preacher—as though the commands to integrity, obedience, repentance, and mercy were ordination vows instead of the call of Jesus on every one of his disciples and, even before that, written by God on the consciences of every human being.

One leader told me how dangerous a particular theologian on the “liberal” side was because she was always there with her students when someone lost a job or suffered a miscarriage. This meant, he implied, that she elicited a type of loyalty that would lead those students away from orthodoxy. I would disagree with the “liberal” on virtually all the

Christian nationalism is not a politically enthusiastic version of Christianity, nor is it a religiously informed patriotism. Christian nationalism is a prosperity gospel for nation-states, a liberation theology for white people.

What we have at the moment is not so much a prosperity gospel as a depravity gospel.

The death of your illusions, then, is not meant to paralyze you, but to reshape you into the kind of person who can weep and groan at the wreckage around you, which is the first step, of course, to seeking a different sort of kingdom.

It’s just agreeing that you like being with one another more than you value being proven right about those things.

No one will book a congressman on cable television for negotiating a compromise on an infrastructure bill, but everyone will talk to the politician who says that Jewish space lasers are causing wildfires.

When one feels as though one is under constant existential threat, one cannot maintain the bonds of trust in others needed to build community or the kind of curiosity that can lead to finding ways to serve one another.

We assume ornate and exotic identities, and bear them in the manner of those enormous wigs once worn at Versailles.”