Author: John Pavlovitz

Each day is a day of mourning for millions of Americans. You can see the bereaved everywhere you look. hey may not be dressed in black or sitting in a church pew or tearfully standing graveside or in the back of slow-moving cars with headlights flashing, but they are deeply grieving nonetheless. They are people who have lost someone they dearly love, though not to death but to something else, something much less expected, something much more unnatural. They have lost them to the knowledge of how unlike they now are; to a moral disconnect that has rendered their...

MAGAs like to tell us there is a “War on Christmas.” They are right. The truth is, Jesus would not have stood a chance in MAGA America. They would have cancelled him immediately. When he told them to love their neighbor as themselves, they would have screamed at him to go back where he came from and spit anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic epithets from behind anonymous message board Nazi avatars, raising defiant middle fingers in his face. When Jesus pleaded with them to welcome the stranger and embrace the outcast and receive the refugee, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity...

Kentucky Republican Representative Thomas Massie tweeted out this photo of his family all holding weapons and wearing beaming smiles, with the caption: “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo” Putting aside what the Conservative reaction would be to any Democrat lawmaker’s Christmas tweet that mentioned Santa and not Jesus. The pearl-clutching “War On Christmas” cries would still be echoing through the canyons of GOP social media and partisan television. We should also table imagining the Republican Christian response, if a Muslim family shared a photo of themselves wielding an arsenal on one of their high holy days. The allegations...

The steady stream of vitriol I receive from professed Christians who identify as MAGA or QAnon or Republican is completely understandable. As they fire-off threatening texts, furiously tap out expletive-laden emails, and break into violent, performative histrionics on social media, I genuinely feel for them. They are often getting some really bad second-hand news from me that blows up the narrative they have spent a long time telling themselves and depend on to validate and to justify them. They are coming face to face with the sobering reality that they are antithetical to Jesus. Worse than that, they are...