In the Ottoman Empire, which was more pragmatic than Islamic, troublemakers were typically invited to the capital, Constantinople — modern-day Istanbul — by the Sultan, with the appearance of defeat and the offer of becoming a vezir, the modern equivalent of a prime minister. It was a move from a well-worn playbook, an obvious trap, but the offer was so tempting that the troublemakers often took the bait — “what if” echoing in their minds — only to be handcuffed, quickly tried, and executed.

The trap worked for centuries so well, not because it was so subtle, and people didn’t see what was coming, but because ambition is a more reliable weakness than stupidity. The troublemaker wasn’t fooled by the offer — he saw it clearly for what it was. He just couldn’t resist the possibility that this time, this particular time, he might be the one to thread the needle. That he might walk into the Sultan’s palace and walk back out wearing the robes instead of the chains. The Ottomans understood something fundamental about power-hungry men: the dream of the throne is stronger than the fear of the axe.

JD Vance just boarded Air Force Two to Islamabad, and the axe is already sharpened.

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An Exceptional Call

A month before the 2024 elections I figured from the headlines and the tone of Kamala Harris that Trump was on his way to the presidency — this time by actually winning it, unlike in 2016. That’s when I stopped writing much about Trump’s contemporary politics, playing three monkeys for the sake of my mental health.

However, this Vance move — the hero miraculously born to save America (and to heal America’s self-inflicted wounds), taking center stage with the support of the selfless president — pushed me to make an exception, so here we go.

A War Nobody Wanted to Own

To understand the trap, you have to understand what the Iran war actually is at this point — not militarily, but politically.

Trump launched the offensive in early March 2026, over the objections of intelligence officials who warned that Iran’s regime was more resilient than Israeli assessments suggested, that the IRGC — Iran’s ideological parallel military, born from the 1979 revolution — would not collapse under pressure, and that closing the Strait of Hormuz was not a bluff. He went ahead anyway, reportedly convinced by Netanyahu’s pre-war briefings that the Iranian population was primed to turn on the regime, that the military campaign would be swift enough to avoid an oil shock, and that a decapitation strike — which killed Khamenei within the first week — would trigger a leadership vacuum Iran couldn’t fill.

I don't have to tell you that none of it played out that way. None of it played out that way. The population didn’t rise. The IRGC filled the vacuum before the smoke cleared. And the Strait, which Trump had privately dismissed as a leverage point Iran would never actually use, closed within 48 hours of the first strike and has stayed closed ever since — taking global oil markets, and Trump’s approval ratings, down with it.

Six weeks into a conflict that was sold to the American public as swift and decisive, the Strait of Hormuz is still choked, gas is over $4 a gallon nationally for the first time since 2022, 20,000 seafarers are stranded in the Persian Gulf, and the ceasefire that was supposed to end it all collapsed within hours of being announced because the two sides couldn’t even agree on whether it covered Lebanon. The war has weakened Trump politically, alienated the anti-interventionist MAGA base that made his coalition possible, and produced none of the clean victories the administration promised. Regime change didn’t happen. The Iranian street didn’t rise up. His son replaced Khamenei and the IRGC is stronger than it was before the first strike.

This is a war that needs a face — but of course not Trump’s, whose brand requires winning, or more often, the appearance of winning. He can’t be photographed presiding over a stalemate. He can’t own $4 gas. He can’t be the president who started a war, promised it would be easy, and is now begging Pakistan to host peace talks that keep collapsing. He needs someone else in the frame. Enter his loyal, ambitious, visibly uncomfortable vice president.

The Mechanics of the Setup

Watch how the handoff was engineered, because the craftsmanship is genuinely impressive.

First, Witkoff and Kushner — Trump’s two original envoys — were run into the ground in Geneva and came back with nothing. Iran publicly refused to engage with them any further. That created a vacuum, and vacuums in this White House get filled with whoever Trump decides to sacrifice next. The Iranians, who’d been following Vance’s carefully leaked private reservations about the war, signaled they’d be more willing to talk to him. At this point, Iran did Trump’s dirty work, handing him the perfect justification to elevate Vance without Trump having to be seen as pushing him into the fire.

Then came the public confirmation. Trump, asked at a press briefing who was leading the diplomatic push, casually listed “Marco, JD” — folding Vance into the effort in the most offhand way possible, as if it were obvious, as if Vance had always been central. No formal announcement. No Rose Garden ceremony. Just a president mentioning his VP’s name in a subordinate clause, making it impossible for Vance to step back without appearing to abandon the mission.

And then the Pakistan trip, with the full press corps watching, with Vance standing at podiums in Islamabad giving updates, with his name attached to every headline about the negotiations. By the time the talks collapsed after 21 hours, “Vance’s Iran talks” was already a fixed phrase in the political vocabulary. Not Trump’s war. Vance’s talks.

That’s how the Sultan invited people to Constantinople. With ceremony. With honor. With the appearance of trust.

The Hungary Footnote Nobody Should Have Missed

Before Islamabad, there was Budapest — and Budapest deserves more attention than it got, because it was either a breathtaking act of political cruelty or an accident that should have made Vance reconsider the whole Pakistan trip before he packed his bags.

Vance was dispatched to Hungary to campaign for Viktor Orbán, a leader Trump had invested significant political capital in as a symbol of the nationalist right’s global momentum. Orbán was trailing badly in the polls. The administration knew it. By Vance’s own admission on Fox News, they knew there was “a very good chance” Orbán would lose before Vance even got on the plane. They sent him anyway.

Orbán’s party was obliterated, and his opponent’s party won a supermajority, meaning more than two-thirds of the parliamentary seats. And the image that will follow Vance into every future profile piece, every opposition ad, every late-night segment, is the one of him on stage in Budapest calling Trump and getting sent to voicemail, then trying again, getting through, and performing a phone call with the leader of the free world in front of a crowd watching a man lose an election. It was humiliating in a way that’s hard to fully articulate — not because anything dramatic happened, but because of the smallness of it. The vice president of the United States, standing on a stage in a foreign country, waiting for his boss to pick up.

If Trump wanted to signal the pecking order before Islamabad, he couldn’t have done it more clearly. The message was: I’ll send you anywhere. I’ll let you fail anywhere. And when you call, I might not answer.

Why Vance Took the Bait Anyway

This is where the Ottoman parallel earns its keep, because the trap only works if the target chooses to walk in. Nobody forced Vance onto Air Force Two. He went anyway.

Vance’s reasoning probably wasn’t wrong on its own terms. He genuinely opposed the war — that much has been confirmed by enough independent sources to be treated as fact. He’d spent weeks watching a conflict unfold that he’d warned against, hemorrhaging credibility with the anti-interventionist voters who were his most natural base, defending in public a policy he’d disputed in private. The peace talks represented the first real opportunity to do what he’d actually wanted to do from the beginning: end it.

There’s also the 2028 calculation, which everyone in his orbit claims nobody is thinking about, which means everyone is thinking about nothing else. If Vance somehow threads the needle — if he sits across from Iranian officials, leverages his anti-war reputation to build the credibility Witkoff and Kushner couldn’t, and comes home with a deal that holds (even somewhat)— he becomes something genuinely rare in American politics: a vice president who ended a war.

The “what if” that the troublemakers in Constantinople kept asking themselves as they rode toward the city gates was the same one Vance asked himself on the flight to Islamabad. What if I’m actually the one who pulls this off?

The Terms Were Never Real

Here’s what should have killed the optimism before it started. Iran’s public negotiating position, the 10-point plan released ahead of the Islamabad talks, included the complete lifting of all sanctions, Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, and a full US military withdrawal from the Middle East. I’m surprised they didn’t demand Trump say sorry for what he did and promise never to do it again.

If anything, these starting positions prove Iran never took these negotiations seriously as diplomacy. Why would they? The talks were more useful as a domestic trophy — proof to their own population that they’d stared down the United States and extracted demands no one else would dare put on paper.

Trump had already described an earlier version of the plan as a “workable basis” for negotiation, then the White House said within 24 hours that the same document was “unacceptable and completely discarded.” The two sides couldn’t agree on whether the ceasefire covered Lebanon. They couldn’t agree on what they’d already agreed to. Sending Vance into that environment and expecting a signed agreement by Sunday was theater, not diplomacy.

And when theater fails on a world stage with your name on the marquee, the audience remembers. “Vance’s failed Iran talks” is a sentence that writes itself into future attack ads with no additional effort required.

The Bodies Trump Left Behind

Vance isn’t the first and won’t be the last. The pattern is consistent enough at this point that calling it as such is almost too generous. “Signature” does a better job.

Michael Flynn was Trump’s first national security advisor, a retired three-star general who’d led “lock her up” chants at the Republican National Convention, who’d staked his reputation and his career on Trump’s first campaign when doing so wasn’t fashionable or safe. Within 24 days of taking office, he was gone — pushed out, hung out to dry over a phone call with the Russian ambassador that senior White House officials, including Vice President Pence, were briefed on and said nothing about until the story broke publicly. Trump didn’t defend him. Trump didn’t call. Trump let him twist, then cut him loose and moved on before the news cycle had time to cool. Flynn spent the next several years fighting federal charges, losing his house, and burning through his savings — before Trump pardoned him on his way out the door in 2020, a gesture calibrated to cost Trump nothing and arrive too late to matter.

Jeff Sessions was the first sitting senator to endorse Trump’s 2016 campaign, at a moment when the Republican establishment was treating Trump like a communicable disease. It was an act of genuine political courage that legitimized Trump’s candidacy in ways that money couldn’t buy. Trump rewarded him with the Attorney General post, then spent two years publicly humiliating him — calling him weak, mocking his Southern accent in private, rage-tweeting about him by name, referring to his own cabinet member as “Mr. Magoo” to anyone who’d listen — all because Sessions had the audacity to follow Justice Department ethics rules and recuse himself from the Russia investigation. Sessions was eventually forced out, ran for his old Senate seat in Alabama in 2020, and was endorsed by Trump’s opponent. He lost.

Chris Christie ran against Trump in 2016, dropped out, and became one of his earliest and most prominent establishment endorsers — arguably doing more than anyone else to normalize Trump for the donor class and the party infrastructure that had been holding its nose. He led Trump’s transition team, put in months of work, and was fired from the transition before Inauguration Day, replaced by Mike Pence, with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner widely reported as the driving force. Christie’s reward for crossing the bridge — and he has his own bridge problems, so perhaps the metaphor is apt — was a phone call telling him he was out.

Mike Pence spent four years as the most publicly loyal vice president in modern memory. He never upstaged Trump, never contradicted him publicly, stood behind him through Access Hollywood and impeachment and the daily chaos, and delivered the evangelical vote that Trump needed but couldn’t reliably generate on his own. On January 6th, 2021, a mob whipped into fury by Trump’s own words marched to the Capitol chanting “hang Mike Pence.” Trump, watching from the White House, was reported to have said Pence deserved it. He didn’t call to check if his vice president was safe. He sent a tweet attacking him while the riot was still ongoing.

Rudy Giuliani was “America’s Mayor” — a man who’d spent decades building a reputation as a tough, credible prosecutor and public servant. He torched all of it for Trump, running a post-election legal campaign so chaotic and unsupported by evidence that judges across the country dismissed case after case with barely concealed contempt. He held press conferences at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. He sweated through his hair dye on live television. He lost his law license. He filed for bankruptcy. Trump, who’d called him one of the greatest lawyers in the country, didn’t cover his legal fees and stopped returning his calls.

The list goes on. Rex Tillerson. Mark Esper. John Kelly. Mark Milley. Bill Barr, who delivered Trump the Mueller summary spin he wanted and was later called “a lazy, slow-moving, lethargic load of crap” in Trump’s own memoir. Each of them, at some point, was essential. Each of them was celebrated, used, and eventually reduced to a cautionary tale.

The mechanism is always the same. Trump needs something — credibility, cover, a specific skill set, a particular relationship, a scapegoat for a specific moment. He offers proximity to power, which is the most intoxicating drug in American political life. The person delivers. Then the thing Trump needed them for either succeeds, in which case Trump absorbs the credit, or fails, in which case Trump was never really involved. The transaction ends. The person finds out what they were actually worth.

Nobody is naive enough to accuse Vance of political naivety. The man who once called his boss “America’s Hitler” and nonetheless played his cards intelligently enough to become his VP when the wind changed direction knows Trump’s history. He’s seen the bodies.

He went to Islamabad anyway.

So What Is This, Really?

The blockade is now in effect — US warships enforcing a hard stop on all traffic entering and leaving Iranian ports, a move that Iran has called piracy and thousands of Iranians rallied against in Tehran yesterday. Iran's IRGC is threatening retaliation. Trump is posting on Truth Social about blowing up Iran's remaining ships. The ceasefire is technically alive but nobody is behaving as though it is. And Vance is back in Washington, giving Fox News interviews about how "the ball is in Iran's court" — the diplomatic equivalent of saying nothing while sounding composed.

The Sultan’s trap didn’t always end in immediate execution. Sometimes the troublemaker was kept comfortable for months, given a title, given access, given just enough rope. The execution came when it was useful — when a scapegoat was needed, when the political calendar demanded a sacrifice, when the Sultan needed to demonstrate that even his most prominent subordinates served at his pleasure.

Trump doesn’t need to fire Vance today. He doesn’t need to publicly blame him this week. The beauty of this particular setup is that the blame accrues slowly, organically, through a thousand news cycles and a thousand “Vance’s failed talks” headlines, building a narrative that will be fully formed and immovable by the time 2028 actually arrives. By then, Vance won’t need to be accused of anything. The record will speak for itself — a vice president who helmed two consecutive high-profile failures in the same weekend, who privately opposed his president’s most consequential decision, and who couldn’t close a deal when it mattered most.

The troublemakers who rode toward Constantinople probably told themselves they were different. That they understood the game better than the ones who’d come before. That they’d spotted the trap and could navigate it anyway. Most of them were right that they’d spotted it. None of that helped them.

Vance is sharp enough to know what this is. The question is whether being sharp enough to see the axe is the same thing as being smart enough to avoid it. So far, the Ottoman historical record isn’t encouraging.

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Go take your Bible from your bookcase, blow away the dust, and start with Genesis, and you’ll hit a contradiction before you finish the first two chapters. Genesis 1 gives you a God who creates the world in six orderly days — light, sky, land, animals, humans, rest. Genesis 2 starts over and picks a different order and method. God scoops dirt, breathes into it, plants a garden, and builds a woman from a rib. Different name for God, too — Elohim in chapter 1, Yahweh in chapter 2.

This isn’t two different stylistic decisions that the author was experimenting with. The two are two separate oral traditions, written down by two different authors, from two different periods, with two different theologies, brought together by an editor who either didn’t notice the seams or didn’t care.

And Genesis isn’t an exception I cleverly isolated the issue. The Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, which scholars also refer to as the Pentateuch, tells the flood story twice, simultaneously, with different numbers of animals on the ark. It gives Moses two different father-in-laws, which you may call cosmetic. But it can’t even decide whether God can be seen face to face or not, which I’d say is fundamental. These are not two stories that complement each other but the work of competing writers who never intended their texts to sit side by side.

Biblical scholars have known this for over two hundred years, but the only reason most people don’t know it is because most churches have decided it’s none of their congregation’s business.

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The Myth of Single Authorship

If you go with the traditional claim, Moses personally wrote the first five books of the Bible and that was that. God dictated, Moses transcribed, end of story. How do we know this? Just because. Some anonymous guy thought this must be the case, others liked it and a myth was born about Moses’ authorship just like that. Nevermind the dozens of obvious problems with that assertion.

Foremost, Moses describes his own death in Deuteronomy 34. He refers to himself in the third person throughout. He mentions places by names that didn’t exist until centuries after the period he supposedly lived in. He tells the same stories twice — sometimes three times — with different details, different theology, and different names for God.

Scholars noticed this centuries ago — to be fair, you don’t need a PhD to pin this down. By the 1800s, the evidence had become so overwhelming that Julius Wellhausen systematized what earlier researchers had already pieced together: the Torah isn’t one book by one author. It’s at least four separate documents, written by different groups at different times, stitched together by later editors who didn’t always bother to smooth out the seams.

This is called the Documentary Hypothesis. The Torah is a composite text. Its authors had different theologies, different politics, and different ideas about what Israel was supposed to be, fighting over the future by rewriting the past.

The Four Voices — And What They Wanted

The traditional labels for the Torah’s sources are J, E, D, and P. The letters don’t matter as much as what each voice represents, because each one maps onto a specific political faction in ancient Israel.

J (the Yahwist) is probably the oldest strand, likely written during the monarchy period in the southern kingdom of Judah — possibly as early as the 10th or 9th century BCE. J calls God “Yahweh” from the very beginning, tells vivid stories with a God who walks in gardens and argues with humans, and is deeply interested in the Davidic dynasty. J’s theology serves Judah’s political interests: the south is the legitimate kingdom, the Davidic line is God’s chosen vehicle, and the covenant runs through Judah.

E (the Elohist) comes from the northern kingdom of Israel. E calls God “Elohim” (until the name Yahweh is revealed to Moses) and tells many of the same stories J tells — but with different emphases. E is more interested in prophets than kings, more cautious about direct encounters with God, and more focused on the northern patriarchs. E represents the rival political and religious establishment of the north, writing their own version of the national story to legitimize their own traditions.

This is already revealing. Two kingdoms, two priesthoods, two versions of the same origin story — each one designed to make their side look like God’s favorites. It’s not that different from two political parties writing their own version of the country’s founding myth. Which, if you think about it, is exactly what it is.

D (the Deuteronomist) is closely associated with the reign of King Josiah in the late 7th century BCE — specifically, with the mysterious “discovery” of a law book in the Jerusalem Temple around 621 BCE, described in 2 Kings 22.

Here’s what happened: Josiah’s priests conveniently “found” a scroll in the Temple that just so happened to support everything Josiah wanted to do politically. It demanded the centralization of all worship in Jerusalem (shutting down rival shrines and priesthoods), insisted on loyalty to Yahweh alone (eliminating the worship of other gods that had been normal in Israel for centuries), and laid out a legal code that concentrated religious authority in Josiah’s capital.

Most scholars agree that this “found” scroll is the core of Deuteronomy and that there’s zero evidence that it was ever found. It’s almost like it was written by scribes and priests in Josiah’s court, and then presented as an ancient document from Moses to give it authority no living politician could claim on their own.

Why this sounds like state propaganda more than anything is that Josiah needed to consolidate power, centralize worship, and eliminate his political rivals — many of whom operated out of the regional shrines he wanted to destroy. He couldn’t do that as a mere king issuing decrees. But if Moses said it? If God commanded it? That’s a different story entirely.

The Deuteronomists didn’t stop with one book. They went on to write (or heavily edit) Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings — the entire “Deuteronomistic History.” And the thesis running through all of it is stunningly consistent: when Israel worships Yahweh alone and follows the Deuteronomic law code, things go well. When it doesn’t, God sends punishment. Every king is evaluated on one criterion — did he centralize worship in Jerusalem and reject other gods? — and the entire history of the nation is reverse-engineered to prove that Josiah’s reforms were the only correct path all along.

P (the Priestly source) is the final major strand, written by priests. Specifically, the Aaronid priesthood, the priestly clan that traced its lineage to Aaron, Moses’ brother.

P is obsessed with genealogies, rituals, purity laws, and the details of the tabernacle. It’s the source behind Leviticus, most of the ritual legislation, and the creation account in Genesis 1 (the orderly, structured one — “And God said, let there be light” — as opposed to J’s more story-telling version in Genesis 2, where God scoops up dirt and breathes life into it).

P’s agenda is institutional. The Priestly writers were establishing the absolute authority of the Aaronid priesthood over all other religious functionaries in Israel. Their texts systematically elevate Aaron and his descendants while sidelining or subordinating everyone else. The elaborate system of sacrifices, purity codes, and temple regulations they laid out was basically a job description. One that guaranteed the Aaronid priests would be indispensable, permanently funded, and positioned at the center of Israelite religious life.

P is also responsible for a crucial theological move: making the covenant with Abraham (and its sign, circumcision) the foundation of Israelite identity. After the Babylonian exile — when the Temple had been destroyed and the monarchy was gone — the priesthood was the only institution left standing. P’s version of history made the priesthood, not the monarchy, the essential thread of Israel’s relationship with God. It’s a power grab written in liturgical language.

The Editors Had Agendas Too

The Torah as we know it didn’t come together until after the Babylonian exile (post-586 BCE), when editors — likely from the priestly circles — took J, E, D, and P and wove them into a single document. By combining the theologies of north and south, monarchy and priesthood, they created a text that could serve as the national scripture of a people who no longer had a nation.

But the editors made personal choices about what to include, what to cut, what to place first, and how to frame the whole thing. The Priestly creation account opens the Bible. The Deuteronomic farewell speech of Moses closes the Torah. These are editorial decisions that shape how the entire text reads — and they reflect the priorities of the people doing the editing, not some neutral archival process.

Richard Elliott Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible? walks through this in detail that’s accessible to anyone who’s curious. So does Joel Baden’s The Composition of the Pentateuch. The evidence isn’t hidden. It’s right there in the text — in the contradictions, the doublets, the shifts in vocabulary and theology that any careful reader can notice once they know what to look for.

The Prophets Were Political Operators

The prophets get treated as mystical figures — wild-eyed men who emerged from the wilderness with messages from God. Most of them weren’t.

Many of the prophetic books were written or heavily edited by schools of disciples, sometimes generations after the prophet supposedly lived. The Book of Isaiah, for instance, is almost certainly the work of at least three different authors spanning two centuries. “First Isaiah” (chapters 1–39) addresses the Assyrian crisis of the 8th century BCE. “Second Isaiah” (chapters 40–55) addresses the Babylonian exile of the 6th century. “Third Isaiah” (chapters 56–66) addresses the post-exilic community. The theology, vocabulary, and historical context shift so dramatically that treating it as a single author’s work requires ignoring everything the text itself is telling you.

Many of the prophets were embedded in power. Nathan was a court prophet under David. Isaiah had direct access to the king. Jeremiah operated in the political chaos of Jerusalem’s final decades before the Babylonian conquest. Their “prophecies” often functioned as political commentary — supporting one faction, condemning another, and justifying specific policy positions by framing them as God’s will.

Ezekiel, writing during the exile, laid out a blueprint for a restored Israel that centered on a rebuilt Temple with a restored priestly hierarchy. His vision was no more than a political program for the post-exilic community, one that would guarantee the priesthood’s position in whatever came next.

Even the “History” Was Propaganda

The historical books — Joshua through 2 Kings — aren’t history in any modern sense.

Joshua presents the conquest of Canaan as a swift, total military victory commanded by God. The archaeology doesn’t support it. Many of the cities Joshua supposedly destroyed either weren’t inhabited at the time or show no signs of violent destruction. Jericho, the signature conquest story, was already in ruins centuries before the period the text describes. What actually happened was migration, assimilation, and occasional conflict over generations — not a holy war led by God’s chosen general.

But that’s not a story you can build a divine land claim on. The Deuteronomists needed a version where God personally handed the territory to Israel through miraculous intervention, because if the claim to the land came from God’s direct command, then anyone who challenged it was fighting God himself.

The books of Samuel and Kings do the same thing with the monarchy. David is the golden boy. Solomon is the wise builder. Every subsequent king is measured against them. But David and Solomon’s kingdoms, as described in the text, don’t match the archaeological record either. The grand united monarchy — Jerusalem as the capital of a vast Israelite empire — looks increasingly like a later idealization, a mythologized past constructed to serve the political needs of writers living in a much diminished present.

The Bible Tells You Who Wrote It — If You’re Willing to Read

Every contradiction in the Torah is a fingerprint. Every doublet is two authors arguing with each other across centuries. Every “discovered” scroll is a political faction using God’s name to settle a score they couldn’t settle with their own authority.

The Deuteronomists rewrote the entire history of Israel to prove that Josiah’s reforms were inevitable. The Priestly writers buried their power grab under layers of ritual legislation so thick that questioning the priesthood meant questioning God. The editors were quietly building a national identity for a people who’d just lost everything else.

And this is the text that two billion people treat as a direct line to the creator of the universe.

The evidence isn’t buried in obscure academic journals. It’s in the text itself — on every page where the same story gets told twice with different details, where the law code contradicts itself, where a “discovered” scroll conveniently backs the king who found it. The Bible has been telling you who wrote it and why for three thousand years. The only thing required to see it is the willingness to actually read what’s on the page instead of what you’ve been told is on the page.

The question isn’t whether the Bible is the word of God. The question is which God, written by which faction, to serve whose interests.

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If you’re not already a paid subscriber and you’re finding value here, I’d love for you to consider becoming one to keep The Unholy Truth alive.

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Sources and Further Reading

• Richard Elliott Friedman — Who Wrote the Bible? (1987, revised 2019)

• Joel Baden — The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis (2012)

• Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman — The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (2001)

• Mark S. Smith — The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (2002)

• Frank Moore Cross — Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (1973)

• Baruch Halpern — The First Historians: The Hebrew Bible and History (1988)

The god whom Jesus called Alaha, and whom people today call “God” in English, Elohim in Hebrew, and Allah in Arabic, has a name — Yahweh. And Yahweh demonstrably wasn’t always in charge.

Before he became the god of Moses, before he became the sole deity of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — before he became the creator of the universe, the judge of all nations, the one and only — Yahweh was a minor regional deity, a storm god from the southern deserts and a second-tier figure in a pantheon he didn’t run. As a god of war, he wasn’t gentle, either — a vicious god you didn’t question. You just obeyed and didn’t let your conscience get in the way.

The god who ran things had a different name: El.

El was the head of the Canaanite pantheon — the patriarch, the creator, the god the other gods answered to, the Zeus of the Ancient Near East. His name is embedded in words billions of people still use without thinking about it: “Elohim,” “Allah,” “Israel,” “Bethel,” “Immanuel.” Every time someone says “Israel,” they’re invoking El. The name means something like “May El persevere.” Not Yahweh. El.

It’s an interesting fossil, a linguistic trace of a time when the people who became the Israelites worshipped a god named El, and Yahweh was either unknown to them or, at best, one of El’s subordinates.

What happened next is one of the most consequential religious mergers in history.

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The last few posts centered around politics with religion as the sidekick. Today we’re going back to Christian history all the way— and of course, the politics come with it.

Here’s a story Christian sources aren’t too keen on telling you.

In 325 AD, Emperor Constantine gathered over 300 bishops in the city of Nicaea to settle the biggest theological question in the history of the faith: Was Jesus God — or wasn’t he?

The council voted, the answer was yes, and just like that, Jesus was “of one substance with the Father” — co-eternal, co-equal, fully divine, and indisputable, of course.

Out of roughly 300 bishops, only two refused to sign the creed. Arius — the priest who’d argued that Jesus was a created being, subordinate to God — was condemned as a heretic and exiled. His books were ordered to be burned, and Constantine even issued a death penalty for anyone caught hiding Arian writings.

And to top it all off, Constantine — the hero who once saw a cross in the sky and conquered in its name — got baptized on his deathbed. Snif, snif.

Case closed, right?

Not even a little bit.

Because the man who called that council — the man who supposedly championed the divinity of Christ — spent the rest of his life quietly dismantling the very decision he’d presided over.

And when he finally died twelve years later, he was baptized on his deathbed by an Arian bishop — one who rejected the idea that the Father and Son were both equally God.

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The Setup

To understand what Constantine actually did, you have to understand what he actually cared about. And it was unity, not necessarily the theology to secure it.

Constantine had just finished consolidating control over the entire Roman Empire. He’d fought a civil war to get there and the last thing he needed was his newly legalized religion tearing itself apart over metaphysics. Mind you, the Arian controversy wasn’t a polite academic debate — it was a full-blown political crisis. Riots in Alexandria, bishops excommunicating each other, congregations splitting down the middle.

So Constantine stepped in, but not because he had a deep conviction about the relationship between the Father and the Son. He simply needed the fighting to stop. At that his letter to both Arius and Bishop Alexander is revealing. He basically told them to knock it off, calling their dispute a trivial philosophical disagreement that nobody should care about.

That's the context people miss, willfully or not. Constantine convened Nicaea because he needed a decision — any decision — that everyone could sign onto and shut up about for good. He believed that for the sake of unity, truth must be decided once and for all — not pursued.

The Vote That Didn’t Stick

The Council of Nicaea produced the Nicene Creed, and on paper, it was a landslide. The Arian position — that Jesus was a created being, the “first and greatest” creation of God but not God himself — was overwhelmingly rejected. The creed declared that the Son was homoousios with the Father: “of the same substance.” Not similar, not comparable, the same. What these bishops knew that the others didn’t is anyone’s guess.

But here’s the thing about landslides at gunpoint: they don’t always reflect what people actually think.

Constantine was physically present at the council, personally opening it with a speech. He participated in the debates, and, according to his biographer, Eusebius of Caesarea, Constantine himself suggested the key term homoousios. The emperor — who hadn’t even been baptized yet — was drafting Christological language for the bishops to vote on.

And the bishops were more than aware which way the wind was blowing. Of the roughly 300 in attendance, many were Arian sympathizers who signed the creed anyway because the alternative was exile. Eusebius of Nicomedia — one of the most powerful Arian bishops in the empire and a relative of the imperial family — signed the creed but refused to sign the condemnation of Arius. For that, Constantine exiled him too.

So the “overwhelming consensus” at Nicaea was really an overwhelming reading of the room. The emperor wanted a result, and he got one. What he did with it afterward tells you everything.

The Slow Reversal

Within three years of the council, Constantine began walking it all back.

First, he recalled the exiled Arian bishops. Eusebius of Nicomedia was brought back from exile by 329 — just four years after Nicaea — and quickly became one of the most influential figures in Constantine’s court. He subsequently got a promotion and eventually became the bishop of Constantinople itself, the seat of imperial power.

Then Constantine turned on the man who’d championed the Nicene position. Athanasius of Alexandria — the most forceful defender of Christ’s full divinity — was condemned at the Synod of Tyre in 335 and exiled by Constantine.

Let me repeat that: the emperor exiled the champion of the very creed his own council had produced.

Meanwhile, Arius himself was rehabilitated. Constantine permitted him to return from exile after Arius submitted a carefully worded statement that technically didn’t contradict Nicaea but conveniently avoided the word homoousios. The Synod of Jerusalem in 336 formally restored Arius to communion. The man the church had declared a heretic was welcomed back in — with the emperor’s full support.

By the mid-330s, the political landscape of the church had been completely inverted. The Arians were in. The Nicene defenders were out. And Constantine was the one flipping the board.

Why of It All

The standard explanation is that Constantine was just trying to keep the peace. The Nicene decision didn’t settle anything — it made things worse. The Eastern bishops resisted the creed because they felt the word homoousios had been forced on them. The controversy kept spreading. So Constantine, ever the pragmatist, began accommodating the Arian side to ease tensions.

That was a charitable reading.

Here’s a less charitable one.

Constantine was never a committed Trinitarian. He didn’t understand the theology, didn’t care about the theology, and chose whichever side seemed most politically useful at any given moment. Early on, when he needed a decisive council to project imperial authority, he backed the Nicene faction. Later, when the Arian bishops proved more pliable and more useful as political allies, he backed them instead.

The evidence supports the less charitable reading. Constantine’s own son and successor, Constantius II, was openly Arian. Under Constantius, Arianism became the effective state religion of the Eastern Empire. The Council of Ariminum in 359 nearly reversed Nicaea entirely. Arian bishops dominated the major sees. Athanasius was exiled five separate times over the course of his career — a record that tells you exactly how contested the “settled” question of Jesus’ divinity really was.

In short, Constantine built the infrastructure for it, elevated Arian bishops to positions of power, marginalized their opponents, and treated the question of Christ’s nature as a political lever rather than a theological truth, all of which reflect the church he left behind.

The Deathbed

And then there’s the ending.

On May 22, 337, Constantine was baptized on his deathbed. He’d delayed baptism his entire life — a common practice at the time, since people believed post-baptismal sin couldn’t be forgiven. He wanted to die clean - and God loved smart people who could rig the system.

The man who performed the baptism was Eusebius of Nicomedia — the Arian bishop who’d defended Arius at Nicaea, who’d been exiled for it, who’d clawed his way back into imperial favor and spent a decade reshaping the church in Arius’s image.

This was so embarrassing to later Christians that a legend was invented — entirely fabricated — claiming that Pope Sylvester I had actually baptized Constantine years earlier in Rome. Scholars dismiss it as a forgery designed to scrub the Arian baptism from the historical record.

Think about what that means. The man who supposedly settled the question of Jesus’ divinity forever was baptized into a version of Christianity that denied it. And the church was so uncomfortable with that fact that they made up a different story.

The Real Legacy

The doctrine that Jesus is God — co-eternal, co-equal, of the same substance as the Father — won because Christians centuries later all agreed on it, not because any of them had access to some truth the others didn't.

And contrary to popular belief, it didn't win at Nicaea, either. It won because, decades later, Emperor Theodosius I made it the law.

In 380 AD — fifty-five years after Nicaea — Theodosius backtracked on the backtracked position and issued the Edict of Thessalonica, which made Nicene Christianity the official state religion of the Roman Empire. Not Arianism, not any of the dozen other Christological positions that had been floating around for centuries, but the Trinitarian formula — and not because a council voted on it, but because an emperor decreed it and enforced it with state power.

The Council of Constantinople in 381 reaffirmed the Nicene Creed. By that point, with the emperor’s full backing and legal penalties for dissent, the debate was effectively over. Arianism was pushed out of the empire — though it survived for centuries among the Gothic tribes that Arian missionaries had converted.

So the story of Jesus' divinity isn't a story about theological truth winning out through careful scholarship and spiritual discernment. It's a story about emperors — what they needed, who they backed, and which bishops they were willing to exile.

Constantine started the process, convened the council, got the vote, and then spent twelve years undermining it because unity mattered more to him than doctrine. His successors finished the job — some on the Arian side, some on the Nicene side — until one emperor finally picked a winner and made it illegal to disagree.

Yes, Christianity rose from being the religion of the poor and disadvantaged to the top — but "at what cost" isn't a question Christianity likes to ask, and who can blame it?

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Sources and Further Reading

• R.P.C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318–381 (T. & T. Clark, 1988)

• Timothy D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Harvard University Press, 1981)

• Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition (2nd ed., 2002)

• Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford University Press, 2004)

• Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (Penguin, 1967)

• Britannica, “Arianism” and “Christology: The Arian Controversy”

• Eusebius of Caesarea, Life of Constantine (4th century)

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In my previous piece, I ended with a line I want to come back to: “Everybody is responsible for their own racism.”

I meant it, and I still do. But I’ve noticed it may not clearly relay and be interpreted either as a throwaway concession to avoid controversy, or as a quiet retreat from everything I’d just argued. It was neither.

Let me do some unpacking related to that.

We hold every individual responsible for their criminal acts, which is foundational to our judicial system. Nobody gets to mug someone and blame their postcode for it. Nobody gets to burn down a synagogue and point at a headline from Gaza. Criminal responsibility is personal.

But we also study what drives crime rates up or down. We map poverty to violence, unemployment to theft, social isolation to radicalisation. We architect entire policies around the understanding that while individuals choose to commit crimes, environments shape how many individuals make that choice. No serious person looks at a spike in burglaries and says, “Well, each burglar is personally responsible, so there’s nothing systemic to examine.” That would be wilful stupidity. You’d be laughed out of any criminology department on the planet - and deservingly so.

And yet, when it comes to antisemitism, that’s exactly the posture we’re asked to adopt. Every flare-up is treated as a spontaneous eruption of ancient hatred — disconnected from policy, from rhetoric, from the deliberate choices of political leaders who know exactly what they’re doing and don’t care what it costs.

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The Middle Ground

People imagine prejudice as binary. You’re either a racist or you’re not. You either hate Jews or you don’t. But that’s not how it works. Prejudice exists on a spectrum, and a dangerous number of people sit somewhere in the murky centre — not hateful enough to act, but not secure enough in their tolerance to resist when the current shifts.

These are the people who would never vandalise a synagogue but might share a meme that edges close to a stereotype. The people who would never assault a Jewish neighbour but might, after the fifteenth news cycle about civilian casualties, start to let "Israel" and "Jews" blur together in their heads. The people who befriend Jewish colleagues and neighbours without a second thought — because so far, nothing has happened to make the prejudice they didn't know they carried rise to the surface. Until something does, and they shed Jewish friendships.

Yet, this is the persuadable middle. And what a responsible government does — what any government with an ounce of strategic sense does — is work to keep that middle stable. You don’t get to hand ammunition to the worst voices in society and then act stunned when the ammunition gets used.

Netanyahu doesn’t seem to care. Not because he’s oblivious — he’s many things, but stupid isn’t one of them — but because the calculus is purely domestic. Every diplomatic rupture, every international protest, every wave of outrage feeds the siege mentality that keeps his coalition intact. The worse Israel looks abroad, the more his base feels vindicated: See? The whole world hates us. We need a strongman. It’s a perpetual motion machine of grievance, and the fuel is Jewish safety everywhere else.

The Jews in Marseille, in Melbourne, in Montreal — they don’t factor into the equation. They’re externalities. Acceptable losses in a domestic political game they never consented to play.

Other Policies Think Systemically

Consider how we handle any other social problem. Drug addiction: we hold users and dealers accountable, yes, but we also examine the pharmaceutical companies that flooded communities with opioids, the economic despair that made people vulnerable, the policy failures that let it spiral.

Domestic violence: we prosecute abusers, but we also study the conditions — economic stress, social isolation, normalised aggression — that predict higher rates. Nobody seriously argues that systemic analysis lets individuals off the hook. If anything, it’s the opposite: it’s how you prevent the next thousand individuals from making the same choice.

Antisemitism deserves no less.

Bigotry Is a Virus

If standing up against antisemitism and developing smart strategies to fight against it don’t convince you because it’s the right thing to do, this should:

Bigotry doesn’t stay in its lane. It never has. When antisemitism gains traction in a society, it doesn’t politely confine itself to hatred of Jews. It cracks the door, and everything else follows. Misogyny. Homophobia. Anti-immigrant hysteria. Anti-Black racism. Islamophobia. Hatred of the disabled, the poor, the different. Contempt for anyone who doesn’t fit the narrowing definition of who belongs. Even if you’re lucky enough not to fall into any of these categories, someone you care about eventually will.

Every society in written history that has let one form of bigotry take root has watched others flourish beside it. Nazi Germany didn’t just target Jews — it came for Roma, for gay men, for the disabled, for political dissidents, for anyone the state decided was less than. Jim Crow went further than subjugating Black Americans — it sustained a hierarchy that kept poor whites in their place, that policed gender roles, that punished any deviation from the prescribed order. Apartheid South Africa didn’t stop at oppressing Black South Africans — it built an entire architecture of classification and control that sorted every human being into a box and punished them for stepping outside it.

The mechanism is always the same. Bigotry eats empathy. Not selectively — wholesale. Once a society accepts that one group can be dehumanized, the muscle that resists dehumanization atrophies. The capacity to see someone unlike you as fully human — that’s not a toggle you flip on and off depending on the target. It’s a practice, a habit, a communal discipline. And when it erodes for one group, it erodes for all of them.

Empathy is the connective tissue of every functioning human community. It’s what makes strangers cooperate, what makes neighbors tolerate difference, what makes democracy possible at all. When bigotry spreads — when it becomes normalized, entertaining, politically useful — it dissolves that tissue. And once it’s gone, the damage doesn’t stop at the group that was first targeted. It metastasizes.

This is why “everybody is responsible for their own racism” is the beginning of the conversation, not the end. Yes, individuals choose. But societies also choose — through their leaders, their institutions, their willingness or refusal to confront what’s happening in the middle, where most people live.

Containment Is a Choice

Every government on Earth understands the logic of containment in other domains. You contain infectious disease. You contain financial contagion. You contain wildfires. The principle is simple: act early, act strategically, and don’t do the thing that makes the problem spread faster.

The Israeli government, under Netanyahu and his coalition partners, has done the opposite with antisemitism. Every time they equate criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews, they hand actual antisemites a recruitment tool. Every time they invoke the Holocaust to shut down policy debate, they cheapen the memory that should function as a firewall. Every time they insist on speaking for all Jews everywhere, they paint a target on communities that never asked to be represented.

Governing isn’t about telling yourself your country is doing the “right” thing. It’s about pursuing a strategy that works at the lowest possible cost. Netanyahu talks endlessly about the first and shows little interest in the second. Then tribalism does what tribalism always does. Of course Israelis will rally together if they’re convinced their country is the victim and that everyone else is to blame but their own leaders. Human beings evolved that way, and populists know it. From Iran to Hungary, from Russia to Turkey, authoritarian-minded politicians keep exploiting the same instinct. Turks know this pattern so well that there’s even a saying: Turks have no friends but Turks. Because they’re convinced that everything is everyone else’s fault — that Turks are victimised for being Turks, descendants of Ottomans who once ruled the region, and that Turkey always does things right and questioning it is treason. Sound familiar?

Governments everywhere make choices that either inflame or contain prejudice against different groups. What makes this case distinctive is the scale of the claim. No other government on Earth asserts the right to speak for an entire global diaspora. No other government binds itself so tightly to a religious and ethnic identity that criticism of its policies becomes, in its own framing, an attack on a people. That’s why the fallout is so vast.

And the people sounding this alarm aren’t Israel’s enemies. They’re Israeli journalists, Jewish scholars, diaspora community leaders — people who understand that the current trajectory threatens not just Israel’s standing, but Jewish safety worldwide. When the people inside the house are telling you the foundation is cracking, you don’t dismiss them as self-hating. You listen.

Consequences of Not Caring

The hardest part of this argument is also the simplest: Netanyahu and his political allies don’t bear the cost of what they’re doing. They sit in Jerusalem, insulated by security details and domestic approval ratings, while Jews in other countries absorb the shockwaves. The feedback loop is broken. The people making the decisions never feel the consequences, and the people feeling the consequences have no power over the decisions.

It’s true at the individual level. But it lets the architects of the system off the hook. It treats antisemitism as a series of isolated moral failures rather than what it partly is: the predictable result of a political strategy that treats Jewish identity as a shield for government policy and Jewish safety as someone else’s problem.

The fix isn’t complicated in theory, even if it’s nearly impossible in the current political climate. Stop claiming to speak for all Jews. Stop treating every criticism as bigotry. Stop using the Holocaust as a silencing device. Stop conflating a government with a people. These aren’t radical demands — they’re the bare minimum of responsible statecraft.

And remember — only failed governments blame everything on the foreign allies that turned their backs on them. Maintaining those alliances is the government’s job, and pursuing strategies that drive them away isn’t the world’s failure. But when your voters rally behind you harder the more you rail against an unfair world, why change an otherwise failing strategy and stop treating Jewish communities worldwide as collateral casualties?

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This essay isn’t about defending or condemning Israel’s current government for its controversial actions. That debate turns into a moral cage match within seconds, and I’m not here for it. More than enough people are already doing that, and the last thing the world needs is another comment designed to win applause from one side and frustration from the other.

What I want to do instead is lay out, plainly and without the comfort of false balance, how Israel’s political leadership—especially its revolving door of populist, right-wing governments—has helped build the conditions that fuel twenty-first-century antisemitism.

This is about understanding the machinery that makes their jobs easier, and how the state of Israel has, through its own arrogance and cynicism, helped grease the gears.

One clarification before we go further: “Israel” here means its government and political elites—the same people many Israelis themselves can’t stand for their corruption and incompetence. This is certainly not an attack on Israelis as a people, or on Jews as a group. It’s a critique of how the state apparatus, through its rhetoric and policies, has blurred the lines between government, religion, and ethnicity in ways that have made life more dangerous for Jews everywhere. The distinction matters, even if Israel’s own leadership works overtime to erase it.

I am also keeping outside my jurisdiction those Israelis who wholeheartedly support their sitting government. Tribalism is a natural human instinct we’ve evolved to have for survival, not a moral failing. I can also relate to the dissonance they must feel between how right they believe Israel is in its actions and how the rest of the world reacts. Except for the US, perhaps, which seems to have abandoned the international legal architecture it largely built after World War II.

Let’s begin.

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When a State Claims to Speak for All Jews

The gravest mistake Israel’s leaders keep making is their insistence that they speak for every Jew on the planet. Whenever the Israeli government faces international criticism, the playbook is the same: “That’s antisemitism.” As if the state of Israel is Judaism itself. As if critiquing Netanyahu or his cabinet is the same as attacking the sanctity of Jewish existence.

This is political cowardice, which they want us to believe is ethnic solidarity. It’s a deliberate conflation, and it’s as dangerous as dangerous can get. When the state makes itself the avatar of an entire people, every action it takes—no matter how ugly—gets mapped onto Jews everywhere. If Israel bombs a hospital, or bulldozes a village, or passes a law denying basic rights, it’s not just the government that faces the backlash. It’s the Jewish kid at school in Marseille. The owner of the corner deli in Queens. The rabbi walking down the street in Manchester. These are people who have zero say in Israeli policy, zero connection to the decisions being made in Jerusalem, and yet they bear the consequences because a government 5,000 miles away decided to make itself their spokesperson.

This is how modern antisemitism is manufactured. The government builds the road and then feigns shock when people follow it all the way to the doorsteps of ordinary Jews.

As Peter Beinart put it in The Crisis of Zionism: when you conflate a government with an entire people, you don’t shield the government from criticism—you put a target on the people’s back.

And I’m not talking about something abstract and hypothetical. Every time headlines about Israeli military actions hit, attacks on Jewish communities in Paris, London, and New York follow. The state’s insistence on being “the representative of the Jewish people” is more than hubris—it’s a calculated shield that, in practice, turns ordinary Jews into collateral damage.

Political Loyalty Tests and the Collapse of Credibility

The United States, Israel’s most uncritical ally, has bought into this false equivalency wholesale. Remember the hospital bombing in Gaza? Israel denied responsibility immediately—no evidence, no investigation, just a flat denial. Joe Biden, instead of demanding answers—the bare minimum any ally should expect—parroted the Israeli line. “We’ll take Israel at its word.”

A superpower, faced with mass civilian casualties, deciding that the word of the accused is sufficient. No forensic analysis, no independent inquiry, no due diligence of any kind.

In any other context, if the accused’s word was treated as gospel and the victims were dismissed without a second thought, people would riot. But when it comes to Israel, the usual standards evaporate. The state has built a political apparatus where criticism is synonymous with bigotry, and where loyalty to the government is a litmus test for moral legitimacy.

Perhaps, the biggest tragedy of all is that the very official Biden trusted had a suspended conviction for corruption and was fighting to avoid jail time. Yet the world was expected to take his word as unassailable truth. This is what happens when politics replaces principle, and a state’s narrative is treated as scripture by foreign powers terrified of the “antisemite” label. The credibility of the entire Western alliance gets tied to the credibility of one government’s talking points—and when those talking points crack, so does trust in every institution that repeated them.

This isn’t to say Israel was lying. I don’t know any more than you do. But the attitude speaks volumes. It sends a clear message to Arabs that this is not about right or wrong. It is like a football match: we picked our side, and we will support it no matter what it takes. We do not even care enough to give the impression that morality matters.

The Holocaust as Political Shield

One of the most cynical moves in modern politics is Israel’s constant invocation of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was real, horrifying, and a tragedy that must never be forgotten. But Israel’s leadership has turned remembrance into a weapon—an emotional bludgeon to silence dissent and deflect accountability. Every time someone pushes back against Israeli policies, the accusation drops: “You’re minimizing Jewish suffering,” or “You’re enabling another genocide.”

This is emotional blackmail. It’s not about honoring the dead; it’s about shielding the living from scrutiny. And over time, it breeds resentment. People start to see Holocaust memory not as sacred, but as manipulative. The ones who suffer aren’t the politicians in Jerusalem—they’re Jews in the diaspora who had nothing to do with any of it, but who now carry the burden of a weaponized tragedy.

Norman Finkelstein nailed it in The Holocaust Industry: the Holocaust is not a moral trump card to silence criticism of a modern nation-state. And yet that’s exactly what it’s become—a rhetorical grenade lobbed at anyone who dares question the gap between what Israel says and what Israel does. The tragedy isn’t just the cynicism. It’s that this strategy corrodes the very memory it claims to protect.

If you plant the Holocaust between your critics and your government, you shouldn't be surprised when populist politicians and movements start working to devalue it. In their calculations, tearing down the shield would expose Israel to the criticism they twant to land. In other words, The Holocaust doesn't get cheapened by accident. It gets cheapened because Israel made it load-bearing — and now every bad-faith actor with a political axe to grind knows exactly which wall to chip at.

Weaponizing Antisemitism—And Draining It of Meaning

“Antisemitism” used to mean something specific: hatred of Jews for being Jews. Today, thanks to Israel’s relentless messaging apparatus, the term has been stretched to the point of meaninglessness. Criticize a bombing? Antisemitism. Question a land grab? Antisemitism. Boycott Israeli goods? Nazi.

This is reckless to say the least. By weaponizing the term against all critics, Israel has trained the world to tune out legitimate warnings. When actual antisemitism surfaces—when synagogues are attacked, when Jewish communities are scapegoated, when conspiracy theories about Jewish power circulate on social media—the world shrugs, assuming it’s just another political spat. Real antisemites slip through the cracks while the state’s defenders keep crying wolf. The boy who cried antisemitism has made it harder to hear the real screams.

Kenneth Stern, who helped draft the original IHRA definition of antisemitism, warned it himself: if everything is antisemitism, then nothing is. The man who literally wrote the definition is telling you it’s being abused. When the author of the standard says you’ve broken it, maybe it’s time to listen.

Diaspora Jews: Unwilling Pawns

Most Jews don’t live in Israel. They don’t vote in its elections, they don’t shape its policies, and many are openly critical of its government. Yet Israeli leaders insist on speaking in their name, drafting them into a political project they never signed up for. Outreach groups bombard American and European Jews with propaganda, demanding loyalty and defense of Israeli policies. The message: to be a good Jew, you must be a good Zionist.

This sets up diaspora Jews as targets for backlash whenever Israel acts. When protesters march against Israeli military actions, they end up outside synagogues and Jewish community centers. Why? Because Israel has gone out of its way to erase any daylight between its government and Jews everywhere.

Tony Judt laid it out in Israel: The Alternative: Israel insists on being the “Jewish state,” then complains when Jews everywhere are seen as answerable for its actions. A state that wraps itself in the identity of a global people acts surprised when that global people catches the blowback. This is the predictable outcome of a deliberate strategy, nothing to be shocked by.

Nationalism as Religion, Criticism as Heresy

Modern Israeli politics—especially on the right—treats nationalism not as a political stance but as a sacred creed. Zionism has morphed from a movement for Jewish self-determination into a quasi-religious dogma. The state is holy, its leaders are prophets, doubters are heretics.

This has poisoned public discourse. Jews who criticize Israel are slandered as “self-hating.” Non-Jews who do so are labeled antisemites. Organizations that advocate for Palestinian rights are smeared as hate groups. The result is a suffocating attitude where only a safe opinion is uncritical support. This isn’t about anything but protecting Jews—it’s about stifling dissent and consolidating power. The conflation of political criticism with ethnic hatred serves exactly one constituency: the people in charge.

Amira Hass, writing for Haaretz, observed that Zionism once sought refuge from antisemitism—and now, in its worst forms, manufactures it. That’s not the verdict of an outsider with an axe to grind. It’s the assessment of an Israeli journalist writing from inside the system. When your own press is sounding the alarm, the problem isn’t the critics. It’s the policy.

Predictable—and Preventable—Consequences

Antisemitism remains a potent and real threat. Attacks on Jewish people and institutions, conspiracy theories about Jewish power, political scapegoating—these are facts, and they predate the state of Israel by centuries. But a significant portion of the antisemitism that flares up around Israeli military operations isn’t the product of ancient hatreds or irrational bigotry. It’s the direct result of a decades-long campaign to fuse Jewish identity with the Israeli state. When Israel acts badly, the world sees “the Jews” acting badly. The government set up the dominoes and then feigns surprise when they fall.

Miko Peled put it starkly in The General’s Son: when people say “Israel makes me hate Jews,” they’re reacting to a system that trained them to see no daylight between the two. That’s not a justification for antisemitism. It’s a diagnosis of a toxic dynamic that the Israeli state itself engineered.

The people who suffer most aren’t Israeli politicians or generals. They’re the Jews living in Brooklyn, Berlin, Buenos Aires—people with no power over Israeli policy, but who are held accountable for it nonetheless.

So, Was It Always Israel’s Destiny?

This isn’t about whether the sitting Israeli government is right or wrong in its actions. Israel will have good governments and bad governments — that’s how democracy works. And the question is why, when a bad government makes bad decisions, Jews worldwide pay the price, and how that dynamic keeps getting brushed aside.

The conversation is so consumed by whether Israel is right or wrong that it misses something obvious: the sitting government couldn’t care less about Israel’s reputation worldwide. It doesn’t need to. It needs votes. And those votes come from a domestic base that’s ready to blame every diplomatic fallout on the countries pulling away, conveniently forgetting that maintaining alliances and protecting Israel’s standing abroad is the government’s job — not everyone else’s.

Even if every single Israeli military action were justified, the strategy is failing on its own terms. When your allies are dropping away, when your international standing is in freefall, when your name has become synonymous with controversy in every capital that used to back you — that’s not the world’s failure. That’s a leadership failure.

Think of it this way: would you keep a CEO who started suing competitors left and right, despite the customer backlash and the company’s cratering reputation? You’d fire him. Even if the company was right in every single case. Because being right doesn’t matter if your strategy is burning down every relationship you need to survive. The CEO’s job isn’t just to win court cases — it’s to protect the company’s position in the market. You don’t get to be right and ruined and call it a victory.

But somehow, when it’s a country, the expectation flips. Suddenly, it’s everyone else’s job to see how right Israel is and magically keep supporting it. And if they don’t? Their fault. Their antisemitism. Their problem.

Everybody is responsible for their own racism. . But it is the government’s job to foresee which actions fuel racism and which ones help contain it. Blaming everything on racists doesn’t make them disappear. It just means you don’t care enough about the cost to the victims — the Jews in Brooklyn, Berlin, and Buenos Aires who never asked to be conscripted into this fight, and who keep paying for decisions they had no part in making.

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What you’re reading is the full series—all three parts—of “Muslims and Evangelicals Are the Same Coin,” which I originally published on The Unholy Truth in separate installments over the course of a week. I’ve brought them together here so the full argument can be read in one place, as a complete piece.

Enjoy it, and let me know what you think in the comments.

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PART I

American evangelicals love talking as if Islam is some alien thing from another planet. They describe Muslims as backward, rigid, obsessed with sex, obsessed with rules, obsessed with sin, obsessed with policing women, obsessed with what people do in private, obsessed with what children are taught, obsessed with protecting society from moral decay.

And every time they do that, the obvious point goes sailing over their heads.

They are describing themselves.

Not all Christians, obviously. Not all Muslims either. In fact, the whole point of this article is that the religious label is often irrelevant. Mainstream conservative Muslims across much of the Muslim world and American evangelicals share far more than evangelicals would ever feel comfortable admitting. The resemblance is not superficial. It is structural. It shows up in family life, in politics, in gender expectations, in fear of secular culture, in suspicion of outsiders, in their constant language of moral decline, and in the belief that society falls apart the moment religion loses control.

That is why the two groups often sound like enemies while behaving like cousins.

The irony gets even better when you look at how both communities imagine themselves. Conservative Muslims often believe the West is spiritually empty, sexually chaotic, and morally unmoored. American evangelicals often believe the Muslim world is authoritarian, repressive, and dangerously religious. Both are partly describing real things. Both are also staring into a mirror and pretending they are looking through a window.

Morality Must Be Enforced From Above

One of the clearest similarities is that both conservative Muslims appnd American evangelicals distrust the idea that ordinary people can be left alone to figure out their own moral lives.

They do not really believe freedom is safe. They may use the word freedom constantly—evangelicals certainly do—but what they usually mean is the freedom to preserve their own moral order, not the freedom of others to reject it.

Conservative Muslims often frame this through religion, community, modesty, family honor, divine law, and the belief that society must visibly submit to moral rules. American evangelicals frame it through “biblical values,” “family values,” the sanctity of marriage, the protection of children, and the claim that America is collapsing because it pushed God out of public life.

Both believe society becomes dangerous when religion stops setting the boundaries. Both fear that once people are allowed too much room to choose for themselves, everything starts sliding: sex, gender, family, authority, education, respect, even truth itself.

That is why both groups are so vulnerable to moral panic. Moral panic is one of their favorite fuels. A schoolbook becomes civilizational collapse. A television show becomes proof of cultural decay. A gay couple becomes an assault on the natural order. A woman choosing her own life becomes evidence that society has forgotten God. Everything is always one step away from disaster. That constant alarm is useful: it keeps followers obedient, keeps them emotionally mobilized, and makes them feel under siege, which is one of the fastest ways to stop people from questioning the system they are defending.

This is also where both communities stop being just religious and become political tribes. For conservative Muslims, Islam fuses with civilization, anti-colonial memory, and resistance to Western domination. For evangelicals, Christianity fuses with nationalism, heritage, and the fantasy of a moral America that once existed and can be restored. Which is why criticism of their religion is never heard as criticism of ideas. It is heard as an attack on the group itself. Disagreement stops being disagreement; it becomes betrayal, and then war.

And once the tribe is under threat, intellectual freedom becomes a casualty. In conservative Muslim settings this means hostility to reinterpretation, pressure against scholars who question inherited doctrine, and reflexive suspicion toward critical history. In evangelical America it appears through culture-war attacks on universities, book banning campaigns, and the rejection of anything that might loosen conservative belief. The logic is identical: truth is already known, so questioning becomes dangerous. That is not confidence. That is fear in ceremonial clothing.

Contrary to popular belief, Islam did not begin as the rigid legal machine many people now imagine. Much of what people now associate with hardline Islamic control—including the criminalization of apostasy, blasphemy, and homosexuality—emerged later through legal and political developments, long after Muhammad’s death. And if American fundamentalists ever got the power they want, it is not difficult to imagine those same prohibitions being turned into law one by one.

It’s all about the mindset, not necessarily religion.

The Protection Myth

This is another area where the family resemblance is almost embarrassing.

Conservative Muslims and American evangelicals both speak endlessly about protecting women while building social systems designed to control them. The details differ. The vocabulary differs. The clothing rules differ. The legal frameworks differ. But the pattern is painfully familiar.

Women are told they are precious, and then treated as dangerous. They are told they are honored, and then monitored. They are told they are central to the family, and then denied equal authority within it. Their sexuality is treated not as their own but as a social risk that men—fathers, husbands, pastors, scholars, community elders—must manage on their behalf.

In conservative Muslim environments this shows up through modesty codes, restrictions on mixing, pressure around marriage, family honor, and the expectation that women carry the burden of public morality on their bodies. In evangelical America it looks different but is no less legible: purity culture, anti-abortion absolutism, suspicion of feminism, the theological praise of submissiveness, and the endless effort to turn motherhood into a woman’s entire moral destiny.

In both worlds, the female body becomes a battlefield where men fight their war against modernity.

And in both worlds, the men doing the lecturing call this protection.

The Architecture Is the Same

Conservative Muslims and American evangelicals did not coordinate. They do not like each other. They do not read each other’s texts or attend each other’s conferences or agree on almost anything theological.

And yet they built the same building.

Same load-bearing walls, same floor plan, same locks on the same doors. The wallpaper is different. The prayers are in different languages. The women dress differently and the men argue about different books. But the structure underneath—who holds authority, who carries shame, who gets monitored, who gets protected by being controlled—is the same structure.

That is not coincidence. It is what happens when any tradition decides that the most important thing religion can do is keep order. Once that decision is made, everything else follows. The family becomes a hierarchy. The community becomes a surveillance system. The woman becomes a symbol. The outsider becomes a threat. And God becomes the enforcer of arrangements that were always, underneath the theology, about power.

Both communities built that building. Both communities live in it. Both communities tell their children it is the only safe place in the world.

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PART II

In isolation, American evangelicals and conservative Muslims may think they agree on very little. Some would even be horrified to be placed in the same sentence—Muslims are terrorists who hate Americans for their freedom, remember?—let alone the same argument.

But spend enough time inside both worlds, and the horror starts to look like recognition.

Part I of this piece laid out the structural similarities—the politics, the gender roles, the fear of secular culture, the constant surveillance sold as community and security. If you haven’t read it, the short version is this: these aren’t two opposing civilizations, just two versions of the same one arguing about the brand name.

Part II is where it gets personal.

Because the architecture of control doesn’t stay abstract. It lands in the body. It shows up in who gets to decide what happens to a pregnancy, what desire is allowed to look like, what a family is actually for, and what happens to anyone who uses the side door instead of the front one.

Both communities have spent generations perfecting the answers to those questions, and yes, the answers differ in detail, but in substance, they’re close enough to be embarrassing.

Abortion

What’s interesting—and more complicated—is what actually happened with abortion across the Muslim world. Tunisia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, and Tajikistan all moved beyond the debate long ago. Access was settled, quietly, and life moved on. These are Muslim-majority societies, many of them deeply conservative in their social fabric, and yet they arrived at a more pragmatic position than the American religious right ever has when it comes to the termination of unwanted pregnancies.

But step outside that list, and the picture changes fast. Across much of the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, abortion is either heavily restricted or banned outright, not because religious authority and state power have merged into the same voice. In Egypt, Iraq, and Pakistan, abortion is largely illegal except to save the mother’s life. In Yemen and Afghanistan under the Taliban, the question barely exists as a public conversation at all. And the language is almost identical to what you’d hear from a Republican lawmaker in Alabama or Texas: life begins at conception, the family must be protected, women’s bodies are treated as communal property, justified as divine will.

Then the United States had its convulsion—the overturning of Roe, the culture war turned into law—and something interesting happened in Turkey. The idea of restricting abortion surfaced briefly in political conversation, which isn’t entirely surprising if you understand Turkey’s complicated relationship with America: a mixture of love, suspicion, and a nagging conviction that whatever Americans do, they probably do it best. The idea was floated, studied, discussed—and then just as quietly walked back. It never became serious policy.

The reason almost certainly had little to do with women’s rights. Turkey’s retreat was more likely about keeping the image of the traditional Turkish family intact—about not producing children outside of marriage, not creating the social disruption that comes with unwanted pregnancies in a society where family reputation still does enormous work. The protection, in other words, wasn’t really about women. It was about the family unit, the community’s image, the same honor architecture operating through a different lever.

And that logic—protecting the family unit, not the woman—is exactly where conservative Muslims and American evangelicals converge most completely. Both sell abortion restrictions as being about life, about God, about the sanctity of the family. But follow the argument far enough and you always arrive at the same place: a woman’s reproductive choices are too important to be left to the woman. Someone else—a husband, a cleric, a legislature, a pastor—needs to be in the room. The beliefs in the shop window may differ, but the purpose behind them does not.

When these societies land on an outcome that looks modern or human-rights-friendly, that does not necessarily mean they got there for the right reason.

That’s the thread that runs through all of it—the exceptions and the restrictions alike. Whether the outcome is access or prohibition, the woman is rarely the one who decides. The men just disagree about which answer God prefers.

Shared Fear of Sexual Freedom

Both groups are deeply convinced that sexual freedom destroys civilization—not merely disrupts or complicates it, but destroys it.

That’s why so much of their rhetoric sounds hysterical to outsiders. They’re not merely objecting to behavior they dislike. They genuinely believe that loosening sexual rules leads to social death. Marriage collapses. Birth rates collapse. Gender collapses. Authority collapses. And then, in their imagination, society dissolves into a selfish carnival of lust, loneliness, and broken children.

This is why they spend so much time fixating on homosexuality, pornography, sex education, premarital sex, divorce, and gender nonconformity. These issues are never treated as private matters. They’re treated as symbols. The point isn’t only what people do, but what those acts represent in a world where religion no longer controls the script.

And that’s what terrifies them.

American evangelicals often speak as if Muslim conservatism is uniquely obsessed with sex, while overlooking that they are too, even if it takes a different form. They just package it in a different accent. They preach about purity balls instead of hijab. They talk about biblical marriage instead of modesty codes. They lobby school boards instead of religious ministries. But the nervous energy is the same, because they can’t stop talking about what other people do with their bodies when control over the body is one of the clearest signs of social power.

They Both Worship the Family as a Cage

Listen to either group long enough and you’ll hear the same sermon: family is the foundation of civilization.

That much, most people can agree on. But what they forget to tell you is that by “family,” they mean family as they personally define it: one that is father-led, morally policed, sexually disciplined, hierarchical, and insulated from outside influence.

The family becomes less a place of love and more a system for training obedience.

On one hand, they scream about smaller government when it suits them; on the other, they want an intrusive one enforcing the life they prefer. Children must be shielded from dangerous ideas. Wives must support male leadership. Men must defend moral order. Elders must be respected. Shame must keep everybody in line. Religion must be passed down. Social roles must stay clear. Community judgment must remain strong.

That arrangement is sold as stability. Sometimes it does create stability. It also creates silence, hypocrisy, repression, and fear—especially for anyone who doesn’t fit the approved script.

Both conservative Muslims and evangelicals are full of people who learned very early that belonging was conditional. Behave correctly, believe correctly, marry correctly, desire correctly, vote correctly, dress correctly, and you’re safe. Step out of line, and suddenly the family that preached love turns into a disciplinary committee.

Swear words are a great threat to society. Corrupt politicians, even well-documented fraudsters with blatant lies, who sell ideas shaped by the religion they believe in? Perfectly alright.

Both Are Experts at Selective Modernity

This part is almost funny.

Both communities claim to resist modernity, but of course, right up to the point where it becomes useful.

Conservative Muslims use smartphones, social media, luxury brands, global finance, modern medicine, and digital platforms while complaining that the modern world is morally rotten. American evangelicals do the same—running megachurches like corporations, using mass media with machine-like efficiency, and embracing every tool that helps them sell old doctrines in fresh packaging.

Neither group rejects modernity. They reject the parts that weaken hierarchy.

They’re fine with technology and comfort. They like power. They like scale. They’ll take modern medicine when they need it, modern infrastructure when it serves them, and modern communications when it helps them organize and preach.

What they hate is modernity’s attack on inherited authority: individual autonomy, secular law, gender equality, sexual freedom, public skepticism, and the idea that power has to justify itself instead of hiding behind tradition.

And then comes the hypocrisy. The same people who preach the sanctity of marriage get divorced, cheat, and chase sex outside marriage while still demanding moral discipline from everyone else.

In the Muslim world, the hypocrisy just takes different forms. In some places, girls are pushed toward sexual acts that don’t “damage” the hymen. Some hospitals offer hymen repair surgeries to prepare a girl for marriage. Some people arrange quick Islamic marriages with a cleric and two witnesses, with no legal trail, just to create a temporary religious cover—and then “enjoy life” while flattering themselves they’re still good Muslims and that the modern world is corrupt.

It’s impossible not to miss the shared logic behind it: the rule stays in place, the mirage stays intact, but the real behavior is kept out of sight.

The Rule Stays Sacred, Not the Behavior

Conservative Muslims don’t live in the morally disciplined society they preach. American evangelicals don’t live the Christ-centered lives they demand from everyone else. Both communities have developed sophisticated systems for maintaining the appearance of the rules while quietly negotiating around them: the hymen surgeries, the temporary marriages, the divorced pastors preaching family values, the megachurch leaders caught in the scandals they’d spent careers condemning.

The rules aren’t really about behavior. They’re about power, about who gets to define normal, about keeping the hierarchy intact while the people at the top of it do whatever they like.

And the people who pay the real price are never the ones writing the rules: the daughter whose body is inspected before marriage, the woman whose autonomy is legislated away by men who will never face an unwanted pregnancy, the kid who figured out early that belonging was conditional and spent years performing a version of themselves that wouldn’t get them thrown out.

Both communities call this tradition. Both communities call this love.

This is about control, built into the system from the start.

The only honest question left is whether the people inside these systems already know that—and have simply decided that the safety of belonging is worth the cost.

Most of them do know. That’s the part nobody says out loud. And in Part III, that silence matters even more, because once the obsession with control is stripped bare, the real difference between these two worlds is not where they police sex most aggressively, but what they do when the subject is poverty, mercy, and the people at the bottom.

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PART III

There is a particular kind of conservative who can lecture you for an hour about moral decay, sexual discipline, the sanctity of family, and the collapse of civilization—and then vote against feeding hungry children without losing a moment of sleep.

That is not a contradiction to them. That is a philosophy.

This is the third piece in a series comparing two of the most powerful religious conservative movements in the world—mainstream conservative Muslims and American evangelicals. Part I and Part II showed how structurally identical these communities are. The same family architecture. The same gender politics. The same fear of secular culture. The same moral panic. The same side doors for the people writing the rules. Two communities that hate each other and cannot stop building the same house.

But there is one place where they part ways. Not on women. Not on sexuality. Not on the endless supervision of other people’s lives.

On the poor.

And that divergence is not a footnote, either. It is the whole story. Because what a community does with its most vulnerable members is not a policy question. It is a character question.

One of these movements still understands that. The other traded it in for something that felt more like power.

The Biggest Difference Is How They Think About Helping the Poor

Now we get to the part evangelicals especially don’t like hearing.

In much of the Muslim world, even quite conservative Muslims tend to see helping the poor as a public good that governments should be involved in. State welfare, subsidized basics, public assistance, and redistributive expectations are often morally acceptable, even admirable. A government that visibly helps people survive can earn religious and social respect for doing so.

That doesn’t mean Muslim-majority governments are always effective. Many are corrupt, inefficient, authoritarian, or deeply unequal. But the moral ideal still matters. The poor aren’t usually framed as proof of personal failure in the same way they often are in American conservative rhetoric.

Conservative Muslims often recognize that life’s unfair, that not everyone’s dealt the same hand at birth, that poor people virtually always are born to poor parents, and that the situation they’re in isn’t primarily their fault. They also recognize luck and that you may work hard and things can still go south. They’ve got a point, really. A bankrupt rich person isn’t at the same starting point as a person from a family of limited means. Rich people may lose all their assets, but they keep their connections and expensive educations. In a macro setting, Iceland’s a good example. After the 2007–2008 financial crisis, Iceland’s financial system imploded, but the country didn’t suddenly become poor. Wealth doesn’t vanish that cleanly. The assets may go, but the education, institutions, infrastructure, and social capital remain. In other words, the kind of poverty that leaves people powerless and desperate, needing help to meet basic needs, is rarely self-inflicted.

In American evangelical politics, by contrast, there’s a powerful current that praises charity but distrusts welfare, glorifies private giving while attacking public support, and treats state assistance as dependency, moral weakness, or theft from the deserving. Feed the poor through church programs and people applaud. Feed them through taxes, and suddenly, many evangelicals start shouting about freedom.

That contradiction says a great deal.

It means the issue isn’t generosity itself. It’s control.

Private charity lets the giver remain morally superior. It allows compassion to be filtered through churches, donors, and local gatekeepers. It can come with sermons, conditions, social discipline, gratitude, and the pleasant glow of personal virtue. State help is different. It treats survival as a public responsibility rather than a private favor.

And that’s where the evangelical discomfort kicks in.

Because once you accept that society as a whole has a duty to protect the vulnerable, the entire mythology of rugged individualism starts to wobble. Then poverty becomes not just a personal tragedy but a political indictment. Then the rich can no longer pretend they owe nothing but occasional kindness. Then compassion stops being optional.

Many conservative Muslims, for all their own harshness in other areas, don’t have the same allergy to that conclusion. They may be socially conservative, religiously rigid, even authoritarian, yet still believe that a decent society should materially support the poor.

That’s a moral difference, not a small one, either.

What Evangelicals Miss Is the Heart

American evangelicals love to present themselves as the guardians of moral truth. They fight over prayer, marriage, abortion, schools, books, drag shows, bathrooms, and pronouns with endless energy. They are exhausted by compassion but fully awake for control.

That is the problem.

For all their preaching about Jesus, a huge part of evangelical politics has become a machine for defending hierarchy while neglecting mercy. They are fierce on sexual ethics, fierce on symbolism, fierce on punishing outsiders, fierce on maintaining boundaries. But when the issue is healthcare, wages, housing, debt, hunger, childcare, or basic material dignity, the urgency suddenly drops.

The heart goes missing.

Needless to say, it’s not always. There are evangelicals who care deeply about justice and poverty. There are Muslim conservatives who are cruel and indifferent. But the dominant tendency in American evangelical public life is impossible to miss: moral strictness for the powerless, moral flexibility for the rich, and deep suspicion toward any collective attempt to build a more humane society.

That is why so many evangelicals can recognize discipline in conservative Muslim societies and even secretly admire parts of it, while still hating Islam as a rival civilization. They are looking at a familiar moral architecture built under a different brand name.

The real scandal is not that the two worlds resemble each other.

The real scandal is that one of them still more easily accepts that helping the poor is part of public righteousness, while the other keeps confusing compassion with weakness and greed with freedom.

That should trouble any evangelical who claims to care what Jesus actually taught.

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So, What’s Going On?

Three pieces. One argument.

Conservative Muslims and American evangelicals are not opposites. They are not ancient enemies representing incompatible visions of humanity. They are parallel products of the same anxiety—that the modern world is dangerous, that freedom is a threat, that the body must be controlled, that hierarchy is sacred, and that God is most useful as an enforcer.

They built the same house. They police it the same way. They protect the same people at the top and extract the same price from everyone at the bottom. They sell control as love and call the transaction tradition. They are experts at manufacturing siege mentality, because a community that feels under attack does not ask inconvenient questions about who is actually running things.

None of that is unique to Islam. None of it is unique to Christianity. It is what happens when religion decides that order matters more than people.

But one difference remains. And it is not small.

One of these movements still carries, however imperfectly, the idea that a decent society owes something to its most vulnerable members. That helping the poor is not charity. It is obligation. That a government which feeds people is doing something righteous, not something suspicious. That mercy is not weakness dressed in soft clothing. It is the whole point.

The other movement had that idea once. It is still in their texts. It is still in the words of the figure they claim to follow, who was more concerned with the hungry and the sick and the outcast than with almost anything else.

They let it go, but not accidentally. They let it go because compassion is harder to monetize than fear, harder to weaponize than shame, and considerably less useful for winning elections.

That is the real scandal. Not that the two worlds resemble each other. Not that both have built systems of control and called them systems of love.

The scandal is that one of them knew better.

And chose this anyway.

This publication exists because readers like you choose to support it.

If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you. If not, and you’re finding value here, I’d love for you to consider becoming one.

Upgrade to Paid

There is a particular kind of conservative who can lecture you for an hour about moral decay, sexual discipline, the sanctity of family, and the collapse of civilization — and then vote against feeding hungry children without losing a moment of sleep.

That is not a contradiction to them. That is a philosophy.

This is the third piece in a series comparing two of the most powerful religious conservative movements in the world — mainstream conservative Muslims and American evangelicals. Part I and Part II showed how structurally identical these communities are. The same family architecture. The same gender politics. The same fear of secular culture. The same moral panic. The same side doors for the people writing the rules. Two communities that hate each other and cannot stop building the same house.

But there is one place where they part ways. Not on women. Not on sexuality. Not on the endless supervision of other people’s lives.

On the poor.

And that divergence is not a footnote, either. It is the whole story. Because what a community does with its most vulnerable members is not a policy question. It is a character question.

One of these movements still understands that. The other traded it in for something that felt more like power.

Subscribe now

The Biggest Difference Is How They Think About Helping the Poor

Now we get to the part evangelicals especially don’t like hearing.

In much of the Muslim world, even quite conservative Muslims tend to see helping the poor as a public good that governments should be involved in. State welfare, subsidized basics, public assistance, and redistributive expectations are often morally acceptable, even admirable. A government that visibly helps people survive can earn religious and social respect for doing so.

That doesn’t mean Muslim-majority governments are always effective. Many are corrupt, inefficient, authoritarian, or deeply unequal. But the moral ideal still matters. The poor aren’t usually framed as proof of personal failure in the same way they often are in American conservative rhetoric.

Conservative Muslims often recognize that life’s unfair, that not everyone’s dealt the same hand at birth, that poor people virtually always are born to poor parents, and that the situation they’re in isn’t primarily their fault. They also recognize luck and that you may work hard and things can still go south. They’ve got a point, really. A bankrupt rich person isn’t at the same starting point as a person from a family of limited means. Rich people may lose all their assets, but they keep their connections and expensive educations. In a macro setting, Iceland’s a good example. After the 2007–2008 financial crisis, Iceland’s financial system imploded, but the country didn’t suddenly become poor. Wealth doesn’t vanish that cleanly. The assets may go, but the education, institutions, infrastructure, and social capital remain. In other words, the kind of poverty that leaves people powerless and desperate, needing help to meet basic needs, is rarely self-inflicted.

In American evangelical politics, by contrast, there’s a powerful current that praises charity but distrusts welfare, glorifies private giving while attacking public support, and treats state assistance as dependency, moral weakness, or theft from the deserving. Feed the poor through church programs and people applaud. Feed them through taxes, and suddenly, many evangelicals start shouting about freedom.

That contradiction says a great deal.

It means the issue isn’t generosity itself. It’s control.

Private charity lets the giver remain morally superior. It allows compassion to be filtered through churches, donors, and local gatekeepers. It can come with sermons, conditions, social discipline, gratitude, and the pleasant glow of personal virtue. State help is different. It treats survival as a public responsibility rather than a private favor.

And that’s where the evangelical discomfort kicks in.

Because once you accept that society as a whole has a duty to protect the vulnerable, the entire mythology of rugged individualism starts to wobble. Then poverty becomes not just a personal tragedy but a political indictment. Then the rich can no longer pretend they owe nothing but occasional kindness. Then compassion stops being optional.

Many conservative Muslims, for all their own harshness in other areas, don’t have the same allergy to that conclusion. They may be socially conservative, religiously rigid, even authoritarian, yet still believe that a decent society should materially support the poor.

That’s a moral difference, not a small one, either.

What Evangelicals Miss Is the Heart

American evangelicals love to present themselves as the guardians of moral truth. They fight over prayer, marriage, abortion, schools, books, drag shows, bathrooms, and pronouns with endless energy. They are exhausted by compassion but fully awake for control.

That is the problem.

For all their preaching about Jesus, a huge part of evangelical politics has become a machine for defending hierarchy while neglecting mercy. They are fierce on sexual ethics, fierce on symbolism, fierce on punishing outsiders, fierce on maintaining boundaries. But when the issue is healthcare, wages, housing, debt, hunger, childcare, or basic material dignity, the urgency suddenly drops.

The heart goes missing.

Needless to say, it’s not always. There are evangelicals who care deeply about justice and poverty. There are Muslim conservatives who are cruel and indifferent. But the dominant tendency in American evangelical public life is impossible to miss: moral strictness for the powerless, moral flexibility for the rich, and deep suspicion toward any collective attempt to build a more humane society.

That is why so many evangelicals can recognize discipline in conservative Muslim societies and even secretly admire parts of it, while still hating Islam as a rival civilization. They are looking at a familiar moral architecture built under a different brand name.

The real scandal is not that the two worlds resemble each other.

The real scandal is that one of them still more easily accepts that helping the poor is part of public righteousness, while the other keeps confusing compassion with weakness and greed with freedom.

That should trouble any evangelical who claims to care what Jesus actually taught.

Subscribe now

So, What’s Going On?

Three pieces. One argument.

Conservative Muslims and American evangelicals are not opposites. They are not ancient enemies representing incompatible visions of humanity. They are parallel products of the same anxiety — that the modern world is dangerous, that freedom is a threat, that the body must be controlled, that hierarchy is sacred, and that God is most useful as an enforcer.

They built the same house. They police it the same way. They protect the same people at the top and extract the same price from everyone at the bottom. They sell control as love and call the transaction tradition. They are experts at manufacturing siege mentality, because a community that feels under attack does not ask inconvenient questions about who is actually running things.

None of that is unique to Islam. None of it is unique to Christianity. It is what happens when religion decides that order matters more than people.

But one difference remains. And it is not small.

One of these movements still carries, however imperfectly, the idea that a decent society owes something to its most vulnerable members. That helping the poor is not charity. It is obligation. That a government which feeds people is doing something righteous, not something suspicious. That mercy is not weakness dressed in soft clothing. It is the whole point.

The other movement had that idea once. It is still in their texts. It is still in the words of the figure they claim to follow, who was more concerned with the hungry and the sick and the outcast than with almost anything else.

They let it go, but not accidentally. They let it go because compassion is harder to monetize than fear, harder to weaponize than shame, and considerably less useful for winning elections.

That is the real scandal. Not that the two worlds resemble each other. Not that both have built systems of control and called them systems of love.

The scandal is that one of them knew better.

And chose this anyway.

This publication exists because readers like you choose to support it.

If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you. If not, and you’re finding value here, I’d love for you to consider becoming one.

Upgrade to Paid

In isolation, American evangelicals and conservative Muslims may think they agree on very little. Some would even be horrified to be placed in the same sentence — Muslims are terrorists who hate Americans for their freedom, remember? — let alone the same argument.

But spend enough time inside both worlds, and the horror starts to look like recognition.

Part I of this piece laid out the structural similarities — the politics, the gender roles, the fear of secular culture, the constant surveillance sold as community and security. If you haven’t read it, the short version is this: these aren’t two opposing civilizations, just two versions of the same one arguing about the brand name.

Part II is where it gets personal.

Because the architecture of control doesn’t stay abstract. It lands in the body. It shows up in who gets to decide what happens to a pregnancy, what desire is allowed to look like, what a family is actually for, and what happens to anyone who uses the side door instead of the front one.

Both communities have spent generations perfecting the answers to those questions, and yes, the answers differ in detail, but in substance, they’re close enough to be embarrassing.

Subscribe now

Abortion

What’s interesting — and more complicated — is what actually happened with abortion across the Muslim world. Tunisia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, and Tajikistan all moved beyond the debate long ago. Access was settled, quietly, and life moved on. These are Muslim-majority societies, many of them deeply conservative in their social fabric, and yet they arrived at a more pragmatic position than the American religious right ever has when it comes to the termination of unwanted pregnancies.

But step outside that list, and the picture changes fast. Across much of the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, abortion is either heavily restricted or banned outright, not because religious authority and state power have merged into the same voice. In Egypt, Iraq, and Pakistan, abortion is largely illegal except to save the mother’s life. In Yemen and Afghanistan under the Taliban, the question barely exists as a public conversation at all. And the language is almost identical to what you’d hear from a Republican lawmaker in Alabama or Texas: life begins at conception, the family must be protected, women’s bodies are treated as communal property, justified as divine will.

Then the United States had its convulsion — the overturning of Roe, the culture war turned into law — and something interesting happened in Turkey. The idea of restricting abortion surfaced briefly in political conversation, which isn’t entirely surprising if you understand Turkey’s complicated relationship with America: a mixture of love, suspicion, and a nagging conviction that whatever Americans do, they probably do it best. The idea was floated, studied, discussed — and then just as quietly walked back. It never became serious policy.

The reason almost certainly had little to do with women’s rights. Turkey’s retreat was more likely about keeping the image of the traditional Turkish family intact — about not producing children outside of marriage, not creating the social disruption that comes with unwanted pregnancies in a society where family reputation still does enormous work. The protection, in other words, wasn’t really about women. It was about the family unit, the community’s image, the same honor architecture operating through a different lever.

And that logic — protecting the family unit, not the woman — is exactly where conservative Muslims and American evangelicals converge most completely. Both sell abortion restrictions as being about life, about God, about the sanctity of the family. But follow the argument far enough and you always arrive at the same place: a woman’s reproductive choices are too important to be left to the woman. Someone else — a husband, a cleric, a legislature, a pastor — needs to be in the room. The beliefs in the shop window may differ, but the purpose behind them does not.

When these societies land on an outcome that looks modern or human-rights-friendly, that does not necessarily mean they got there for the right reason.

That’s the thread that runs through all of it — the exceptions and the restrictions alike. Whether the outcome is access or prohibition, the woman is rarely the one who decides. The men just disagree about which answer God prefers.

Shared Fear of Sexual Freedom

Both groups are deeply convinced that sexual freedom destroys civilization — not merely disrupts or complicates it, but destroys it.

That’s why so much of their rhetoric sounds hysterical to outsiders. They’re not merely objecting to behavior they dislike. They genuinely believe that loosening sexual rules leads to social death. Marriage collapses. Birth rates collapse. Gender collapses. Authority collapses. And then, in their imagination, society dissolves into a selfish carnival of lust, loneliness, and broken children.

This is why they spend so much time fixating on homosexuality, pornography, sex education, premarital sex, divorce, and gender nonconformity. These issues are never treated as private matters. They’re treated as symbols. The point isn’t only what people do, but what those acts represent in a world where religion no longer controls the script.

And that’s what terrifies them.

American evangelicals often speak as if Muslim conservatism is uniquely obsessed with sex, while overlooking that they are too, even if it takes a different form. They just package it in a different accent. They preach about purity balls instead of hijab. They talk about biblical marriage instead of modesty codes. They lobby school boards instead of religious ministries. But the nervous energy is the same, because they can’t stop talking about what other people do with their bodies when control over the body is one of the clearest signs of social power.

They Both Worship the Family as a Cage

Listen to either group long enough and you’ll hear the same sermon: family is the foundation of civilization.

That much, most people can agree on. But what they forget to tell you is that by “family,” they mean family as they personally define it: one that is father-led, morally policed, sexually disciplined, hierarchical, and insulated from outside influence.

The family becomes less a place of love and more a system for training obedience.

On one hand, they scream about smaller government when it suits them; on the other, they want an intrusive one enforcing the life they prefer. Children must be shielded from dangerous ideas. Wives must support male leadership. Men must defend moral order. Elders must be respected. Shame must keep everybody in line. Religion must be passed down. Social roles must stay clear. Community judgment must remain strong.

That arrangement is sold as stability. Sometimes it does create stability. It also creates silence, hypocrisy, repression, and fear — especially for anyone who doesn’t fit the approved script.

Both conservative Muslims and evangelicals are full of people who learned very early that belonging was conditional. Behave correctly, believe correctly, marry correctly, desire correctly, vote correctly, dress correctly, and you’re safe. Step out of line, and suddenly the family that preached love turns into a disciplinary committee.

Swear words are a great threat to society. Corrupt politicians, even well-documented fraudsters with blatant lies, who sell ideas shaped by the religion they believe in? Perfectly alright.

Both Are Experts at Selective Modernity

This part is almost funny.

Both communities claim to resist modernity, but of course, right up to the point where it becomes useful.

Conservative Muslims use smartphones, social media, luxury brands, global finance, modern medicine, and digital platforms while complaining that the modern world is morally rotten. American evangelicals do the same — running megachurches like corporations, using mass media with machine-like efficiency, and embracing every tool that helps them sell old doctrines in fresh packaging.

Neither group rejects modernity. They reject the parts that weaken hierarchy.

They’re fine with technology and comfort. They like power. They like scale. They’ll take modern medicine when they need it, modern infrastructure when it serves them, and modern communications when it helps them organize and preach.

What they hate is modernity’s attack on inherited authority: individual autonomy, secular law, gender equality, sexual freedom, public skepticism, and the idea that power has to justify itself instead of hiding behind tradition.

And then comes the hypocrisy. The same people who preach the sanctity of marriage get divorced, cheat, and chase sex outside marriage while still demanding moral discipline from everyone else.

In the Muslim world, the hypocrisy just takes different forms. In some places, girls are pushed toward sexual acts that don’t “damage” the hymen. Some hospitals offer hymen repair surgeries to prepare a girl for marriage. Some people arrange quick Islamic marriages with a cleric and two witnesses, with no legal trail, just to create a temporary religious cover — and then “enjoy life” while flattering themselves they’re still good Muslims and that the modern world is corrupt.

It’s impossible not to miss the shared logic behind it: the rule stays in place, the mirage stays intact, but the real behavior is kept out of sight.

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The Rule Stays Sacred, Not the Behavior

Conservative Muslims don’t live in the morally disciplined society they preach. American evangelicals don’t live the Christ-centered lives they demand from everyone else. Both communities have developed sophisticated systems for maintaining the appearance of the rules while quietly negotiating around them: the hymen surgeries, the temporary marriages, the divorced pastors preaching family values, the megachurch leaders caught in the scandals they’d spent careers condemning.

The rules aren’t really about behavior. They’re about power, about who gets to define normal, about keeping the hierarchy intact while the people at the top of it do whatever they like.

And the people who pay the real price are never the ones writing the rules: the daughter whose body is inspected before marriage, the woman whose autonomy is legislated away by men who will never face an unwanted pregnancy, the kid who figured out early that belonging was conditional and spent years performing a version of themselves that wouldn’t get them thrown out.

Both communities call this tradition. Both communities call this love.

This is about control, built into the system from the start.

The only honest question left is whether the people inside these systems already know that — and have simply decided that the safety of belonging is worth the cost.

Most of them do know. That’s the part nobody says out loud. And in Part III, that silence matters even more, because once the obsession with control is stripped bare, the real difference between these two worlds is not where they police sex most aggressively, but what they do when the subject is poverty, mercy, and the people at the bottom.

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American evangelicals love talking as if Islam is some alien thing from another planet. They describe Muslims as backward, rigid, obsessed with sex, obsessed with rules, obsessed with sin, obsessed with policing women, obsessed with what people do in private, obsessed with what children are taught, obsessed with protecting society from moral decay.

And every time they do that, the obvious point goes sailing over their heads.

They are describing themselves.

Not all Christians, obviously. Not all Muslims either. In fact, the whole point of this article is that the religious label is often irrelevant. Mainstream conservative Muslims across much of the Muslim world and American evangelicals share far more than evangelicals would ever feel comfortable admitting. The resemblance is not superficial. It is structural. It shows up in family life, in politics, in gender expectations, in fear of secular culture, in suspicion of outsiders, in their constant language of moral decline, and in the belief that society falls apart the moment religion loses control.

That is why the two groups often sound like enemies while behaving like cousins.

The irony gets even better when you look at how both communities imagine themselves. Conservative Muslims often believe the West is spiritually empty, sexually chaotic, and morally unmoored. American evangelicals often believe the Muslim world is authoritarian, repressive, and dangerously religious. Both are partly describing real things. Both are also staring into a mirror and pretending they are looking through a window.

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They Both Believe Morality Must Be Enforced From Above

One of the clearest similarities is that both conservative Muslims and American evangelicals distrust the idea that ordinary people can be left alone to figure out their own moral lives.

They do not really believe freedom is safe. They may use the word freedom constantly — evangelicals certainly do — but what they usually mean is the freedom to preserve their own moral order, not the freedom of others to reject it.

Conservative Muslims often frame this through religion, community, modesty, family honor, divine law, and the belief that society must visibly submit to moral rules. American evangelicals frame it through “biblical values,” “family values,” the sanctity of marriage, the protection of children, and the claim that America is collapsing because it pushed God out of public life.

Both believe society becomes dangerous when religion stops setting the boundaries. Both fear that once people are allowed too much room to choose for themselves, everything starts sliding: sex, gender, family, authority, education, respect, even truth itself.

That is why both groups are so vulnerable to moral panic. Moral panic is one of their favorite fuels. A schoolbook becomes civilizational collapse. A television show becomes proof of cultural decay. A gay couple becomes an assault on the natural order. A woman choosing her own life becomes evidence that society has forgotten God. Everything is always one step away from disaster. That constant alarm is useful: it keeps followers obedient, keeps them emotionally mobilized, and makes them feel under siege, which is one of the fastest ways to stop people from questioning the system they are defending.

This is also where both communities stop being just religious and become political tribes. For conservative Muslims, Islam fuses with civilization, anti-colonial memory, and resistance to Western domination. For evangelicals, Christianity fuses with nationalism, heritage, and the fantasy of a moral America that once existed and can be restored. Which is why criticism of their religion is never heard as criticism of ideas. It is heard as an attack on the group itself. Disagreement stops being disagreement; it becomes betrayal, and then war.

And once the tribe is under threat, intellectual freedom becomes a casualty. In conservative Muslim settings this means hostility to reinterpretation, pressure against scholars who question inherited doctrine, and reflexive suspicion toward critical history. In evangelical America it appears through culture-war attacks on universities, book banning campaigns, and the rejection of anything that might loosen conservative belief. The logic is identical: truth is already known, so questioning becomes dangerous. That is not confidence. That is fear in ceremonial clothing.

Contrary to popular belief, Islam did not begin as the rigid legal machine many people now imagine. Much of what people now associate with hardline Islamic control — including the criminalization of apostasy, blasphemy, and homosexuality — emerged later through legal and political developments, long after Muhammad’s death. And if American fundamentalists ever got the power they want, it is not difficult to imagine those same prohibitions being turned into law one by one.

It’s all about the mindset, not necessarily religion.

The Protection Myth

This is another area where the family resemblance is almost embarrassing.

Conservative Muslims and American evangelicals both speak endlessly about protecting women while building social systems designed to control them. The details differ. The vocabulary differs. The clothing rules differ. The legal frameworks differ. But the pattern is painfully familiar.

Women are told they are precious, and then treated as dangerous. They are told they are honored, and then monitored. They are told they are central to the family, and then denied equal authority within it. Their sexuality is treated not as their own but as a social risk that men — fathers, husbands, pastors, scholars, community elders — must manage on their behalf.

In conservative Muslim environments this shows up through modesty codes, restrictions on mixing, pressure around marriage, family honor, and the expectation that women carry the burden of public morality on their bodies. In evangelical America it looks different but is no less legible: purity culture, anti-abortion absolutism, suspicion of feminism, the theological praise of submissiveness, and the endless effort to turn motherhood into a woman’s entire moral destiny.

In both worlds, the female body becomes a battlefield where men fight their war against modernity.

And in both worlds, the men doing the lecturing call this protection.

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The Architecture Is the Same

Conservative Muslims and American evangelicals did not coordinate. They do not like each other. They do not read each other’s texts or attend each other’s conferences or agree on almost anything theological.

And yet they built the same building.

Same load-bearing walls, same floor plan, same locks on the same doors. The wallpaper is different. The prayers are in different languages. The women dress differently and the men argue about different books. But the structure underneath — who holds authority, who carries shame, who gets monitored, who gets protected by being controlled — is the same structure.

That is not coincidence. It is what happens when any tradition decides that the most important thing religion can do is keep order. Once that decision is made, everything else follows. The family becomes a hierarchy. The community becomes a surveillance system. The woman becomes a symbol. The outsider becomes a threat. And God becomes the enforcer of arrangements that were always, underneath the theology, about power.

Both communities built that building. Both communities live in it. Both communities tell their children it is the only safe place in the world.

That’s all for now today. In Part II, we will explore what people actually do inside it. Stay tuned.

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If you want to find the most churchgoing, Bible-thumping, Jesus-praising region in the entire United States, head south. Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, Arkansas — these are states where Christianity isn’t just a religion. It’s an identity, a culture, but also a political platform. A way of sorting the good people from the bad ones.

And if you want to find some of the highest rates of poverty, violent crime, divorce, teen pregnancy, and infant mortality in the developed world — head to exactly the same place.

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The Numbers Don’t Lie (Even When the Preachers Do)

Don’t mistake the Bible Belt for a vague cultural concept — it’s a geographic reality with measurable outcomes. And those outcomes are damning.

Mississippi is the most religious state in America, year after year, by virtually every metric Gallup and Pew can throw at it. It’s also the poorest. It has the highest rate of food insecurity. The worst healthcare outcomes. Some of the highest rates of obesity, diabetes, and preventable death. Its infant mortality rate is closer to a developing nation than a wealthy democracy.

Alabama is neck and neck. Arkansas too. These are states where you can’t drive five miles without passing three churches — and where the social indicators look like something went badly, catastrophically wrong.

Meanwhile, the least religious states in the country — Vermont, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire — consistently rank among the healthiest, most educated, and most economically stable. They also have some of the lowest divorce rates in America. Which is awkward, given that Bible Belt politicians have spent decades telling everyone else how to run their families.

This is not a subtle pattern. It’s a sledgehammer.

What the Bible Actually Says

Here’s the part that should make every Bible Belt pastor deeply uncomfortable. The teachings most emphasized in the region — personal salvation, cultural warfare, sexual purity, national pride, punishment for sinners — are almost entirely absent from the core of Jesus’ message.

What Jesus actually said, repeatedly and without ambiguity, was this: feed the poor, heal the sick, welcome the stranger, forgive the sinner, sell your possessions, give to the needy, don’t accumulate wealth, and stop worrying about everyone else’s sins before you deal with your own.

The Sermon on the Mount isn’t a vague inspirational passage. It’s a direct political and ethical program. Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the peacemakers. It doesn’t say blessed are the well-armed. It doesn’t say blessed are the free market. It doesn’t say blessed are those who cut food stamps so they can give tax breaks to people who don’t need them.

The Bible Belt has built a theology that would be completely unrecognizable to the man it claims to worship.

The Real Religion of the Bible Belt

What the Bible Belt actually worships is a cocktail of nationalism, racial anxiety, nostalgia, and prosperity gospel — dressed up in Scripture and sold as Christianity.

The prosperity gospel deserves special attention here, because it’s the most nakedly dishonest theology in modern American religion, and it has saturated the South. The core claim is that God rewards the faithful with wealth and health. That financial success is a sign of divine favor. That poverty, by implication, is a sign of moral failure.

This is not a fringe view. It’s Joel Osteen filling a stadium in Houston. It’s televangelists with private jets explaining to their congregations that God wants them to give more. It’s the theological justification for why the richest country in the history of the world can look at its poorest citizens and say, with a straight face, that the system is just.

Jesus, for his part, said it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. He didn’t add any asterisks. He didn’t say “unless you tithe.” He didn’t say “unless you vote Republican.” He said it plainly, and the prosperity gospel industry has spent decades trying to explain why it doesn’t mean what it clearly means.

On Divorce, Sexuality, and Other People’s Business

The Bible Belt has made sexuality and marriage its signature political obsession. Anti-LGBTQ legislation, abstinence-only education, battles over bathroom bills, sermons about the sanctity of marriage — this is the culture war the region has chosen to fight, loudly and continuously, for decades.

The results are instructive.

The Bible Belt has some of the highest divorce rates in the country. It consistently outpaces the godless Northeast in teen pregnancy. Its abstinence-only education programs have been studied repeatedly and the conclusion is always the same: they don’t reduce sexual activity, they just reduce the likelihood that young people will protect themselves when they have it.

The obsession with other people’s sexuality is, of course, a very old religious tradition. It’s also one Jesus showed essentially zero interest in. He never mentioned homosexuality. He spoke directly about divorce exactly once — and was considerably stricter than most evangelical churches currently practice. He spent his time with prostitutes, tax collectors, and social outcasts, not because he was making a point about tolerance, but because those were the people he thought actually needed him.

The Bible Belt’s sexual theology has nothing to do with the Bible. It has everything to do with power, conformity, and the very human desire to have someone to look down on.

The Stranger at the Gate

If you want one single issue where the gap between biblical teaching and Bible Belt politics is most catastrophically obvious, it’s immigration.

The Hebrew Bible commands hospitality to the stranger no fewer than thirty-six times — more than any other ethical instruction in the Torah. You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the heart of a stranger. The New Testament continues this tradition. Matthew 25 — one of the most unambiguous passages in the entire Christian canon — makes it explicit: when you turn away the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, and the stranger, you are turning away Jesus himself.

This is not a metaphor open to interpretation. Matthew 25 isn’t poetry. It’s a direct moral claim about where God is located — and the answer is: among the most vulnerable people on earth.

The Bible Belt’s political representatives have, almost uniformly, used their Christianity as justification for the harshest possible immigration policies. Family separation. Detention camps. Dehumanizing rhetoric about invaders, criminals, and replacements. This is what their Christianity looks like in practice.

There is no reading of the New Testament that supports this. None. People have tried. They keep pointing to Romans 13 — submit to governing authorities — which is the same passage used to justify chattel slavery, apartheid, and Nazi collaboration. If that’s where you’ve landed, the problem isn’t the immigrants.

The Poverty Problem Nobody Wants to Name

The Bible Belt states receive more federal aid per capita than they contribute in federal taxes. They are, in economic terms, the most subsidized region of the country — kept afloat largely by the tax dollars of the coastal states their politicians spend most of their time vilifying.

This is not a political attack. It’s a budget line.

And yet these same states consistently elect politicians who campaign against the social safety net, against healthcare expansion, against food assistance — against, in other words, the precise mechanisms that are keeping their own constituents alive. In several states, governors refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, which would have cost them essentially nothing and provided health coverage to hundreds of thousands of their poorest residents. They refused on ideological principle. Their constituents paid with their lives.

The Bible has a word for this. It calls it a failure to care for the least among us. Jesus wasn’t subtle about what he thought of people who had the power to relieve suffering and chose not to. The parable of the rich man and Lazarus is one of the most vivid images in the Gospels: the wealthy man who ignored the beggar at his gate ends up in torment. The beggar ends up in paradise. No caveats. No prosperity gospel asterisks.

Why This Happened

The unbiblical nature of the Bible Belt was paved through a deliberate process, over generations, in which Christianity was fused with Southern identity, white identity, and political conservatism in ways that served very specific interests.

After the Civil War, the Southern church faced a reckoning. It had spent decades providing theological justification for slavery — a position so indefensible that it eventually had to be abandoned. But the underlying architecture — the use of Christianity as a tool of social control, racial hierarchy, and political power — never went away. It just rebranded.

The civil rights movement was opposed by the majority of white Southern churches. The Moral Majority and the Christian right emerged in the late 1970s not, as the mythology claims, as a response to Roe v. Wade — but as a response to the IRS threatening the tax-exempt status of racially segregated Christian schools. The movement that now claims to speak for Christian values in America was born out of resistance to racial integration. That’s not a slur. That’s the documented history.

The theology followed the politics, as it usually does. What the Bible Belt calls Christianity is, in most of its political expressions, a justification system for a set of cultural preferences that existed before the Scripture was ever opened.

What’s your take? Have you seen the gap between Bible Belt theology and Bible Belt outcomes up close? Leave a comment below.

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There’s a question that doesn’t get asked in church, or anywhere Christianity gets discussed seriously.

If Jesus founded Christianity, why does it look nothing like what Jesus taught?

Jesus preached in Aramaic to poor Jewish peasants in Galilee. He talked about the Kingdom of God arriving on earth, said nothing about original sin, nothing about his own pre-existence as a divine being, nothing about faith in his death and resurrection being the ticket to salvation. He told people to feed the poor, forgive their enemies, and stop performing piety for an audience.

Paul, writing decades later in Greek to Gentile audiences scattered across the Roman Empire, built something else entirely. Something that became the Christianity you actually recognize.

The Church didn’t follow Jesus. And there’s a “good” reason for that. At least good for the church itself.

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Quick clarification before anyone’s blood pressure goes up.

When I write about Jesus, I’m not treating the Gospels as a verified biography or theological claims as historical fact. However, when I look at things from Christianity’s perspective, I sometimes assume those claims are true for the sake of discussion, and that can confuse people. That’s all there is to it.

Jesus Had an Actual Message

If you look into the Synoptic Gospels — Mark, Matthew, Luke — you’ll see what Jesus primarily talks about. The Kingdom of God. That’s the running theme, showing up over 80 times across those three gospels as the center of his parables, his sermons, his whole program.

And what is the Kingdom of God in Jesus’ mouth? Not heaven after you die, but a coming transformation of the present world — a reversal of the social order where the poor inherit the earth, the hungry get fed, and the powerful get knocked off their thrones. It’s thoroughly Jewish, thoroughly apocalyptic, and thoroughly this-worldly.

Jesus wasn’t preaching believe in me and you’ll go to heaven or worship me, not the God of Moses. Instead, he was preaching God is about to fix everything, and here’s how to live in anticipation of that.

That’s a profoundly different religion than the one that would eventually build cathedrals, crown emperors, and burn heretics.

Paul Wasn’t Jesus’ Acquaintance.

Paul is, by his own admission, the most influential figure in early Christianity — and he never met Jesus during his lifetime, not because he wasn’t around when Jesus handpicked twelve disciples. He was, but Jesus didn’t choose him.

It’s entirely a personal claim that his encounter with Jesus was a vision on the road to Damascus, a revelation he received, as he puts it in Galatians. The evidence for it isn’t any stronger than the evidence offered by your typical cult leader who claims to have conversations with Jesus.

Paul’s Jesus isn’t a wandering Jewish preacher from Galilee but a cosmic figure who existed before creation, descended into human flesh, died as a sacrifice for sin, and rose again to become Lord of the universe. Read Romans, Galatians, and 1 Corinthians, and you’ll barely find a single reference to anything Jesus actually said or did during his earthly ministry.

Instead of the historical Jesus, Paul was interested in the theological Christ, a figure he largely constructed through his own visionary theology and creative reading of Jewish scripture.

The scholar E.P. Sanders spent decades on this, as did James Dunn, N.T. Wright, and a dozen others across the ideological spectrum. The consensus, even among scholars who are personally Christian, is that Paul’s theology represents a dramatic transformation of what Jesus was actually teaching.

Paul moved the goalposts. Jesus said the Kingdom was coming. Paul said the Kingdom had already been inaugurated — spiritually, in the risen Christ — and what mattered now was your personal relationship to that event.

Sin. Grace. Faith. Justification. These are Paul’s categories, not Jesus’.

The Church Had a Problem

By the second and third centuries, the Jesus movement had splintered into a dozen directions. Jewish Christians still kept the Torah and saw Jesus as a prophet or messiah — not God. Gnostics thought the material world was evil and that Jesus came to liberate souls from it. Communities were circulating gospels that never made the final cut — the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip.

The emerging orthodox Church — the one that would eventually ally with Rome under Constantine — needed to consolidate, needing a theology that could be systematized, taught, enforced, and used as a foundation for institutional authority.

Paul gave them that. Jesus, frankly, didn’t.

Jesus left nothing in writing, didn’t found an institution, and didn’t lay out a theology of priesthood, sacrament, or ecclesiastical hierarchy. His ethics — love your enemies, give away your possessions, don’t judge — are genuinely radical and resist institutionalization almost by design.

Paul, by contrast, handed them a theological system: salvation through faith in Christ’s atoning death, the Church as the body of Christ, clear language about authority and order in congregations. The later Pauline letters even supplied household codes and a defense of hierarchical structure.

You can build a Church on Paul. It’s very hard to build a Church on the Sermon on the Mount without your institution immediately indicting itself.

They Couldn’t Erase Jesus

The Church didn’t throw Jesus out — the whole claim to legitimacy rested on him. What happened was subtler. They filtered Jesus through Paul.

The gospels themselves were written after Paul’s letters — decades after, in most cases. And while they most likely preserve genuine historical material about Jesus, they also reflect the theological concerns of their authors’ communities and era. By the time the canon was fixed in the fourth century, Jesus had been thoroughly theologized. The Synoptic Jesus, who almost never calls himself divine, had been brought into alignment with the Johannine Jesus, who declares I and the Father are one and identifies himself with the pre-existent Logos.

The Jesus of the Nicene Creed — made binding at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE — skips almost entirely over what Jesus taught, going from virgin birth straight to crucifixion and resurrection. His actual ministry, his actual message, doesn’t appear. What matters is who he was theologically, not what he said practically.

Look at What Got Emphasized

Want to understand which Jesus the Church actually promoted? Look at the liturgical calendar, the sermon topics, and the theological priorities that shaped two thousand years of Christian history: the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Second Coming. These are all events, all categories that fit nicely into Paul’s theology, moments where Jesus’ body becomes the central vehicle of doctrine.

By contrast, how often has a mainstream Christian church organized its theology around the Sermon on the Mount, the Parable of the Rich Young Ruler, or Jesus’ instruction to sell everything and give the proceeds to the poor?

Attempts to take those teachings seriously have rarely gone smoothly. Liberation theology tried, and the Church spent decades suppressing it. The Social Gospel movement tried as well and was often dismissed as soft, political, or insufficiently focused on saving souls.

Across the centuries, personal salvation — Paul’s emphasis — has consistently dominated, while social transformation — the emphasis of Jesus’ teaching — has been marginalized, spiritualized, or outright condemned.

The Pauline gospel, whatever its theological merits, fits far more comfortably with existing power structures. It asks believers to hold the correct beliefs and live morally as individuals, while the gospel Jesus preached calls for something far more disruptive: the dismantling of the systems that make people poor in the first place.

Empires have rarely struggled to decide which version to sponsor.

What Would Jesus Think?

Take the historical Jesus — an apocalyptic Jewish prophet, advocate for the poor, and harsh critic of religious institutionalism and the priestly class — and drop him into a modern megachurch, a Vatican press conference, or a prosperity-gospel broadcast, and he would recognize almost nothing.

He was suspicious of wealth, yet the Church accumulated staggering wealth. He was hostile to religious hierarchy performing piety for status, yet the Church built elaborate hierarchies and dressed them in gold. He preached an imminent Kingdom that would overturn the powerful, yet the Church eventually became one of the powerful.

Paul isn’t responsible for all of that. But the theology he articulated — faith over works, grace over law, the spiritual over the material — gave later Christians the tools to turn Jesus’ very concrete demands into something personal, interior, and safely postponed to the afterlife.

In the process, the Kingdom of God became heaven, the reversal of the social order became individual moral transformation, and the poor who were supposed to inherit the earth became souls who would one day go to paradise.

Jesus was elevated to God, but his message was quietly buried.

So, What’s Going On?

Most Christians have never been told that the faith they practice is primarily Pauline, not Jesuanic. That’s not a minor footnote. That’s the whole story.

The theology you inherited — sin, grace, faith, personal salvation, heaven as the destination — comes overwhelmingly from a man who never heard Jesus preach, never saw him heal anyone, and built his theology from a vision on a road and a creative rereading of Jewish scripture.

That might not bother you. Fine. But you should at least know it.

Because when Christians argue today about whether the Church should feed the poor or focus on saving souls, they are not having a new theological debate. They are reenacting a conflict that was settled — politically and institutionally — in the second and third centuries. The Jesus side lost, the Paul side won, and the winners got to write the syllabus.

The Church didn’t suppress the Sermon on the Mount with a memo. It simply kept preaching Romans instead, week after week, for centuries, until most people could no longer tell you what Jesus actually taught — only what later theology said he was.

There’s a word for taking someone’s legacy, replacing it with your own agenda, and keeping their name on the marquee.

The Church has been doing it since before there was a Church.

Ironically, even Paul didn’t have Christianity in mind when he wrote those letters — but that’s for another piece.

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Sources and Further Reading

• E.P. Sanders — Jesus and Judaism (1985)

• Paula Fredriksen — Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews (1999)

• James D.G. Dunn — The Theology of Paul the Apostle (1998)

• Bart D. Ehrman — Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (1999)

• N.T. Wright — Jesus and the Victory of God (1996)

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MAGA Jesus Is Paul’s Jesus — Not the Gospels’

Every Sunday in America, millions gather in church, bowing their heads to ask Jesus to bless their country — along with their guns, their borders, their political party, and their chosen candidate.

They stick fish symbols on pickup trucks, carry crosses to political rallies, wave Bibles — sometimes upside down — for photo ops, and place “Jesus Saves” beside “Trump Won” on the same yard sign without a hint of irony.

The thing is, they’re not completely wrong to invoke Paul. They’re just calling him by the wrong name.

Before We Begin

About a week ago I sent out a reader survey — and the response was humbling. Based on your feedback, I’ve put together a publishing schedule covering the topics you asked for most, which you’ll be seeing roll out over the coming weeks and months (or until the next survey shakes things up).

The overwhelming majority of responses were positive, but a handful of you left constructive critical feedback. I appreciate that more than you know — and if you left an email, I’ll be reaching out personally.

Thank you. Genuinely.

The God of the Republican Party Feels Off

When the Christian Right talks about authority, hierarchy, and submission to law — that’s Paul.

When they talk about the proper role of women — silent, subordinate, focused on home and family — that’s Paul.

When they defend wealth, dismiss economic justice, and tell poor people that their poverty’s a spiritual problem rather than a structural one — that’s Paul.

When they demand doctrinal conformity, cast out heretics, and build institutions designed to enforce ideological purity — that’s Paul.

Not Jesus. Paul.

And the distinction’s enormous. It’s the difference between a religion of liberation and a religion of control.

What Jesus Actually Said About Power

Jesus was executed by the state.

Let that sink in for a moment.

The founder of Christianity was deemed enough of a political threat that the Roman Empire — which had seen a thing or two — decided he needed to be publicly tortured and killed as a warning to others. And no, Rome didn’t crucify people for blasphemy against a god they didn’t believe in — whatever the Bible implies to whitewash Roman culpability. Rome crucified rebels, agitators, and threats to public order. That’s what Jesus was to them.

Jesus’s message was dangerous because it was a direct challenge to every power structure of his day. Roman imperial power. Jewish priestly power. Wealth. Status. The entire system of first-century hierarchy.

“He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.” — Luke 1:52-53

That’s a declaration of political intent, not a metaphor, regardless of how you look at it.

Jesus didn’t bless the powerful but promised them consequences. He didn’t comfort the comfortable but disturbed them — repeatedly, deliberately, with great rhetorical precision.

Chances are the Republican Party’s Jesus would’ve been horrified by the actual Jesus.

What Paul Said About Power

Now let’s look at Paul.

“Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted.” — Romans 13:1-2

There it is.

The foundational text of Christian political quietism: it’s God’s will to obey the government. Don’t rebel.

This is the verse that’s been used to justify — are you ready for this list — Roman imperial rule, the divine right of kings, American slavery, apartheid in South Africa, and Nazi collaboration by the German church.

Romans 13 is the Swiss Army knife of authoritarian theology. Every regime that’s ever wanted Christian cover for its exercise of power has reached for it.

And Paul handed it to them.

Now ask yourself: which version of Christianity do you think powerful people have preferred to fund, promote, and amplify for two thousand years? The one that says the powerful will be cast down? Or the one that says governing authorities are established by God?

The answer isn’t complicated.

The Prosperity Gospel Is Paul, Albeit in Corrupted Form

Let’s talk about money. Because the Christian Right loves to talk about money.

The prosperity gospel — the theological cancer spreading through American evangelicalism that tells people God rewards faith with wealth — has no basis in the teachings of Jesus. None. Zip. Zero.

Jesus said:

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” — Mark 10:25

This is something he said repeatedly in different versions.

He told a wealthy man to sell everything. He praised a widow who gave her last two coins while condemning the wealthy donors who gave from their surplus. He said you can’t serve both God and money.

Jesus had a view on wealth and it wasn’t friendly to the wealthy.

But Paul’s letters, filtered through two thousand years of interpretation by wealthy institutions and comfortable theologians, got reframed into something that could accommodate — and eventually celebrate — accumulation.

To be fair, Joel Osteen merely perfected the packaging of the pre-existing prosperity gospel. The theological raw material had been there for centuries, marinated in Pauline interpretation that slowly, quietly sanded off every inconvenient edge of Jesus’s radical economics.

Women, Again

You can’t discuss the Christian Right’s politics without discussing women. And you can’t discuss their theology on women without going straight back to Paul.

The opposition to women in church leadership? Paul.

The theological argument for male headship in marriage? Paul.

The framing of women’s bodies as sites of moral danger requiring male oversight? Paul.

“I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.” — 1 Timothy 2:12

Meanwhile, in the Gospels, women are the first witnesses to the resurrection. They’re the ones who stayed at the cross when the male disciples fled. Mary of Bethany sat at Jesus’s feet as a disciple — in a culture where that was a radical act — and Jesus defended her right to be there.

The Republican Party’s position on women’s autonomy, women’s leadership, and women’s bodies isn’t derived from the Jesus of the Gospels.

It’s derived from the Paul of the Epistles.

Every time a Republican politician quotes scripture to justify restricting women’s rights, ask them to show you the chapter and verse from Jesus. They can’t. Because it isn’t there.

Christian Nationalism Is a Pauline Project

Christian nationalism — the belief that America is or should be a Christian nation, governed by Christian principles, with Christian identity baked into its legal and political structure — is having a moment.

Project 2025. The Seven Mountain Mandate. Dominionism. Whatever you want to call it, the basic idea’s the same: Christians should control the institutions of power and use them to enforce Christian values.

That project has nothing to do with Jesus.

Jesus didn’t establish a government. He didn’t write laws. He didn’t tell his followers to seize institutional power. When pressed on the question of political authority, he famously said give to Caesar what’s Caesar’s — and then pivoted back to talking about God.

His Kingdom was explicitly not of this world — at least not in the sense that worldly kingdoms operate.

Christian nationalism is Pauline in its instinct — the idea that the church should be aligned with governing authority, that Christian identity and civic identity should be fused, that institutions should enforce doctrinal conformity.

It’s just that Paul was telling people to submit to Roman authority, and the Christian nationalists want to BE the authority. They’ve taken Paul’s framework and flipped it: instead of the church serving the state, they want the state to serve the church.

Either way, don’t look for Jesus’s fingerprints. You won’t find them.

The Jesus They Couldn’t Tame

Here’s the part that should haunt every politically active American Christian.

The actual Jesus — the Jesus of the Gospels, that is — is a nightmare for the American right.

He commands care for immigrants and refugees. (Leviticus 19:34, and Jesus reaffirms it.)

He commands feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoner. And he says — explicitly, in Matthew 25 — that how you treat “the least of these” is how you treat him.

He commands non-violence. He rebukes Peter for drawing a sword. He tells his followers to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them.

He doesn’t say a word about abortion, homosexuality, or the capital gains tax. But he says a great deal about wealth, power, violence, and the treatment of the vulnerable.

None of that fits neatly on a Republican platform. So it gets quietly set aside, and Paul’s more manageable theology gets promoted in its place.

The MAGA Jesus is a fabrication. A political prop stitched together from selective Pauline proof texts, nationalist mythology, and the audacity to put a red hat on a first-century Jewish revolutionary.

The real one would’ve flipped their tables.

What’s Your Take?

Is the Christian Right following Jesus or Paul? Does the distinction matter politically? And what would American Christianity look like if it took the Sermon on the Mount as seriously as it takes Romans 13?

If this essay made you think, made you angry, or made you want to forward it to your pastor — do it. See what happens.

This publication exists because readers like you choose to support it.

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Sources and Further Reading

• Crossan, John Dominic & Reed, Jonathan L. In Search of Paul. HarperCollins, 2004.

• Wink, Walter. The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium. Doubleday, 1998.

• Whitehead, Andrew L. & Perry, Samuel L. Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States. Oxford University Press, 2020.

• Tabor, James D. Paul and Jesus. Simon & Schuster, 2012.

• Horsley, Richard A. Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder. Fortress Press, 2003.

• Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne. Liveright, 2020.

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There’s something strange happening, and once you see it you can’t unsee it.

The same people who rage about former Prince Andrew and his association with Jeffrey Epstein will turn around and defend the Bible as the ultimate moral authority. Andrew’s reputation is wrecked; his friendship with Epstein was an insult to the Commonwealth realm, starting with the British; his BBC Newsnight interview was a slow-motion car crash; and his legal settlement with Virginia Giuffre didn’t exactly help his case. And to be honest, few people needed the Epstein files to dislike this spoiled, arrogant brat. None of that is in dispute here — but it’s also not the point.

The point is moral consistency, which turns out to be a lot harder than moral outrage.

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Today we’re talking about emergency powers — the special authorities usually held by a president, monarch, or head of state, sometimes triggered on their own initiative and sometimes on the advice of a prime minister, the powers that appear when something goes wrong: war, terror attacks, natural disasters, civil unrest, public health crises — the moments when leaders insist that extraordinary times require extraordinary measures.

I originally planned to approach this through an American lens because there’s no shortage of material there, but two things stopped me. Not everyone reading this lives in the United States, and there’s only so much appetite for America-focused analysis post after post. More importantly, however, the misuse of emergency powers is not an American problem; it is a democratic problem, a structural vulnerability built into most constitutional systems.

We don’t talk about it enough. We debate elections, corruption, political personalities, and party rivalries, yet we rarely slow down to examine what emergency powers actually are, why they exist, when they are justified, and when they quietly turn into something else.

The fact of the matter is that emergency powers are designed as necessary evils — mechanisms meant to bend normal rules without breaking the system, temporary tools to protect the state when ordinary procedures are too slow or too rigid — but power rarely behaves as if it is temporary.

So what exactly are these emergency powers? Why were they created in the first place? When are they defensible? When do they become dangerous? And why is it impossible to claim you love your country while supporting their misuse?

That is where we begin.

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What Emergency Powers Actually Are

Emergency powers are legal authorities written into a country’s constitution that allow the executive branch to act outside normal procedures during a declared crisis. They are not accidental loopholes; they are intentional design features built into modern democracies.

The logic behind them is straightforward. In extreme situations that demand immediate action, the normal legislative process can be too slow, too fragmented, or too constrained to respond effectively. If a country is invaded, if a large-scale terrorist attack occurs, if a natural disaster devastates infrastructure, or if a fast-moving public health crisis spreads, governments may need to mobilize resources, restrict movement, or coordinate security measures without waiting for prolonged debate.

Emergency provisions exist to provide the required speed and flexibility.

Think of it like this: when there is an intruder in your house, you do not organize a family meeting to vote on what to do. You act first and deliberate later.

Emergency Powers Require Serious Justification

Emergency powers temporarily suspend democratic traditions because of an unforeseen serious matter and are non-democratic by nature, which is what makes them a necessary evil.

Democracy depends on debate, delay, checks, balances, judicial review, opposition voices, and public scrutiny. Emergency powers compress that process and concentrate authority. They accelerate decision-making by bypassing parts of the normal system.

Arguably, this “loophole” is one of the biggest threats to democracies because the democratic system itself grants non-democratic powers to individuals under certain conditions.

That is precisely why they require serious justification.

You cannot treat emergency powers as routine policy tools. You cannot invoke them because legislation is inconvenient, because opposition is annoying, or because governing through normal channels is politically difficult. They exist for situations that genuinely threaten the functioning of the state or the safety of the population in ways that ordinary law cannot adequately address.

The Foundation of Authoritarian Rule

Many non-democratic regimes did not begin with coups; they began constitutionally, within systems that had elections, parliaments, courts, and emergency clauses written into law “just in case,” clauses that eventually became the bridge.

The pattern is not chaotic but procedural: a crisis occurs, the executive declares an emergency, rights are temporarily limited, oversight narrows, opposition is restrained “for stability,” and the public accepts it because the threat feels real.

Then the emergency lasts longer than expected, expands beyond its original scope, and gradually reshapes the system — not by abolishing democracy in one dramatic act, but by governing through exceptions until the exception becomes the rule.

Weimar Germany: Emergency as a Fatal Habit

The collapse of the Weimar Republic is often reduced to a single moment in 1933, which is extremely misleading.

Before Hitler consolidated power, Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution allowed the president to suspend civil liberties during emergencies. It was intended as a safeguard against instability. Germany faced hyperinflation, political violence, and economic crisis. Emergency decrees seemed practical.

But they became frequent.

Those in power were short-sighted. They believed the constitutional “back door” was working almost miraculously, failing to consider what constant suspension of democratic traditions would mean in the long run.

Presidents increasingly ruled by decree instead of working through parliament. Legislative paralysis was bypassed through emergency authority. Over time, governing without full parliamentary consent stopped feeling extraordinary.

By the time Hitler came to power, the use of emergency powers had already been normalized. After the German parliament fire in 1933 — an event widely believed to have involved Hitler — emergency powers were invoked again. Few institutional barriers remained strong enough to resist.

Subsequently, civil liberties were suspended, political opponents were arrested, and media freedoms were curtailed.

The decree was presented as temporary.

It never truly ended.

Hitler did not need to abolish the constitution immediately; he conveniently used its emergency mechanism to hollow it out.

Italy: Crisis and Executive Strength

In the first quarter of the 20th century, Benito Mussolini did not seize total power in a single night either.

Italy faced post-war instability, economic tension, and social unrest. Mussolini was appointed prime minister while the country was still a democracy. Soon after, emergency measures followed to “stabilize” the state.

Opposition parties were gradually weakened. Press freedoms narrowed. Security powers expanded. Each measure was framed as necessary to restore order.

The shift from a parliamentary system to a fascist regime did not begin with the open abolition of democracy. It began with emergency responses to instability.

Authoritarian control grew through legal instruments.

Turkey: State of Emergency and Structural Change

After a convenient coup attempt in 2016, a state of emergency was declared, allowing the president to issue emergency decrees that led to sweeping dismissals, arrests, and institutional restructuring, with thousands of civil servants, academics, judges, and military personnel removed and numerous media outlets closed.

But the 24-month-long emergency period did more than neutralize immediate threats; it reshaped the institutional balance, expanded executive authority significantly, and paved the way for constitutional changes that consolidated presidential power.

While the country remained under the state of emergency, the parliamentary system was effectively replaced through a controversial referendum in which courts accepted fraudulent ballots that lacked an official stamp for validation.

And just like that, a presidential system was instituted that granted broad powers to one individual with little institutional accountability.

Hungary: Rule by Decree

Hungary provides another example of how emergency powers can extend executive control without formally abolishing democratic structures, as emergency provisions related first to migration and later to public health allowed rule by decree under specific conditions; parliament continued to exist, elections were still held, yet executive discretion steadily widened.

When emergency authority becomes a recurring instrument rather than a rare safeguard, the line between normal governance and exceptional governance begins to blur, and a democracy that repeatedly operates under emergency logic gradually internalizes centralized control as standard practice.

The transformation unfolds slowly, not dramatically.

Russia: Managed Democracy Through Crisis

In Russia, the consolidation of power occurred over years, often justified through security concerns, counterterrorism measures, and narratives of national stability.

After terrorist attacks in the early 2000s, reforms were introduced that centralized authority, including changes to how regional governors were selected. Media space narrowed, and opposition became increasingly constrained.

Formal democratic structures remained.

But the balance shifted heavily toward executive dominance, justified repeatedly by reference to national security and internal threats.

An emergency did not require a continuous formal state of emergency; it required a sustained narrative of vulnerability.

When threat becomes a constant backdrop, extraordinary measures begin to appear routine.

The U.S.: Abraham Lincoln and the Reach of Emergency Power

Anyone who believes “this could never happen here” should look at the United States during the Civil War under Abraham Lincoln.

In 1861, the Union was breaking apart. Southern states had seceded. War had begun. Lincoln responded fast — and aggressively.

He suspended habeas corpus, allowing detention without immediate court review. Thousands were arrested, including suspected Confederate sympathizers and political critics. He expanded the army without prior congressional approval. He ordered a naval blockade before Congress formally declared war. In some areas, civilians were tried in military courts instead of civilian ones.

Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled in Ex parte Merryman that only Congress could suspend habeas corpus. Lincoln ignored the ruling. His reasoning was blunt: if the government collapses, constitutional technicalities mean little.

That is emergency logic.

The United States did not become a dictatorship. Elections were still held in 1864. Congress later authorized parts of what he had done. The war ended. The extraordinary measures were not made permanent.

But the scope was enormous. Core civil liberties were curtailed. Executive authority expanded dramatically. And it all happened within a constitutional system that prided itself on checks and balances.

In a functioning democracy, Lincoln should have been held accountable for disregarding a court ruling. An investigation should have examined whether the suspension of judicial authority risked becoming normalized and setting a precedent. I’m not saying Lincoln should have been convicted, but the system should have made it clear that what was done was not taken lightly. Unfortunately, victors are rarely required to justify themselves — and that is precisely what Adolf Hitler was betting on.

The precedent remains. Once emergency powers are activated, even compliance with court orders can begin to look optional.

So, What’s Going on?

Emergency powers are not the problem. Their normalization is.

Every democracy builds in emergency authority because crises are real. War, terror, pandemics, collapse — governments must sometimes act quickly. But the same mechanism that allows speed also allows concentration of power. And concentration, once tolerated, rarely shrinks on its own.

History shows a pattern. A crisis occurs. Rights are limited temporarily. Oversight narrows. The public accepts it because the threat feels real. Then the emergency lasts longer than expected. Then it expands. Then it quietly reshapes the system.

Not through a dramatic abolition of democracy, but through governing by exception until exception becomes routine.

If you love your country, you love its limits on power. You love the courts that can block leaders. You love the opposition that can criticize without fear. You love the friction of debate and the inconvenience of checks and balances. Those are not obstacles to stability. They are the structure that makes stability legitimate.

At the very least, invoking emergency powers simply to get things done is a sign of a politician who cares more about their term than the country itself. A patriotic leader knows that normalizing emergency powers weakens democracy.

If you don’t care about the misuse of emergency authority because you approve of the outcome, you are short-sighted. If Trump can stretch emergency powers to bypass resistance, the same door is open for a president you deeply oppose. And you will have no ground to stand on when criticizing it.

Powers normalized today become tools tomorrow.

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In 1865, the guns finally went quiet in “The Land of the Free.” The Confederacy was finished, General Lee handed over his sword to General Grant at Appomattox, and four million ethnic African slaves were, at least on paper, declared free. That meant the Civil War was over. Not so fast.

In reality, though, the fight just moved—from battlefields to courtrooms, from plantations to prisons, from open rebellion to coded language, and from military uniforms to tailored suits and snappy campaign slogans.

No, America’s biggest issue today isn’t inflation or immigration. It isn’t even polarization.

It’s all about a war fought more than 150 years ago that never truly ended and keeps resurfacing in new modern forms.

Let me explain.

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What the Civil War Was Actually About

Before we go any further, let’s clarify what the Civil War actually was — focusing only on the parts relevant to this discussion.

In 1861, eleven Southern states seceded from the United States after Abraham Lincoln was elected president, issuing formal declarations of secession. Their reasons, written plainly in roughly 10,000 words across those documents — even if they hoped you would zoom out long before you finished reading — placed slavery at the center of nearly every argument. The Southern economy depended on enslaved labor, the political system was built to protect it, and the social order justified it.

The war that followed lasted four years and killed more than 600,000 Americans. By the time it ended, entire regions were devastated, cities had burned, and families were torn apart. But at least with the surrender of the Confederate army, slavery was formally abolished through the 13th Amendment — at a time when elected representatives amended the Constitution, not nine unelected judges.

If you were naïve enough, you could almost believe the issue was settled — that the Union was stamped as indivisible once and for all, and that human beings could no longer be legally owned.

The South lost an entire social system built on racial dominance while keeping its land. The old ruling class had been defeated on the battlefield, but it still lived, still owned land, still held influence, and still believed in its version of order (any theories on why American farmers are still predominantly white, and why even many middle-class Black Americans today are just a few missed paychecks away from financial trouble?)

Politicians were ready to ignore that the Confederation was gone, but its hardcore supporters remained, with equal voting rights like any other American, deeply despising the federal government.

Half-Hearted Reconstruction

After the war, for a minute at least, it seemed like America might actually face up to what it had done. During Reconstruction, Black Americans voted, Black men held office, new state constitutions were written, and federal troops enforced civil rights in the old Confederacy. It was far from perfect and met with constant resistance, but nonetheless, it was real change — at least for a while.

The turning point in post–Civil War American history came when a deluded federal government lost its nerve and pulled its federal troops out of the South, believing Reconstruction was over. White supremacist violence exploded, brutally crushing Black political power, and what followed was revenge.

The South was quick to rebuild its racial hierarchy under a new set of rules. Slavery was technically gone, but it transitioned into forced labor through the leasing of convicts, up to 90% of whom were Black — surprise, surprise. Segregation laws spread, and voting rights were squeezed out through literacy tests, poll taxes, threats, and plain old terror. The message? The South might have lost the war on the battlefield, but it planned to win the peace in the culture and at the ballot box.

Myth of the “Lost Cause”

The South pulled a strategic move through none other than rewriting history. Suddenly, the Civil War was all about “states’ rights,” “heritage,” and “northern aggression” — of course, it wasn’t slavery, don’t be silly.

Statues of Confederate figures popped up in town squares as if the Confederate states themselves hadn’t said at the time that slavery was at the heart of the conflict. Schoolbooks got a makeover, transforming the Confederacy into something romantic. Groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy worked overtime to mold public memory into something that could be put into textbooks to teach children as history.

The result?

Generations of Americans grew up with a faint idea of what the war was really about.

Mission accomplished.

That’s what happens when a society tells itself the same lie until it becomes part of its identity.

That’s how you get Americans waving Confederate flags and saying it’s about liberty — because, in their version of the story, the Confederacy was fighting for local freedom.

Race Is Still the Fault Line

If the war had truly ended, race wouldn’t still be right in the middle of every big American political fight. But here we are: every major flashpoint, whether it’s policing, voting, schools, or immigration, runs along racial lines that echo back to the 1800s.

After the Civil War, the 15th Amendment said Black men could vote. But that right got chipped away within a generation—through legal tricks and straight-up violence. Fast forward nearly a hundred years, the Voting Rights Act tried to fix things, but even that’s been weakened again in recent years.

The fight over who gets political power? That’s the same fight that fueled secession back in 1860. Now, it shows up in court cases, redistricting battles, and legislative chess games instead of cannon fire. The Confederacy isn’t on the map anymore, but its voting patterns still pop up in today’s elections—like a ghost that won’t leave.

Symbols Never Went Away

If a war truly ends, its symbols don’t stay in public squares. They end up in museums. In the cautionary chapters of textbooks.

Especially when the side that started the conflict was fighting for something as morally indefensible as keeping slavery. Within a few generations, those people are remembered as traitors. Not misunderstood patriots. Not cultural icons. Traitors.

Look at the Netherlands. Dutch Nazis practically took over the occupied country and worked with the German Nazis during World War II. Those who sided with the occupiers aren’t defended today as “heritage.” No one waves their flags at rallies and calls it pride. They’re remembered as people who betrayed their own country, while the Dutch resistance is what’s honored.

For all practical purposes, that Dutch faction with indefensible morals died with the war, becoming a warning, not a banner.

Or take France. The Vichy regime cooperated with Nazi Germany. After liberation, its leaders weren’t immortalized in marble across city squares. Philippe Pétain — once a World War I hero — was convicted of treason. Modern France doesn’t treat Vichy nostalgia as a respectable political identity, collaboration isn’t transformed into a fight for regional autonomy.

For all practical purposes, that French faction with indefensible morals died with the war, leaving its remnants in history books — not in patriotic rallies.

But in America, Confederate monuments stood in public squares for more than a century. Not hidden. Not archived. Standing tall. The Confederate battle flag resurfaced during the civil rights era — not as a relic, but as a message.

And even now, you still see that flag at rallies and protests. That isn’t harmless nostalgia but a signal. A signal says the identity behind it never disappeared.

What makes it even more revealing is that many of the people defending those statues and flags insist they love America more than anyone else. They accuse others — usually “liberals” — of disrespecting the nation. Yet they rally around the symbol of a rebellion that tried to tear the country apart just to keep one human legally owning another.

All of those points point to the same conclusion: the war ended militarily. But its spirit is alive and kicking.

Confederacy’s Logic Got a Facelift

It’s true that no modern politician goes around saying we should bring back slavery. But the deeper logic—hierarchy, resentment, grievance, fear of change—never really went away. It just got new labels. After slavery ended, there was segregation. After that, it was all about “law and order.” Then came fresh calls for “states’ rights,” and now we hear talk of “border security” and “protecting our culture.”

The words keep changing, but the feelings underneath are the same. The Civil War was really about whether America would be a true multiracial democracy or stick to a racial hierarchy—and that argument is still happening today, whether it’s in Congress or on cable news.

January 6 Was Actually a Flash

When rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Confederate flags were waving in the halls of Congress. That’s wild, considering that flag never even made it into the Capitol during the actual Civil War. Its appearance was a sign of long-running continuity, not some weird coincidence.

The belief that the federal government is illegitimate if it doesn’t match your idea of who should be in charge? That goes back to 1861. The fact that it’s still around today just shows that old ideas don’t really die—they just change form.

Electoral Maps

Take a look at today’s electoral maps and you’ll notice familiar patterns—they often line up with the old Union and Confederacy borders. Sure, things have changed, and it’s not just North versus South anymore, but cultural memory leaves its mark and shapes how regions see themselves.

The same regions that once fought to keep slavery now often lead political movements focused on nationalism, cultural grievance, and a deep suspicion of federal power. History doesn’t repeat itself perfectly, but it definitely leaves a mark.

Every few years, politicians talk about national unity. It sounds nice, but it rarely feels real. That’s because unity needs a shared memory and some basic moral agreement—and America just doesn’t have that.

Some people see the Civil War as a fight to keep slavery and think Reconstruction was a missed shot at real justice. Others talk about “honor” and “heritage,” seeing Reconstruction as the government pushing too hard. If we can’t agree on what the war was really about, we’ll never agree on what justice should look like today.

That’s why unity often feels fake instead of natural—because we still haven’t worked out the core argument.

Prison System With Historical Echoes

The 13th Amendment banned slavery — except as punishment for a crime. That “except” is not a footnote. It gave Southern states the legal cover to arrest Black men for trivial, invented, or selectively enforced offenses and then lease them out to private companies. Slavery didn’t vanish. It changed paperwork.

That’s how slavery and mass incarceration became connected by design.

Today, the United States has the highest incarceration numbers in the history of humankind. It even leaves China in the dust — and China’s population dwarfs that of the U.S. Think about that for a second. A country with a fraction of the population locks up more of its own people.

Modern prisons aren’t plantations. But the thread linking racial control, prison labor, and political power didn’t snap in 1865. It was rewoven. And that thread runs straight from the end of the Civil War into the institutions still operating today.

Cultural Memory Was Never Fully Cleared

After World War II, Germany faced its Nazi past head-on: banning certain symbols, building memorials, and making sure history was taught in schools. After the Civil War, America took the softer path—choosing to let bygones be bygones instead of digging in for a real reckoning.

There was no national truth commission, no big push to dismantle Confederate memory until just recently—and even now, it’s still a fight. Reconciliation put white unity ahead of Black justice. So the wound closed up, but it never really healed.

Fast forward today, we don’t have cannons firing between states anymore, but the hostility is still there. Now it shows up in media bubbles, echo chambers, and talk that treats political opponents like existential threats instead of just people who disagree.

When people start tossing around words like “traitor,” “enemy,” or “take our country back,” it’s the same emotional energy as in the 1800s. When folks see each other as threats to survival instead of just rivals in government, that’s civil war thinking—just without the armies.

Federal Government Remains a Target

In 1861, secessionists called their fight a stand against federal tyranny. And not much has changed since then. You still hear people calling federal agencies illegitimate or corrupt whenever those agencies push policies that aren’t popular in their region. That old suspicion of central authority hasn’t gone anywhere.

Legally, the Civil War settled that states can’t just break away by force. But it never got rid of the resentment behind secession. You can still hear it in today’s complaints about federal overreach.

So, What’s Going on?

The Civil War ended on the battlefield in 1865—papers signed, armies sent home. But the moral debate over race, power, identity, and federal authority? That never really ended. One side surrendered in uniform, but not in spirit. Until America faces that unfinished argument honestly—not just with nostalgia—the fight will keep showing up in new ways and new spaces.

Look at the headlines, the maps, the slogans, the rallies—does this feel like a country that finished its war, or just one that switched up the battlefield?

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c

Justice.

An overused word we stopped questioning. All while it’s not just a fundamental — it’s the fundamental of society. It’s where you set the rules and define how society must function.

And in jurisdictions where common law prevails — remnants of the British Empire — the jury system is treated like a sacred cow.

You’re not supposed to criticize it. Criticizing it is framed as criticizing democracy itself.

But democracy is not a universal remedy that magically makes everything better.

Truth is not decided by majority vote. And justice shouldn’t be either.

And ironically, democracy is supposed to protect us from having truth determined by majority vote — just as science relies on evidence rather than popular support to establish what is true.

Let me explain.

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Why the Jury System Started in the First Place

You cannot talk about the fairness of the jury system without first talking about its history — how it evolved as a remedy to address real problems.

The idea of the jury system emerged in medieval England in the 12th century as protection against unchecked royal power. At the time, kings controlled the courts, and judges answered to the Crown. If the king wanted you punished, you were almost certainly punished.

Instead of a government official deciding guilt alone, a group of local citizens would weigh the accusation. In small communities, these people often already knew the facts; they knew the accused, they knew the families, they knew the context.

It was a shield to protect individuals from the state by separating the judicial branch from the executive.

By the 13th century, this principle became embedded in English common law and spread throughout the British Empire. It later became central to American constitutional identity. The jury was framed as a bulwark against tyranny — a way to prevent the state from crushing individuals without community consent.

When legal systems were primitive, when kings were unpredictable, and when centralized authority was dangerous, involving ordinary citizens was a stabilizing force.

For its time, that made sense. Decisions were based on interpretation — whether a witness seemed trustworthy — rather than on hard evidence like forensic science.

The question is whether the jury system is doing more harm than good today.

Randomness Is Not Fairness

Let’s start with the most obvious problem with the jury system — the one almost everyone admits: you cannot predict what a jury will decide.

Truth is binary.

Either something happened or it didn’t.

You have the court procedure, you have the evidence, you have the facts presented. If the system were working properly, the outcome would be predictable. The same evidence should lead to the same result.

If the outcome depends on which random strangers happen to sit in that box, then the result becomes unpredictable, which is what we have.

The core of the jury system is randomness.

Twelve citizens, no training, no legal education, no forensic background, no requirement to understand probability, psychology, or scientific methodology.

They are given complex evidence — DNA reports, financial records, expert testimony, contradictory witness statements — and then told to apply a legal standard that no one can define precisely: “beyond reasonable doubt.”

Emotion Wins More Than Evidence

Trials are not logic competitions. They are storytelling contests where two sides compete to see who can persuade — or manipulate — the jury more effectively.

Both prosecutors and defense attorneys tell stories, knowing very well that jurors respond to narrative far more than to technical detail.

• A grieving mother on the stand will outweigh a statistical argument.

• A confident expert will overpower a cautious one.

• A dramatic closing statement will linger longer than a footnote in a forensic report.

Judges are trained to separate emotion from legal reasoning.

Jurors are not.

And once emotion enters the room, objectivity leaves quietly.

Ironically, in real expertise, confidence can be a warning sign. The true expert understands uncertainty, knows the limits of the evidence, and admits what cannot be known. But in a courtroom, certainty wins. The expert who sounds most convinced often carries more weight than the one who speaks with nuance.

Bias Doesn’t Disappear Because You Swear an Oath

Jurors swear to be impartial as if that doesn’t erase bias.

Statistics say race, gender class, attractiveness, even clothing influence verdicts.

A well-dressed defendant looks “responsible.”
A poor defendant looks “suspicious.”
A calm witness is “credible.”
A nervous one is “hiding something.”

These reactions happen automatically.

The jury system assumes that ordinary citizens can walk into a courtroom and suddenly detach from every subconscious bias they carry from life.

That’s unrealistic.

I can admit this personally. When something happens to someone from the middle class, it affects me more than when it happens to someone from the lower middle class. I relate to the former more easily. If they become the victim, it feels like it could happen to me. The latter feels more distant.

I’ve worked on that, and I believe I’ve improved.

That said, we are often blind to our own biases. The fact that we think we’ve overcome them doesn’t mean we have.

Now I’ll ask you an uncomfortable question: If the Titanic had carried only third-class passengers on its maiden voyage, would we still talk about it the same way today?

Another one: If, during an invasion, up to five hundred thousand Europeans had died — directly or indirectly, through the collapse of infrastructure or the spread of endemic disease — would we have reacted the same way we did when it was Iraqis? Or would we have cared more because they looked like us, lived like us, and felt closer to us?

Tragedy hits differently depending on who it happens to.

And jurors are not immune to that instinct.

The Group Pressure Problem

We pretend deliberation rooms are temples of reason, but they are more social environments.

Strong, persuasive personalities dominate. People who see the world in black and white — ironically, one of the least reliable segments of society — take over. Quiet jurors fold. People change votes to avoid confrontation. Some don’t care enough and agree just to go home.

Group psychology has shown this for decades. Individuals conform. Confidence wins arguments even when it lacks evidence. Exhaustion lowers resistance.

Now imagine that dynamic deciding whether someone spends thirty years in prison.

You are not getting pure logic in that room.

You are getting negotiation, fatigue, compromise, and personality dominance.

That isn’t justice.

That’s social dynamics.

The Illusion of Protection

Supporters say juries protect citizens from government abuse.

In theory, yes. Jurors can refuse to convict under unjust laws.

In reality, jurors are instructed to follow the law as written. Judges limit discussion of nullification. Most jurors do exactly what they are told.

The supposed shield against tyranny is heavily managed.

At the same time, history shows that juries have protected injustice as often as they have resisted it. All-white juries. Biased acquittals. Convictions shaped by public hysteria.

Furthermore, in non-jury systems, judges are tested on their neutrality. Allowing your personal life or worldview to determine decisions is unacceptable. The outcome of a case cannot depend on the individual judge.

Furthermore, the judge decides what evidence may be presented to the jury. If decisive evidence proving guilt was improperly collected — for example, without a search warrant — it is something the jury will never know about. Instead of penalizing the police officer while acknowledging the evidence, the system often proceeds as if the evidence does not exist. As a result, even serial killers may be found not guilty and freed to kill again.

Is this protecting individual rights, or is it intentionally acting blind and careless about the safety of society?

Why the System Works Better for the Wealthy

This is probably a key reason why no one is talking about the jury system. It works better for the rich.

The jury system operates within an adversarial structure in which persuasion and preparation shape outcomes, and both are strongly influenced by financial resources. A wealthy defendant can hire experienced trial attorneys, retain independent experts, and devote significant time and strategy to shaping how evidence is presented and interpreted — basically, how to manipulate those twelve people most effectively. That level of preparation does not guarantee acquittal, but it increases the ability to challenge claims, create doubt, and control narrative momentum in ways that matter inside a courtroom.

Defendants with limited means face structural disadvantages that are not theoretical but practical. Public defenders often carry heavy caseloads, access to independent experts may be limited, and pretrial detention can restrict preparation while increasing psychological pressure. When bail cannot be afforded, stability and strategy suffer. Over time, these constraints influence not only how a case is built, but how it is perceived.

Because jury trials involve uncertainty, economic inequality interacts directly with risk. Those with resources can afford to contest charges fully and endure prolonged proceedings, while those without may accept plea agreements to avoid unpredictable outcomes. Jurors evaluate evidence as it is presented to them, and presentation depends on preparation. When preparation depends on wealth, inequality outside the courtroom inevitably shapes what happens inside it.

So, What’s Going on?

I’m not talking about something theoretical. Ninety-nine percent of the people sitting on death row are poor. Coincidence?

The current system is no longer simply about guilty or not guilty, but about who manipulates twelve people into thinking a certain way, or who manages to select judges who will decide according to their expectations. However, if judges are political, then they should resign with every presidential election so that the new government can appoint new judges to reflect the will of the people.

Is it still justice if we ignore scientific methods and allow twelve non-experts to decide which forensic evidence makes more sense, or how much weight it should carry, based on whether the defendant or the accuser was more persuasive? Is that still protecting individuals’ democratic rights?

Next Up…

That’s all for now.

Next time, we’ll examine why, in a democracy, the judiciary must remain undemocratic—and the difference between a republic and a democracy.

Take care,
Tanner

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There’s a cruel irony happening in America right now.

The loudest people claiming to protect Christianity are the same ones doing the most damage to it. Not because they’re too religious. But because they’ve confused Christianity with something else entirely — and that something else is power.

Christian Nationalism is less about the religion it’s supposed to be inspired by and more a political ideology that has borrowed the language, the symbols, and the emotional weight of Christianity to serve goals that Jesus — by every account we have of him — would have found repulsive.

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First, Let’s Define What We’re Talking About

Christian Nationalism is the belief that America was founded as a Christian nation, that it should be governed according to Christian principles, and that Christians — specifically a certain kind of conservative, white, Protestant Christian — should hold privileged status in law, culture, and politics.

It shows up in school board meetings demanding prayer be put back in classrooms. It shows up in politicians who wave Bibles at rallies and then vote against feeding hungry children. It shows up in the idea that America’s decline is God’s punishment for tolerating gay people, immigrants, or the wrong political party.

This is not a fringe movement. It has real political power. And it is not the same thing as being a devout Christian who participates in politics. That’s a perfectly normal and reasonable thing to do.

The difference is this: a Christian in politics lets their faith inform their values. A Christian Nationalist demands that the state enforce those values on everyone, believer or not.

That distinction matters more than most people realize.

It Trades the Gospel for Grievance

The actual message of the New Testament — whatever your theological interpretation — centers on things like loving your enemies, caring for the poor, welcoming strangers, humility, forgiveness, and the rejection of worldly power.

Christian Nationalism preaches almost none of that.

What it preaches is grievance. It tells its followers that Christianity is under attack. That true believers are being persecuted. That America has been stolen. That the enemy — liberals, atheists, immigrants, LGBTQ people, Democrats — must be defeated for God’s kingdom to be restored.

This is a gospel of resentment. And it is addictive in the way all resentment is addictive. It gives people an enemy to blame, a tribe to belong to, and a cause to fight for. It feels righteous. It feels holy.

But it is not Christianity. Not even close.

Jesus told his followers to love people they disagreed with. Christian Nationalism teaches followers to fear them, loathe them, and politically crush them. These are not compatible ideas dressed in different clothes. They are opposite ideas — one of them just happens to be wearing a cross.

It Corrupts the Church’s Actual Mission

Here’s a practical problem that gets overlooked in all the political noise: Christian Nationalism is driving people away from Christianity at historic rates.

Young Americans are leaving the church faster than any generation before them. When researchers ask why, one of the most common answers is that the church feels too political, too focused on power, too judgmental, and too entangled with a specific political party.

And they’re not wrong. When your local megachurch pastor is sharing Trump memes and telling the congregation that voting Democrat is a sin, you’ve stopped being a church and started being a political action committee with tax-exempt status.

When people can no longer tell the difference between following Jesus and voting Republican, they make a logical choice: if Christianity is just conservatism with hymns, I’ll skip both.

This is devastating for the long-term health of Christianity as a living, breathing community of faith. The church is supposed to be a place that transcends political division — a place where people across every background find something bigger than politics. Christian Nationalism has turned it into a partisan bunker.

And the people running that bunker don’t seem to notice or care that it’s getting emptier every year.

It Worships Power — Which Christianity Explicitly Warned Against

The New Testament has a lot to say about power. Almost none of it is flattering.

Jesus turned down political power when it was offered. He washed his disciples’ feet. He died on a cross between two criminals. His entire ministry was conducted among society’s rejects — the sick, the poor, the morally compromised, the foreigners. He had virtually nothing to say to the powerful except: watch yourself.

Christian Nationalism does the exact opposite. It is obsessed with power. It wants Christian influence embedded in every branch of government. It wants judges who will rule according to “biblical law.” It wants the state to enforce Christian moral standards on people who never agreed to live by them.

This is not a minor theological footnote. This is a fundamental betrayal of what Christianity claimed to be about.

When a movement that calls itself Christian throws its full weight behind authoritarian politicians, celebrates dominance over political enemies, and treats humility as weakness, it has not found a new way to express the faith. It has abandoned the faith and glued a cross to something else entirely.

Power corrupts. The New Testament says it better than that, but the principle is there. When a church grabs for political dominance, it stops being able to speak truth to the powerful — because it has become the powerful. And history is full of examples of what happens next: corruption, abuse, scandal, and the slow moral death of an institution that forgot what it was supposed to be for.

It Rewrites History to Justify Itself

One of Christian Nationalism’s core claims is historical: America was founded as a Christian nation, and we need to return to those Christian roots.

This is mostly false, and the people promoting it know it’s mostly false.

The founding fathers were a mixed group theologically. Some were devout Christians. Others were Deists who believed in a creator God but rejected organized religion and miracles. Thomas Jefferson literally cut the miracles out of his Bible with a razor blade. The Constitution does not mention Jesus or Christianity. The First Amendment specifically prohibits the establishment of a state religion — not because the founders hated religion, but because they’d seen what state-sponsored religion did to Europe and wanted no part of it.

When Christian Nationalists insist America was founded as a Christian theocracy that must be reclaimed, they’re not doing history. They’re writing myth. And they’re using that myth to justify something the actual founders explicitly feared: a government that uses religion to control people.

The myth is necessary because without it, the whole project falls apart. If America was never a Christian nation in the theocratic sense, then restoring it to that status isn’t recovery — it’s conquest. And that’s a much harder sell.

It Makes Christianity Synonymous With One Political Party

This is perhaps the most strategically catastrophic thing Christian Nationalism has done to the faith it claims to love.

It has made Christianity — in the minds of millions of Americans — indistinguishable from the Republican Party.

That means every time a Republican politician does something corrupt, cruel, or embarrassing, it is now also a black eye for Christianity. Every time the GOP takes a position that most Americans find repugnant, it’s Christianity’s reputation on the line, too.

More importantly, it means that roughly half of America that leans left now views Christianity as the religious wing of the political opposition. Not as a source of meaning, community, or spiritual truth — but as the enemy team’s jersey.

This is a catastrophic narrowing of Christianity’s potential reach and influence. Not influence in the political sense — but in the actual sense the church is supposed to care about: the influence of ideas about how to live, how to treat others, how to find meaning in a confusing world.

You cannot be a light to all nations when you’ve become the mascot of one political party in one country.

What Are Christian Values Anyway?

Before anyone demands “Christian government,” we need to ask a simple question:

Which Christianity?

There isn’t one agreed-upon version. Catholics disagree with Baptists. Evangelicals disagree with mainline Protestants. Orthodox Christians disagree with both. Even the earliest Christians argued fiercely about doctrine, authority, and practice. If Christianity spoke with one clear political voice, there wouldn’t be thousands of denominations.

And even if there were a single unified Christianity, which principles are we enforcing?

For most of its history, Christianity accepted slavery. The New Testament tells slaves to obey their masters. Churches defended the system for centuries. At the same time, other Christians fought to abolish it. Which “Christian value” goes into law — the one that chained people or the one that freed them?

Christian societies also operated under strict patriarchy. Women were expected to be under the authority of fathers or husbands. They were barred from leadership and public power. Is that the biblical order the state should restore?

The phrase “Christian values” sounds noble. But once you ask for specifics, it becomes selective memory.

If a movement wants the state to enforce Christianity, it owes the public two honest answers:

Which Christianity?

And which parts?

So, What’s Going on?

If you’re a Christian who actually care about the long-term health and integrity of your faith, Christian Nationalism should terrify you. Not because it’s too Christian, but because it’s become an ideology that barely has anything to do with religion in any meaningful sense.

It’s using the cross as a battering ram, selling political ambition as religion, and driving people away from the church by the millions while convincing itself it’s doing God’s work.

Secularism — the strict separation of church and state — wasn’t invented to make sure atheists live a happy life, but to protect Christianity from politicians who are ready to exploit it in any way they can.

Do you really think politicians who start handing out the Ten Commandments in classrooms, pose with Bibles they can’t quote, promise to “restore Christian America” at campaign rallies, or suddenly discover prayer when cameras are rolling do it because they’re deeply spiritual? Or because they know it plays well with a certain voting bloc?

Today, Christianity needs secularism now more than ever.

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In Part I, we looked at invasion habits, alienated allies, trade misfires, and a growing credibility problem. But those were symptoms. In Part II, we move deeper into the structural patterns and long-term consequences that keep this cycle alive.

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The Democracy Promotion Disaster

America loves to talk about spreading democracy. In practice, American democracy promotion has been a disaster that often makes things worse.

The problem is that Washington talks about democracy while supporting some of the most authoritarian regimes on earth. Saudi Arabia is a medieval monarchy that murders journalists and bombs Yemeni civilians, but it’s a close American ally. Egypt is a military dictatorship that imprisons tens of thousands of political opponents, but it gets billions in American aid. Israel receives unconditional American support despite its treatment of Palestinians.

Meanwhile, when countries actually try to democratically elect governments that don’t align with American interests, the United States suddenly loses its enthusiasm for democracy. Venezuela elects a left-wing government? Time for sanctions and coup attempts. Bolivia elects Evo Morales? The United States backs the opposition. Iran tries to nationalize its oil in the 1950s? CIA-backed coup.

The hypocrisy is so glaring that nobody outside the United States takes American democracy promotion seriously anymore. When Washington lectures other countries about human rights and democratic values, the rest of the world rolls its eyes.

This matters because it undermines America’s soft power. The United States used to be able to claim moral authority on the world stage. That authority is gone. America looks like just another self-interested great power, except one that can’t stop talking about values it doesn’t actually uphold.

The Military Budget Black Hole

America spends more on its military than the next ten countries combined. That’s not an exaggeration—it’s literally true. The United States could cut its military budget in half and still outspend any potential rival.

But does all that spending make America safer? Not really.

The bloated military budget crowds out investment in everything else that actually matters for national strength. Infrastructure is crumbling. The education system is falling behind international competitors. Healthcare costs are bankrupting families. Scientific research funding is a fraction of what it should be. All the things that made America a superpower in the first place are being neglected so the Pentagon can buy another aircraft carrier or develop another fighter jet that costs more than some countries’ entire GDP.

Meanwhile, America’s actual security challenges—cyber attacks, climate change, pandemics, economic disruption—can’t be solved by aircraft carriers and fighter jets. COVID-19 killed more Americans than every war since World War II combined, and the military budget did nothing to stop it.

China isn’t trying to match America’s military spending. It’s investing in technology, infrastructure, and economic development. In thirty years, which approach do you think is going to produce a stronger country?

The Losing Propaganda War

Here’s something that should terrify American policymakers: the United States is losing the global propaganda war to China and Russia.

Not because Chinese and Russian propaganda is particularly good—it’s often crude and obvious. America is losing because its actions don’t match its words, and the whole world can see it.

Russia says America is a declining empire that bullies other countries. Then America launches a disastrous war in Iraq and imposes sanctions on half the planet. Russia’s propaganda starts to sound plausible.

China says America is a hypocritical power that preaches democracy while supporting dictators. Then America bears hugs Saudi Arabia and Egypt while bombing Libya. China’s propaganda starts to sound plausible.

The problem isn’t that America needs better messaging. The problem is that America’s actual foreign policy is indefensible. You can’t spin your way out of bombing weddings with drones or supporting coups against democratically elected governments.

Meanwhile, China builds roads and ports around the world through the Belt and Road Initiative. Are some of those projects debt traps? Sure. Are they still more popular than American military bases and lectures about democracy? Absolutely.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Problem

Here’s one of the most frustrating ways America shoots itself in the foot: it treats countries as enemies, then acts surprised when they become enemies.

Take Russia. After the Cold War ended, Russia was weak, poor, and looking for integration with the West. America could have helped Russia become a prosperous democracy tied to Western institutions. Instead, NATO expanded right up to Russia’s borders, American advisors helped oligarchs loot the Russian economy, and Washington treated Russia as a defeated enemy rather than a potential partner.

Putin is a dictator and a thug, no question. But American policy helped create the conditions that brought him to power and made him hostile to the West. Russia didn’t have to become an enemy again. American policy made it one.

Or look at Iran. After the 1979 revolution, relations were hostile, sure. But there were opportunities for détente. The Obama administration negotiated a nuclear deal that was working—international inspectors confirmed Iran was complying. Then Trump tore it up for no reason except that Obama’s name was on it.

Now Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than ever, and the moderates in Iranian politics who wanted better relations with America have been discredited. The hardliners were proven right: you can’t trust America to keep its agreements.

China is heading down the same path. American policy treats China as an enemy that must be contained. So China acts like an enemy that’s being contained, building up its military and reducing dependence on American technology and markets. The confrontation that American policymakers feared is becoming real because American policy is making it real.

Why Does This Keep Happening?

So why does America keep shooting itself in the foot? Why can’t the supposed superpower learn from its mistakes?

Part of it is simple arrogance. American exceptionalism—the belief that America is fundamentally different and better than other countries—makes it hard for American policymakers to imagine that the rules apply to them too. Invading countries has consequences. Breaking international agreements has consequences. Treating allies like servants has consequences. But if you believe America is exceptional, you think you can get away with anything.

Part of it is the influence of special interests. Defense contractors profit from military spending and foreign interventions. Pro-Israel lobbying groups push for unconditional support for Israel. Oil companies shape Middle East policy. These interests don’t care about America’s long-term strategic position. They care about quarterly profits and the next election cycle.

Part of it is political polarization. Foreign policy has become just another partisan football in America’s culture wars. Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on anything, so consistent long-term strategy is impossible. Each administration reverses the previous administration’s policies out of spite, leaving allies confused and enemies opportunistic.

Part of it is the media ecosystem. Cable news and social media reward hot takes and tough talk, not nuanced understanding of complex situations. Politicians who advocate restraint and diplomacy get accused of weakness. Politicians who advocate bombing someone get called “decisive leaders.”

And part of it is just institutional inertia. The foreign policy establishment in Washington has been making the same mistakes for so long that it doesn’t know how to do anything else. The people who designed the Iraq War are still writing op-eds calling for more interventions. The people who expanded NATO are still defending the policy. Nobody ever gets fired for failure in Washington—they just move to a think tank and keep advocating for the same failed policies.

What’s the Cost?

All of this self-sabotage has real consequences. America’s international influence is declining. Its economy is weighed down by debt from pointless wars. Its infrastructure is third-world quality. Its political system is increasingly dysfunctional. Its reputation is in tatters.

Meanwhile, China is rising not because it’s doing everything right, but because America is doing so much wrong. Russia is able to cause trouble far beyond what its actual power should allow, because America has alienated so many potential partners. Regional powers like Turkey and Saudi Arabia increasingly ignore American preferences because they know American threats are empty.

The world isn’t ending. America is still rich, still powerful, still influential. But the trajectory is clear. Every year, America has less leverage, less credibility, less ability to shape events. And every year, American foreign policy makes that trajectory worse.

Can It Be Fixed?

The good news is that none of this is inevitable. America could stop shooting itself in the foot any time it wanted to. It would require acknowledging mistakes, changing course, and prioritizing long-term strategic thinking over short-term political gains. It would require rebuilding relationships with alienated allies, showing restraint instead of always reaching for military solutions, and actually living up to the democratic values America claims to champion.

It would require, in other words, basic common sense and humility.

The bad news is that there’s no sign any of that is happening. The foreign policy establishment keeps doubling down on failed strategies. Politicians keep pandering to the worst impulses of their base. The media keeps treating international relations like a reality TV show.

So America will probably keep shooting itself in the foot. The wounds will keep accumulating. And one day, America will look around and wonder why it’s no longer the superpower it used to be.

The answer will be simple: you did it to yourself. Nobody else was necessary. America’s greatest enemy has always been its own inability to learn from its mistakes.

And that’s the most frustrating part of all. This isn’t a tragedy where a great power falls to a stronger rival. This is a farce where a great power trips over its own feet again and again, blaming everyone else, learning nothing, and wondering why things keep getting worse.

Welcome to American foreign policy in the 21st century. Please watch your step—or don’t. At this point, it probably doesn’t matter.

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America loves to think of itself as the world’s policeman, the beacon of democracy, the indispensable nation. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: the United States has spent the last several decades making foreign policy decisions that hurt its own interests. Time and again, Washington has picked fights it didn’t need to pick, backed the wrong people, and alienated allies who actually wanted to help. The result? A weaker America, a more chaotic world, and a lot of people scratching their heads wondering what the hell happened.

This isn’t about America being evil or incompetent. It’s about hubris, short-term thinking, and a stunning inability to learn from mistakes.

The obvious one first.

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The Invasion Addiction

America’s obsession with invading countries. After September 11th, the United States had the world’s sympathy. Countries that normally couldn’t stand each other were lining up to support America. It was a moment of genuine international solidarity.

Then the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq.

The Iraq War was a masterclass in self-sabotage. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein, as terrible as he was, had nothing to do with 9/11. The whole adventure was based on either lies or catastrophic intelligence failures, depending on how charitable you want to be. The war cost trillions of dollars, killed hundreds of thousands of people, destabilized an entire region, and created the conditions for ISIS to emerge.

What did America get out of it? A damaged reputation, a depleted military, a massive debt burden, and a Middle East that hates the United States more than ever. Mission accomplished, indeed.

Unfortunately, Iraq wasn’t a one-off mistake but part of a pattern. America has been overthrowing governments and launching military interventions for decades, and most of them have backfired spectacularly. Libya? That intervention helped turn the country into a failed state and a haven for terrorists. Syria? The half-hearted involvement created a power vacuum that Russia and Iran filled. Afghanistan? Twenty years and trillions of dollars later, the Taliban is back in charge.

Every single one of these interventions was sold to the American public as necessary for national security. Every single one made America less secure. The pattern is so consistent that you’d think someone in Washington would notice and maybe try a different approach. But no. The military-industrial complex has bills to pay, and politicians need to look tough on the world stage.

Alienating Allies Like It’s a Sport

America doesn’t just shoot itself in the foot with its enemies. It also has a remarkable talent for pissing off its friends.

Take Europe. For decades, European countries were America’s closest allies, bound together by NATO, shared democratic values, and economic ties. Then America started treating Europe like an annoying younger sibling who doesn’t know what’s good for them.

The United States conducted mass surveillance on European citizens and leaders. It pressured European companies with extraterritorial sanctions that had nothing to do with European interests. It pulled out of international agreements like the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris Climate Accord, leaving European partners scrambling. It imposed tariffs on European goods for reasons that made sense to nobody except Donald Trump. It demanded that Europeans cut off trade with China and Russia without offering viable alternatives.

The message Europe received was clear: America doesn’t see you as partners. It sees you as vassals who should do what they’re told.

The result? Europe is slowly but steadily trying to build strategic autonomy from the United States. European leaders talk openly about not being able to rely on America anymore. That’s not Chinese or Russian propaganda—that’s what America’s closest allies are saying.

Or look at Latin America. The United States has spent over a century meddling in Latin American politics, backing coups, supporting dictators, and imposing economic policies that benefited American corporations while impoverishing ordinary people. Then American politicians wonder why so many Latin Americans want to migrate north and why left-wing governments in the region are skeptical of Washington’s motives.

The Monroe Doctrine—the idea that America gets to control what happens in the Western Hemisphere—is still alive and well in Washington. Meanwhile, China shows up with investment deals and infrastructure projects, no regime change required. Guess who’s winning influence in America’s own backyard?

The Trade War Nobody Wanted

International trade policy is another area where America consistently scores own goals. The Trans-Pacific Partnership was supposed to be America’s economic counterweight to China in Asia. It would have established American-led trade rules for the region and strengthened ties with Asian allies.

Then the United States pulled out.

China, which wasn’t even part of the TPP, couldn’t believe its luck. Asian countries that wanted closer economic ties with America were left hanging. So they turned to China instead. Now China is the economic hub of Asia, and America is on the outside looking in.

The Trump administration’s trade war with China was another brilliant piece of self-sabotage. Tariffs on Chinese goods were supposed to bring manufacturing jobs back to America and force China to change its economic practices. What actually happened? American consumers paid higher prices, American farmers lost access to Chinese markets, and American companies dependent on Chinese supply chains got caught in the crossfire.

China didn’t collapse. It didn’t fundamentally change its system. It just found other trading partners and doubled down on technological self-sufficiency. Meanwhile, American companies that spent decades building relationships and supply chains in China watched their investments become political liabilities overnight.

The Biden administration kept most of those tariffs in place, by the way. Turns out that once you start a trade war, it’s politically difficult to admit it was a mistake and back down.

The Credibility Crisis

Here’s a less obvious way America shoots itself in the foot: it keeps making threats it doesn’t follow through on.

Obama declared that the use of chemical weapons in Syria was a “red line.” Then Assad used chemical weapons, and Obama didn’t follow through. America’s credibility took a hit.

Trump threatened “fire and fury” against North Korea. Nothing happened. He made a deal with the Taliban to withdraw from Afghanistan, then Biden executed the withdrawal so chaotically that it looked like America was fleeing in the middle of the night. America’s credibility took another hit.

Over and over, the United States makes grand statements about what it will and won’t tolerate, then fails to back up those statements with action. This teaches the world a simple lesson: American threats are empty. American promises are negotiable.

Why does this matter? Because international politics runs on credibility. When America says it will defend Taiwan or protect the Baltic states or prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons, people need to believe those commitments are real. When America’s track record is full of unmet promises and abandoned allies, those commitments start to sound hollow.

The Afghan withdrawal was particularly damaging. After twenty years of telling the world that America stands by its partners, the United States left tens of thousands of Afghan allies behind to face Taliban retribution. The message to every potential American ally was clear: when things get tough, America might just cut and run.

So, What's Going on?

Taken together, these patterns tell a clear story. Military overreach, economic miscalculations, strained alliances, and eroding credibility are not isolated incidents. They are recurring features of American foreign policy in the 21st century. The damage is not always immediate, but it accumulates.

In Part II, we’ll look at the deeper structural forces behind this cycle — the democracy promotion paradox, the military budget imbalance, the propaganda problem, the self-fulfilling rivalries, and why the system keeps repeating the same mistakes.

Because the real issue isn’t just what America does abroad.

It’s why it keeps doing it.

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