suffering.Because, while you were not the author of this chaos and death, you were its spokesperson, Karoline. You were its voice. You woke up every single day, and you legitimized it, championed it, defended it, and sold all of it—and so it is on your hands, as well.As a woman and a mother and a wife and a Christian and a human being, maybe auctioning off your soul was worth all of that to you.And if so, I feel really sorry for 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

This should be easy.We are now two years into the most openly corrupt, inept, and relentlessly predatory presidential administration in our nation’s history.We have watched an extremist minority commandeer Congress, the Justice Department, our Military, and the highest court in our nation, mounting an unprecedented repeal of the rights of women, of environmental protections, of voting rights, of elemental liberties.Republican leadership across this country has declared open war on diversity, on education, on the legitimacy of our elections. Our checks and balances are nonfunctioning, our systems of protection have been compromised—and we are warring with one another.We should be easily coalescing around our collective values, but we are not.The upcoming midterms should be the slam dunk of the century, but they aren’t.We should be rising together to eradicate this fascism en masse, but we’re not.Some establishment Dems are formulating plans to combat rising Democratic Socialist candidates instead of asking why those people and platforms are resonating with voters, or what might be learned about their party’s weaknesses. Far-Left activists incessantly push out strident, baby-with-bathwater objections to moderate candidates, disqualifying them for past behavior, one-time verbal gaffes, single-issue stances, or previous political positions. Longtime party moderates are operating as if the former rules of engagement still exist, too paralyzed by fear and scarcity to do anything but what they’ve always done, while burn-it-all-down anarchists want to turn a massive tanker on a dime without acknowledging the diversity of thought among the voting bloc they seek and need. From the center to the fringes, we liberals war with potential allies, allowing no gray space of compromise, no personal evolution for people, and no possibility of future alignment with those who do not currently check every possible box. In doing so, we passionately partner in the work of our adversaries. We easily find ourselves violently fighting with one another over matters that are in fact trivial, when compared with all that hangs in the balance. Put simply, the Left has a purity problem, and if we don’t get over it, it’s going to destroy us.Meanwhile, despite some fracturing in the MAGA monolith, the other side is simply circling the wagons, making concessions, consolidating power, and gaining traction—spirituality and morality and virtue be damned. This is why we’re where we are today.For all their sermonizing, Conservatives have never allowed their personal morality to get in the way of a political win. That has been the story for the past few years here: millions of people on the Right trading in their personal and religious values for the coming of a kleptocratic kingdom they will all benefit from. They have sacrificed their individual convictions on the altar of the bigger win, or at least, what seems like victory in the moment.Now, I’m not asking moderates, progressives, liberals, and Left-leaning believers to do that. I’m not suggesting we collectively sell our souls the way our counterparts have. I’m not advocating for a collective treason against what we value.We are different from our political and religious adversaries, precisely because we are more committed to our personal convictions than to purchasing influence.We do stand for something greater than empty pulpit pounding and phony patriotic histrionics about Christianity and America under attack or returning to our days of former supremacist glory.We are driven by moral and spiritual prompts that refuse to align with monsters or horde a consuming power that will corrupt us.We aren’t fueled by a contempt that would snap its fingers and wipe out everyone else.But if we can’t lay down our all-or-nothing, my-candidate-or-no-candidate absolutism and set aside our arrogant virtue to stand shoulder-to-shoulder against a formidable threat, we’re soon going to find ourselves with no voice whatsoever.Longtime rank-and-file Democrats, this is bigger than you.Frustrated Progressives, this is bigger than you.Democratic Socialist advocates, this is bigger than you.Defiant Third Party holdouts, this is bigger than you.Exhausted abstainers, this is bigger than you.Ambivalent moderates of all parties, this is bigger than you.Everybody needs to take a breath, find some humility, and talk to—not at or about one another.We all need to understand how urgent these moments are. We need to stop killing our allies with friendly fire, and we need to discard the inconsequential battles of preference so that we can win the singularly vital war of which we all will prosper.When our Republic is secured, and our essential liberties are restored, then we can go about the necessary and very attainable work of navigating our differences to renovate America into something we all can take pride in, something better than it has been.But if we fail to confront this existential threat because we are distracted and divided by moral litmus tests, lazy squabbling, and performative purity politics, we will have all squandered the moment in front of us.The Right is pushing America to the brink of theocracy and fascism, and we on the Left need to stop helping them.We need to win together because when we win, life and the planet and the future does too.It’s time we pulled ourselves together.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. 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A full decade into one of the darkest chapters in our nation’s history, white people in this country need to be honest about something: White Christians ruined everything.Over the last ten years, self-identified followers of Jesus have almost singlehandedly destroyed all that was good and decent and beautiful in America by hitching themselves to a monster and refusing to let go, no matter how unrepentantly evil he has proven himself to be. I mean, think about it:If not for them, his vile Access Hollywood video confession of assault is a deal breaker in 2016.If not for them, his ridiculing of a disabled reporter is a bridge too far.If not for them, he isn’t declared a Christian.If not for them, he isn’t elected or reelected.If not for them, there are no stomach-turning photo ops of opportunistic religious sycophants laying hands on him.If not for them, thousands of brown-skinned families aren’t violated, terrorized, and treated like animals.If not for them, no one breaches the Capitol on January 6th and throws our electoral process into chaos.We are living in a completely different timeline, now, because of them.If not for white, alleged Christians in our government, sick people aren’t creating GoFundMe pages to get routine medical care,our elections aren’t polluted by techbro oligarchs.women aren’t losing their fundamental liberties,and ICE isn’t murdering people in cold blood and without accountability.If not for White Evangelicals, his unhinged, racist vanity rallies are empty.If not for them, climate change isn’t dismissed, science isn’t opposed, expertise isn’t mocked, and sound medicine isn’t disregarded,If not for them, gun violence victims get more than #thoughtsandprayers platitudes.If not for them, every pedophile and rapist in the Epstein Files is facing a legal reckoning right now.If not for these Christians, MAGA is the extremist fringe movement it should always have been.Talk about losing the plot. Talk about mission drift. Talk about gaining the world and losing your soul. Talk about effing everything up for this monster... for this human garbage… for this loveless, joyless, empty, vacant nothing.If not for the professed followers of Jesus, throughout this country, bigots aren’t emboldened to proudly parade their hatred in the light of day.Sexual assault survivors aren’t belittled and traumatized anew.Every one of his lies is named and condemned.He is held accountable for his crimes and his immorality and his trampling of the Constitution.If not for them, this planet is safer, more compassionate, and more just—period.As a white person who grew up in the Church and pastored for decades, that’s a tough pill to force down.Ironically, despite all their sanctimonious sermonizing, finger-wagging condemnation, and sky-is-falling histrionics, the white Evangelical Church has enabled, nurtured, and championed more inequity and more misery in these days than any other entity, and there is no close second.For the disparate masses of the world, American Christians have become a barrier to belonging, a sanctuary for supremacy, and a hostile presence for the least of these.By its marriage to a politics of exclusion, the Conservative Church has failed the poor, women, people of color, gender fluid human beings, the disabled, and non-heteronormative people.It’s failed immigrants and refugees and foreigners; vulnerable and marginalized communities; non-religious and non-Christian human people.It has failed everyone outside the tiny gated community of the white and the wealthy.This is indeed a tragedy.But more than anyone, the White Evangelical Church has failed Jesus.They have misappropriated his likeness, hijacked his name, and weaponized his message into something grotesque and oppressive—and it is rightfully repelling good people.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 our existential life, we’re not at the precipice of authoritarianism, and we’re not steeped in this unapologetic supremacy, if not for people claiming to be devoted to the same Jesus I’ve grown up trying to emulate.There are tens of millions of white people here, both Christian and non-Christian, who wake up every day working to be agents of kindness and generosity in this world, who are driven to sickness by the irreparable harm being done to this nation, to humanity, to the planet in the name of God. And we, not people of color, not immigrants, we white people, are going to need to be the ones to make our presence felt in our neighborhoods, on social media, in school board meetings, and at the polls, and drive these charlatans and frauds out of power and influence, and into the places of irrelevance and shame they so richly 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

“So, this is what it’s like to feel normal.”As I sat in a small cafe overlooking a sun-dappled Florentine piazza, that thought floated in with the evening breeze, bringing a protracted exhale that surprised me, as if I’d suddenly remembered how to breathe again.It had taken me nearly five full days away from America to begin to realize how very unwell I’d been, how physically and emotionally depleted the past eighteen months had left me, and most alarming of all—how normal that exhaustion had become. It was as if someone interrupted the ubiquitous chaos I’d grown accustomed to and softly said, “Yeah, you don’t have to live like that.”Little by little, with 4,500 miles and nearly a week now separating me from my beleagured home, all my recent symptoms had suddenly become clear: the jagged irritability bubbling always beneath the surface, the ever-present knot in the pit of my stomach, the low-grade dread hovering in the periphery of my thoughts, the pervasive hopelessness I’d gotten used to, the slow but certain attrition to my joy that no longer alarmed me. Leaving America showed me how sick America has made me.But it wasn’t just the change of scenery that had revealed the maladies afflicting me, afflicting us; it was the dozens of human beings I’d shared conversations with, people who reminded me that there are other ways to exist that I’d forgotten about. Everywhere I went, shop owners, servers, Uber drivers, and other travelers from the disparate corners of this planet routinely verified how abnormal our daily life actually is:Not everyone wakes up each day feeling they need to marshal every available resource to protect themselves from their elected officials. Not everyone fears a routine surgery will bankrupt them.Not everyone has masked, Government-funded goons murdering innocent people in their streets. Not everyone has a career criminal and serial predator as a Head of State. Not everyone is helmed by theocratic, conspiratorial Christian zealots.Not everyone is watching every fundamental liberty evaporating.Not everyone is feeling as though their nation’s best days are behind them.And honestly, that all felt a bit shocking. That’s how insidious the sickness of living in this iteration of America is, how commonplace the brutality now is, how the monstrous now seems normal. We have been immersed for so long in a state of sustained urgency and unrelenting suffering that it no longer occurs to us that these are not the default settings of a civilized nation, that we are not supposed to be this deprived of optimism. We are gradually becoming acclimated to nightmarish realities that no decent human beings should ever make peace with.My profound privilege is not lost on me. I know that many people here don’t have the good fortune of a respite from the horrors for 10 minutes, let alone 10 days. Most Americans can’t place geographic space between themselves and this country and have the precious white space of mental rest it yields, yet that doesn’t make the reckoning of the toll this place has taken on me, on all of us, any easier to accept. I’m now back in the country I call home, and I’m trying like hell not to forget what I learned while I was away; the terrible afflictions that come from living here inside this unfettered epidemic of corruption and hatred. I want to remember how heartsick I’ve been, so that I can keep from sliding further into the abyss, so that I do not allow America to render me devoid of joy or bereft of hope.If there’s anything I can give you as a memento of my travels, it’s confirmation that none of this is normal, that we deserve something more than this dystopian bigot fever dream we’ve grown ever more comfortable with, that this leaden nihilism does not have to be our destiny, unless we allow it to be.Maybe you’ve started to accept the unacceptable, maybe you’ve been emotionally numbed by the unrelenting atrocities, or maybe you’ve grown so weary from fighting that you’ve stopped remembering what it’s like to breathe. If so, may you be reminded that these are symptoms of illness, but they do not need to be a death sentence.The only way we can help retain our sanity and stay tethered to our humanity is to not succumb to the sickness surrounding us, to not let this parasitic regime destroy us, to refuse to be swallowed up by the cancer of cruelty our leadership has released into our bloodstream.To every American who is being sickened by America: take heart, keep going. We can get well together. We will.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 the state of our nation, which we all agreed was somewhere between sky-is-falling and Armageddon.The conversation turned toward the alleged bright spot found in the reality of many of Trump's supporters joining the Leaving MAGA movement; finally being roused from the ten-year stupor of 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 finally be putting aside their fierce tribalism and joining 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 seeing at all right now.The fact of the matter is, with very few exceptions, people who voted for Trump in 2024 (many for the third time) and who are beginning to come around enough to move them to action, have not had their humanity awakened watching his and his Administration’s violent, illegal weaponizing of I.C.E. against immigrants, both documented and undocumented.They have not 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 aren’t having their once-stone 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 haven’t experienced a miraculous, biblical 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 aren’t being overtaken by some newfound responsibility as global citizens, feeling a sudden rush of affinity for the persecuted people of Ukraine, or Gaza, or Iran, or Lebanon.No, the only reason Trump supporters are forming any kind of oppositional response to Trump is that the pain has become 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, and see their healthcare options dissolve, they are magically finding themselves becoming the resistance that decent human beings have been for a decade now.Their rebellion is not born out of true contrition for their damaging alliances, 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. As MAGA Americans 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), it is finally becoming a bridge too far. As their feet are finally put to the fire they wished upon so many others, suddenly immorality and overreach are becoming objectionable.And this will continue to happen in the coming weeks and months with the people around us. We will see more and more conversions of convenience.The moment members of Trump’s genuflecting multitude 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

“I never wished for someone to die before. I’ve been suicidal many times in my life—but I’ve never been homicidal.”So began the tearful confession of a middle-aged woman who approached me after an event in Lincoln, Nebraska. She paused for a second, exhaled loudly, and then continued, her voice shaking:“I’m ashamed to say that I find myself wishing these terrible people would just... disappear, so that they can’t hurt us anymore.” She said, “I just feel like I’m waiting for them to get old and die off. What do I do with this anger?”I knew what I was supposed to tell her, what I was expected to tell her, what I wanted to tell her.I wanted to tell her that these impulses were wrong, that such feelings were unhealthy, that this kind of consuming hatred toward another human being was dangerously toxic.I wanted to remind her that this level of contempt for a stranger was the very thing she abhorred in the people she feels this way toward.I wanted to steer her from such negative energy… but I couldn’t do any of these things.I understood her.Her desperation and hopelessness made perfect sense.Her terrifying headspace hit home.This is a natural human response to unchecked brutality and unrelenting cruelty: wanting it all to end.You don’t actually wish harm to people; you just wish harmful people would stop harming other people, and there seems to be nothing in them that will move them to stop, other than expiring.When we see powerful human beings willfully doing damage to other people or to the planet, this rage is our heart’s alarm; it is our very humanity protesting against unspeakable violence that we feel powerless to do anything about. Imagining a world without predators and bullies and malevolent people is a way to stay tethered to our sanity; a defense mechanism against complete emotional collapse. Of course, we don’t desire violence or wish catastrophe, but we understand our past enough to know that sometimes injustice and hatred are generational: bigotry experiences a Renaissance, has a brief prolific period, and then passes. It seems like we are in the middle of that kind of brutal rebirth right now, and we want it to end.Throughout the history of the planet, when the powerful have viciously assailed mankind, there have been good people whose stomachs have been turned and whose blood has boiled in response, people who loved and cared and healed and prayed and worked, and who knew they might have to wait for change to fully come, through young people who rejected such hatred wholesale.And that’s the pivot that needs to happen in our hearts when we feel that scalding anger at people who are presently evil: we look forward to what might be born on the horizon of history. We pour ourselves into the lives of young people, we work to change the hearts we can, we seek compromise and common ground with those who disagree with us, and we do everything in our power to prep the ground for the equality, diversity, and justice that will inevitably grow.Of course, I’d never wish physical harm on another human being or ever rejoice in anyone’s early demise, but I confess that in these days I take some solace in the reality that we are all temporary: that everything shifts, that all tyrants pass away, that all evil empires fall, that all hateful movements die out, that all monuments to inequity eventually crumble.I rest in the knowledge that the people here who seem singularly burdened to injure others will one day naturally cease to be. I don’t hope for that day, and I don’t hasten that day. I simply pray that when it does come, when the hateful people doing such unrestrained damage finally depart this place, that compassionate, kindhearted, loving people are born to occupy the space they leave.I pray for a new Renaissance of empathy for this place, and trust that it will come.No, I am not waiting for bad people to die; I’m doing all the good that I can while I live. 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

America is dying.I’m not referring to the systemic collapse of our Republic or the slow suffocation of Democracy here, though these are certainly not unlikely outcomes at this point.This is far deeper than the seats of power or a congressional alignment, more than the structural implosion of this nation. The greatest, most grievous failure of America in this moment isn’t legislative but moral.The soul of this place is dying in screams and silences.The brown-skinned screams rise from our collective home:The anguished cries of a young mother being violently torn from her children on their front lawn.The frantic pleas of a father of four dragged from his worksite by lawless masked mercenaries.The inconsolable sobs of a woman whose husband will never see his daughter grow up.The weary moans of devoted fathers, loving spouses, beloved uncles, and cherished nieces shackled in a stifling death camp.The screams rise from half a world away:The desperate, terrified wails of a Palestinian toddler left buried in the rubble of what seconds ago was the only home she’s ever known.The guttural howl of an Iranian father, holding the unrecognizable body of his teenage daughter.The unheeded shrieks of a young couple assassinated in front of their children. The tortured shouts of a Gazan family slowly being starved to death.This horrific noise is the soundtrack of waking nightmares; the raw-throated echoing of the vilest of history repeating. They are sounds that shake decent human beings to their core.But those screams are only half of this tragedy.Equally devastating is the white-skinned silence; the contagious moral laryngitis afflicting people of profound privilege who avert their eyes and cover their ears.It is the breathtaking quiet of human beings who have retreated into the cloistered places of temporary comfort and imagined safety; those who quickly scroll away from the videos because they do not want to hear the screams, because that would leave them culpable for their inaction and their stilled voices.White America, we need to lean into the screams of brown-skinned people, to invite them inside, to let them break our hearts and boil our blood, until the fury within us rises and erupts in a fierce and sustained roar that violently disrupts the inhumanity that will not stop unless we make it stop.White friends, what exactly are you waiting for?How much suffering do you need to see?What terrible sounds will finally awaken your voices?What line still needs to be crossed for you to declare it unacceptable?What good is it if you claim morality or conscience, if these result in you saying nothing while our neighbors are brutalized?How real is your professed faith if it yields no measurable opposition to the greatest violations of human life?How much is your patriotism worth if the disregard for the elemental liberties of this nation leaves you speechless?If ethnic cleansing and genocide do not stir your fury and your vocal cords, what is the point of you being here?Your silence won’t save you, anyway; it will only postpone your suffering as you abdicate the elemental parts of your humanity during the interim. That is a coward’s path and one I refuse to take.The only way we can endure as a nation is if we all find the courage to speak with clarity, if we allow ourselves to be heard here and now.White friends, the cost of using your voice is nothing compared to the price of your silence.Let your life say something before it’s too late.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

All over America, MAGA Republicans will stream into churches this Sunday.They will do so joyously.They will do so confidently.They will do so believing they are righteous.It will be another hollow procession of fervent disciples of a felon-predator who have again spent the past week applauding the abuse and degradation of the poorest and most vulnerable among us. They will proudly carry their Bibles, while evangelizing for a man, a party, and a movement that are antithetical to its contents regarding what it means to love people as God does.Without a hint of self-awareness, they will take their seats in front of a cross symbolizing sacrifice, after another seven days amplifying a greed that will drive millions of people further into illness, food scarcity, and despair. They will feign love for their neighbors, while breathlessly supporting a regime doing all it can to make sure those neighbors will experience poverty, have reduced access to education, and lives that will be far more painful and far shorter than they needed to be.They will try and pretend they give a damn about Jesus, while celebrating the relentless violent persecution of immigrants, refugees, and anyone with brown skin who their repugnant cult leader’s goon squad decides to round up from worksites, graduation ceremonies, and church services.They will have the God-mocking audacity to sing songs about a Creator who sets the captives free, even as they pump their chests and post social media taunts about concentration camps that will be a blazing, miserable final destination for human beings whose lives and stories they will never care to know.They will imagine themselves faithful soldiers in the Army of the Lord, while rejoicing in the protection of human traffickers and rapists, among whom is likely the man they claim is anointed by God to lead them.These are the hypocrites and pretenders Jesus warned about. They are the fraudulent, performative predators he spent his entire life and ministry rejecting.The only reason they should be entering a church at all is to fall to their knees in repentance, asking for forgiveness for so perverting Jesus’ love your neighbor message into something that dehumanizes the human beings in their path, something that only wounds and expels, something that is the very embodiment of evil.As a former pastor, I wish I could be in these buildings this Sunday, so I could look these people in the eyes and hold the compassionate, gentle, generous words of Jesus up to them like a mirror in a way their spiritual leaders won’t, because they, too, are morally compromised.I’d love to shove Jesus’ commands to love the least, to care for the most vulnerable, to welcome the stranger in their faces and watch them squirm and rationalize and desperately engage in theological gymnastics to try and avoid accountability for urinating on the loving, healing, helping, immigrant Christ.I wish I could confront them with the truth, that if Jesus were to show up in the flesh in their midst, they’d have him cast out for his woke theology, removed from their gatherings for daring to preach an empathy they now find detestable, and capriciously tossed into some prison for no other reason than the color of his skin or his nation of origin.Every decent human being, whether they claim faith or not, sees what a gross and empty Sunday parade these self-identified Christians are making into buildings where they will surround themselves with the trappings of goodness and faithfulness, all the while making life for so many outside the building a living hell.I don’t expect a single one of these MAGA acolytes to step into their churches and actually hear the words of Jesus in a way that softens their hearts, moves them to repentance, and sends them out into a nation they have done such irreparable harm to in order to bring any kind of healing or equity or restoration. This is mostly because they no longer have any need for Jesus.In fact, I’m really hoping Jesus doesn’t show up in their gatherings.He wouldn’t be safe.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’m just gonna come right out and say it: I’ve had it with people right now.OK, it’s probably not particularly healthy to have a grievance with an entire species, so let me narrow that down a bit…I’m angry with everyone who isn’t angry.I’m having a really hard time with the unbothered people, the “everything is gonna be fine” people, the people who are acting as though they are above those of us who are blowing gaskets, breaking down, and freaking out.You know who I’m talking about: those friends, family members, coworkers, classmates, and social media acquaintances who tone-police us for surveying the monumental destruction being inflicted upon our fragile Republic and its people and being livid. Those people.I’ve arrived at my breaking point with human beings around me who are still averting their eyes, avoiding the news, and anesthetizing themselves on a mind-numbing cocktail of wishful thinking, retail therapy, self-preservation, and American exceptionalism.I’ve reached the limit of my tolerance for people who have seemingly spent the past year poo-pooing hundreds of atrocities and illegalities, any one of which would be an alarm-tripping red flag for a nation sliding swiftly into fascism.And I’ve really had it with people who are still criticizing the emotionality of those of us who’ve been told for a decade that we’re overreacting, while we’ve watched every single supposedly impossible prediction come to pass.I don’t think laissez-faire wait-and-seers who are banking on a simple November midterm resurrection are particularly helpful right now.Look, I believe in being rational and level-headed whenever possible, in offering a measured response to most kinds of adversity, to being strategic and sober of mind in the face of many struggles.But right now, circumstances are such that we could use a lot more furious human beings. We need people who have seen, heard, and have had enough: enough injustice, enough lawlessness, enough dehumanization, and who aren’t afraid to be labeled too loud, too pissed off, and too passionate.There is a time and place for self-control, for tolerance, for listening and bearing with people, for breathing and being still. But there is also a time and place when the gravity of the moment calls for something fierce and unwieldy; a wildness of heart that isn’t interested in decorum or social norms. I suggest that now is such a time, and here is precisely the place.Authoritarianism has overtaken America.Our president is a sociopath.His Cabinet is sycophantic.His party is complicit.They are at war with the world.They are ignoring law and morality.They are building concentration camps.They are murdering protestors.They are silencing journalists.The media are bending the knee.This Congress is neutered.The Supreme Court is compromised.The checks and balances are disappearing.The systems are failing.People are being arrested for existing.People are being targeted for who they love.These are not hyperbolic rantings of overly emotional crepe-hangers; they are the clear-headed conclusions of those of us who are paying attention, who’ve read the files, who’ve waded into the minutiae of the legislation, and who don’t scroll away from things that turn our stomachs and break our hearts.I’m not advocating for an aimless, reckless assembly of panicked people running around like headless chickens, but some urgency and a little ferocity from a lot more people would be a good start. Ignorance is bliss until it’s deadly.If you’re already furious, fed up, and losing your filters and your f***s, celebrate that. We need a lot more fire and a lot less chill.Right now, it’s a sign of your humanity, of your sanity, and of your soul, to look around at it all and say, “I’ve had it… I’m furious.”Note: If you’ve had it and want to know how to productively and strategically wield your exasperation with other similarly pissed-off people, start by contacting your local Indivisible group, connecting with the ACLU, and partnering with Remove Coalition or Red, Wine, & Blue. You can also research progressive faith communities, nonprofits, and candidates, and ask them where they can use your help.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.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. 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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