Author: John Pavlovitz

“If you don’t like this country, then leave” is the tired refrain sung by supporters of this President.

Once again we find ourselves here in this terribly familiar place. We are grieving again. We are watching in disbelief again. Dozens of families are planning funerals again. On Saturday, August 3, as the death toll climbed we heard the graphic details, watched the unfathomable video, saw the media frenzy, and the deja vu of it all was stomach-turning. The questions come once more: “Why the hell are we doing this again? Are we ever going to fix this? How much death do people need to care?” It is as if we are watching the replay of a horror...

If the migrants were white, things would be very different right now in America. We would never have heard anything about building a wall during the 2016 Presidential campaign. It would not have become a Republican rally chant, a Conservative hashtag staple, a MAGA t-shirt favorite, a Donald Trump fixation. Republicans would not be forever declaring a “national emergency” at our southern border. There would be no talk of the lawless streams of bad people currently “overrunning” us. Republican politicians would not be continually working to create connections between exhausted, desperate families — and drug dealers, rapists, and gun...

Something often happens to people exposed to repeated trauma. Gradually, they become conditioned to accept the horrors as commonplace. Time and brutality starts to wear down their defenses and sap their emotional resources and they begin learn to live alongside the most malignant sickness as if it were ordinary. Slowly but quite decidedly they grow numb to the unthinkable cruelty and the sustained violence until it all begins to seem normal. Eventually they lose the ability to be outraged or to push back or to even care. Self-preservation begins to craft a story in their heads where the most...

Conservatives tell us all the time how much they love embryos. They speak effusively about them in conversation, publicly revere them, shed crocodile tears over them, accost strangers entering clinics over them, viciously troll people on social media over them, sermonize on street corners about them. They even claim to have voted for an otherwise reprehensible monster they would never otherwise tolerate to lead them—solely because of them. Republican people of faith regularly fall all over themselves, carry on wildly, and tear their garments in showy grief over embryos; unleashing all manner of histrionics at those they deem a...

I feel sorry for professed Christians who support this President. They have a profound and fundamental spiritual problem: their God is too small. They passionately worship a deity made in their own image: white, American, Republican, male—and perpetually terrified of just about everything: Muslims, immigrants, gay children, Special Counsel reports, mandalas, Harry Potter, Starbuck holiday cups, yoga, wind turbines, Science — everything. Their God is so laughably minuscule, so fully neutered of power, so completely devoid of functioning vertebrae that “He” cannot protect them from the encroaching monsters they are certain lurk around every corner to overwhelm them. MAGA...