The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Supposedly Non-Racist White People in the United States,You realize what’s happening right now, don’t you? You have to see it at this point, right?I mean, they’re not hiding it anymore.This repugnant, racist President, his white supremacist party, and the soulless bigots he’s polluted the highest Court of our nation with aren’t even trying to pretend this is anything else but the desperation of morally inverted human beings who realize time and progress are coming to swallow them up.They’ve read the writing on the wall ever since November of 2024. They’ve seen the changing demographics of this nation. They’ve witnessed the wild swings in the state and local elections away from them and their Draconian fever dreams. And they see the plummeting approval ratings of a deranged, lame duck President whose narcissism, recklessness, and incompetence are collapsing our economy, terrorizing vulnerable people, alienating our allies, and throwing the entire planet into chaos.These dying white dinosaurs see the asteroid of humanity’s evolution coming for them, and in a naked act of panicked self-preservation, they are firing off one final Hail Mary salvo to try and stave off political extinction. Republicans are furiously dismantling the provisions and protections of the Voting Rights Act for one reason: they assume that white voters will save them. They believe that if they can silence the voices and the votes of Black people in this country, they will be able to drag this nation back to Jim Crow segregation unabated. They are banking on the hypothesis that if they legislate and gerrymander historically racial minorities out of the electoral process, they’ll have no remaining obstacles to a pre-Civil-Rights-Movement United States. It turns out the alleged "greatness” MAGA has been pining for over the past ten years is a gated community of ignorant, phobic white people.The Republican Party is going all-in on the assumption that people who share their pigmentation also share their corroded hearts; that we will amen their repulsive aspirations and cosign their depraved delusions. And we’re going to have to be the ones to reclaim this nation for the disparate multitude it was always supposed to belong to. This existential crisis facing us is not a Black problem, or a Latino problem, or a brown-skinned immigrants problem. This is a decent-white-people-who-are-sick-to-their-f****n’-stomachs-of-white-racists, problem. The rights of people of color must be the hill we take and are willing to die on, lest our fragile, imperiled Republic dies instead.These unapologetically racist machinations and shameful civil rights regressions authored by our low-melanin brethren, as alarming as they are, are an invitation to the rest of us. We have a golden moment to declare our conscientious objections to their uncivil war on people of color, to forcefully and permanently bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice, and to send these sneering supremacists back to the hell that they came from once and for all.And this all must be done now. We cannot squander time navel-gazing, engaging in prolonged lamentations, or trying to predict how bad things will get. We need to throw ourselves into the trenches of local politics. We need to leverage our social circles, economic resources, and social media platforms to denounce white Christian nationalism. And perhaps, most importantly, we need to get into the faces of the white people in our orbits and let them know that these are the moments to declare who they truly are. We cannot profess to be anti-racist and be silent right now. We either need to find and raise our voices in opposition or admit that we really aren’t all that interested in equality, that our activism has been performative, that our convictions aren’t worth much to us.Because there will be costs to this work, white friends. We will face separations in our families, disruptions to our social circles, disconnections from our church friends, and relational turbulence we’ve never experienced. There will be financial repercussions, the loss of opportunities, and the dissolution of partnerships. We may face the emotional and perhaps even physical violence of people who look like us but bear no internal resemblance.We’re going to lose something as we confront the racists around us, but it’s a hell of a lot better than losing our Democracy or our souls.The Republican Party believes that other white people will save them. Instead, we must be the ones to defeat and destroy 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

Boy, being in a cult really rots your brain.Watching the Right assembling online with virtual torches and pitchforks, engaging in wild histrionics and performative pearl-clutching, while calling for the head of television host Jimmy Kimmel, one has to marvel at his rank-and-file’s steadfast ability to defy reality.It’s staggering when you compare the man they’re crusading against and the one they’re emotionally tethered to…Jimmy Kimmel isn’t responsible for the deaths of countless people.Donald Trump is.Jimmy Kimmel isn’t a court-adjudicated rapist.Donald Trump is.Jimmy Kimmel isn’t a 34-count felon.Donald Trump is.Jimmy Kimmel didn’t incite a violent insurrection at our nation’s Capitol in an effort to overturn a free and fair election, harm members of Congress, and prevent a peaceful transfer of power.Donald Trump did.Jimmy Kimmel’s name isn’t listed tens of thousands of times in the Epstein Files.Donald Trump’s is.Jimmy Kimmel doesn’t have dozens of credible sexual assault accusations.Donald Trump does.Jimmy Kimmel didn’t threaten an entire civilization with destruction.Donald Trump did.Jimmy Kimmel didn’t bomb a girl’s school in Iran.Donald Trump has.Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t partnered in multiple genocides.Donald Trump has.Jimmy Kimmel isn’t fighting to deport the children of migrants.Donald Trump is.Jimmy Kimmel isn’t trying to legislate Draconian Evangelical religion.Donald Trump is.Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t caused pregnant women to die in emergency rooms because their doctors could not save their lives.Donald Trump has.Jimmy Kimmel isn’t partnering with the NRA and gunmakers while doing nothing to protect high school kids from getting butchered in their hallways.Donald Trump is.Jimmy Kimmel isn’t causing Transgender people to move out of the country for their safety.Donald Trump is. Jimmy Kimmel never stood before the nation and said that immigrants were eating people’s pets.Donald Trump did.Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t called for the executions of U.S. Presidents and opposing politicians.Donald Trump has.Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t put 500 million dollars from stolen oil reserves into an offshore bank account.Donald Trump has.Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t compared himself to Jesus.Donald Trump has.Jimmy Kimmel isn’t dismantling our Department of Education.Donald Trump is. Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t alienated our nation’s greatest allies.Donald Trump has.Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t gone to war against the Free Press.Donald Trump has.Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t sent an army of masked thugs to terrorize people of color in their churches, businesses, streets, and homes.Donald Trump has.Jimmy Kimmel didn’t cancel USAID, already killing thousands of the most vulnerable on the planet.Donald Trump did. Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t emboldened racists to verbally and physically assault people of color on trains, in coffee shops, and in their own yards.Donald Trump has.Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t partnered with techbros and oligarchs to curate the media and gain access to Americans’ personal data.Donald Trump has.Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t consolidated our nation’s wealth into the hands of the wealthiest among us.Donald Trump has.Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t spent the last decade tearing apart every principle, system, and institution designed to make this nation safer, to care for our most vulnerable, and to protect every human being’s inalienable rights.Donald Trump has.Jimmy Kimmel will not be remembered among the most violent and destructive human beings in our planet’s history.Donald Trump will.So yeah, the mindless MAGA zombie horde can engage in feigned outrage and call for the head of Jimmy Kimmel as if he were some terrible scourge upon this nation, while carrying water for a vile, traitorous career criminal and serial predator who has complete contempt for them, the United States, and, honestly, everyone but himself.The rest of us, the people with a capacity for critical thinking and working empathy, the Christians who care about the teachings of Jesus, and those who truly love this land and its disparate people, know exactly who the true danger here is.And we stand with Jimmy Kimmel.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 getting contact insanity from proximity to this violent, kleptocratic Administration.There is no way for otherwise mentally well, emotionally stable human beings to exist in this kind of prolonged lunacy and extended predation without being internally altered, without losing some sense of normalcy, without developing a persistent PTSD that will likely never leave.It’s understandable. We are all sharing our home with an unhinged cadre of miserable doomsday cult squatters who will not rest until everyone around them is as nihilistic and devoid of joy as they are.The toxic cocktail of boundless hatred, prolific malfeasance, and breathtaking incompetence that they continually day drink from spills over into the lives of those of us who still wake up every morning just hoping to do our work, care for our families, help people, and enjoy human existence without having to contend with full-blown Armageddon.No event comes without chaos, no day arrives free from existential catastrophe, no consequential moment is not leveraged to divide. For the last ten years, everything has been a fraud, a grift, a con, or a weapon, manufactured and stewarded by a collection of broken people who’ve found affinity in their greed, narcissism, and refusal to do the work of self-examination.Combine this carefully curated chaos with incessant attacks on the media, dubious dissemination of information following emergencies, and never-clear investigatory procedures in their aftermath, and every single moment of crisis is made exponentially worse.This week has been no exception.Within nanoseconds of a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, hundreds of MAGA influencers, Right-Wing talk show hosts, and Republican politicians began saturation bombing social media with a single message:This is why we need Trump’s ballroom.Uh, what?Conservative influencers were still livestreaming from the site of an alleged assassination attempt on the President and Cabinet, in a monumental breach of what should be the absolute tightest of safety protocols—and the wave of propaganda and disinformation flooded our newsfeeds.Not gratitude for the incident ending without death.Not concerns for the safety and well-being of hundreds of people.Not efforts to bring clarity to the bedlam of yet another supposed targeting of a President.Such things would be the hallmarks of a collective not addled by cultic tribalism and possessing working empathy. They would have defined any other Administration in this nation’s history.In the wake of the WHCD, as in every other time of national unease, what we get from Trump, from his soulless surrogates, and his wish-they-were-bots-but-sadly-they’re-actual people, is nonsense and buffoonery.Instead of factual information, calm-headed discourse, and calls for unity, we get a coordinated virtual building campaign for another bloated, opulent, gold-plated monument to a cognitively-addled felon-rapist, who is rapidly losing his battle with time and gravity and wants to desecrate everything he can with his likeness before departing.Trump’s cultivated mass delusion has permanently damaged tens of millions of people around us who quite likely would have been reasonable right now if not for having developed Stockholm syndrome and becoming emotionally tethered to their greatest abuser. Their identities and destinies are now inextricably bound to his.And my friends, that leaves the rest of us; the sleep-deprived, heartbroken, rightfully furious human beings to try and hold onto our right minds while being immersed in the insane, the profane, and the cruel, by people who have nothing else to offer.And our individual and collective sanity is non-negotiable if we are to withstand this steady onslaught of chaos, be effective in reversing our political realities, and course correct from the greatest error in our nation’s history.Resist the pull of their nonsensical rage bait, do your best to avoid being distracted by their incendiary bombast, and do not be drawn into debate with people who have abandoned sense and benevolence.Find times of rest and clarity, taking refuge in stillness and solitude.Care for your physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional health. Create beautiful things, cultivate gratitude, and fight like hell to stay joyful.Immerse yourself in meaningful community with your like-hearted neighbors. Partner in the redemptive, neighbor-loving work happening where you are.And above all, refuse to let your mind descend into the spinning maelstrom of madness that has swallowed so many around us. We can’t afford to lose our heads or our souls right now.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 confess that I’m a little lost these days.I’ve become a restless, reluctant nomad moving through familiar places with a nagging internal dissonance.I am a lifelong American who is profoundly disoriented trying to navigate this nation now.I was born here and have spent most of my life here, and yet for a while now, I’ve begun to feel more and more like a stranger in my homeland.There are dozens, sometimes hundreds of moments in a given day when I look around, and I simply don’t recognize this place anymore. It all seems terrifyingly foreign.Waking up every morning and walking out into this version of my country is that bittersweet experience of expectantly visiting the town you grew up in as a child, feeling the rapid deflation as you note the changed landscape and strain to see the familiar places you used to know well and feel at home in.Yes, it’s still a version of the familiar, with quick glimpses here and there to momentarily ground and reconnect you, but so much seems missing and so much feels different that you begin to grieve the alterations that have taken place because of how much appears gone for good. You realize you miss the idea of home rather than the reality of it.I’ve found myself frantically searching for old familiar landmarks to try and ground myself again: family, neighborhood, community, church, nation—but these have all been renovated to the point of being almost completely obscured by the garish facades in their place; newly fashionable malevolence, bitterness, and cruelty.See, that’s the thing: it isn’t that the physical landscape has changed. There are so many people I do not recognize anymore; people whose lives I used to call home, people I once found easy affinity with, people who now make me feel newly orphaned.I’m unsettled and distanced in their presence; estranged from them because of what I’ve discovered about their hearts, what I’ve heard out of their mouths, what I am realizing about our new (or perhaps newly revealed) moral incompatibility.They are the America that I am most disheartened to bear witness to. They are the greatest source of my lostness. They are why I wander here.Maybe this was never the place I thought it was. That image is likely just the selective memory or the idealized version of it all as filtered through a younger, more naive, less aware, more optimistic version of myself. Still, the sense of loss is the same, the grief as crushing.Part of me wants to leave altogether, to go and make a new home somewhere else that might feel more aligned with this iteration of who I am, but that would feel like surrender; it would be admitting a defeat that I am still not yet ready to consent to. I still have dreams of what this place can be: not a mythical land born of ignorant nostalgia but a tangible incarnation of the best of its stated aspirations.Right now, the best thing I know to do is to keep my eyes open for the other restless, reluctant nomads; to look for those who, too, feel lost here but who are still stumbling through increasingly unfamiliar surroundings, trying to manifest quiet goodness in the middle of the loud, sickening march toward national greatness.I’ll keep seeking out those compassionate, generous, open-hearted sojourners who also no longer feel at home here, and together we will shepherd humanity through these days, and we will be rebuilders.We will make an America where compassion is our greatest calling.We’ll make an America where diversity is celebrated.We’ll make an America where religion isn’t wielded like a weapon.We’ll make an America where no one goes without.We’ll make an America that is big enough for everyone who wishes to call it home.We’ll make an America where no one has to go elsewhere to find refuge or respect.Fashioning the nation we could be out of the nation we are seems impossible, but I still feel it’s worth trying, because I know I am not alone in my disorientation. I am surrounded by similarly heartbroken human beings, who are also here in this thick, heavy darkness, passionately stumbling toward the light of what we might still be.And because of them, though I am an American who is lost in America, I am not yet ready to lose America.Where do you feel that sense of lostness I talk about? What helps you feel connected? What keeps you going? 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

Lately, I’ve been getting sick of bad news.More accurately, I’ve been getting sick from bad news.And not figuratively or metaphorically sick, either. I mean that it’s been making me physically ill: showing up in ever-present headaches, a permanently clenched jaw, an enduring knot in the pit of my stomach, and a continual fight-or-flight, full-body Cortisol tsunami.I imagine you understand some of these symptoms of information sickness. That’s largely been the story for most of us for the past 15 months (hell, more like the last ten years): feeling like the bad news is unending. And to some degree, this has been true, but have we also allowed ourselves to believe the mythology of our newsfeeds, internal editors, and worst-case scenario minds?A few days ago, I realized that I was doing something I’ve spent years warning people not to do. I’d fallen into the trap of negatively editorializing the information in front of me; of deciding whether it was bad or good (usually determining that it was the former), and letting that decision shape the story I told myself.Maybe you’ve been guilty of that lately, too: of putting a negative slant on the headlines in your head. It’s easy to do. We are a people who live inside a story, and we are the narrators of that story. The world moves, people do things, events take place, and we decide what all that means, and our emotions and perspective flow from them.This week, I thought of a piece of Christian Scripture from my pastor days. At this point in my life, I’ve recontextualized the Bible, and many passages no longer resonate in the same way they once did, but there are still ideas and phrases that can be incredibly meaningful, simply as concepts.In the New Testament, there is a section of the book of Romans, which is purported to be a letter written by a pastor named Paul to the Jesus followers in house churches in Rome during the first century. The writer is encouraging his audience to remember how important their presence and work were regarding the spreading of the Gospel (which actually means “good news”).He closes this portion of the letter by quoting an Old Testament prophet, writing, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news.” (10:15)Regardless of our theology or religious worldview, what a wonderful idea this is: a reminder to all of us to think about the news our feet bring to the places we travel every day, the people we cross paths with, and the stuff we post on social media. Take away the trending stories, the alarming updates, the disturbing realities, and we are still sentient human beings who have choices to make about how we spend our time, our resources, our energy. We still have freedom, decisions, and options in front of us.Without even needing to attach it to religion, there is a gospel (good news) according to you. What are you evangelizing? What are the headlines in your head? Is hopelessness trending there?We can easily begin believing the angry, fearful people are the majority; that their hateful hearts are humanity’s default, that everything has gone to hell; that all the news is breaking badly.If you feel that way, friend, stop it. This is a lie, and I think deep down, you know it.The good news-bringers are literally everywhere right now: showing compassion to strangers, doing small, unseen acts of decency, toiling humbly in anonymity, living generously toward people, loving counterintuitively.When we tell ourselves a story of everything is awful, all is lost, and we’re irreparably and permanently screwed, we’re doing a terrible injustice to the tens of millions of people who at any given moment are working to craft a more beautiful planet; people who are doing micro acts of kindness, standing up to bullies, opposing legislation, finding and using their voices, and showing up in the places of pain and injustice and need.There is glorious, heartwarming, defiantly human work being done all around you in this very moment, and if you could get yourself to see it, hope would be involuntary.No, we can’t avoid the bad news. We can’t fast-forward through the difficult things, we can’t sidestep the painful, and we can’t get around the suffering and the sadness in this life. What we can do is respond in such a way that we bring something with us into our daily journeys: we can bring kindness, courage, creativity, and consistency.I don’t want you to deny the sorrow is there, or to minimize the very real dangers, or to pretend many things aren’t in many ways quite awful. But I do want you to allow a dissenting opinion in, because it deserves to be heard. I want you to have a passionate rebuttal to the prophets of doom who forecast an irreversible course into the abyss, especially when their voices sound like your own.The world needs some good news now.Give it some.Be good news-bringers.May we have beautiful feet.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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Sometimes, in this life, you find yourself repenting for the sins of your past. Other times, you feel the need to repent for the sins of others’ present.I suppose I have a foot on each of these paths lately.I’ve spent a good portion of the past three decades pastoring in predominantly white churches along the East Coast of the United States. They ranged from tiny, unassuming wooden chapels to massive, gleaming megachurches; from hymn-and-robe traditionalism to modern rock show bombast. Although my theology has shifted substantially in the years since I first stepped into a pulpit or onto a platform, and I’ve long ago put local church ministry in my rearview mirror, I still possess a massive trove of treasures from those years. I was part of meaningful, creative work that I did with great care, I had the privilege of walking with people through the celebrations and devastations of life, and I did so while being held within communities filled with people who genuinely loved me—at least up until the point they didn’t or couldn’t. I’ve often said that organized religion and organized crime are frighteningly similar: when you’re on the inside, you’re warmly embraced and fiercely protected, but the moment you deviate from the party line, it’s concrete shoes and horse heads in the bed (or, maybe a condescending Facebook post lamenting your eventual miserable afterlife of weeping and teeth-gnashing).One of the things most people don’t tell you about pastoral ministry is how political a job it is; the number of people you end up trying to placate and please, the small compromises you end up making in a noble attempt to keep an always-tenuous peace among a (hopefully) diverse group, and the way you can easily become beholden to those you are entrusted to shepherd. All but the last of my churches I left voluntarily, and on good terms, and in that final instance, I had knowingly preached myself out of a job because I refused to make the concessions that I’d previously settled with. Still, I imagine at the time, even most of the congregants there would have told you they respected me and valued my voice. At the very least, I believed they and the tens of thousands of people in the communities I’d departed would have found commonality with me in the worth of every human being, the beauty of diversity, and the teachings of Jesus.That was, of course, until 2016, when hundreds of people in those churches slowly began changing, or maybe they simply began revealing who they truly were all along. Their rigid theological stances were now up for debate, their once-sharply defined ethical lines all softened, and the previously fixed moral goalposts began moving. Ever since, as a minister who genuinely hoped he’d helped people in my care expand their circles of their compassion, jettison toxic theology, and emulate the generous heart of Jesus, I’ve felt a creeping sense of failure.Social media often allows you to stay virtually connected to people long after you’re geographically or relationally tethered to them. You may not even realize you are still attached at all, until the almighty algorithm suddenly thrusts them in front of you, and you find yourself saying two things to yourself: one, I totally forgot about them, and two, what the hell happened to them?Every day for the last decade on social media, I’ve seen pastors I served alongside, selfless volunteers from my youth ministries, former students I ministered to who are now grown, and thousands of people from those congregations all fall into the mindless, joyless, death cult for a vile, belligerent serial predator. I’ve watched from a distance as they’ve violently crusaded against transgender people, spewed anti-immigrant vitriol, amplified baseless anti-Science propaganda, and inexplicably rejoiced in trauma to their neighbors.And even though I know that many of these people had been steeped for years in poisonous, rigid doctrine before I ever crossed paths with them, and that they walked through the doors of my churches carrying the crushing hidden burdens of the voices who spoke hatred into their hearts by their parents and pastors before they could even read—still, I’ve felt partly responsible:Was I not clear enough in my messaging?Did I pull too many punches because I was afraid of the turbulence?Was I too blinded by privilege, self-preservation, or hubris to notice the flimsy veneer of religion covering something rotten underneath?As their pastor, could I have done anything to keep them from throwing Jesus in the garbage and falling prostrate before a monstrous parasite and his miserable movement?These are impossible questions to answer, of course, just as the ones we’re asking as friends, spouses, partners, parents, children, and siblings are, of those we no longer recognize. I guess we’re all trying to figure out where everything went sideways. Maybe the reality of who the people we’ve loved have become, the ugliness they’ve embraced, the darkness of their hearts, and the damage they’ve shown themselves capable of was all so unthinkable that we couldn’t have prepared for or prevented it. Maybe they were always going to end up here, no matter what we said or did.But now that we’re here, as a former pastor who every single day sees the sprawling, predatory, hateful congregation so many I ministered to have willfully joined, I only feel a deep grief and the need to apologize to a hurting, heartbroken, and fractured world, for the loveless people from the churches I served who apparently missed the entire damn point.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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Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called Life.And getting through is a heartbreaking slog right now.Now, I can’t quantify it, but I’m a firm believer that things really went to hell here after Prince died. A decade ago, losing both him and David Bowie within a couple of months was a collective gut punch I don’t think we’ve ever fully recovered from. I know I haven’t.Over the past year, watching this fascist regime’s relentless assaults on his beloved Minneapolis, I’ve often thought to myself, “Prince wouldn’t have stood for this s**t.” I wonder how he would be using his platform right now, and pulling his community together, and singing truth to power. He damn sure wouldn’t be silent.A year before his passing, the Purple One released ‘Baltimore,’ a song lamenting the murders of Freddie Gray and Michael Brown by police, and the escalating violence and unrest in America, writing:Nobody got in nobody’s waySo eye guess u could sayIt was a good dayAt least a little better than the day in BaltimoreDoes anybody hear us pray?4 Michael Brown or Freddie Gray?While it’s been a beautiful thing seeing Bruce Springsteen, U2, Florence and the Machine, The Strokes, and so many others making art and launching tours to confront corrupt power, oppose violent bigotry, and call Americans to a higher level, Prince would have hit different. He always did. I had the good fortune of seeing Prince close to a dozen times. These were, for me, spiritual experiences in the truest sense of the word: joy, liberation, unity, love, euphoria. It was baptism in blistering guitar, heavenly choirs of strangers, holy ground as a dance floor. As he sang, Strangely beautiful, beautiful strange.The first time I saw Prince at Philadelphia’s Tower Theater, I can remember standing wedged inside a sweaty, pulsing, kaleidoscopic mass of humanity, thinking: “These are my people!” I’d found my place. Among a myriad of gifts, this was the solitary magic of Prince. He brought completely disparate groups of people together and made them feel they fit. He transcended musical genres, broke through color lines, and challenged gender roles. He boldly declared the dance floor big enough for all of us. And in that free and joyful place, we all danced.When you were at a Prince show, you belonged. You were the right color, the right shape, the right religion, the right you. And in that space, you felt at home in your own skin and connected to those around you in ways that defy explanation. As much as anything right now, America could use those joyous nightly reminders of how many good people are still here and what we can still do together.Prince gave me much more than hundreds of songs that altered my path and lifted my spirits.He showed me that masculinity and femininity could inhabit the same space and be embodied in people simultaneously.He made me realize that I could love God while being a complete contradiction. He showed me that spirituality and sexuality weren’t divergent endeavors, but equally beautiful experiences of the Divine.He taught me that friends don’t let friends clap on the one and three.He showed me that humanity’s differences are where the glorious stuff is.And he showed me that sometimes all you need is a funky beat and some friends who set you free.Ten years after his passing, Prince’s artistic absence is palpable. As a singer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, producer, and dancer, he will forever be without peer; an artistic force of nature, the likes of which we had never seen, and will never see again. The talent, creativity, passion, and light that he left this planet with cannot be measured.Prince gave me more joy than I can properly express. His music provided me with a place that felt like mine, but never made me feel alone. His shows gave me an occasional three-hour experience of Heaven coming down. As he sang in Uptown: “Black, White, Puerto Rican, everybody just a freakin’...good times were rollin’.” I miss standing in that space; that one where the world could sing one beautiful song together. Yeah, the threats we’re facing are more complicated than a pop song, and no, life isn’t like a Prince concert, though maybe it should be. There is something defiantly subversive about collective joy. Prince reminded us that we need to fight hatred, but we can’t stop dancing, either.To all my fellow freaks who are grieving the place we call home and feeling devoid of light; to all the misfits, outcasts, and weirdos out there who find solidarity in their oddness and who want to make sure everybody gets to join the party:May all your berets be raspberry.May all your corvettes be red.May all your rain be purple.And if De-elevator tries to bring you down,go crazy, punch a higher floor.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

JD Vance continues his asinine, nonsensical crusade against Pope Leo for the Pontiff’s opposition to Trump’s wasteful war in Iran, the barbarism of ICE, and the continual weaponizing of Christianity by this Administration.Vance actually had the stratospheric gall to say with a straight face that the Pope “should stick to issues of morality.”This is an unintentional confession by the Vice President that shows just how useless his religion is, how oblivious he is to the teachings of Jesus, and how little morality matters to him.Now, let’s set aside the fact that Vance spends his waking days emotional pleasuring, genuflecting before, and joyfully doing the bidding of a man he himself not long ago compared to Hitler: a court-adjudicated rapist and 34-count felon indicted several times for high crimes; a man whose racism, misogyny, and contempt for humanity are boundless. The theological gymnastics he needs to do, and the self-delusion required to reconcile his subservience to Trump with his profession of faith, aren’t things we have time to unpack right now.I’m not sure exactly what moral issues he believes the Pope should keep himself to; exactly what specific lane he’s suggesting he stay in, but the Vice President seems to believe there’s a whole lot that doesn’t make the cut.To Vance:The intentional bombing of school children isn’t a moral issue.Fully partnering in a genocide isn’t a moral issue.Destroying one of the world’s oldest cultures to distract from a single serial predator’s sexual crimes isn’t a moral issue.Dragging the entire planet into the existential chaos of a deadly, unprovoked, unnecessary war isn’t a moral issue.But that’s not all…The list of what lies outside the bounds of the Vice President’s morality is expansive and ever-growing:- the violent invasion of foreign countries for oil, real estate, and the benefit of billionaires.- the cutting of power to an entire country in an effort to strong-arm them into submission by starving their people.- the deployment of masked, Gestapo-esque thugs, ravaging the streets and preying upon people with brown skin.- the beating, kidnapping, imprisonment, and deportation of people without due process or just cause.- the wiping out of billions of dollars in aid for the hungry, the sick, the disabled, the vulnerable.Which all begs the questions: Just what the hell is JD Vance’s working morality, anyway? How exactly does that Catholicism he never shuts up about show up in his life, his choices, his work?What did he think Jesus was actually doing 2,000 years ago?Any professed Christian with even a mustard seed of integrity understands what the Pope understands: if our personal faith convictions don’t compel us to feed the hungry, care for the poor, defend the vulnerable, confront racism, oppose bloodshed, and stand up to corrupt power—they’re crap.Jesus spent his life and ministry showing his followers that everything was spiritual; that the greatest commandment to love one’s neighbor meant that nothing was off the table. This means that healthcare, education, war, the environment, human rights, body autonomy, and food scarcity are precisely the places where our personal morality needs to show up, because people’s health and safety and survival are moral issues. Vance, as well as Franklin Graham, Paula White, Sean Hannity, and the sprawling cadre of Christian cosplayers who clutch their pearls at the Pope supposedly meddling in politics, don’t see the irony of engaging in these performative lamentations while dragging the U.S. into a full-blown white Christian Nationalist Theocracy.They have no issue presiding over this twisted shotgun wedding between Church and State, legislating their perverted, supremacist theology for the rest of us, and brutalizing the poor, sick, foreign, and vulnerable in the name of a Jesus they frankly don’t give a s**t about.JD Vance doesn’t want the Pope to stick to moral issues; he wants the Pope to stop reminding the world that JD Vance and his party have no morality to speak of, no working theology of benevolence, no desire whatsoever to love their neighbors.They want a Christianity without Jesus, so they can destroy everything he spent his life saving.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: Content references sexual assault and may be triggering to survivors.There are days when you come upon something that shakes you to your core, a reality that is so antithetical to humanity, so sickening in its perversion, that you feel your guts twisting around themselves, your face heating, your blood pressure skyrocketing.I’m still not sure how to process this, but I’m trying, because it’s something that, as a man, I know has to be reckoned with.CNN has exposed the existence of what they describe as a massive online “rape academy”, where men from around the world gather on group chats and message boards to encourage and celebrate the drugging, recording, and sexual assault of their wives and partners for the pleasure of other similarly depraved men.They describe a sprawling virtual horror scape filled with husbands, partners, fiancés, and boyfriends violating the bodies, the trust, and the privacy of the women they share a home, a family, and a bed with.These sites sit under the ghastly umbrella of what is termed “sleep content”, featuring the abuse of sleeping or medically-incapacitated women, with hundreds of thousands of posts dedicated to the procurement and administering of drugs enabling these unthinkable acts. Just one of the websites, which draws primarily from an American audience, received 62 million views in a single month this year alone. That kind of widespread degeneracy is almost unfathomable, but maybe that’s because I’m a man. As unimaginably repugnant as the reality of this curated collective sickness is, I have a feeling it’s probably not shocking to most of the women who’ve read about it this week. They likely aren’t all that surprised. For decades, the women in my life and those I’ve met doing this work have shared the ever-present fear that comes from realizing you are always a potential target of violence, always on alert, always within arm’s reach of harm, always in the company of danger.They know they aren’t safe when they jog on greenways. They aren’t safe when they’re walking to their cars at night. They aren’t safe at on-campus parties.They aren’t safe when grabbing a drink with co-workers. They aren’t safe while they’re working out.They aren’t safe when on vacation.As a man, I can’t fathom the way such realities shape your worldview, renovate your identity, alter your behavior, and hover like a dark cloud in the background operating system of your mind.But to realize that you may not even be safe when you’re in bed, asleep with a man you’ve built a life with, shared your heart with, revealed your dreams to, had children with; someone you’ve walked through illness and joy and grief alongside—that must be an atomic bomb to the psyche. The emotional devastation of such a revelation seems irreparable. And as enormous as the crimes CNN has uncovered are, they have even wider implications, as it isn’t only these women who are impacted by this grotesque corner of the manosphere.It is the middle school girls in the classrooms where these monstrous men teach. It’s the young women pulled over in late-night traffic stops by the officers who frequent these websites after work. It’s the recent college graduate whose new boss spends his free time watching the violation of strangers’ wives. It’s the daughters being raised by fathers who see women as less-than human, who find pleasure in their degradation. It is the boys and young men whose father figures, mentors, coaches, teachers, and idols have such disregard for women that they see violence against them as entertainment content.Where do we even begin to dismantle such accepted brutality and confront this male-pattern inhumanity? I confess I’m not quite sure. What I do know is that women don’t need to answer this question; men do, all of us: the monsters who haunt the blackest spaces of the dark web, the internally broken men who are capable of exploiting and injuring their loved ones, the guys who share cubicles, locker rooms, hedgerows, and family gatherings with them, whether they know it or not.In fact, fixing this collective moral male cancer is firmly on the shoulders of the “not all men” men, who swear they abhor these “rape academies,” and everything they uncover about us as a species. The brothers, sons, fathers, grandfathers, boyfriends, fiancés, and husbands on this planet who truly aspire to be men of decency, of conscience, of morality, are going to need to become the loudest advocates for the women we share this space and time with. We who tell ourselves we’re the good guys are going to need to get in the faces of the men in our orbits and let them know where we stand, what we will not accept, and how unwelcome the dehumanization of women is; in tossed off comments, in casual jokes, in perverted theology, in misogynistic policy, and in violence of any kind.The battle for the soul and the collective conscience of men isn’t going to be won by women, as they shouldn’t need to convince anyone of their inherent worth and beauty. That simply is.This war has to be won by men who are sick to their stomachs by what we’ve become, and who refuse to let any other man off the hook for the shared mess we’ve made here, whether in our actions or inactions, our words or our silences. Women deserve to be safe in parks and schools and gyms and nightclubs, and definitely in their homes and their beds.That day may eventually come, though sadly, it will not be soon.Until then, women are right to choose the bear. 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 keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” — Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride,The first Christians didn’t call themselves Christians.It wasn’t some congratulatory self-identifier as it is today; a way of loudly trumpeting one’s own supposed goodness, quickly slapped on social media bios, bumper stickers, and t-shirts without forethought, personal cost, or empirical evidence. It wasn’t about a place you visited for an hour on Sunday before Cracker Barrel, either.The term Christian was originally a designation of the community of people following Jesus, by those outside of it after his death. It was quite likely a slur; a scarlet letter attached to a marginalized group who’d traded comfortable alignment with Caesar for dangerous devotion to a compassionate itinerant Hebrew street preacher from Nazareth.In the formidable Roman Empire in which it was born, Jesus’ movement was fully countercultural; shunning its power and material wealth, breaking its barriers between the important and the inconsequential, fighting the stereotypes of the in and the out. The people of Jesus were the table-setters, the wound-menders, and the wall-breakers.These “little Christs,” as they were called, were derided by outsiders because the expansive, diverse, interdependent community they were creating stood in such opposition to Rome’s singular, top-heavy, trickle-down might, and their generous presence created turbulence there.Being called a Christian then meant ridicule, threat, and oppression from the Government and the religious leaders. It wasn’t a cheap decal people adorned themselves with to declare their own righteousness; it was applied to them by powerful people who despised them.Trump Christians wouldn’t be called Christians by these people; they would be called Romans, and those following Jesus then wouldn’t recognize people supporting this President now as their spiritual descendants.There would be no bloodline to trace, no affinities to note, no visible family resemblance.Christians then destroyed social barriers between people; they didn’t fortify them.Christians then, welcomed the marginalized and vulnerable; they didn’t harass them at school or in hospital rooms or on street corners.Christians then healed the sick and fed the hungry and clothed the naked; they didn’t resent them, malign their character, or leave them to die.Christians then pushed back against the corrupt power hoarding wealth; they didn’t partner with it.Christians then loved their disparate neighbors as themselves; they didn’t wall them off and lock them in cages and send them away.People aligned with a Jesus who said “Let the children come to me and do not hinder them”, would have been fully sickened seeing families separated, children ravaged by genocide, students being murdered in their schoolsPeople emulating to a Jesus who said, “You cannot serve both God and money”—wouldn’t be overlooking rape, corruption, and bigotry just to pad their 401ks or get a few tax breaks.People synonymous with a Jesus who fed a hillside multitude, not because they were right or saved or moral, but because they were hungry, wouldn’t recognize a “pull yourself by your own bootstraps” callousness toward those in need.People associated with a Jesus who touched lepers and healed the sick wouldn’t be able to comprehend professed believers who penalized people for preexisting conditions, or forced people to go bankrupt to pay their medical bills, or made staying alive a financial death sentence.Most of all, people connected to Jesus weren’t tripping over themselves to publicly claim their Christlikeness. Other people decided that.Religious people currently supporting this President can label themselves any way they want.They can imagine themselves sanctified while perpetuating something that far more resembles Caesar of Rome than Jesus of Nazareth.They can try and retrofit Jesus’ Christianity to the bloated, self-aggrandizing, malevolent Empire they’re currently wallowing in.They can try and bastardize Jesus’ expansive “For God so loved the world“ purpose statement, into a walled-off, gated white community “America First” rally slogan.They can even preach the angry gospel of white nationalism and contempt for outsiders, and call themselves Christian while doing so.But no one in the time of Jesus would be calling them Christian.Not the Romans.Not the Christ followers.Most of all, not Jesus.He said, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” John 13:35Outside of the narrowest segment of straight, white, Republican Americans, MAGA faithful have no love to offer.The first Christians were labeled Christians because they emulated Christ, in all his compassionate, kind, loving, healing, welcoming, border-breaching, barrier-busting goodness.Conservative Evangelicals emulate someone antithetical to all of these things.Technically speaking, of course, given the origins of the word, maybe none of us should claim to be Christian and just see if people can reverse engineer our beliefs by our actions, but if we’re going to, we should at least seek some kind of spiritual synergy between our lives and the life of Jesus revealed in the Gospels.MAGA believers may be self-identified Christians, but from the outside, the title is fraudulent.They aren’t “Little Christs.”They aren’t “followers of the Way.”They aren’t even Evangelicals, as they have no good news to bring for the poor, imprisoned, and vulnerable.They aren’t peacemakers.They aren’t caregivers.They aren’t healers.They are simply “Little Trumps”: reflecting his heartlessness, his cruelty, his self-reverential narcissism.In that God of arrogance and greed and malice, they truly trust.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. 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This week, Donald Trump committed blasphememe.He reposted an AI-slop, pseudo-Baroque, Jesus-coded conservative fever-dream fresco of himself in a flowing red and white robe, his glowing hand resting over the forehead of a stricken male, while flanked by a series of awestruck, reverent figures, each one whiter than the other. A rockets’ red glare hodgepodge of cheesy, street corner souvenir shop American iconography (including some bizarre video-game, science-fiction alien army) sits above Trump, like a radiant crown of divine approval.As always, the failing, flailing president thought it would be a much-needed easy win: something he could impulsively lob into the ether without consequence; something to fully own the Libs and titillate his cultic devotees.Things didn’t go as he planned.In a week where Trump was tripling down on his ill-conceived attacks on Pope Leo for the Pontiff’s criticisms of the illegal and immoral war in Iran (and his annoying habit of quoting Jesus), this self-aggrandizing bit of messiah porn proved too much, even for many of Trump’s sycophantic disciples. Members of the clergy, Republican politicians, Conservative talk-show hosts, MAGA influencers, and a larger-than-normal portion of his historically obedient rank-and-file voiced their displeasure at such unabashed heresy. Things got so bad that in what should have been another curated self-serving photo op for Trump in front of the White House, he ended up facing reporters’ questions about the meme. Clearly rattled by the pushback, the lame-duck wanna-be despot responded by suggesting that he thought the image was of him as a doctor healing a man, and then invoked the Red Cross… for some reason.Outside of the most cultic of his supporters, nobody was buying it.The Internet, which once again remains undefeated, responded with an unrelenting tsunami of ridicule, the likes of which we haven’t seen… well, since No King’s Day. Over the past twenty-four hours, my social media feed has been filled with gut-busting mockery of Trump’s delusional propaganda and his flimsy attempts to cover his own assets when he failed to read the room. The sarcasm has been thick; the skewering, merciless; the satire, scathing. It’s been cathartic to joy-scroll through and laugh mightily at Trump’s expense, but more than that, the jokes reveal how close this aspiring fascist regime is to crumbling, while reminding us of the subversive power of laughter.Authoritarians are, at their core, narcissists, and all narcissists crave adoration. Reverence is their lifeblood, accolades the air they breathe. Outwardly overconfident but internally fragile, more than having their names on currency, grand ballrooms, or opulent public monuments, they subsist on the praise and flattery of others. Trump may be the most miserable, needy, and delicate of history’s recent tyrants, and finding himself in the crosshairs of pubic scorn undoubtedly rattles him. He so desires the accolades of strangers that when he is instead met with derision, he falls apart, unable to relate to human beings who are not genuflecting before him. Ridicule is his kryptonite.This is the path forward. Yes, we will need to continue to organize politically, to form broad coalitions of opposition, to wield our financial influence. We will need to marshal our collective power in securing free elections in the Fall, protect our vulnerable neighbors, condemn unjust wars, and resist civil and human rights rollbacks. We need to do the difficult, costly, exhausting, and painful work of resisting this very real threat to our Republic.But we can’t forget that it is our joy that makes us different.Our ability to laugh at this man and his movement isn’t just a defense mechanism staving off hopelessness in a dire situation; it is a sure and steadfast declaration that we will not kiss the ring, we do not comply, and we refuse to become as deeply unhappy as those who stand opposite us.Respect, awe, and blind worship are the food of the Narcissist-In-Chief, and together, we will starve him.My friends, keep laughing, keep mocking, keep ridiculing, and stay joyful.There is a power there that cannot be defeated.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

The Trump Administration and its MAGA disciples are at war with the Pope. Add him to their ever-growing enemies list, comprised of clergy, politicians, military personnel, journalists, athletes, musicians, and actors who dare not bend the knee to their Dear Leader; people who have the audacity to oppose this regime’s wasteful violence.In his Palm Sunday address in St. Peter’s Square, just a week before Easter, Pope Leo harshly criticized the war in Iran, saying, “(Jesus) does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them…. Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.” And in response, rather than choosing introspection, reflection, prayer, or repentance, they have chosen violent opposition; criticizing, condemning, and slandering him for his calls for people of faith to be people of peace.But it’s critical to be clear on what is happening here: these Conservative Christians don’t despise Pope Leo, at least not primarily. They don’t hate him as much as they hate his Jesus.They are sickened by the “Love your neighbor as yourself” Jesus, who has made him a champion of the poor and the sick.They spit in the face of the “blessed are the peacemakers” Jesus, who has compelled him to call for the abolition of the death penalty.They seethe with anger toward the “care for the least of these” Jesus, who moved him to previously confront JD Vance’s ridiculous position that in the New Testament, love is hierarchical based on geography.As with Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, the Reverend William Barber, and Pope Francis before Leo, when it comes to spiritual leaders, there is simply nothing that triggers MAGA Christians quite like the teachings of Jesus. Their perverted theology of exclusion dictates that they must reject anyone who represents a barrier to the theocratic fever dreams they have for this nation.Jesus’ kindness, his compassion, his mercy, and his selflessness all fly in the face of the predatory bully pulpit they are constructing at the Capitol. A Jesus who feeds the hungry, binds up the bleeding, calls out predatory power, condemns wealth, and welcomes the stranger all actively confront the religion of compulsion found in Project 2025, which has proven during Trump’s second term to be their true sacred text.Professional traitor, serial grifter, and loyal Trump henchman Steve Bannon has called Leo the “worst pick for MAGA Catholics,” declaring him the “anti-Trump pope.”If he’s the anti-Trump pope, that means he is a pro-Jesus pope—and that is the last thing this Christian cosplay ensemble needs right now.There is no place in their cruel congregation for an empathy that seeks to walk inside the shoes of another, no room for a soft heart toward those crushed by poverty and sickness, a zero-tolerance policy regarding the outsider or the foreigner seeking refuge.When the Pope declared, “This is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, ​whom no one can use to justify war,” — this was itself a declaration of war in the hearts of those who desperately need a Jesus-less Christianity.So, Trump and his surrogates, disciples, and sycophants are now unleashing all manner of vitriol toward Pope Leo, but it isn’t the big story. The bigger story is that MAGA Christianity has no desire to acknowledge, embody, or align with the teachings of Jesus. As long as anyone who claims the Christian faith, whether clergy or lay leader or pew-sitter, strives to embody the lavish love of Jesus of Nazareth, they will be the enemy of the Religious Right.And the irony of all of this is that Christ’s teachings in the Gospels: of loving neighbor, of not returning violence for violence, of sharing abundance so that all can be fed, of looking after the vulnerable and the endangered, do not find such violent opposition from any other group of people on the planet.Agnostics, Jews, Muslims, Atheists, Buddhists, Humanists, Wiccans, Hindus, Unitarians, and people of any other worldview can find some shared ground in those aspirations. They may not be deists or theists, or they may have an entirely different religious tradition as their pathway, and still feel some affinity in the Sermon on the Mount’s call to love their neighbor.The only people who fully reject Jesus’ wall-demolishing compassion, his abhorrence of war, his sacrificial love, and his open-handed generosity outright are MAGA Christians. They are the sole demographic on the planet who appear violently allergic to his life and work.So, as you watch the Right openly weeping, gnashing their teeth, and rending their garments at Pope Leo, remember that they don’t hate the messengers half as much as they hate the one who sent them.The compassionate, generous, inclusive Jesus of the Gospels is the one they are working so hard to eradicate.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

The words Walter Reed showed up on my timeline over the weekend. I confess that my heart fluttered, my spirit quickened, and I pulled out our corkscrew and put it on the counter, just in case.A few hours later… false alarm. Party postponed.Humanity, still hostage. Unfettered lunatic, still at the wheel.Annihilation, still in play.Hellscape, still fully ablaze.While I would never wish anyone harm, I will rejoice the day he leaves the planet.I feel no shame in saying this.It would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise.And I will be far from alone in my elation.When he departs this mortal sphere, it will be an occasion of global jubilation, not unlike the passing of any of history’s previous monsters.On that day, there will be a collective exhale that we haven’t experienced since the end of the Second World War.Outside of all but a small, brainwashed faction of the population’s most cultic, human beings around the world, will break out in spontaneous celebration at the subtraction of a presence that has done incalculable damage to the course of humanity. On that day, the messiah of the miserable will no longer be able to generate new nightmares for the rest of us. We will finally be freed from his nonsensical ramblings. He will be unable to pervert the truth, or bastardize the office, or stoke division, or murder the English language.But I’m not foolish enough to believe that this will be the end of the nightmare. His enablers will remain; those opportunistic, bottom-feeding hate-mongers, soul-auctioning political traitors, and armageddon-welcoming religious zealots will still all be here, rushing to fill the power chasm he will leave behind. They will devour one another trying to occupy the throne once it is empty.And not only them, but the legion of his civilian foot soldiers, who carried him upon their shoulders.These past 10 years have done irreparable harm to the sovereignty of our nation, to our systems of governance, to the relational connections between us, to the collective health of the planet.But he hasn't done this. The people we share this country with have done it using him as their weapon of choice. Our family members. Our friends. Our co-workers. Our neighbors. His departure 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 fraudulent, 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 illicit 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 suffering he has spearheaded, would do nothing to conceal the heart maladies 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 has made his exit, 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, to protect and serve us.These people and the atrocities they co-authored, sadly, will all long outlive him.He has merely been the symptom. The cruelty in the heart of his supporters is the sickness.Even when he’s gone, they’ll still be here.So, any celebration will be short-lived.We’ll have to figure out how to overcome the hatred that made him.Then, we’ll really be able to rejoice.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

If you voted for Donald Trump, you owe America’s children an apology.You owe them an apology for making them grow up with a hateful, incompetent, petulant, predatory monster as their President.For placing their safety in the hands of an impulsive toddler who trolls world leaders with nuclear annihilation and wields the military like a petrified coward.For unleashing the fierce tide of bigotry they have to see in their classrooms, hallways, ball fields, and neighborhoods, because the man you chose has repeatedly practiced, encouraged, and legislated it.You owe our daughters an apology for excusing his reprehensible words about women and his heinous crimes against them; for ignoring the evidence of his inhumanity, for placing a man with such clear disregard for women at the highest level of leadership in the country they call home.You owe our sons an apology for propping up someone with a lifetime resume of filth and misogyny, and asking them to look up to that man as a leader; for rewarding the very sexist, ignorant, repugnant behavior decent parents implore their sons never to engage in or abide in those around him.You’ve let this nation’s children down by thrusting them into an America that is far less secure, less compassionate, less decent, more fractured, and more violent than it was when he arrived, and because that truth alters children immersed in it.You owe an apology to every child who has to spend their formative years in an America that is defined by:fear of the other,an epidemic of cruelty,a poverty of decency,a deadly allergy to facts,a Christianity of coercion and malice,and a defiant resistance to diversity.You owe an apology to terrified Latino children, who’ve watched their parents bludgeoned and bloodied by thugs, for no other reason than the color of their skin.You owe an apology to children who will have to attend underfunded schools with empty bellies, because your messiah of misery is without empathy.You owe an apology to queer children, Muslim children, black children, and disabled children, whose lives have been made more turbulent and painful than they have to be, because their president lacks decency.You owe an apology to children who will be fearful and feel less-than because of the color of their skin, or their place of birth, or their sense of self, or the faith of their family.And you owe an apology to the world’s children:To those in Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, Lebanon, Venezuela, and Cuba, whose childhoods, homelands, families, and bodies have been disfigured and destroyed by the mindless cruelty of the man you chose to lead.To children whose chances for a peaceful existence are threatened by one horrible narcissist whom you gave carte blanche to do whatever his poisoned heart desired.My children.Your children.The children of this country and of the planet.They all have lost because you were irresponsible with one of the greatest responsibilities you’ve ever had in their lifetime, and now they have to live with the terrible fallout—and you owe them all an apology.I’m well aware of what your likely response to all this will be. I don’t imagine an apology will be forthcoming, so I’ll apologize to them on your behalf.Then, I’ll spend every day living that apology.I’ll remind my children, your children, and all children, that there are lots of adults who still believe that people are inherently valuable and stunningly beautiful; that not all adults fear brown people and gay people and foreigners and immigrants.I’ll remind them that there are still people committed to the truth and to equality, and the richness found in diversity.I’ll do my best to make them feel safe and hopeful here, even on the days that I don’t.I’ll even teach them to forgive people who fail and hurt them, because I know how difficult that is right now.And I’ll remind them that even when bad people are rewarded, doing the right thing is still the thing most worth doing.I’ll teach them that when hatred seems the most treasured currency, love is still worth more than gold.I’m just sorry that they have to live with or die because of someone who never deserved the lofty throne you handed him.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Hey, friends, this message isn’t for everyone. It’s not for people who are okay.If you’re perfectly fine, you can skip this.If you’re emotionally regulated, mentally stable, and physically well-rested, go ahead and opt out. Gold star today!If your nervous system isn’t all sorts of jacked up, your sleep isn’t utter trash, your breathing isn’t short and shallow, and your faith in humanity isn’t hanging by the thinnest of threads, please feel free to navigate away and enjoy the rest of the day. I’ll give you a second to see yourself out…… … Alright, if you’re still here, I’m assuming you’re in some state of profound not-okayness: that the unrelenting barrage of Constitutional crises, perpetually breaking bad news, and what-the-hell-is-next social media nightmare fuel feed has left you reeling and rudderless.Whew, thank God you’re here! I’m glad to know I’m not the only one noticing a sense of dread buzzing in the background operating system of their daily routine, contending with a thick brain fog that now makes simple tasks Herculean, and wondering how I’m supposed to go on with normal life when we’re rapidly sliding into a fascist abyss that most of the people around me seem oblivious to.And honestly, that helps.Sometimes, when we’re not okay, the thing we need most is to know that someone else isn’t okay either; that we are not alone in the despair. That sorrowful solidarity is medicinal. We should normalize radical not-okayness today.There are a billion books, think pieces, video tutorials, and news stories providing proven strategies for maintaining emotional, mental, physical, and relational health in difficult times: hydrating, exercise, nutrition, meditation, journaling, prayer, volunteering, play, and community, to name a few. We should be taking advantage of every tool at our disposal to keep ourselves from sinking beneath the weight of the existential tsunami we’re currently being bludgeoned by.But, we also need to realize that even the best self-care recipe, workout regime, or spiritual practice isn’t foolproof in days like these. We aren’t equipped for this kind of sustained trauma, no matter how competent or well-read we are. Regardless of our work ethic or education, our systems are not built to be in perpetual fight-or-flight urgency. We cannot survive uninterrupted chaos forever, as high-functioning, emotionally mature, or mindful as we might be.There is no manual for this s**t.Not being okay doesn’t mean your faith isn’t strong enough. It doesn’t mean your attitude isn’t positive enough.It doesn’t mean you’re overly negative or weak or emotional.All being not okay right now means is that you’re passing the human test; that you’re a feeling, thinking, self-aware being who refuses to pretend they don’t see that the world is on fire, or to maintain the facade that they are somehow unaffected by that fact.The last thing we need right now is to waste time and energy trying to convince ourselves or anyone else that it’s business as usual inside our heads. Last week, I caught myself lying to a neighbor in the grocery store. We noticed one another in adjoining checkout lines, and he asked me how I was, and I smiled and said, “I’m doing well.”Doing well? I thought to myself, still smiling. You are so full of it. You’re a few thousand miles from well.When I asked my friend the same question, he too smiled and said, “I’m Good.” I wondered if he wasn’t lying, too. I hoped he was.Of course, it would have been more than a little awkward for the clerks and other shoppers if two grown men unpacked their grievances and inventoried their outrage there in the express line. That kind of emotional purging is not appropriate everywhere. But, in general, we’ve all gotten used to self-censorship when it comes to acknowledging our burdens, and that isn’t helping anyone. It doesn’t make us more effective or more capable; it just makes us less honest.Today, release yourself from the expectation of holding it together, give yourself permission to crash out, stop apologizing for your rougher-than-usual edges, and let yourself off the hook for dropping some balls.It’s not you, it’s what you’re going through.It’s good to be not okay with genocide or authoritarianism or inhumanity or war, especially when far too many seem okay with such things.To the burnt-out, pissed-off, brokenhearted, unrested, and unwell out there, welcome.Let’s be not okay together. That’s how we will make it okay.If you’re not okay, let me know why 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

This Easter, the MAGA God lovers will be everywhere.Your social media feed, your street, and perhaps even your dinner table may be filled with people who loudly claim adoration for both Jesus Christ and this President. Their profiles will be adorned with effusive soliloquies about their steadfast faith.They will share memes proudly declaring that Jesus is Risen.They will publicly pledge their fierce and undying love for God.And they will be lying… at least, according to Jesus.In the Gospel of Matthew, he tells a crowd of his students and strangers a parable about the coming judgement of God, in which the imagined righteous people will be split into two groups. One will have eternal and joyful fellowship with him, the other will be forever separated and suffering.And the evaluation will have nothing to do with a magic, momentary prayer they uttered, or the money they gave, or the religious services they attended, or how boldly they announced their faith—and certainly not their political affiliations. Their spiritual convictions and their hearts will be judged solely on how they treated people.Jesus tells those listening that the way they cared for the least of these: the poor, the hungry, the imprisoned, the stranger, will be the way they cared for him; that as they injured or ignored the vulnerable here, they injured or ignored him.In other words, to those who imagine themselves right with God, Jesus is incarnated in the humanity in their path. He is the disparate neighbor they are called to love.Given this, these MAGA Christians who will make grand displays of piety and devotion need to reckon with the gravity of Jesus’ words, and the implications for their perceived righteousness:Who and where is Jesus on this Easter?Jesus is permanently entombed in a bombed-out basement in Gaza.Jesus was slain on a Minneapolis sidewalk by the masked thugs.Jesus lies lifeless beneath the jagged rubble of an Iranian girl’s school.Jesus is the veteran whose house was foreclosed on after his aid was canceled.Jesus died from exposure in the squalor of a scalding Florida concentration camp.Jesus is the Latino man weathering the taunts and threats of emboldened bigots in the very restaurant he built.Jesus is the Muslim grandfather, cleaning profane slurs from the walls of his mosque.Jesus was violated on an island by grotesque monsters whose power and privilege keep their names concealed.Jesus is the trans teenager trying to hold her bladder for the entire school day to avoid the bathroom bullies and their predatory parents.Jesus is the toddler whose brain was permanently damaged by a virus that we long ago eradicated.Jesus bled out alone in an overturned car on a Beirut street.Jesus is the pregnant mother of three who will die in a crowded emergency room because doctors were not allowed to save her life.Jesus is the radiant young American soldier killed in Tehran for a wasteful war of distraction for a pedophile. Jesus is the 11-year-old girl who took her life when her classmates told her ICE would come for her family.Jesus is the grandfather who slowly suffocated without treatments that kept his lungs working.Jesus is the exhausted Ukrainian father whose sleep and rest never come. Jesus is a black college student whose body was found hanging from a campus tree.This is who Jesus says he is right now. This is where Jesus says he is in these moments.And if this is indeed true, then the prolific hatred and unrepentant cruelty of his professed followers toward so many hungry, scared, and cast-aside human beings here are going to judge them.So, this Easter, MAGA Christians can engage in all manner of performative religiosity and feigned faith. They can sing and preach and post and pontificate about their joy at the Resurrection.They can tell us they love God.They can say that Jesus is risen.And Jesus and we will both know they’re lying.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

Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem, welcome to reality.It was always going to end this way. We tried to warn you.Those of us who’ve been paying attention for the past two hundred and fifty years here pleaded with you not to be distracted by the seductive pull of proximity to power, because it was never going to be permanent with those men. Your elevation in their midst could never be anything but temporary, because the Patriarchy will always discard you. No matter how enticing the invitation is on the front end, no matter how effusive and flattering the initial pitch, when the chaotic turbulence becomes too great, when the scalding tongues of criticism come too close, when a ceremonial sacrifice is required, it will always be heads like yours upon the chopping block.We told you that to the fragile, jittery man-children pulling the strings, you were provisionally useful but ultimately expendable. Once you had served your purpose, once the feigning of equity had accomplished its goals, once the appearance of progress had taken root enough to satiate the naysayers, things would always revert to their natural baseline. You refused to listen; the shouts of your ambition and internalized misogyny too loud for you to hear anything else.Despite their grotesque body of work, despite the dehumanization they have trafficked in, despite their prolific misogyny, you told yourself a story that they were different, that you were different, that this was different.None of it was different because these men are vile creatures of hateful habit who are incompatible with evolution, allergic to change, and in contempt of your ascension.You think you’re the first woman here: temporarily lulled into believing yourself truly accepted, imagining that your inclusion is unconditional, feeling that you will be the sole exception to the violently insecure man-made rule?The road to Patriarchy has been littered with those who deluded themselves into thinking they could be agents of change in a cancerous system that would ultimately devour them and spit them out. You may have imagined that your whiteness insulated you, but gender will always trump pigmentation, so you were never truly safe.For a few months, you felt the cheap and fleeting intoxication of being picked by career predators who have built their empires on the backs of millions of other women who implored you not to be fooled by the rented influence you were being handed. In spite of the red flags and the recent past and your own eyes, you insisted on carrying water for men who believe that God is a man and that women are baby machines, and so we shouldn’t feel sorry for you, but a bit of us does. We know it’s quite possible you never saw this coming. You believed lies up close that you should have recognized from a mile away.The voices of your parents and your pastors and your politicians groomed you since birth to be manipulated in these moments, told you you were less-than, and convinced you that you were not worthy, so that when the highly-conditional offer was extended, you simply couldn’t refuse. You bent the knee, you kissed the ring, and you willfully perpetuated the injury of generations of girls and women, whose subjugation you were complicit in, whose lives will be more difficult because of your presence. You collaborated with predators and conspired with rapists, oblivious to the irony or in too deep to extricate yourselves. And now, here you are, joining the ranks of other women who could not foresee that with these men you chose to partner with, this was always a matter of time.As expected and as we predicted, here’s your pink slip from the Patriarchy. Hopefully, whatever you got for your soul was worth it.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 reader recently told me that she thinks I’ve become too negative lately: that she misses the optimistic version of me that she got to know before the 2024 election.“I miss that version of me, too,” I assured her.Then I asked: “So, do you want me to be optimistic or honest?”I wasn’t being facetious or sarcastic with the question.I know that she (like myself and every other sentient human being with working empathy) has completely had it with the catastrophic, the unprecedented, the terrifying. She (like all of us) is stumbling around, both hope and sleep-deprived. But the alternative to sober realization is to indulge in toxic positivity; to deny the nightmare reality, avoid the afflictive emotions, and wait for a rescue that simply isn’t comin’.’And that’s the rub here, isn’t it: the only way we’re going to persevere is by not sedating or distracting ourselves, which means we’re going to have to feel and know a lot we’d prefer not to.Now, contrary to the opinion of some, I really hate being the bearer of bad news, but anyone thinking we “just have to get through the next two years” isn’t paying attention.We are already long past the point of any conventional remedies to this fascist takeover. November 5th, 2024, was the closing of that window.Many of the checks and balances are gone, the Republican Party is unsalvageable, the courts will not permanently sustain us, and no wholesale election rescue is possible.The old rules of engagement are no longer relevant, which is why, outside of a few leaders, the Democratic Party is falling to the occasion right now.Whether we survive or not as a nation is going to depend solely on whether or not We The People are willing to do what we’ve never had to do in this nation: stand together and oppose our own Government.And this does not necessarily mean violence, but it will likely mean exposing ourselves to violence directed by those in power, pushback from our neighbors, rejection from our families, but believe me, those we stand with and for are worth it.What civil and human rights activists have done to bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice 60 years ago, we are now entrusted with continuing, and if we fail, that work, too, will prove not to have prevented democracy’s demise but postponed it.I don’t share this to scare or depress you, but to empower you. You have enough information and resources right now to do what needs doing.No one is going to hold our hands or save us: no party, no court, no personality. We need to use our personal, financial, and relational resources and do something today.If tens of millions of people move in the small and close confines of where they are, we might be astounded at how much collective power we have.I didn’t write this to alert you to how dire the circumstances around us have become. You know that, or you wouldn’t be here. I’m not here today to tell you how bad things are; I’m here to remind you how good you are.This is not about anyone else’s inhumanity; it is about your humanity.It’s not about one group of people’s cruelty; it’s about your empathy.In some ways, it doesn’t matter who is in the seats of power.It doesn’t matter how horrible the legislation that gets passed is.It doesn’t matter how much the Evangelical church rejects Jesus and his teachings.It doesn’t matter how compromised the courts are.It doesn’t matter how predatory the preachers or the politicians become.Those things, in one important way, are almost irrelevant.The only thing any of us possesses is how we choose to show up in the world, as ugly, nihilistic, and brutal as it might be.Anyone else’s capacity for violence is not the point. Your capacity for love is the point.And that love is the only plan for us individually and collectively.So, as bad as it is here, we will passionately move together in these days, but we will do so recognizing that we are inextricably bound together here.We will fight for the outcasts, the vulnerable, and the hungry.We will fight for the lonely, the hurting, and the desperate.We will fight for the progressive, the moderate, and the conservative.We will fight for the blue voters and the red voters.We will fight for the deeply religious and the fiercely anti-religious.We will fight for those fortunate enough to be born here and those who seek to call this place home.We will see hatred and ignorance and violence as the only enemies worth our collective rage.We will not become people at war with the world, but for it.We will fight for everyone.We will fight for everything.You are one of the fighters, and you’re still here.That’s what matters most.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

As someone who grew up in the Church and who spent three decades ministering within it, there’s something particularly distressing about the expansive hellscape we’re all stuck in right now: it’s all because of white, professed Christians who are committed to being terrible.They’re the ones persecuting trans people for existing,the ones working incessantly to deny people the right to vote,the ones attempting to take body autonomy away from women,the ones trying to purge America of immigrants,the ones attacking birthright citizenship,the ones warring against our public schools,the ones cheering the brutality of ICE,the ones celebrating wars and genocides.Every day, I look at these people, and I wonder, Don’t they ever get tired?Doesn’t it wear them out to spend so much time and energy monitoring the genders, orientations, bodies, families, and relationships of people they’ve never met? How does it never get old: always being that deeply entrenched in someone else’s business?”Honestly, it’s a miracle more white Evangelicals don’t pass out from sheer exhaustion. It’s incredibly taxing work, policing the world instead of, ya know, loving it.America seems grossly overpopulated with Christians determined to bully others into compliance, shout them into silence, or eliminate them from their midst. It’s all so wasteful, so mean-spirited, and so antithetical to the teachings of Jesus (not to mention fully draining for them and their targets).It’s really hard to pray for these people, as they seem to revel so in their cruelty, finding perverse joy in excluding others in the name of a supposed God of love.But I do pray for them to get tired.I pray that they get tired of the malicious religion that is hardening their hearts and squandering their days. I sincerely believe it would alter both them and the planet in ways they’d never imagine:If Conservative Christians finally got tired of persecuting queer people, they’d realize how fruitless their aggression has been, how much damage it’s done, how unlike Jesus it’s been. They’d see people whose only agenda is to live and work and love and worship, and to spend the fleeting days of this life doing something that gives them joy. They’d see people no different from themselves.If Conservative Christians finally got tired of condemning the world, they’d be able to see it differently. If everyone around them was viewed through a lens of compassion and not damnation, they’d recognize how fragile and precious the humanity around them is, and discover how connected they are to it. They’d cast off the exhausting burden of viewing everyone as a threat and begin to recognize everyone as the neighbor they are called to love as themselves.If Conservative Christians finally got tired of worshiping America, they’d find that every place is holy ground: Gaza, Iran, Ukraine, Mexico, and every inch of this planet. They’d stop needing to fortify themselves, wall themselves off, dig in their heels, and defend God, because they’d realize they don’t own God to begin with. They’d realize that making America great was never the assignment; it was blessing the world.If Conservative Christians finally got tired of a faith characterized by fear, they’d hunger for a faith marked by love. They would become deeply burdened to care for their neighbors, even the ones who do not look, love, or worship the way they do. They’d stop seeing diversity as a menace and recognize it as the greatest gift we’ve been given: the beautiful difference of humanity.If Conservative Christians finally got tired of being terrible in the name of Jesus, they’d be able to accurately reflect him; bring his mercy, empathy, and kindness to the places where such things are not plentiful. They’d be able to see every other as themselves, to see no distinction between them and their neighbor, and to recognize the image of God in every face they encounter.I hope that more white Christians will be able to find a more life-giving, hope-bringing expression of their faith convictions, for their sake and the sake of those who simply want to live today unfettered by anyone else.Life is difficult. People are doing the best they can.I pray that more Conservative Christians get tired of being terrible so that they’ll have more time to be loving.The world needs less terrible. It needs more loving.This should be what people of faith are here to bring.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

There’s a good deal of online dialogue lately about how we should be responding to people around us, who are finally beginning to extricate themselves from the MAGA death cult; whether due to human rights atrocities, war crimes, pedophile protection, or simply high gas prices and a decimated 401K.Ex-Trumpers have posted tearful monologues about the vitriol they’ve experienced as they’ve stepped into the light to declare their newfound emancipation from the indoctrination they received at the hands of their parents, preachers, politicians, and partisan news bubbles. They report of the mockery, acrimony, and insults they’ve absorbed from strangers, family members, and former friends on their de-culting journey, and the way this ugliness has left them struggling to find ways to move forward. I’ve seen moderates and left-leaners engaged in protracted, volcanic debate with one another, with passions running high and insults flowing freely.Some demand a strict, no-tolerance policy for former Trumpers, a permanent scarlet letter, forever exempting them from full inclusion in the larger collective. Proponents of this hardline stance maintain that the injuries these MAGA foot soldiers have been complicit in are so irreversible, and the fractures they’ve helped create are so irreparable, restoration is not possible.Others point to such intolerance as a hypocritical practicing of the very close-minded ostracism they’ve lambasted red-hatters for the last ten years, and as evidence for why the Left will never persevere in overcoming a hateful minority movement. These kinds of punitive purity tests, they say, will never allow us to create the broad coalition of resistance necessary to overcome authoritarianism.There are very few hard and fast rules to all of this, but here’s what we owe defecting MAGAs:Acknowledgement. I’m a firm believer that what will soon rouse many Trump supporters from their cultic stupor will not be empathy or moral awakening, but self-preservation. They will not be rejecting this regime’s inhumanity as much as finally feeling the pain themselves, and this should not be rewarded with praise. Still, regardless of how they reached clarity about the object of their decade-long, breathless adoration, it is no small gesture to outwardly break with a movement that gave you identity, provided you a sense of belonging, and formed your community. That should be respectfully acknowledged. Decency. Despite a decade of almost incomprehensible cruelty toward just about everyone on the planet outside of those within their narrow, insular movement of white Republican heteronormativity, we who’ve found ourselves on the other side have told ourselves tales of our own moral superiority. We’ve subsisted on a narrative where our compassion, our code of ethics, our working morality, or our spiritual convictions made us different. To meet former MAGA cultists with unrelenting hatred and dehumanization makes such stories fiction. If we can’t bring our humanity to bear when it is most difficult, we’re not as different as we think. Expectation.Having spent so much time participating in the destruction of our Republic doesn’t mean these people can’t be invited into a counter-movement, but they will need to demonstrate with their voices, their activism, and their social media that they have changed. They will need to actively work to undo what they have done to vulnerable, marginalized, oppressed people, and to speak out against the dehumanization they have co-signed. It’s not enough to claim internal renovation; there must be repentance expressed tangibly. We owe ex-Trumpers the chance to prove their hearts have evolved by the work of their hands and the words from their mouths. Having said that, here’s what we are not obligated to offer MAGA refugees:Forgiveness.We need to be honest: it's been a decade of Trump’s moral sewage: a never-ending parade of human rights violations, vile perversion, dehumanizing comments, legislative overreach, and giddy brutality. His body of work is prolific and unmistakable.One hundred percent of the people now fleeing Trump witnessed him ridicule a disabled person, watched the Access Hollywood video, experienced his incompetence during COVID, heard him say that immigrants were eating family pets, have seen the lawless violence of ICE, realized he’s been disregarding the Constitution, and have known his name is all over the Epstein files. For whatever reason, none of that mattered for a hell of a long time. At some point, grown adults need to own their choices, and these people, over and over again, have chosen illegality, immorality, and sociopathy. Nothing can erase that fact, and we are not obligated to make peace with it.Hopefully, there will soon be a massive exodus from the MAGA-mind virus, and we’re all going to need to figure out how to fold these former cultists into the collective resistance, without forgetting how we got here. We shouldn’t avoid the inhumanity they’ve been party to, but we can’t respond with inhumanity ourselves, either.How should we respond to family members, friends, and strangers as they begin to peel away from Donald Trump? What do you feel we owe these people, and what is too much to ask? 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 love Donald Trump. We'll never get another president like Donald Trump. That is why it's important we do everything we can to try to get him re-elected.”A Republican Congressperson didn’t say this a few days ago.A Fox News anchor didn’t say it.A Nazi content creator didn’t say it.Your racist neighbor didn’t say it. (Well, maybe…)Franklin Graham said this.One of the Evangelical world’s most influential preachers did.Son of the esteemed and certainly wildly spinning in his grave, Reverend Billy Graham did.Leading into Holy Week, Christianity’s marking of the last few days of Jesus’ life, this supposed man of God, stood behind a podium to address American Conservatives.He did not use the moment of consequence to condemn the unprovoked bombing of Iranian citizens or the illegal and immoral war visited on their nation.He delivered no fiery sermon against the genocide in Gaza, the intentional starving of the Cuban people, or the brutal attacks on Lebanon.He didn’t unleash righteous fury at a presidential regime protecting a network of wealthy rapists and pedophiles.He called down no divine judgment upon a masked army of violent thugs terrorizing brown and black-skinned human beings in the places they live, study, work, and worship.He did not castigate the soulless cadre of oligarchs swallowing up the financial and natural resources of this nation.He made no impassioned appeal to the self-identified Christians listening, to replicate the heart of Jesus by rallying around the vulnerable, the oppressed, the poor, and the foreigner; to flip the tables of the powerful who prey upon the least of these.He did not decry America’s renaissance of open racism, its persecution of immigrants, or its sinful lack of affordable healthcare.No, this cosplaying, snake oil peddling religious huckster, used this moment and the microphone and the spotlight his privilege affords him, to pledge undying allegiance to a court-adjudicated rapist, to a serial predator, to a war criminal, to a convicted felon, to a murderous, wanna be dictator.It was this vile, repugnant, profane career criminal whose fervent defense he came to: not exhausted Mexican refugees or terrorized trans people or war-ravaged Ukrainians or battered peaceful protestors.Just a few days before Easter Sunday, Franklin Graham proudly preached the dehumanizing, racist, violent, perverse Gospel of Donald Trump. I was a pastor for nearly three decades, and during that time, I largely abandoned the concept of Hell. I simply could not reconcile a place of eternal torment for human beings, constructed by a God who is supposedly love. However, some days I confess that I want to be wrong.Look, I’m not a theological expert by any means, but I feel fairly confident in saying that if the Hell Conservative Evangelicals promise does exist, Franklin Graham is a slam dunk. If there’s a hell, it will be filled with people who claimed faith in Jesus, while trying to strip the sick of care, the terrified of refuge, and the vulnerable of protection, and reveled in it as if it were a righteous victory.If eternal damnation exists, it should be the wages of men and women who coordinated, participated in, and applauded the vilifications of immigrants and refugees, whose only crime was their nation of birth or the color of their skin.If there’s a place of endless agony saved for people with cancerous hearts, it will surely house those who crucified strangers for their sexuality, who persecuted them over pronouns, who willfully trafficked in a dehumanization that was deadly.If there’s a hell, it’s going to be packed to the brimstone-scorched rafters with professed Christians who chose to celebrate, turn the other way, or be silent as they watched it all happen.So, for at least this moment, I am praying for the existence of Evangelicals’ angry, vengeful, and punitive Maker to materialize.Because, if by some chance God has indeed crafted a furnace of forever suffering for heretics, blasphemers, and those who willfully brought suffering upon God’s people in His* name, then Franklin Graham will finally be made accountable for the mockery he has made of Jesus and the damage he has done to those Jesus fiercely loves.* Evangelicals’ gendering for GodThe 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

Sometimes you don’t notice attrition when it happens.When you lose elemental parts of yourself, they don’t all depart at once, and since you’re sustaining the daily woundings of this life from the inside, you may not be aware of the thousands of tiny cuts at the time. You may not notice the lifeblood slowly draining from your spirit.In fact, you might believe you’re who you’ve always been, until something reminds you of the you you used to be.No Kings Day reminded me.Earlier this week, I wrote a piece as Saturday approached, questioning the ultimate merits of the rally in helping us avoid an inexorable slide into fascism. Some suggested that I’d become more negative and fatalistic, that they missed the me they'd encountered a few years ago. While not completely agreeing with them, I couldn’t ignore the fatigue of the last decade; the collective sorrows accumulated along the way, the sad deja vu of, for at least the 30th time, heading out into a beautiful day to confront the very leaders entrusted with protecting our Republic and its people.I may not have been despondent, but I’ve certainly been feeling the wear and tear of the draining dog years of this regime.But, yesterday, as I stood shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of similarly exhausted, equally disheartened, but still not ready to call it a day human beings lining the streets of our little North Carolina town, I found a few things I hadn’t even realized I’d lost.I found joy.There is a silent toll that witnessing so much suffering takes on compassionate people, especially when you work so hard to remain awake and aware. Being reminded every day of just how many human beings are experiencing such wasteful brutality can gradually suffocate the spirit, rendering us joyless. One of the first sounds I noticed as I found myself within the pulsating mass of humanity on that highway was the sound of laughter, and it was my own. I realized it had been a while since I’d heard it like this: easy, constant, booming. The joy was medicinal. It was infectious. This was not a dour, dismal acknowledgement of defeat, as much as it was a joyfully defiant dance party of pissed-off people who haven’t let a minority movement of misery make them incapable of restorative jubilation.I found hope.One of the goals of authoritarian regimes is to extinguish the lightness from people; to inundate them with a legion of emergencies and nightmares that require so much energy to confront that they begin to lose the ability to see anything ahead worth pursuing. When optimism dries up, the future becomes a bleak foregone conclusion. I hadn’t realized I had been chronically emotionally dehydrated. That is, until once surrounded by a swirling technicolor sea of activists, fighters, healers, helpers, and dreamers in the rising North Carolina sun, I could feel hope returning within me: not a naive one that denies the gravity of the moment or the reality of the threats, but a hope that refuses to give this ugliness the last word.I found another America.There’s been a story that’s made headlines in my head lately: the one of this nation’s certain demise; the one where fascism’s presence will be permanent; the one where we are now hopelessly overrun in both the government and our electorate with violent, hateful, cruel people who find joy in the suffering of others. And while there’s no debating that a sizable segment of America certainly fits that description, the vast majority here (those who made their presence unmistakable felt throughout this nation yesterday by the millions) is comprised of beautiful, loving, patriotic human beings who don’t just believe in the idea of America, they embody it. I remembered that throughout its nearly quarter of a millennium history, this place has always been inside the crucible of conflict, because the country we aspire to be cannot be incarnated without it.I found a bit of myself.One of the greatest tragedies of the last decade is how wasteful it’s all been: the unnecessary emergencies generated by those in power, the unrelenting assaults on vulnerable people, the never-ending constitutional crises, the stupefying cruelty, and the collateral damage of trying to hold and attend to all of it. I’m not who I was ten years ago, and some of that is a good thing. But for a couple of hours in the streets of our town that seems to finally be waking up, I was able to clarify what matters to me, the things and the people worth fighting for, and the kind of human being I want to show up in the world as.Yesterday won’t magically rewind the clock pre-election and let us have a do-over. It doesn’t suddenly erase the unprecedented damage to our systems and safeguards. It alone can’t bend the arc of the moral universe away from fascism. That will require a sustained and organized presence, political engagement leading into the midterms like we’ve never seen, and very likely, a general strike.But No Kings Day was a glorious reminder of how vital joy, hope, diversity, and our collective efforts are in resisting this Renaissance of hatred.Our Republic is still in great peril, but we, its fierce caretakers who number in the tens of millions, are still not ready to consent to defeat.With all we’ve had thrown at us for ten years by this batshit wanna be despot, his morally bankrupt accomplices, and his cultic disciples, that, in itself, is a victory.Share your feelings and experiences from No Kings Day 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

A friend of mine who is politically active and engaged every day in justice work here in our town recently confessed to me and a group of friends, “Dozens of times a day, I look around at everyone seemingly on autopilot, and I just want to scream, ‘The world is f*****g on fire, people!’”I felt seen.According to a recent NPR article, three major reports warn that Democracy in America under Trump is eroding rapidly.The piece cites an annual report by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden, that has lowered America’s democracy ranking from 20th to 51st out of 179 countries.Staffan Lindberg, V-Dem’s Founding Director, is quoted as saying, "The developments in the United States are moving towards dictatorship, which the founders wanted to avoid. It's the most rapid decline ever in the history of the United States and one of the most rapid in the world."This should be a five-alarm fire, all hands on deck, stop-whatever-the hell-you’re-doing-and-get-in-the-game, national emergency, but to a terrifying number of Americans, it simply isn’t.Despite the unceasing nightmare fuel of the news cycle, it seems like most people are still trying to do business as usual: going through the motions as if we’re not losing elemental freedoms by the hour, as if the checks and balances are still in place, as if all we need to do is show up at the polls in November.From the outside, everything looks perfectly normal: pickleball courts are packed, people are out on restaurant patios having lunch, and weekend parties are in full swing. It doesn’t look like a failing democracy, which is part of the reason we’re in such trouble right now.Many of us are fully cognizant of the steady slide toward the abyss, but it sure feels like an alarming portion of our family members, friends, neighbors, and co-workers can’t see all that we’ve lost over the last 15 months: the dismantling of 250-year-old systems of governance, the reversal of human and civil rights that took generations to secure, the erosion of protections for people and the land, and the suffocation of the agency of its citizens.Or, maybe they see it, and they just can’t manage to care enough to stop scrolling or streaming to do anything about it. And, honestly, this is what terrifies me: not the brazen, incessant attempts by this regime to dismantle every structural system and safeguard set in place by our founders, but the collective apathy it is being greeted with.I’m beginning to fear that Americans as a whole are too lazy to prevent the collapse of our Republic, not because we’re unaware, but because we are determined to remain unbothered.We’ve become a nation of soft convictions and low energy, anesthetized by a numbing cocktail of Amazon Prime immediate gratification, social media dopamine dependency, stream-binge diversion, and artery-clogging, drive-thru self-soothing.Oh, sure, we can manage to boycott a fascist-friendly big box store for a couple of weeks, but eventually ease and proximity win out, and we’re right back to tacitly funding ICE because we just had to have new patio furniture.We may be temporarily devastated by scenes on our timelines of the genocide in Gaza, the growing devastation in Iran, or the crimes against humanity here at the hands of a weaponized law enforcement, but we’re quickly yanked away by videos of sass-talking birds or killer cheese dip recipes.When I detox fully from American exceptionalism, I wonder if the United States has the wherewithal to prevent ourselves from falling into a dictatorship; if we’re really made of the stuff our forebears were.Are we willing to get our hands dirty, to alter our previously planned lives, and to experience the discomfort that comes when the urgency of the moment refuses to defer to the story we want to be true?Do we have enough good people who are willing to move together across lines of politics, religion, race, nation of origin, and orientation in sustained acts of civil disobedience and systemic disruption?Do we have the diligence and courage to risk the loss of something: time, money, comfort, to ensure we don’t lose something far more precious? Do we have the attention span and intestinal fortitude to fight like we’ve never had to fight before, because we’ve never had to go to war with our government in this way before?I gotta say, I’m concerned that the answers don’t seem encouraging.Look, I believe in the need to live fully in times when the darkness is thick and oppressive; to make sure that we’re not so consumed with encroaching horrors that we eliminate the restorative and joyful experiences of being human. We can’t and shouldn't spend 24 hours a day in a state of unrelenting panic. Our ability to stay in the fight for the long haul is dependent on our ability to find moments of pleasure and rest and even escape.But if we’re going to reverse the democracy death spiral much of the world is predicting we’re in, a lot more of us are going to need to get far angrier and more activated than we are right now.I’m running out of ways to try to dislodge people from their stasis, and I’m beginning to doubt that anything will ever be a red line for some of them.Democracy doesn’t always die in darkness. Sometimes, it dies in the glow of a phone screen.So, what are you thinking? What’s your reaction to what I’ve shared? Are you seeing more people become engaged, or are more people tuning out? What have you found to be effective in motivating people? Do you believe, as a collective, that the American people can meet this moment? Let me know in the comments.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. 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People often accuse me of being anti-Trump supportersI suppose practically speaking, they’re often correct, but they’re also missing the point, sometimes mistakenly and sometimes intentionally.Well-meaning friends might say this as an oversimplified bit of descriptive shorthand; a way of quickly summarizing the work I do, the words I write and speak, the activism I engage in, and the directness of the voice I use.More often, though, strangers say this as a pointed criticism; the assertion that I am somehow preoccupied to the point of dangerously disproportionate anger toward a group of strangers; that I am singularly fueled by an unhealthy hatred for people simply because of their political affiliation.That isn’t the real story here.This, in many ways, has nothing to do with Trump, the GOP, or their all-too-willing acolytes.My life is and always has been oriented toward something far greater than a person or a party. I am propelled into my days by who and what I love.I’m pro-humanity.I have a fierce regard for every human being who finds themselves here, and it burdens me greatly when anyone is exposed to cruelty and violence in any form, because I realize that life is heavy and it’s difficult for most of us, on our best days. My stomach turns when people of power and privilege pile burdens on already burdened people.I’m pro-diversity.I find the differences in disparate humanity here to be one of the greatest gifts we are given in this life, and experiencing this expansive variety has always made me a better and wiser version of myself. I despise when one group of people wants to rid the world of those who don’t look, talk, think, and believe the way that they do, because we all lose in the subtraction.I’m pro-equality.I believe every person on the planet has the same inherent worth, regardless of their race, nation of origin, sexuality, or any other qualifier. Each of the 8 billion people who reside here is deserving of reverence and justice, and I am driven fully to sickness when anyone’s value is ignored, when they are treated as less-than.I’m pro-compassion.I want to cultivate empathy in the days I am given here; to remember just how much pain people are in, how many invisible battles they are fighting, how paper-thin a thread they sometimes hang by. I want my life to be a soft place to land for human beings whose lives can be terribly hard.I’m pro-family.Not just my family. Not just families who look like mine or worship like mine. Not just families who live in America or were born here or speak my language. Not families who conform to anyone’s expectations. I believe every home and every configuration of people in those homes is as valid and beautiful as my own.I’m pro-decency.I am an unrelenting fighter for joy; for belly laughs and warm embraces and well-earned smile lines around eyes who have seen wonders and beheld beauty.I am a fierce warrior for unearned acts of kindness, for gentle words for people who are hurting, for unsuspecting blessings from strangers.I am a steadfast defender of goodness that finds no joy in exclusion or separation or injury to another.I believe I was fortunate to be born where I was born, and with all the privileges and advantages I have because of it, and that I have a responsibility to share and not to hoard these things as some divine birthright or earned reward or sign of my superiority.I want to leverage my talent, my resources, my voice, and my abundance to make this world more compassionate, loving, and kind than when I arrived.And all of this is the crux of the misunderstanding.That these convictions almost always leave me in direct opposition to the MAGA ethos, to its grim practitioners, and to their miserable messiah is a sad indictment of who they are.The fact that centering empathy and decency invariably necessitates me pushing back against them and opposing their unrelenting holy war on the rest of the world says far more about him than it does me.I’m not against Trump supporters. I’m not working to keep them from voting or marrying the person they love or using the bathroom they want to use or making their own healthcare decisions or living where they wish to live. I’m actually for them.I am, however, also for Muslims and immigrants and refugees and Christians and atheists and young black men and veterans and transgender teens and poor families and sick children and single parents and undocumented neighbors, and this makes me MAGA’s adversary by choice—their choice.I’m joyfully, passionately, unapologetically, perpetually pro-all humanity.That’s the real story here.That’s who I am.I wish that was who they were.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 Message to the Would-Be King…We see that you’ve declared yet another war this week.This time, you haven’t viciously attacked some distant nation whose people you’ve bombed without cause, as a reckless and deadly act of distraction.This time, you haven’t launched a violent campaign against brown-skinned human beings, whose dehumanization you’ve trafficked in for over a decade.This time, you haven’t brought relentless trauma to survivors of the predators and rapists, among whose numbers you find yourself.This time, you haven’t marshaled a savage offensive on the electoral process, or trans kids, or women’s rights, or environmental protections alone.No, this time, you’ve declared war on all of us: the Radical Left.You see, we know it isn’t merely a political party that you’re threatened by, trying to silence, consumed with hatred for, and seeking to eradicate—it’s the American people.It’s those of us who stand in your way; those whose knees refuse to bow and whose mouths will not regurgitate the curated praise of sycophants and cult members that you bathe your eggshell ego in.It’s students of history who know a failing, flailing wannabe dictator in a death spiral when they see one, and who have no interest in kissing the ring, shutting our mouths, or quietly complying.It’s people of conscience who’ve courageously served, fought, bled, and suffered for this nation to defeat fascism on foreign shores, and who damn well aren’t going to allow it to thrive here.It’s generations of activists and allies who decades ago braved water cannons, beatings, and arrests so that every human being could be afforded the dignity they deserve, and that you would deny them.It’s people of true and abiding faith who refuse to allow you to make a mockery of a God you have never sought, a Jesus you have contempt for, and a religion you drape yourself in to cover your wickedness. It’s human beings of every pigmentation, orientation, nation of origin, religious tradition, and political affiliation who will not allow a Temu authoritarian to write the epitaph for our 250-year republic.We are all the Radical Left.And you, you teetering, jittery lame duck, dollar store despot, have declared war on all decent, law-abiding people here, and we’re to tell you that you cannot win.You are the enemy of the people, of We The People,” the fierce, unwieldy multitude whose presence here is your greatest remaining obstacle. And so we declare war on you.You’ll see us gather by the millions this weekend, filling city streets, highway overpasses, city parks, parking lots, and neighborhood sidewalks, declaring our collective opposition. We will stand together as a defiant army of sustained resistance, unlike anything this nation has ever witnessed.But rest assured, we’ll be there well after the sun sets on that day.We will be in our neighborhoods, outnumbering the masked monsters you deploy to terrorize and brutalize.We will be in our communities, feeding, clothing, and caring for one another, protecting the most vulnerable whom you so gladly prey upon.We’ll be organizing in our communities to support candidates, monitor the polls, and protect people whose voices you are working so hard to silence.We’ll be relentlessly hounding the compromised lawmakers and public servants who would discard their oaths and abdicate their responsibilities just to please you.We’ll be everywhere your cultic disciples show up to let them know that they are part of a miserable minority that will not prevail.And believe us when we tell you that we will defeat you and we will outlast you.When you leave the office or this planet, whichever comes first, we will be here to rebuild what you have broken, to heal all that you have injured, to tear your name from every place you have defiled with it, and to course-correct from the greatest collective error in our nation’s history.And so today, we, the Radical Left, raise a defiant middle finger, we spit on the ground in front of you, we defy your will, and we piss on your crown.The kingdom is crumbling, and where we find ourselves, the king is already dead. He has no home here.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

Kristian A. Smith is a public theologian, Spiritual Humanist, and digital pastor of The Faith Community Virtual — an inclusive, justice-rooted ministry anchored in Greatest Commandment Theology. A proud child of the Black Church and fifth-generation Baptist preacher, Kristian holds a Master of Divinity from Mercer University's McAfee School of Theology. He is the host of Holy Smokes: Cigars and Spirituality and the author of Breaking All The Rules and Question Your Answers: A Deconstruction Survival Guide. Known for deconstructing harmful theology and advancing spiritual liberation, Kristian builds beloved community one honest conversation at a time.Connect with Kristian:WebsiteThe Faith Community on YouTubeInstagram 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 Saturday is No Kings Day.More than 3,000 protests are planned throughout every state in the U.S., as well as hundreds of cities around the world.If last year’s events are any indication, close to ten million people could be in attendance.We can safely make some predictions about what will happen. this weekend:The National Mall will be overrun by a massive, ebullient mob of radical woke leftists: families, schoolteachers, ministers, parents, grocery store clerks, college students, business owners, grandparents, and toddlers on shoulders.City streets all over this nation will be lined with exuberant, sign-waving throngs of joyfully defiant human beings loudly declaring their shared disdain of a wannabe dictator. Local parks will explode in a kaleidoscopic display of disparate humanity, converging to declare their solidarity and their collective rejection of authoritarianism.Republican lawmakers’ offices will be surrounded by a spirited show of fierce resistance from pissed-off, fed-up constituents demanding accountability.And, based on my previous experience, there are some guarantees I’ll make:The vibe will be glorious.The chants will be on point.The sign game will be strong. The love will be tangible.It will be soul-stirring.It will be goosebump-inducing.It will be off-the-charts beautiful.And if that is all that happens, it also won’t make a damn bit of difference.We’ve already had two massively successful No Kings Day events, and as cathartic and encouraging as they were, things here are far worse than they were then.The Constitutional crises are piling up. We’re immersed in unnecessary and unwinnable wars halfway across the world. This Administration’s disregard for legality and morality is escalating. The complete Epstein files are still concealed, the monsters within them still evading their reckoning. ICE is still ravaging our communities with impunity and with taxpayer funding.And our traitorous, cognitively-decimated, sociopathic Predator-In-Chief has become more unstable, more violent, and more unhinged than before. We’re a hair’s breadth from full-on fascism.The last No Kings Day protests didn’t stave off the chaos that is now here, and it won’t prevent what this regime has planned, unless we all do more than show up on Saturday.Rallies and protests are powerful, important things.They are a necessary visual reminder that we’re not alone.They help provide a sense of agency in dark days, to help our minds right-size the threats that seem so towering and so beyond our reach.They give us a chance to stand with a chosen community and be a tangible response to the things that burden us.They connect us with people we live, work, and study alongside and give us the chance to forge partnerships and build coalitions.Rallies and protests are awe-inspiring, breathtaking moments.But rallies and protests don’t save democracies.They can’t craft legislation and they won’t protect endangered people.Rallies alone won’t jettison corrupt leaders from their well-fortified perches of power.They can’t reach into the labyrinthine hallways and cloistered rooms where those charged with protecting us decide our fates.Protests can’t tip the scales of our political process back toward balance.They will not reject would-be dictators.Please hear me: attending a No Kings protest for a few hours isn’t nothing, but it is the easiest possible ask of us, as Americans. Our efforts on Saturday don’t matter even a little bit to Trump and his sycophantic gaggle of ghouls. Like so many times before, they will simply allow us to have an afternoon where we all feel a false sense of power, blow off steam, and then largely return to our lives currently in progress, while they continue to dismantle our Republic largely unabated.We need to remember that transformative activism is found in sustained movements, not in soothing moments, and we need to find our place in the messy and local battles throughout this nation until we actually strike fear into the oppressors and oligarchs, and upend the new order they are constructing where we are truly powerless.The only way this Saturday will really mean something is if we make meaningful connections with our neighbors while we’re there, if we partner with organizations in our communities, if we sign up to work the polls or lobby our lawmakers or contribute to campaigns, if we find a place to do the daily, unglamorous, incremental work of resisting fascism. For No Kings Day to matter, it cannot be a landing pad; it must be a launching pad.Yes, Saturday afternoon is something.But Monday morning is everything.In the comments, let me know what you’ll be doing for No Kings Day, and share ways that you’ve found to do sustained activism in meaningful ways, so that others can be inspired beyond Saturday. 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.”These words are a continual presence these days.I hear them a couple of hundred times a day in one form or another.I read them in desperate social media outbursts.I overhear them in coffee shop conversations.I find them in my inbox from friends and from strangers.I hear them in my own head.They are the symptoms of a shared sickness we now find ourselves afflicted with: a sprawling homegrown mental health crisis. They are part of a growing national neurosis brought on by a continual assault on decency, sanity, and goodness by those in power.Mental health is a daily battle, even on our best days.During any given year in America, one in five adults (nearly 68 million people) experiences mental illness; 10 million of these people finding their lives fundamentally impacted by their internal, invisible maladies.The personal toll of these diseases is almost incalculable: debilitating mood disorders, propensity toward addiction, susceptibility to physical illness, and regular feelings of isolation and hopelessness.Nearly 50, 000 people die here by suicide each year, with 25 attempts for each of these deaths. Many of these premature passings have direct or indirect lines to undiagnosed, untreated, or treated but ultimately insurmountable sickness. At any given moment, tens of millions of people are fighting a battle in their own heads, just to stay here.This is all under normal circumstances, and these are not at all normal circumstances. These are days that tax people’s already burdened mental defense systems and emotional reserves by relentlessly targeting their places of vulnerability:the real and manufactured emergencies designed by our leadership,the daily, incessant legislative attacks on vulnerable people groups,the normalized acts of violence this sociopathic president not only tolerates but incites,the untethered behavior regarding matters of national security, international relations, environmental stewardship, and human rights.Our leadership is mentally unwell, and lots of good, already hurting people see it clearly. They understand the gravity of these moments for our nation, and they are rightly terrified by the lack of accountability, the absence of conscience, and the poverty of empathy.Men and women, already prone to depression and anxiety, those normally driven to despair without any discernible cause or reason, now also have objective data that makes that hopelessness quite sensible.The MAGA movement is making otherwise mentally healthy people emotionally sick and making already ill people much worse. And a growing number of otherwise well people are developing a form of PTSD from continual exposure to a group of people in power whose malevolence and contempt for life are beyond comprehension. They, too, are finding the space within their own heads to be a dangerous one as they live within it all and try to make sense of senseless cruelty.What's worse, the GOP’s boundless assaults on human rights, their vicious crusades against science, their continual gaslighting of otherwise sensible people, and their reckless fake news conspiracy theories, aren’t just making those who oppose them prone to head sickness; they’re doing the same to their supporters.Republican leaders are playing on their own rank-and-file’s paranoia, instability, and fear; ratifying their latent or active neuroses, and justifying the ways they now act out in both emotional and physical violence.We are seeing daily acts of aggression in schools, churches, subways, city streets, and grocery stores by people whose own illnesses and frailties have been triggered by the incendiary language and calculated lies continually perpetuated from the top. If there is such a thing as Trump Derangement Syndrome, these are its symptoms.America is sickly, and this regime is perfectly fine with that.It’s no coincidence that the Trump Administration has drastically reduced funding for mental healthcare and removed barriers to ill people accessing firearms. This cocktail of mayhem is what it thrives upon, traffics in, and desires.In an environment populated by emotionally fragile and mentally unhealthy people, it’s much easier to act without accountability and to continue to take away resources, personal liberties, and human rights without recompense.Mental illness is rarely treated with the same urgency and seriousness as physical illness, and the dismissal is even more profound in days when people feeling deep sadness and great empathy for others are derided as weak, overly emotional, or too sensitive. The callousness of these days makes brain maladies trivial, or worse, worthy of ridicule.The President and those who support him in Congress are counting on exhausted people growing too weary from pushing back, too overwhelmed fighting their inner demons, and too hopeless to go on.We can’t allow that.We need to keep our eyes and ears open to the pain of others right now: to hear the suffering in their words or that is buried in their silence, and to move toward it.We need to linger long enough to see people who are hurting; to notice their withdrawal and absence, and to make sure they’re OK.We need to use the resources currently available of therapists, doctors, and counselors who understand these invisible sicknesses and how very real they are.We need to gather in community to bolster and encourage one another, and to remind people that they aren’t alone in the wars they wage to get better.We need to reach out to people in our own despair, in our sadness, in our own fight to stay here.And we all need to carry one another and care for one another, realizing that the GOP has no desire to, and in fact is doing willful damage to the people they have sworn to protect.We are not well, America.Many of our leaders are really not well.The sickest and most damaged among them sits in the Oval Office.Together, we need to oppose the ugliness that collectively threatens us.We need to care for our health and the health of those around us.We need to work and vote to purge our nation of the curators of this chaos, so that we can get well together.Writing is my life’s work. If you find encouragement or inspiration here, please 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 can anyone still support him?Tens of millions of us still find ourselves asking this question, watching a staggering number of Americans somehow remain unflinching in their devotion to this President. Despite high crimes, sexual assaults, cognitive decline, reckless wars, and an authoritarian agenda, they remain seemingly giddy over his existence.But Trump’s supporters aren’t necessarily pleased with the actual policies, tactics,or methods, but with the results: pissing off the people they don’t like.That is all that matters to them.It’s the reason they vote the way they do.It’s the reason their support is steadfast through pedophilia accusations and acts of treason and human rights disasters and wanton ignorance.It’s the reason they remain emotionally infatuated with him despite his breaking every campaign promise.Trump supporters have always seen his ascendency as a big “F— You” to his predecessor, to the identity politics that they feel has targeted them, and to an ever-diversifying nation that they see as a threat. More than affordable healthcare, unpolluted food, and economic opportunity, they want someone to stick it to the world on their behalf, and in their rage-addled state, they somehow believe he does that.It’s a nationwide mental health crisis that seems both beyond repair and belief.It’s terribly sad to admit that a huge portion of this nation is moved not primarily by party over country (which would be bad enough) but by spite: that they care more about flipping Democrats the bird than the sovereignty of our nation. To know that people you respected and loved and work with live with anger as their engine is a reason for mourning.MAGA voters would rather give a strident middle finger to woke liberals, even at the expense of the air their kids breathe and the schools they attend.They’d prefer to “own the Libs,” even if their medical bills bankrupt them, and businesses migrate away, and natural disasters go ignored.Their white fragility is so profound that two years ago, they gave Trump another blank check because he’s reversing any recent advances by marginalized communities whose gains they see as threats to their own.They still feel victorious, even though gas prices are astronomical, we’re immersed in chaos, nothing is trickling down, and America is not first.Even professed Christians among them are willing to abandon any semblance of Christlikeness because they get back the nostalgic veneers and ceremonial trappings of God and Country that Obama couldn’t satisfy because of his pigmentation and his embracing of the world and its religions.And so these people are now subsiding on Liberal tears and complete denial.That is the only barometer for them in this moment of what is good, wise, or productive.It guides their vote, filters their media, defines their faith, and shapes their hearts.That’s why arguing policies or stating facts or attempting constructive conversation with them right now is almost impossible, because spite is irrational and stubborn and unmovable. It wants emotional food that feels good, even if it is filled with empty calories.The only course of action right now is for those of us motivated by things other than revenge and payback and vitriol to be clear, loud, and unified.We need to reach across all the divides, and to be about what we’re about, and to declare these things with clarity and without relenting or apology.Our intent should no longer be understanding these people who are still emotionally bound to him. We do understand them. We’ve listened to them. That’s why we know that they cannot be convinced by any previously used methods to connect with rational people. Their blind hatred of the Left and their complete adoration of this President make them, practically speaking, unreachable currently.And as frustrating as sharing a nation with them is, they remind us who we do not want to be.Being motivated by spite is a really horrible way to go through this life, which is why the rest of us can’t make our response now be about these people and the angry wars they want to stay immersed in. It cannot be shaped by our grievances and complaints and purity stances either. We need to gaze higher than that.The human and civil rights of our people, the future of our children, the integrity of our nation, our standing in the world, and the defense of our Constitution are all far too important to squander as a middle finger to people we want to piss off.We’ve seen what that yields.We need to live and work and vote for equality, diversity, compassion, love, and justice—not for spite.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, Donald Trump ridiculed California Governor Gavin Newsom’s dyslexia, saying, “Honestly, I'm all for people with learning disabilities, but not for my president."Personally, I’d rather have a human being with dyslexia leading our nation than a felonious, traitorous rapist who has the compassion of a ham sandwich, but that’s just me.Trump’s comments, as disgusting and dangerous as they are, are hardly shocking. His body of work against those with physical, mental, and emotional challenges is well-documented and shameful:Trump’s initial 2016 presidential campaign included a vicious rally ridiculing of a disabled reporter, which in any other iteration of America would have immediately disqualified him. He has often publicly used the R-word in insulting political opponents, including then-Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.In March of 2025, Trump’s nephew Fred C. Trump, whose son William was born with a genetic abnormality that altered his physical and cognitive development, detailed the contempt his uncle has for mentally disabled human beings, quoting him as saying, “Those people… “the shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”It’s impossible to overstate how damaging Trump’s words are to disabled people throughout this nation, especially children, who have to hear the occupant of our highest office tell them they are less-than, that they are a burden, that they are insult-fodder, that they will forever be limited by their differences.For a nation that has seen tremendous progress in the perception of and conversation around Americans with disabilities, the President’s ignorant, Jurassic ramblings signal a sad regression, with millions of his sycophantic disciples celebrating the return of slurs, myths, and mockery that they are all too happy to traffic in.And somehow, as incomprehensibly destructive as Trump’s words are, they pale in comparison to his party’s legislative war on children and adults with disabilities:The Trump Administration’s incessant attacks on SNAP benefits are a fierce blow to disabled people, who are disproportionally impacted by the funding cuts and program cancellations.The elimination of DEIA programs throughout the country are profoundly harmful to the visibility, representation, and opportunity for those with physical, mental, and emotional challenges.The Administration is working to dismantle the Department of Education, including severe cuts to staffing and financial support for the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services.They have targeted (SSI) Supplemental Security Income, which helps provide financial support for parents of children with disabilities, placing greater burdens on already vulnerable families. They’ve cut funding to SOAR (Supplemental Security Income (SSI)/Social Security Disability Insurance, and (SSDI) Outreach, Access, and Recovery), an invaluable resource in housing those with severe mental illness and other serious medical conditions.Trump’s Department of Labor has canceled a proposal to phase out subminimum wages for workers with disabilities, financially penalizing them in the workplace.Over and over, in both the President’s reckless words and his regime’s punitive legislative assaults, children and adults with disabilities in America are facing an undeserved cruelty that they should not be left alone to endure. While the domestic terrorism of ICE, the growing carnage of the war in Iran, and the prolific predation of the Epstein files all relentlessly scream for our attention and rightly receive it, it can be easy to overlook tens of millions of people who are finding themselves assailed by those elected to protect and represent them. We cannot overlook them.Decent human beings here need to make sure we do not fail our families, friends, and neighbors with our silence or our inaction. We must confront those who would drag our nation back to a shameful place where those with disabilities are shut in and silenced, erased from the collective community, and denied the freedoms and liberties that presence here should provide without caveat or condition.People of faith, morality, and conscience need to step forcefully into the face of the bullies and the bigots, whether in our families, our schools, our communities, or in the White House, and let them know that we will not tolerate their cruelty.Donald Trump, his willing Cabinet of ghouls, his complicit party, and a pathetic number of their supporters will continue to demean and dehumanize disabled people, but they will not do it unopposed.They have declared war on Americans with disabilities, but they’re gonna have to fight all of us. And we will not let them win.In the comments, please share your experience as a disabled person or someone who loves them, or the work you’re doing to care for, advocate for, and stand alongside those with physical, mental, or emotional disabilities. Help me crowdsource hope and resources.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 still remember the precise moment I stopped believing in hell.Over two decades ago, I was at a Christmas dinner party in the home of a gay couple. From the outside, it looked like any holiday gathering: a warm, beautifully decorated room filled with people laughing and telling stories in the soft glow of the tree, while the silky voice of Johnny Mathis wafted through the air along with the heavenly cocktail of aromas from a well-used kitchen.Most of the guests that night happened to identify as LGBTQ, which hadn’t really occurred to me until, as I smiled and surveyed the room, a sickening thought rudely interrupted: “Many Christians believe that these beautiful people in this room (other than my wife and me) are all going to hell. For no other reason than their gender identity or sexual orientation, every one of them is doomed to spend eternity beyond this life in perpetual torment at the hands of a God who apparently made them, put them here, and loves them passionately.”And as a Christian and a pastor, I was supposed to believe and preach this, too. It simply no longer rang true for me. I couldn’t reconcile this with the character of an infinitely loving Creator. I lost hell right then and there.And after that moment, I began taking note of the vast multitudes I’d also been taught were similarly condemned:My Jewish friends from the gym.The Muslim couple down the street from our home.The gay couple I’d once worked for in college.My atheist friends from high school.My non-Born Again classmates from childhood.Every non-Christian who ever lived.Thousands of authors, musicians, philosophers, and thinkers have inspired me. Gandhi, Buddha, and everyone from their faith traditions.An estimated 69 percent of the people on the planet right now. (around 5.6 billion of them).Lots of good human beings are in hell, and many more are on their way, at least, according to Evangelicals who seem all too happy about that fact.Over the course of my life, I’ve met or known of so many brilliant, funny, giving, caring people, who for thousands of different reasons can’t or won’t declare themselves Christians, and the idea that God condemns them simply for that fact feels far more human than divine to me now. It seems more like the mind of people who are determined to exclude, judge, and shame. Hell doesn’t feel like the logical construction of a God who is Love, but of human beings who are hateful.Few things get Christian leaders as excited as forecasting damnation for other people. It rallies their bases, gives them a common enemy to rail against (gays, Muslims, Atheists, Democrats, drag queens, etc.), and leverages the fear that we all have that God may be out to squash us. It’s also a big religious business, which doesn’t hurt.And there’s a trickle-down judgmentalism that reaches the pews too, allowing ordinary, incredibly imperfect people to believe themselves safe from divine prosecution because they’ve said the magic words, and to simultaneously feel superior to those they can condemn from a distance based on any number of perceived things that disqualify them from Heaven: their sexual activity, their faith perspective, their political affiliations, their nation of origin.Not long after this experience, I shared a social media post about being resigned to my own eternal punishment, and I received replies from all over the world; people from every walk of life, every life stage, of every religious tradition and color and orientation, who all expressed a similar sentiment:I’ll see you there!And that’s the recurring thought I often have now as I cross paths with people who I once believed were condemned, as well as those who confidently almost joyfully condemn them: If Heaven is supposedly filled with such petty, self-righteous, hypocrites, it doesn’t sound all that much like Heaven to me, and if so many beautiful, life-giving souls are surely bound for Hell, it seems like it’ll be one helluva time.I received a gift at that Christmas party nearly twenty-five years ago. I found myself freed up to see people as they were: for their inherent worth and equally flawed beauty, none deserving of eternal torment, and each one like me: doing the very best that they could to be decent and loving and kind and to treat people well. I’m pretty sure God will be cool with that.I’m well aware that many professed Christians believe that my doubts about the existence of hell all but guarantee that I’ll spend eternity there, and I’m sure that with great pride or pity, many will comment as such. But from the looks of it, I’ll be in good company in my hot-and-humid eternity, and I won’t have to look far to find diverse, loving humanity when I get there. I look forward to spending eternity alongside all the compassionate, creative, and open-hearted people who weren’t good enough for an Evangelical afterlife, which is just as well.The clearer the image of these miserable, judgmental people’s Heaven becomes, the less and less trepidation I have of my soul’s resting place somewhere outside of it.Receiving their damnation actually begins to feel like dodging a bullet: I’ll be avoiding them.To quote one of my favorite songwriters, the great Frank Turner:And we’re definitely going to hell—but we’ll have all the best stories to tell.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, Trump supporters.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, 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 terrifying defection of decorated generals and dedicated public servants, 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 you, his supporters is:Is this really what you wanted?Did you really want grocery and gas here to rise stratospherically while he dumps billions of dollars into foreign conflicts and his own bank accounts?Did you really want us dragged into an unnecessary, costly, and unwinnable war against a nation our highest Cabinet members and intelligence experts admit did not pose an imminent threat to us?Did you really intend for Latino families to be terrorized in their workplaces, schools, and homes, with no regard for due process or for legal and human rights?Did you really want the predators and perverts behind one of the largest human trafficking organizations in our history to be shielded from accountability for their brutality against our most vulnerable? Did you really want delusional billionaires and oligarchs to have access to our nation’s financial resources, trusted news organizations, and personal data?Did you really vote for the dismantling of programs that provide benefits to veterans, lunch to hungry children, and retirement funds for the elderly?Did you really want us alienated from the world by abandoning every global humanitarian and diplomatic partnership we have participated in?Is this really what you voted for? Honestly?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. If you voted for Donald Trump and you’re ashamed of that fact, or if you feel like you’re being unfairly criticized, I’m sorry, but that isn’t what this is about right now. Your guilt or your discomfort doesn’t trump your responsibility as a citizen of a nation you claim to revere. Your regret without a response is useless. No one is interested in shaming you, we’re interested in hearing you.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 soon-to-be uninsured.It doesn’t shield marginalized communities from hate crimes or uncover the truth about the pedophiles in our government, or ensure our kids don’t die from preventable diseases, or pull us from a half a dozen reckless acts of aggression on foreign soil that are costing billions of dollars and unthinkable human suffering.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 citizens are 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 all of us.What this means, friends, 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 standing with the marginalized, poor, and disregarded (including Trump voters). We’re marching, and we’re calling our elected officials, and we’re busting our butts to keep our Constitution intact, so that regardless of our political affiliations or religious beliefs or nation of origin, we all have access to the personal and collective liberties this nation promised.And all the while, this President traffics in partisan rhetoric designed to keep us warring with one another, to divert our attention with manufactured culture wars, to fool us into believing the evil is beside us and not above us, to distract us from the truth that we are in equal peril. 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 elemental freedoms that we all treasure. All this to say, I’m really sorry for your embarrassment, but even more concerned about your silence.Your vote, 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 voice now is necessary too.Please join those of us who are resisting together because we love America more than a political party, because we know we are all closer to being beggars than billionaires, and because we understand that this isn’t about some of us, it’s about all of us.Please speak, and speak up.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

As horrifying and sad as it is watching the worst inhumanity of the past repeating itself in the place we call home, it does allow us to look back and get some idea as to where we’re likely headed.For students of History, the last two years here in America have been one long experience of Déjà vu of the worst kind: a growing assemblage of governmental red flag overreach, incendiary rhetoric designed to dehumanize an entire segment of the population, a steady failure of both systems and sanity, and the mass delusion of otherwise reasonable people who gladly enabled a fragile lunatic’s sickening rise. For those of us fortunate enough not to have had our brains rotted and our souls devoured by the decade-long death cult of an orange imbecile here in America, we’ve endeavored to understand how people around us succumbed to a hollow ruse that either intelligence or empathy should have seen through. We’ve repeatedly beaten our heads against the wall trying (and failing) to find new ways to reach into the stupor of their blind adoration and pull them into moral clarity, none of which proved successful. And, we’ve attempted to predict just when (if ever) they would awaken from this ten-year racist fever-dream and come to terms with the multitude of horrors they’ve co-authored with their votes and their undying allegiance. If recent history is any indication, we’d better not hold our breath.Last night, I found myself tumbling down a YouTube rabbit hole of archival footage of the end of World War II recorded by the US Air Force’s First Motion Picture Unit for a series of films code-named Special Film Project 186. There were heartbreaking scenes of the unthinkable barbarism of the Nazis, vivid inventories of the human, cultural, and emotional toll of Hitler’s reign, and the stories of German leaders, soldiers, and citizens as they reckoned with the end of a twelve-year-long parade of abject brutality.One particular video detailing the liberation of the concentration camp at Dachau stopped me dead in my tracks, because suddenly, I could see what’s coming here.Near the end of the clip, the narrator quoted German author Erich Kästner, who wrote in his diary on May 5th, 1945, about his country and its people:Depression is turning into irritability. Everyone is making someone else responsible. And everyone is excluding just one person from this blame: themselves. Erich Kästner continued: Why are people irritable? Did they actually believe the deception? Did they really confuse the outrageous rhetoric with facts? No one can be that stupid. Now, they are pretending to be surprised. In other words, they would rather be thought of as a complete idiot than as a scoundrel.This is where MAGA Americans are headed in the (hopefully near) future when Trump has his bunker moment or reaches his political demise: not the admission of culpability for the suffering, or the grieving and repentance such ownership requires, but feigned ignorance.They will pretend not to have heard the rest of us over the last decade as we labored relentlessly to rouse them awake with facts and data that they stridently rejected.They will claim no recollection of the nearly infinite occasions we passionately appealed to a reason and decency that were nowhere to be found within them. And they will plead innocence in the hopes that we will somehow believe that they were misled, duped, and swindled, instead of correctly concluding that they’d abandoned their humanity in the presence of a moral bottom feeder whose prejudices, phobias, and grievances matched their own.When justice finally arrives (as it always does for tyrants and despots); when Trump’s legion of atrocities can no longer be contained within heavily redacted files, buried beneath Fox News fluff pieces, or explained away by their wildest mental gymnastics, then, they will fire off one last, desperate salvo: denial.One day soon, just as the Germans Erich Kästner wrote about eighty years ago, MAGA Americans will hope to be thought of as gullible idiots rather than complicit enablers. They will seek exoneration in the name of having been fooled, attempting to rewrite the story one last time and hope the rest of us will let them.When that happens, we’ll need to preserve history and their participation accurately, so that if this terrible bit of History repeats itself in the future, the good people who bear witness in those days will make sure no one forgets—or let’s them off the hook.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 Muslim Friends,I’m an American Christian, and I wanted you to know that I’m sorry.I’m sorry that the loudest voices representing my faith tradition right now seem to be the most hateful ones, the most violent ones, the ones least like Jesus.I’m sorry that these voices are making you feel unwelcome and unloved; that they are magnifying fear, leveraging ignorance, and trafficking in stereotypes.I am sorry that they are causing you to experience undeserved animosity in the places you worship, raise your families, and do your work.I want you to know that those bullies do not represent me, no matter how high a platform they have or how loudly their voices carry.They don’t represent most of the Christians I know, either. They certainly don’t represent Jesus. He preached that the peacemakers were the ones most replicating God’s heart; that a fierce and unrelenting love for our neighbor was the mark of a true disciple of Christ; that our religious convictions are defined by our willingness to welcome the stranger.You see, so many Christians here fully realize that the people attacking you are fundamentalist religious extremists, too. There is little difference between them and those they so vehemently condemn. Like you, we recognize contempt and malice when they come decorated with righteousness, clothed in religion, and wrapped in scripture.We understand well that hatred is not the sole property of any religion or nation, and we reject the broad and damaging brush they paint you with. You deserve to be fully seen, fully heard, and fully known, and to have your lives alone speak for you. We all do.We know that so many of you, like so many of us, choose goodness and default to gentleness. We know that you, too, believe in the inherent value of all people and genuinely seek peace with those who live alongside you. We wake up each day seeking love, compassion, kindness, and mercy, and in so many fundamental ways, we are the same.We are all together in this life, living shoulder to shoulder in the kindhearted middle of true humanity, stuck wedged between warring factions who don’t realize they are so very much alike. We are all their collateral damage.I apologize for those who have bastardized the teachings of Jesus and weaponized our faith tradition in ways that cause you such pain. I am sorry that they are perpetuating violence with every dehumanizing comment, every incendiary sermon, every reckless stump speech, and every bit of social media slander.But more than that, I am sorry that so many of us have been so silent in the face of it all. Most people don’t have the power, or the reach, or the influence that these propagandists have, but that can no longer be an excuse.Just as the terrorists and zealots steal your voices and commandeer your spirituality, so the predatory presidents and the bigoted politicians do ours. We’re going to change that. We have to.Right now, please accept these words as a beginning; as confirmation that we are fully disgusted with our misguided brothers and sisters, that we condemn their narrow-minded, unprovoked attacks on you and your faith tradition, and that we are fully committed to finding a better response to violence than more violence.We will not meet fear with fear.We will not respond to bigotry with more of the same.We will not be drafted into their manufactured holy war.So, until we can wrestle the microphone from those warmongers who have monopolized it, and until we can make sure that the voice of Jesus is the one most loudly representing us, please know that we are sorry.We are called by our tradition to be forgivers, to be cheek turners, to be healers, to be peacemakers.Many of us remember this.Many of us desire this.May this peace be in us.And may this peace, be with 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

“You should let people know what you’re for, not what you’re against.”I hear this sentiment from time to time, and perhaps you do, too.The implication is that declaring your opposition to people, or laws, or movements is somehow an unhelpful negative posture that comes across as combative and confrontational and inevitably makes people back away or shut down.On its face, the idea sounds like it makes total sense: focus on positivity and a message of collaboration, and you’ll have better progress with people who disagree with you.The problem is, it’s simply not universally true.It’s not something I’m all that interested in either, at least when it comes to the arrival of fascism.I want people to know what I’m against.I want to specifically name the things I find unconscionable, the conduct that turns my stomach, the legislation I abhor, the cruelty I will not abide.I want to state my disgust with such clarity that misunderstanding me is not possible.I want there to be no ambiguity in my words or any confusion about my outrage, because I don’t want to let the bigots and racists and phobic people off the hook.I don’t want them to pretend we’re of like mind merely because we both use words like family, justice, love, or liberty.That specificity allows for no mysteries and forces people to declare where they stand, regarding immigration, or LGBTQ rights, or women’s healthcare. That clarity doesn’t let anyone hide behind semantics or vague language.Whenever people say, “I want to know what you’re for, not what you’re against,” they’re usually not being intellectually honest anyway. They know damn well what I’m for; they just don’t like what I’m for or how forcefully and unapologetically I’m delivering the message.It isn’t that they actually believe me to be an unreasonably negative person; they simply realize that attacking me for my tone and my manner is a convenient conversation stopper that allows them to avoid accountability and not have to dig any deeper.I’m against many things:I’m against LGBTQ people being told who they can marry, what bathrooms they can use, whether they can adopt children, and why they can’t serve in the Military.I’m against sick and poor people being without affordable healthcare in a nation that conservative leaders won’t stop saying is so damn great, when every other civilized country seems to figure it out.I’m against the violence regularly experienced by Muslims and Jewish people, immigrants, people of color, women in hijabs, and men in turbans at the hands of emboldened supremacists.I’m against old white men with no medical experience making legislative decisions about what a woman does with her body or what choices she has regarding her autonomy over that body.I’m against conservative Evangelicals trying to legislatively impose their religious phobias and antiquated prejudices against people who don’t believe, love, worship, or look the way they do.I’m against the proliferation of weapons of rapid carnage, the near-daily mass murders committed with them, and a political party so in bed with the gunmakers that they do nothing to stop the bleeding.I’m against Right-wing media for intentionally preying upon suggestible people by providing an endless stream of lies and incendiary rhetoric designed to manipulate them into being perpetually terrified of people of color, Latinos, foreigners, and Democrats—everyone, really.I’m against Republicans in Congress who have abandoned their responsibility to represent the people, who regularly disregard the Constitution, and who undermine our national sovereignty by capitulating to a predatory leader whose only impulse is to damage.I’m against this historically malignant President and the incessant and unspeakable violations he commits against the most vulnerable and already burdened human beings—and the people I love and live alongside who’ve abandoned all morality and decency to support him.If anyone claims they can’t tell from these statements about what I’m against, that I’m conversely for equality, for diversity, for compassion, for humanity, I’m not going to argue with them.I’m just going to believe that they don’t really want to know what I’m for, because the things and the people I’m clearly for, they’re clearly against.And by speaking with absolute clarity and undeniable specificity about all that boils my blood, and turns my stomach, and grieves my heart, maybe I will give others the courage to declare it as well.Perhaps what we need right now is a fierce, disparate affinity community of people who will not tolerate the dehumanization that is having the run of the house right now—and who are OK saying so.It’s good to let people know what you’re against.So, how do you feel about all of this? What are you against? Let me know in the comments. 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 MAGAs,This war has you confused, and I’d like to help you.I see your performative star-spangled posturing, your arrogant middle finger contempt for strangers half a world away, your perverse joy at the broken bodies of people with dark skin and strange headwear, and I feel like someone needs to tell you something:You’re not Donald Trump. He is not you.What I mean is that he is not like you, even though you have placed your very identity in him, even though you wrongly believe there is some possibility that you can attain the undeserved lofty position he occupies, even though you incorrectly feel he represents you in a world you’ve decided has wronged you.You and he have nothing in common.He does not share your fierce, though sometimes misplaced, national pride. The truth is, he is an opportunistic parasite; an insatiable bloodsucker who has left everything he has touched scarred, withered, and lifeless. His 79-year moral slime trail is strewn with assaulted girls, dehumanized tenants, disregarded spouses, bankrupt business partners, slandered women, abducted grandfathers, and nameless corpses. America is simply another host he has slapped his name on and drained of its resources.He does not share your respect for the men and women of our Military, your children. They are, to him, the losers and suckers he has called them; expendable collateral damage of his capricious, vain, and pointless acts of aggression in our streets, on foreign waters, and in a rapidly-growing number of nations he has decided to claim, colonize, or deplete. He does not share your faith in Jesus or your adoration of God. He has never had any other deity other than the needy, fragile, loveless husk of a man he sees in the mirror. He has never stepped into a church without cameras rolling, never read a Bible beyond the page he sacrilegiously signs, and never had an impulse to love any neighbor as himself. Religion to him is an ill-fitting costume, dusted off and draped over his barbaric frame while he fleeces the sheep.He does not share your work ethic or your pride in the work of your hands.He is a ban born on third base and 89 feet; cradled in privilege and opulence that all but a tiny fraction of one percent of this world will ever experience. His success is a grand mirage; a gold-veneer facade built on reality TV, Fox News fiction, and purchased propaganda. He doesn’t give a damn about the working class, because he has built his unearned empire upon its back.In other words, MAGA friend, you are not him, and he is not you. He is not of you, or with you, or for you.You, MAGA friend, are the Iranian people. The hardworking, honest, human beings living thousands of miles away under the brutal thumb of corrupt leaders whom you claim you seek to emancipate them from, even while disparaging them with slurs and threats. They may not share your religion or your nation of origin or your mother tongue, but you have far more in common with them than you will ever have with a morally bankrupt billionaire warmonger like Donald Trump. There is no difference between you and the people of Iran who toil their entire lives in systems that are designed to consume them.They will bury their children and you will bury yours, and he will never shed a single tear for either.That’s why Donald Trump and his party are in complete control of the presidency and of Congress, and yet your groceries are astronomical, your gas prices are stratospheric, your healthcare costs are crippling you, and your jobs are disappearing. It’s why he runs the Department of Justice, and yet a legion of pedophiles and rapists are still safely in the shadows, still shielded from accountability.It’s why he is our Military’s Commander-In-Chief, and thousands of your children are being needlessly placed in harm’s way, staring into the face of the abyss, and delivered like slaughterhouse lambs, for a war you honestly can’t explain or justify because the person sending them cannot.Just like the atrocities of Ukraine and Gaza before, you are vilifying the victims and applauding the predators, never realizing that your affinity is not with the latter but the former.So, you can enjoy the temporary intoxication of manufactured patriotism, you can feed on the empty calories of America First, and you can dehumanize a nation you couldn’t distinguish from a dozen others.You can regurgitate White House talking points that paint millions of innocent people as faceless monsters whose eradication is righteous.And most of all, you can fall prostrate before this sneering, self-pleasuring narcissist who couldn’t care less if you lived or died, or for the suffering and sorrow he is inflicting on multitudes, in the name of a Constitution he has no allegiance to, a God he has no belief in, and a nation has complete contempt for.But know this truth: the only thing you and Donald Trump have in common is that you both worship Donald Trump.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. 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I used to think I loved America, but I didn’t.It turns out, I loved the myth of America.Growing up, I bought into its songs and its anthems and its stirring stories of liberty and opportunity; I fully embraced the carefully curated fiction handed to me, which I guess was understandable.For a white, cisgender, heterosexual male who identified as Christian, these myths were more true for me than most. They were all I’d ever known. That version of America had always been available to me, even if it was out of reach for many people. But the more I had my eyes opened by travel and experience and curiosity and education, the more I saw the cracks in the glistening, whitewashed facade and into the putrid decay underneath. It is a sickness that now seems more pervasive and profound than ever. As bad as I’ve come to realize it has always been, in many ways it feels far worse now.Lately, I’m realizing that not only do I not love this nation, but I really don’t like it very much, either: not the one we have been and certainly not the one I see us becoming now that we have rejected decency and elected inhumanity.I don’t like the fierce denial of Science and data.I don’t like the rejection of education and expertise.I don’t like rising hostility toward the different.I don’t like a cruel white Christian Church devoid of a compassionate Jesus of color.I don’t like the unrepentant brutality of our leaders.I don’t like a political party fully beholden to a traitorous monster.I don’t like the racists emboldened to bully store clerks and harass black teenagers.I don’t like seeing people I love devoured by baseless conspiracy and nonsensical propaganda.I don’t like hundreds of millions of people being one illness away from bankruptcy.I don’t like realizing how many people I know harbor hatred for strangers.I don’t like that we are being helmed by a felon-rapist who is bereft of nobility.I don’t like so much of this place that it grieves my heart and brings me to tears.My adversaries tell me to “just get out if I don’t like it,” and on many days, I completely agree with them. I confess to regularly daydreaming about leaving it all behind, about beginning again somewhere else: about escaping the coming flood of fascism that feels unstoppable, avoiding my increasingly unrecognizable neighbors, and cutting off my unhinged family members.Yet, I know even having the option to do such things is a symptom of my privilege and a luxury many cannot afford; people who will remain here regardless of what happens because their forebears had stayed and because not staying isn’t something their minds have the good fortune to entertain.And so, even though I really don’t like America, I’m trying to stay in America, too.I’m trying to stay because my children and so many other people’s children deserve to inherit something less like what this place is, and more like the place it could be: the nation the songs declare we are but have not yet been.I’m trying to stay to show people that Christianity is not what they’ve been told it is by this MAGA, Bible Belt bastardization with a bloodthirsty, gun-toting, white Republican Jesus with no love for his neighbors.I’m trying to stay to stand up to the grocery store bullies and the mosque door vandals and the social media terrorists and the truck flag bigots, to let them know that they don’t have the run of the house just because they have had a kindred spirit in the White House or steadfast advocates in the highest levels of Congress or surrogates on the Supreme Court.I’m trying to stay to help build the country I dream of living in, the one whose glory I have seen brief flashes of; the one that has always been made better by good people who decided to be loud in the face of a really powerful violence that seemed to be winning.I’m trying to stay here and get my hands dirty, instead of watching from a safe distance and praying someone does something to keep it all from hitting the fan, because that’s how we ended up here.Most of all, I’m trying to stay because I’ve done my time here and contributed my gifts and earned my scars, and I’m not about to let anyone threaten me or push me or shout me out of here.It’s getting bad here, and yes, I do fully believe it’s all going to get worse before it gets better, but I’m staying so that hopefully the worst isn’t quite as bad and so the better arrives a little bit sooner.If things continue to devolve and our systems further fail and fascism gets a greater foothold, I may feel differently.But for now, I’m going to roll up my sleeves, steady myself, double my resolve, and work tirelessly alongside tens of millions of others here who don’t like America either, but who are hell-bent on crafting a better version of it.I love the liberty and equality and diversity this nation was supposed to aspire to, and we still have a shot at being home to these things, even if the odds are not as good as they may have been a year ago.For now, that is enough reason to stay.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. 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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 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 reached 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 are particularly helpful right now.Look, I believe in being rational when at all 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 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.America is on the brink of authoritarianism.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 minutia 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.”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, guys, it’s time for us to have a white man-to-white man conversation.We need to talk about how we’re going to clean up the catastrophic mess we’ve made here.And we need to be honest with ourselves and reckon with the truth that this nation is in the perilous place it is, because we have collectively failed the human test.Our handiwork is everywhere right now:The rabid nationalism that has swallowed up the Evangelical Church.The inexplicable second term of a court-adjudicated rapist.The violent, anti-immigrant persecution by ICE and its supporters. The Renaissance of unapologetic Nazi idols and white supremacist cheerleaders.The never-ending culture war campaigns and Don’t Tread on Me battle posturing from the political and religious Right. The knuckle-dragging, intellectually fetal toxic manhood running through the MAGA movement.And, even the internalized misogyny of Conservative Christian women.We need to fully own it all and to decide what we’re going to do about it.I can already hear the objections coming from behind tiny screens throughout this country from guys like me who abhor this wannabe despot, his willing acolytes in Congress, and the red-hatted death cultists who are now in year ten of living vicariously through their snarling, incompetent messiah of white mediocrity:Not all white men!Yes, all white men.Not me!Yes, you, and yes, me. None of us gets a pass on this. There is no immunity prize when it comes to culpability.The protests we’ve attended, the posts we’ve authored, the charities we’ve contributed to, and the number of James Baldwin quotes we’ve shared on social do not exempt us. There is no Good White Guy loyalty card where we earn rewards for having deconstructed our faith, spoken out against patriarchy, defected from the politics of our parents, or evolved beyond the dog-and-pony faux patriotism and hollow, one-hour-a-week religion we were weaned on. None of that absolves us from our failure to police our own; for the times we have stayed silent when speaking required courage; when we have laughed nervously through the dehumanizing, sexist filth delivered by our neighbors, fathers, friends, and co-workers. We need to inventory and lament the countless times we should have corrected another man; when we failed to cut off the ignorant diatribe of a stranger, or come to the defense of a woman being berated in our presence, when we chose the family gathering of least resistance and avoided meeting the moment.I fully realize that white men are not a monolith in matters of politics or religion. Obviously, our ideologies, our opinions, and our values vary widely, as do their tangible expressions of these things in our lives. When it comes to both the contents of our hearts and the work of our hands, it would be unfair to suggest that any one of us is interchangeable with another.And yes, acknowledging the national scourge of white supremacy, believing that women and trans people deserve to have agency over their bodies, condemning the white Evangelical theocratic aspirations, and demanding serial predators be made accountable are all important. Yet, we don’t get kudos or atta-boys for entry-level human being stuff. That’s the bare minimum of what men of decency should do. In fact, it is precisely because we do know better that we bear the responsibility of making sure the other men around us know that they cannot get away with the garbage they can around other like-minded morons, kindred racists, and fellow predators.The job of overcoming misogyny should not be left to women alone, the war against homophobia not relegated solely to the LGBTQ community, and the defeat of xenophobia not placed upon the shoulders of immigrants. They must be accompanied in these battles must be accompanied by members of the very community who serve as their genesis.When it comes to the privileges provided by our gender and pigmentation, we have equally benefited, and as a result, we are equally to blame. This nation has been a 250-year-long group project that we were declared leaders of without needing to be intellectually qualified or morally equipped for the job.And in days like these, when so many fragile, insecure, and emotionally-addled white guys are doing such harm to marginalized and vulnerable communities, all while crying about their supposed oppression, men of character and decency need to step up and make sure that they know that in us they will not find a safe space, a silent observer, or a willing accomplice.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

Earlier this week, a friend from Australia sent me a text.He’d been watching the news and said he wanted to check on me.“We’re heartbroken to see what’s going on there.” He wrote. “Is it really as bad as it looks?”Another sweet reader from England emailed me this morning with similar concern for our nation and for me, based on what she’s been reading and seeing in the media.Over the past year, many kind-hearted people from all over the world have made similar inquiries about America, asking if it is as dire and alarming up close as it appears from a distance.Yes, yes it is.In fact, it’s actually far worse here on the ground, because all the ugliness people can see from thousands of miles away is probably still rather abstract, a largely undefinable, faceless wave of malice and bigotry, something to be analyzed and picked apart and studied. To them, it’s likely a fascinating, if not terrifying, historical event.But here on the ground, this malignant sickness has a distinct face, one that is far too familiar:It’s the face of family members whose newly revealed racism is continually confronting us around the dinner table.It’s the face of former church friends, who have completely abandoned the Jesus they claim faith in and chosen the vilest of idols.It’s the face of once pleasant neighbors who casually regurgitate extremist propaganda in sidewalk conversations.It’s the face of childhood friends spewing anti-immigrant filth on their social media profiles.It’s the face of storeowners and hair stylists and restaurant workers, the interactions with whom have become careful walks through conversational minefields.So yes, it’s the staggering cruelty of those holding the power here, but just as much, it’s the people we know and live alongside who are so gladly empowering them by supporting them.Yes, it’s the complete bastardization of the rule of law and the systems of protections our forebears put in place to avoid putting our nation in such peril, but it’s our coworkers and uncles and classmates who don’t seem to give a damn about that.Yes, it’s one political party’s sociopathic lack of empathy and their unrepentant viciousness, but it’s the people we’ve shared Thanksgiving dinner with and served on mission trips alongside, who share their venom and boost their signal.Yes, it’s Republican politicians’ incessant attacks on the poor and the sick and the vulnerable, but it’s the once kind-hearted people we love, who have been so poisoned by partisan talking points and perverted Christian theology that they celebrate all of it.That’s why this is all so bad.We’re certainly losing the big things here: the integrity of our elections, the stability of our Republic, the faith in our systems, the illusion that our Republican leaders will put anything over power and party.But we’re losing much more than that.We’re losing the soft places we called home: our families and our churches and our circle of friends.We are swiftly and almost hourly seeing the relational fractures that may have always been there beneath the surface, but are now visible and cavernous.We’re trying to decide whether to fight for relationships we’ve spent our lives nurturing, or whether we need to sever those connections in the name of self-preservation.These things will never make the news or have a global impact, but they are shattering our personal worlds to the bedrock.So, we’re fighting and opposing and working and resisting in the face of this monumental and historically malevolent national political cancer—and while we’re doing that, we’re also trying to preserve our families and our friendships and our workplaces, which are also hanging by a thread.This is a Constitutional crisis, and it’s a family emergency.We’re wondering what happened to our nation, and to people we once loved and respected; to our parents, grandparents, siblings, neighbors, and best friends.Yes, our Democracy is in peril, but our most treasured relationships with people are in tatters, too.We are trying to salvage both, and it’s exhausting.Our efforts involve defending our Republic and rebuilding our tribes.So yes, friends around the world, thank you for caring about us in America.It is as bad as it looks from where you’re standing.But I promise you, it’s far worse up close.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