Jason and I grew up in the same Southern Baptist church in Amarillo, TX. We heard the same sermons, sang the same songs, and were shaped by the same faith tradition. He went one direction, and I went another. But I've been thinking a lot lately about how we talk about honoring people of different faiths but rarely extend that same dignity to people who walked away from faith entirely. Jason did the hard, honest work of following his questions all the way to the end, and I think that deserves honor. This is his story, and I'm grateful he trusted me with it.

I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church and attended for much of my adulthood. I left Christianity for good around age 35. (I still write about religion and create content about religious news and data.)

Most people don’t step away from faith because of a single thing. It’s not One Big Question that gets in the way of continuing along a familiar, comfortable religious path.

We sometimes picture the loss of faith like a tire blowing out on a highway, leaving debris scattered everywhere and causing a vehicle to shudder and veer off the road. But I think, in a lot of cases, it’s just a slow leak. The air gradually exits until the tire is too flat to move forward safely. That was the case with me. In writing this essay, I considered trying to pinpoint exactly what triggered that flat tire, as if there were a single cause. But it’s not that simple.

Committed to Truth

I know how the flat progressed, though. I grew up a faithful and active church kid in the late 1970s and through the culture wars of the 1980s. I was always the one who asked questions—Why aren’t there dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden story? Who did Adam and Eve’s children marry? Why did God kill all those creatures and people during the Flood? Why did all the Canaanites have to be murdered?—but distinctly remember the lack of good answers. Fifth-graders really aren’t supposed to be asking those kinds of questions anyway.

At the same time, my Sunday School teachers and my youth pastor and traveling revival preachers kept telling me how important it was to pursue the truth. Absolute truth exists, they said, and Jesus was the eternal representation of it. “I am the way and the truth and the life,” Jesus said.

That’s why I kept asking! I was all-in on my commitment to truth, because I knew the truth would stand up against honest questions. And I was DEVOUT devout. I read the Bible every day. I prayed. I was writing and leading high school Bible studies as a high school student. I wrestled with my faith, sought the Lord with all my heart, served my church and community. I read voraciously in my daily “quiet time,” which is what we called our personal morning devotionals. In high school, that reading looked like books by Charles Stanley and Chuck Swindoll and Max Lucado. Those led to reading outside my Evangelical faith tradition, including Catholic authors like Brennan Manning and Henri Nouwen, and those works led to church historians and much deeper theology. I read all the apologetics books. I read the Bible, front to back, multiple times. I memorized lengthy passages. I was choosing to read Jaroslav Pelikan as a 17 year-old, for crying out loud.

I was desperately seeking answers because I HAD SO MANY QUESTIONS.

The tire of my faith was constantly leaking air. I kept airing it up, but just couldn’t figure out how to patch the hole. From around age 15 to 35, I used energy and effort to keep moving forward. My faith was being propped up by my willingness to work hard, to seek God, to pray for more faith and to engage with theology in search of certainty.

A List of My Problems

For the purposes of this essay, I figured I should make a list of those questions. These were the religious problems, logical inconsistencies and hurdles I spent decades with, unsuccessfully trying to find my way around them. It was never one thing. It was all the things.

(A quick note: I’m not listing these as “gotcha” questions, but as examples of the things I wrestled with for 20 years. These aren’t new to anyone, and I know that apologists have answers. I know those answers. I did the work. I never found the satisfaction I sought.)

A quick list:

● The existence of suffering: Human suffering, yes, but even within the animal kingdom. Every creature created by God and designed for this world is doomed to die, likely in a violent and painful way. Is life that cheap? The suffering of sentient creatures was something I could never reconcile with a God who called Creation good, even after the Fall. What kind of divine being intends or allows a world like this?

● Biblical contradictions or historical inaccuracies: I grew up being taught we should take the Bible seriously and literally, but I kept seeing things in scripture that didn’t match other scriptures. I began studying the Bible seriously to find my way past these errors. Reading it in depth only uncovered more. If the Bible is God’s truth, why was so much of it clearly untrue?

● Church history is ugly: Things like colonialism, racism, slavery, complicity in abuse. These didn’t match the teachings about the life-changing power of the Gospel. Jesus clearly wasn’t transforming humanity for the better, at least not at the institutional level. I began studying this academically and found disappointment around every corner.

● Prophecy and faith healing: I wanted this kind of prayer and miraculous outpouring of God’s presence to be real. I was a Southern Baptist kid who wanted desperately to have a charismatic experience. But no one honestly reckoned with these failures of prophecy or fake healings. The stories of dramatic examples “from Africa” fell apart on investigation. People were always getting healed of back pain or blood diseases, but no one ever regrew an amputated limb.

● Science and faith: From Copernicus to Darwin, these felt genuinely irreconcilable, particularly when it came to evolution or cosmology. Science kept explaining things that we previously got wrong or attributed to divinity. Every time science filled a gap that faith had previously occupied, I kept waiting for that to feel like an attack on God. But it just felt like learning.

● The atonement: Atonement theory is so central to Christianity, and of course I know that there are other Christian ways to wiggle around the preposterousness of atonement theory. But I spent so many of my teenage years just secretly wondering why this was the way it is. Why does an all-powerful God require blood to forgive? If God created these rules of justice, couldn’t God simply change them? Why couldn’t an omnipotent God find a less violent solution? Why would God design a redemption system that structurally excludes most humans who ever lived? How are we supposed to worship a father who says, “I love you unconditionally, but someone has to be hurt before I can forgive you”?

● The canon: Sweet Moses, I have spent SO much of my time reading about the development of the canon. If God’s primary method of communicating truth to all of humanity across all of history is the Bible, a collection of texts, then the reliability of those texts matters enormously. The stakes couldn’t be higher. But even the most surface-level study of the canon shows it was assembled, edited, and canonized by humans with political interests. That was so unsettling to me, especially after I realized historians and Bible scholars have been wrestling with this for centuries.

● One-way prayer: Again, I sought God seriously and legitimately and faithfully for 20 years. I prayed for faith. For understanding. For his presence. I got nothing. When we pray for something and it happens, it becomes a testimony. When we pray for something and it doesn’t happen, we excuse it. It’s all confirmation bias, and it works the same whether you’re praying to the God of Christianity, to Allah, to Ganesh or to Thor.

● Other world religions: I couldn’t shake the question of why Christianity gets default truth status, or why the eternal destination of a human soul was based so much on geography. And the exclusivity of it! The idea that billions of people who never heard the Gospel are condemned through no fault of their own. I kept thinking that, if I had been born in Saudi Arabia, I probably would have been a Muslim. Was the fate of my soul attributable to the luck of geography?

● Hell: The idea of eternal conscious torment disturbed me so much as a kid. I had nightmares. So many traveling evangelists harped on this reality. I had so much fear that my faith wasn’t real and that eternal burning was my future. Later I began to realize how the doctrine felt morally incompatible with a loving God, and how most of what I understood about hell developed outside the Christian tradition—from the ancient Greeks to Dante.

● Anxiety: As an adult, I realized how much of my anxiety was tied to my faith, from my attempts to follow and live within God’s will to the eternal status of my soul. Where was the “peace that passes understanding”?

● Divine hiddenness: If God desires a relationship with everyone, why is God’s existence not more obvious? The “God wants us to choose him freely” argument in response sounds satisfying for about thirty seconds before it starts falling apart. Awareness and coercion are not the same thing.

● Cultural context: The Bible’s endorsement or tolerance of slavery, genocide, and treatment of women as direct commands bothered me, even as a teenager. The argument against this sounds reasonable on the surface (of course, ancient texts reflect ancient cultures!), but you can’t tell me God is the source of objective truth and morality but also he accommodated these terrible ancient moral intuitions. If that worked, then why can’t God accommodate today’s moral intuitions? Speaking of…

● Moral progress outside the church: From environmentalism to women’s rights to racism to LGBTQ+ acceptance, I kept noticing the church ending up on the wrong side of what felt to me very much like moral progress. This was the institution supposedly following the source of objective truth and morality, yet I consistently found it taking sides that felt morally wrong to me—someone whose morality was formed by my Christian upbringing.

That’s enough of those questions. There are many more, and I’m sure spelling them out doesn’t matter. The apologists have answered them all! They are easily reconciled! Except for me, I guess. I spent years with them swirling in my mind, at various intensities.

If the arguments didn’t work, I was taught to find comfort in the fact that “God’s ways are higher” than my ways. My own heart is “deceitful above all things,” you know. I should trust in the Lord and lean not on my own understanding. In isolation, these aren’t bad ideas. But developed systematically they train people to distrust the cognitive tools God supposedly gave us—the tools that help me evaluate whether a belief is true.

Two Assumptions

People who know that I deconstructed have assumed one of two things. First, that something bad must have happened to me. That’s not true at all. All the best parts of my personality were forged in my church upbringing. Church people are my people. I am still invested in learning more about the Bible. I love Christian history and the idea of religion, period. I just am not working so hard to believe it anymore.

Second, people wonder if the intellectual nature of my questions mean I “read myself out of faith.” Maybe that’s accurate, but let me tell you what I was reading: The Bible. Biblical commentaries. Church history. Apologetics. Theology. Should I not have been reading that stuff? I was expressing the values the church taught me: that absolute truth exists and that we should seek it with our whole heart. I did. I pursued it right out of faith.

I didn’t lose faith because I stopped caring about truth. I left because I kept caring about it.

This reference will be lost on younger generations, but in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig writes about the South Indian Monkey Trap. Villagers would catch monkeys by hollowing out a coconut, filling it with rice, and chaining it to a post. The hole was just big enough for a monkey to reach in with an open hand, but too small to pull a closed fist back through once it had grabbed the rice. The monkey makes a fist inside the coconut and won’t let go. It’s not trapped by the coconut. It’s trapped by its own stubbornness.

When my kids began reaching the age where they were asking the same questions, I realized I had held on to faith for too long. I fought. I struggled. I ignored my intuition because accepting the simplest answer—Maybe this whole thing just isn’t true?—was too uncomfortable.

Here’s why: The entire system is designed to make letting go feel like loss. If you release your grip on inerrancy, you’re on a slippery slope. If you question the atonement, you’re questioning the gospel itself. If you sit with doubt too long, that’s a spiritual problem, not an intellectual one. Every question had a cost attached to it. Every loosened finger felt like betrayal.

But at some point I understood the threat only works if you keep your fist closed. The moment you open your hand and let go, the trap has no mechanism. I just had to allow myself to ask whether what I was holding onto might actually not be accurate, or coherent, or good.

So I let go. I walked away.

On the other side, outside the trap, I didn’t encounter all the things I’d been told to expect. Sin or debauchery. Meaninglessness. Nihilism. Despair. What I found instead was that the values my faith had built in me—curiosity, compassion, a hunger for truth—didn’t require that faith to survive. They were already mine. I still care deeply about how I treat people, and tried to teach those values to my kids. I still find the world astonishing. I still think ethics matter enormously. And this surprises some people: I am still very pro-religion. I find the world’s religious traditions, in all their variety and contradictions, to be among the most revealing things humans have ever produced about what it means to be human.

But mostly what I found was personal peace. When you spend 25 years wrestling, it feels really, really good finally to not wrestle.

Jason writes about religion on his Substack, .

He is also the author of 12 Major World Religions: The Beliefs, Rituals, and Traditions of Humanity’s Most Influential Faiths.

You can also find Jason on TikTok & Instagram (@religiverse)

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I have been sitting with a strange feeling all morning, trying to figure out what to call it. It is not quite shock (nothing feels shocking anymore) and it is not quite anger, though there is some of that too. It is something closer to recognition. Like watching a scene you have read about in a book play out in real life, and realizing the book was trying to warn you about something.

This week, the President of the United States attacked the Pope. He went on social media and called Pope Leo XIV weak, terrible, and suggested that Leo only has his job because of Trump. THEN, forty minutes later, he posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ with robes, glowing hands, healing the sick, American flags and fighter jets filling the sky behind him. This is the literal definition of blasphemy, y’all.

What Leo Actually Said

It is worth pausing to understand what Pope Leo did to earn this response, because the answer tells you everything you need to know about what is actually happening here. He looked at a war being waged in the name of God, watched a president threaten to destroy an entire civilization, and said that God does not bless any conflict. He said that invoking the holy name of God to justify discourses of death is wrong. He canceled a planned visit to the United States to go sit with migrants instead.

That is what got him attacked. Witness.

Pope Leo, responding to Trump, said something that I think deserves to be read slowly. He said that Trump’s framing shows “not understanding what the message of the Gospel is.” He said he would not enter into debate. And then he got on a plane to visit migrants in Algeria. That is a man who knows what he believes and has decided to simply keep doing it regardless of who is watching or who is angry.

The Pattern Underneath the Post

Here is what I keep coming back to. When Leo was first elected (the first American pope in history) Trump celebrated. He posted that it was a great honor for the country. He tried to claim him. He wanted Leo to be his pope, an American pope for an American Christianity, a religious leader who would line up behind the flag and the jets and the war and call it blessed. And when Leo would not do that, when he kept saying that the Gospel has something to say about how we treat the poor and the immigrant and the enemy, Trump did what he always does with people who refuse to perform loyalty. He turned on him completely. He called him weak. He suggested he should be grateful.

Then he posted himself as Jesus. (Which he now claims he was depicting himself as a doctor)

What the Healing Stories Are Actually About

I want to say something about that image, because I think it deserves more than a gasp. The image shows Trump in robes, glowing hands outstretched over a man in a hospital bed, surrounded by a nurse, a soldier, and what appears to be an ICE officer. American monuments fill the background. Fighter jets streak across the sky. The whole thing is drenched in the iconography of empire.

And then I think about the actual healing stories in the gospels. Jesus healed a leper—someone the religious establishment had declared unclean and untouchable, someone kept outside the city walls. He healed a Roman centurion’s servant, crossing every social boundary that existed to do it. He healed people on the Sabbath and got in trouble for it because the institution was more concerned with the rules than with the person bleeding in front of them. He healed a woman who had been hemorrhaging for twelve years and had spent everything she had on doctors who couldn’t help her. He touched people that nobody else would touch.

The people in the background of that AI image (the jets, the soldiers, the monuments, the eagles) those are not the people Jesus was healing. Those are the people he was healing people from.

Read that again. ^

Why This Moment Is Different

I want to be careful here, because I am aware that American presidents have always wrapped their agendas in religious language. This is not new. The civil religion of America has always blurred the line between the flag and the cross, and the church has always had to resist the pull of that conflation. What feels different now is the directness of it. The claim being made is that America is God’s instrument, that the war is God’s war, that the president who wages it is, apparently, God’s stand-in.

And the Pope (an imperfect man leading an imperfect institution, like every human and institution that has ever existed) looked at all of that and said no. He read the Gospel and came to conclusions about what it means, and then he acted on those conclusions even when it cost him something.

I think there is a word for that. And that word is faithful.

What Faithful Looks Like When It Costs Something

After leaving pastoral ministry in 2022 what brought me back, more than anything else, was encountering people who held their faith with both hands even when the institution around them was letting them down. People who kept showing up. People who kept saying the true thing even when the easier thing was available.

Leo is doing that. On a world stage, in a moment when the most powerful person in the world is telling him to get in line, he is just continuing to do what he understands the Gospel to ask of him. He said he would not enter into debate and then he got on a plane.

For those of us who have spent years trying to untangle the Gospel from the machinery that has been built around it or trying to figure out what following Jesus actually looks like when you strip away the political performance and the institutional loyalty and the brand management…watching this is something. It is a reminder that faithfulness is not complicated. It is just costly. And the people who practice it tend to be too busy actually doing it to spend much time talking about it.

The Pope said no. And then he went to be with the people Jesus spent his life with. That’s the whole story.

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You don’t need me to list it all out, you already know. You’ve already seen the headlines this week, probably more than once, probably late at night when you told yourself you were just going to check one thing. The economic anxiety is real, the political noise is real, the sense that something foundational is shifting beneath your feet and nobody in charge seems particularly concerned about it is real. And if you’ve spent any time at all in deconstruction or reconstruction, you came into this moment already a little tired or already a little tender. Probably already carrying more than most people around you probably realize.

The world actually is a lot right now. This isn’t anxiety lying to you. Some of what you’re feeling is just honest grief about real things, and it deserves to be treated that way. What I want to gently push back on is the idea that consuming more of it is the same thing as caring about it, or that staying perpetually activated is the same thing as staying faithfully engaged. It’s not!

And the tradition we’re recovering together has something to say about that.

The ancient church didn’t have the twenty-four-hour news cycle, obviously, but they knew what it felt like to live in an empire that was chaotic and cruel and completely indifferent to their wellbeing. They developed practices to stay rooted enough to live in it with integrity. These are spiritual disciplines that have survived every empire that tried to outlast them, and I think they’re worth trying again.

1. Let Silence Be the First Word

Most of us have never actually experienced intentional silence because we’ve never let it get quiet enough to find out what’s in there. The moment there’s a gap, we fill it. Whether it’s the commute, the line at the grocery store, or the thirty seconds before sleep—we reach for the phone because the silence feels like wasted space, and also because the silence is where all the things we’ve been avoiding are waiting patiently for us.

Henri Nouwen wrote in The Way of the Heart that solitude is the furnace of transformation, the place where we stop performing even for ourselves and simply exist before God. That sounds beautiful and it is, but it’s worth saying that it doesn’t start beautiful. It starts uncomfortable. It starts confrontational. The first few times you actually sit in quiet without giving yourself an exit ramp, what comes up is usually the thing you’ve been outrunning. Maybe it is the fear you dressed up as productivity. Or the grief you buried under information. But if you stay in it, something eventually settles because you stopped sprinting away from yourself long enough to remember who you are underneath them. Even fifteen minutes of silence in your day changes the texture of the whole thing.

2. Pray Words That Have Already Survived

One of the quieter gifts of liturgical tradition is the way fixed prayers function when you have nothing left to generate on your own. When you’re too wrung out to come up with original spiritual thoughts, you can borrow someone else’s. The Psalms especially. Psalm 46 has been close to me lately.

“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea.”

That was written by someone who also believed the world was coming apart at the seams. It has been prayed through plagues and wars and famines and the rise and fall of empires. It arrived on the other side of all of it still intact.

There is something deeply stabilizing about praying words that belong to the whole communion of saints across all of history. You are not the first person to feel like the ground is moving. You are not the first person to be frightened by what the powerful are doing. You are not the first person to wonder whether hope is still a reasonable thing to hold onto. Millions of people before you have stood exactly where you’re standing, in the middle of their own version of this, and they prayed these same words.

3. Find One Person and Tell Them the Truth

Not to vent to, not to doomscroll alongside, just one person you can tell the actual truth to. Words like “I’m scared”, or “I don’t know how to hold all of this.” The early church was a community of people who had decided to face hard and frightening things together rather than alone, and that shared witness was itself a form of resistance against despair. You don’t need a program for this, or a formal small group, or the right setting. You need one person who will sit with you in it without trying to fix it or explain it away or hand you a verse and call it done.

And for some of us, one trusted friend isn’t enough. If the anxiety is persistent, if the dread is starting to color everything, if you’re finding it hard to function in your normal life, please consider talking to a therapist or counselor. There is nothing unspiritual about that. In fact I’d argue the opposite. Seeking professional help when you need it is one of the most grounded and self-aware things a person can do. It’s taking your own inner life seriously enough to give it real attention. The church has sometimes made people feel like faith should be sufficient for everything, and that getting outside help is a failure of trust. That is bad theology and it has hurt a lot of people. Your nervous system is not a spiritual deficiency. A good therapist is a gift, and you’re allowed to use one.

One More Thing

None of this will stop the news from being what it is. The world is going to keep being complicated and loud and sometimes frightening, and no practice makes that untrue. But there is a difference between a person who is slowly shaped by the chaos and a person who is grounded enough to stand inside it without losing themselves. That’s what all of this is reaching toward. Just enough rootedness to stay human, to stay present, and to stay open to what God might still be doing in the middle of all of it.

If this found you at the right moment, pass it along to someone who might need it. And if you want to keep thinking through this kind of thing together, I’d love for you to support my work by becoming a paid subscriber. This community is one of the places I’m trying to practice what I just wrote.

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I’ve told this story before, but it matters here so I’m going to tell it again. In the summer of 2022, I stepped away from pastoral ministry completely. I had spent a decade leading a non-denominational evangelical church and I was done. Not just tired. Done. Done. The kind of done where you’re not sure you’ll ever go back.

I wasn’t angry exactly, I was something worse. I had become cynical. I had seen too much. Too much politics disguised as theology. Too many power plays wrapped in prayer language. Too many leaders who cared more about the brand than the people. And somewhere in the middle of all that I had lost the thing that had called me into ministry in the first place. I couldn’t feel it anymore. The fire or the pull or whatever you want to call it. It was just gone, and I didn’t know if it was coming back.

We were living in Texas at the time and my wife, and I spent two years trying to find a church that felt like home. We visited dozens of places, and nothing fit. Everything felt like a version of what we’d left or a version of something we couldn’t quite connect with. Two years is a long time to wander without a spiritual home. Long enough that you start to wonder if maybe you’re the problem.

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The Sentence That Changed Everything

In June of 2024 I went to visit a friend in Kansas City. He was on staff at a church called Resurrection, A United Methodist Church. We were just hanging out for the weekend. Catching up. Nothing spiritual on the agenda. And at some point, in the conversation, he said something to me that I wasn’t expecting and wasn’t prepared for. He told me it would be a shame if I wasn’t in ministry.

That’s it. That was the whole thing. One sentence over a casual weekend visit. No dramatic intervention. No prophetic word delivered with a booming voice and a hand on my forehead. Just a friend who looked at me and said I still see it in you, even if you don’t.

I don’t know how to explain what happened inside me when he said that. Something that had been locked up for two years cracked open. Not all at once. Not like a light switch. More like a door that had been sealed shut for so long I forgot it was there and someone just barely pushed it open enough to let a little light through. That conversation set in motion a chain of events that brought my family to Kansas City and brought me back into ministry in a way I never could have predicted or planned.

Hope showed up that weekend. As a person. As a friend who believed in me when I had stopped believing in myself.

The Cynicism Trap

I understand cynicism. I lived in it for two years. And I can tell you that cynicism is one of the most seductive postures a person can adopt because it feels like wisdom. It feels like you’ve finally seen through the nonsense and arrived at the truth. The church is broken. People are disappointing. Institutions are corrupt. Nothing ever really changes. And once you’ve settled into that mindset it becomes very difficult to leave because leaving feels naive. Hope feels foolish when you’ve been burned enough times.

And our culture runs on cynicism right now. Turn on the news and everything is a crisis. Open social media and everyone is outraged or exhausted or both. The general consensus seems to be that things are getting worse, people can’t be trusted, and optimism is for people who haven’t been paying attention. And honestly there are days when the evidence for that position feels overwhelming.

The church is not immune. Deconstruction spaces in particular can become breeding grounds for cynicism if we’re not careful. And I say that as someone who writes in that space every single week. There is a version of deconstruction that tears everything down and never builds anything back up. That identifies every problem with the old system and offers nothing in its place. That becomes so skilled at critique that it forgets how to hope. I’ve been there, and it’s a dead end.

Resurrection Is Not a Concept

Here’s what I’ve learned about hope. It almost never shows up the way you expect it to. It doesn’t arrive as a theological argument that finally convinces you everything is going to be okay. Or through a book or a podcast or a perfectly worded Instagram post. Hope, in my experience, almost always shows up as a person. Someone who sees you. Someone who sits with you in the wreckage and doesn’t try to fix it or explain it or fast-forward through it but who simply says I’m still here and I still believe something good is coming.

That’s what Easter is about, friends. And I don’t mean Easter as a holiday with lilies and new outfits and a sunrise service. I mean the actual resurrection. The thing itself. The audacious, ridiculous, world-altering claim that death does not get the last word. That the worst thing is never the last thing. That a man walked out of a tomb and in doing so rewrote the entire story of what is possible.

I spent six weeks in this series asking you to sit in hard things. Mortality. Hunger. Confession. Lament. Silence. Grief. I asked you not to rush through them. I asked you to let Lent be Lent, and I hope you did. Because here’s what I believe with everything in me.

The hope of Easter only means something if you’ve actually walked through the valley to get there.

Resurrection that skips death is denial. But resurrection that comes after you’ve sat in the tomb for three days, or two years, or however long your particular wilderness lasts? That kind of resurrection will wreck you in the best possible way.

The Door Is Open

If you’re reading this and you’re in the cynical season right now, I want you to hear something. You are not too far gone. You are not too burned. You are not too deconstructed or too disillusioned or too done for hope to find you. I know because hope found me in a living room in Kansas City when I had absolutely zero expectation that it would. It just showed up wearing the face of a friend and said one sentence that blew the door open.

That’s how God works. Through people who love you enough to tell you the truth about who you are when you’ve forgotten. Through a meal and a conversation and a weekend visit that you didn’t know was going to change your life. Through the stubborn, relentless, unshakeable insistence that dead things don’t have to stay dead.

This whole Lenten series has been about the season we’d rather skip, and I get it. Nobody wants to sit in ashes and hunger and grief and silence. We want the Easter part. We want the hope and the joy and the lilies and the hallelujah. But the road to Easter goes through all of it. Every single bit of it. And if you’ve walked that road with me these past seven weeks, I want you to know that I’m grateful. And I want you to know that the tomb is empty. And I want you to know that hope is not naive. It’s the bravest thing you’ll ever choose to believe.

Happy Easter, yall.

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A few months ago a guy I grew up with sent me a message here on Substack. We played baseball together as kids. He said he used to think the world of me and my brother. He said he’d been praying about it and felt like he couldn’t stay silent. And then he told me he was genuinely worried about my salvation.

He wasn’t mean about it. That’s the part that made it so hard. He wasn’t trolling or picking a fight. He was a guy from my hometown who remembered me as a kid and believed with every fiber of his being that I was in spiritual danger. He told me my writing was misleading and manipulative. He told me I was bending scripture to fit the world. He quoted 1 Timothy and begged me to reconsider the path I was on. And then he signed off by saying he prayed for me to have the peace and love of Jesus.

I sat with that message for a long time, and I wasn’t angry. I was just sad. Because that message represents something that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough in deconstruction spaces. It represents grief. The slow, quiet kind of grief that settles in when you realize that people you love and respect are never going to be able to follow you to where you’ve landed. And that some of them will interpret the most honest season of your faith as evidence that you’ve lost it entirely.

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The Death Nobody Sends Flowers For

When someone you love dies, the world makes space for your grief, at least for a little while. People bring food, they send cards, and your employer usually gives you a few days off. There kind of a cultural script for mourning the loss of a person and even though that script is inadequate in about a hundred ways, at least it exists.

But when you leave a faith tradition, there is no script. No casseroles show up at your door. Nobody sends a sympathy card that says “sorry you lost your entire theological framework and half your friendships in the process.” There is no bereavement leave for the death of your old belief system. And yet the grief is still very real. It is heavy and disorienting and it can last for years.

I trust me, I know, because I’ve lived it. Leaving evangelicalism cost me relationships I thought were permanent. It changed the way certain family members look at me. It has rearranged my social world in ways I’m still sorting out. And the hardest part wasn’t the people who got angry, it was the people who got sad. The people who looked at me with genuine concern and said they were praying for me (not to be passive aggressive) but because they sincerely believed I was walking away from God. That kind of love, the kind that comes wrapped in the theological certainty that you’re headed straight for destruction, is one of the most painful things I’ve ever experienced. Because you can’t argue with it and you can’t fix it. You can only grieve it.

The Bounce-Back Problem

And our culture has a very specific expectation about grief. You’re allowed to be sad for a little while. A few weeks, maybe a month. And then you should be getting back to normal. Moving on. Finding your new church. Rebuilding your community. Getting over it. The timeline varies depending on who you ask but the underlying message is always the same. Grief is just a phase. It has an expiration date. And if you’re still in it past that date then something is wrong with you.

The church is often even worse about this than the broader culture. There is an unspoken expectation in many Christian communities that grief should resolve quickly into worship. Or that sadness should transform into praise. That the appropriate Christian response to loss is to fast-forward to the part where God works it all together for good and to skip the long, messy, formless middle where nothing makes sense and the only honest prayer is “how long, O Lord?”

Nicholas Wolterstorff lost his twenty-five-year-old son in a mountain climbing accident. In his book Lament for a Son, he wrote something that stopped me cold. He said “every lament is a love song.” I think about that constantly now, because it reframes everything. Grief is not the absence of faith, or some kind of spiritual failure…

Grief is what love looks like when it has lost the thing it loves.

And we have to stop rushing people through that process.

Letting Grief Be Grief

Jesus never rushed anyone through their pain. When Mary and Martha were grieving Lazarus, he didn’t show up and immediately fix it. He wept with them first. He entered the grief before he entered the miracle, and I think the order matters more than we realize. Because it tells us something about the heart of God that all of our bounce-back theology misses entirely. God is not in a hurry to get past your pain. God is not standing at the end of your grief with a stopwatch, tapping his foot, wondering when you’re going to pull it together. God is sitting in it with you. For as long as it takes.

That message from my old baseball teammate still sits in my inbox. I haven’t deleted it. I probably won’t. It represents something I lost that I’m still learning to grieve. A version of belonging that doesn’t exist for me anymore. A world where everyone I grew up with was on the same page and the answers were simple and the people who loved you never had to worry about your salvation because you all believed the same things.

That world is gone for me, and I’m okay. But okay and grieving are not mutually exclusive. You can be further along than you’ve ever been in your faith and still feel the ache of what it cost to get there. Both things can be true at the same time. Lent makes space for that. The whole season is an invitation to stop fast-forwarding through the hard parts and just let them be hard for a while.

Try This

This week, give yourself permission to grieve something you haven’t fully grieved yet. Maybe it’s a relationship that didn’t survive your deconstruction. Maybe it’s a community you had to leave. Maybe it’s a version of God you used to believe in that you can’t believe in anymore. Whatever it is, don’t rush past it. Don’t slap a Bible verse on it. Don’t skip to the resurrection. (It’s not even Holy Week yet.) Just sit in the loss and let it be what it is. A love song for something that mattered to you. That’s one of the most faithful things you can do this Lent.

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Everybody has an opinion about everything now. And not just an opinion but an urgent, fully formed, publicly stated opinion that needs to be shared within the first fifteen minutes of any event happening anywhere in the world. A politician says something controversial and within seconds your feed is a wall of hot takes. A celebrity makes a statement and suddenly everyone you know is a cultural commentator. A tragedy happens and before the facts are even clear there are already a thousand threads telling you exactly what it means and who is to blame and what you should think about it.

We are drowning in words. And I don’t think most of us realize how much it’s costing us.

I read somewhere recently that the average American consumes somewhere around thirty-four gigabytes of information per day. I don’t even know what that means exactly but it sounds like way too much. We wake up and reach for the phone before our feet hit the floor. We fill the car with podcasts. We scroll through lunch. We fall asleep to Netflix. Every available moment of silence gets stuffed with content and noise and opinion and commentary until there is literally no space left in the day where we are just quiet. Just still. Just existing without someone else’s words in our heads.

And the church has bought into this completely. Pastors feel the pressure to make public statements about every cultural moment within hours of it happening. If you don’t post your take fast enough, people assume you either don’t care or you’re on the wrong side. Social media has turned ministry into a never-ending press conference where silence is interpreted as complicity and thoughtfulness is mistaken for cowardice. The hot take has replaced the sermon as the primary unit of pastoral communication and I think we’ve lost something enormous in the exchange.

My Commute

This Lent I made a commitment that sounded simple and turned out to be one of the hardest things I’ve done in a while. I decided to drive to and from work in complete silence. No podcasts. No music. No phone calls. No audiobooks. Just me and the road and thirty minutes of nothing each way.

The first few days were brutal. I’m not exaggerating. The silence felt physically uncomfortable, like an itch I couldn’t scratch. My hand kept reaching for the phone. My brain kept racing to fill the gap with something, anything, because apparently I have trained myself over the years to be incapable of sitting in a quiet car without external stimulation. That realization alone was worth the experiment.

But somewhere around the end of the first week something started to shift. The noise in my head began to quiet down. Not all at once and not completely, but enough that I started to notice things I hadn’t noticed before. Ideas I didn’t know I was carrying. Convictions I’d been too busy to feel. Creative thoughts that had been waiting patiently for a gap in the noise to slip through. Some mornings the Holy Spirit showed up in that silence in ways that genuinely surprised me. Not in a dramatic, clouds-parting kind of way. More like a quiet nudge. A thought I didn’t generate on my own. A gentle correction I probably would have missed if I’d had a podcast filling the space instead.

Five hours a week. That’s what an hour of silence a day during the work week adds up to. And I can tell you honestly that those five hours have been more formative than most of the content I’ve consumed in the last year, because it turns out you can’t hear much of anything when you never stop talking.

The Ministry of Shutting Up

James 1:19 might be the most ignored verse in the entire New Testament. “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry.” Quick to listen. Slow to speak. Read that again and then open any social media platform and notice how completely we’ve inverted that instruction.

We are quick to speak, slow to listen, and angry about everything all the time.

We have built an entire culture around the exact opposite of what James is telling us to do and then we wonder why everything feels so exhausting and fruitless.

Henri Nouwen understood this. He wrote that “silence is the home of the word” and that “without silence, the word loses its power.” I’ve been sitting with that idea during these quiet commutes and I think he’s right in a way that goes deeper than just personal devotion. Our words have lost their power because we’ve multiplied them beyond all reason. We speak so much and so fast and so constantly that nothing we say carries weight anymore. Everything is content. Everything is a take. Everything is noise piled on top of noise until the signal is completely buried.

Nouwen spent significant time living in monastic communities and what he discovered there wasn’t that monks had figured out how to escape the world. It was that they had figured out how to be present in it. Silence wasn’t just the absence of something, it was the presence of something. It was the space where God’s voice could actually land because someone had finally stopped talking long enough to hear it.

What Silence Isn’t

I want to be careful here because I don’t want to over-spiritualize this. Not every silent commute ends with a divine revelation. Some mornings I just drove to work and thought about what I was going to have for lunch. And that’s fine. Silence doesn’t have to be productive. It doesn’t have to result in a spiritual breakthrough or a creative epiphany or a moment of profound clarity. Sometimes silence is just silence. And in a world that demands constant output and constant engagement and constant noise, just being quiet for thirty minutes is a radical act all by itself.

But I will say this. The days when something does break through are the days that remind me why this matters. There is a version of my life where I fill every available second with sound and stimulation and never once create enough space for God to get a word in. I’ve lived that version. Most of us have. And it’s exhausting in a way that has nothing to do with physical tiredness and everything to do with spiritual depletion.

You can be busy for God and completely deaf to God at the same time.

I know because I’ve done it.

Try This

This week, find your silence. You don’t have to join a monastery or go on a retreat or sit cross-legged on a cushion for an hour. Just pick one space in your day that you normally fill with noise and leave it empty. The commute. The morning coffee. The walk to pick up the kids. Whatever it is, let it be quiet. Don’t fill it. Don’t optimize it. Just sit in it and see what happens when you give your soul a few minutes without words.

You might hear nothing. You might hear everything. Either way, you’ll be practicing something the church has known for two thousand years that our culture has almost entirely forgotten.

Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is close your mouth and open your ears.

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“Everything happens for a reason.” I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard that sentence in a church. After a miscarriage. After a diagnosis. After a death that made no sense and never will. It rolls off the tongue so easily, this little theological bumper sticker, and the person saying it almost always means well. They’re trying to help. They’re trying to offer comfort. But what they’re actually doing is placing a period at the end of someone’s pain before that person has even had a chance to finish their sentence.

We have a positivity problem in the American church. And I don’t mean that we’re too joyful or too hopeful. Joy and hope are beautiful things. I mean that we have built an entire religious culture around the idea that sadness is a problem to be solved, that grief is a season to be rushed through, and that if you sit in your pain for too long something must be wrong with your faith. We have turned optimism into orthodoxy. And it is destroying people.

The Day Everything Changed

My twin brother and his wife were expecting a baby girl. Her name was Ellington. I remember the excitement in his voice when he told me. I remember the plans being made for her arrival. And then Ellington was stillborn.

What happened next is the part that still makes me angry. Not at God (although that definitely happened), but at the theology that showed up uninvited to my brother’s grief. People who loved him and meant well began saying the things that Christians say when they don’t know what else to do. God has a plan. She’s in a better place. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Everything happens for a reason. Every single one of those sentences landed on my brother like a brick. Because what he heard underneath all of that well-meaning theology was that God wanted his daughter to die. That this was the plan all along. That the God who supposedly loved him had designed this nightmare on purpose.

I couldn’t let that stand. I sat with my brother and I told him something that I believed with everything in me. God didn’t want this. God didn’t plan this. God is heartbroken too. And I watched something shift in his eyes when he heard that. Not because I had all the answers. I didn’t. But because for the first time someone had given him permission to grieve without having to pretend it was all part of some divine blueprint.

The Problem with Blueprint Theology

Jessica Kelley knows this territory better than most. When her four-year-old son Henry was diagnosed with brain cancer, the Christian cliches came pouring in. God’s will. Divine design. The Lord’s perfect plan. In her book Lord Willing?, Kelley dismantles what she calls “blueprint theology,” the widespread belief that God has a detailed plan for everything that happens, including the most horrific suffering imaginable. She argues that this framework doesn’t just fail to comfort people, it actively harms them. Because if God planned your child’s death then either God is cruel or your grief is an act of rebellion against his sovereignty. Neither of those options leaves room for an honest relationship with the divine.

And I want to pause here because it’s Women’s History Month and I think Kelley’s work deserves far more attention than it gets. She writes with the authority of someone who has walked through the worst thing a parent can experience and come out the other side with a faith that is more honest and more beautiful than the one she started with. If you haven’t read Lord Willing?, put it on your list. It might change the way you think about God and suffering forever.

Lament Is Not a Lack of Faith

Here’s what toxic positivity in the church gets wrong. It assumes that grief and faith are opposites. That if you’re lamenting then you must not be trusting. That sadness is evidence of spiritual failure. But the scriptures tell a completely different story. The Psalms are full of lament. Nearly a third of them are psalms of complaint or sorrow or raw, unfiltered anguish directed straight at God. David didn’t sugarcoat his pain. He didn’t slap a worship chorus on top of his grief and pretend everything was fine. He screamed at God. He asked why. He said things that would get him escorted out of most contemporary worship services.

And God never once told him to stop.

Jesus himself wept at the tomb of Lazarus. Think about that for a second. He knew he was about to raise Lazarus from the dead. He knew the resurrection was coming. And he still wept. Because the pain was real and the loss was real and the appropriate response to real suffering is tears.

Lent gives us permission to sit in that space. The whole season is an invitation to stop pretending, stop performing, stop rushing to the happy ending. We spend so much of the year sprinting toward Easter that we forget the road there goes straight through the valley. And the valley is part of the path.

What If We Stopped Fixing and Started Sitting

If you’ve ever been in pain and had someone try to fix it with a Bible verse or a platitude, you know how isolating that feels. It doesn’t feel like love. It feels like being told to shut up in religious language. And if you’ve ever been the person offering those platitudes (I have, more times than I want to admit), then Lent is an invitation to repent of that impulse and learn a different way.

The most Christlike thing you can do for someone who is suffering is not to explain their pain. It’s to sit in it with them. No answers. No silver linings. No “at least” statements. Just presence. Just the willingness to say I don’t know why this happened and I’m not going to pretend I do but I am here and I am not leaving.

That’s what I tried to do for my brother. I didn’t have a theology of suffering neatly packaged and ready to deliver. I just had the conviction that God was not the author of his pain and that his grief was not a problem to be solved. Ellington mattered. Her absence mattered. And no amount of positive thinking or theological spin was going to make that less true.

Try This

This week, resist the urge to fix someone’s pain. If someone in your life is grieving or struggling or just having a hard time, practice the ministry of presence instead of the ministry of answers. Sit with them. Listen. Let the silence be uncomfortable. And if you’re the one in pain right now, give yourself permission to lament. You are not failing at faith. You are practicing the most ancient and biblical form of it. The Psalms have been waiting for you.

In memory of Ellington McLaine Stringer - January 21, 2018

If this essay meant something to you today, would you consider sharing it with someone who might need to hear it? So much of the damage done by toxic positivity happens because people don't know there's another way to think about God and suffering. Sharing this might be the thing that gives someone permission to grieve honestly for the first time. And if you're not yet subscribed, I'd love to have you along for the rest of this Lenten journey. We've got a few more weeks to go.

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I grew up singing Rich Mullins at the top of my lungs in a church with burnt orange carpet. “Our God is an awesome God, He reigns from heaven above, with wisdom, power, and love, our God is an awesome God.” It was one of those songs that made you feel like the ceiling might lift off the building. Like something holy was actually happening. I still love that song. But somewhere between that burnt orange carpet and adulthood, I started noticing that the God many evangelicals seemed to worship wasn’t quite the one Rich Mullins was singing about. This one was less interested in wisdom and love and more interested in geopolitical conflict, military dominance, and a very specific countdown clock to the apocalypse.

When the End Times Became a Foreign Policy

Dispensationalism didn’t start as a political movement. It started as a theological system developed in the 1830s by an Anglo-Irish preacher named John Nelson Darby, who divided all of human history into distinct “dispensations” or eras in which God relates to humanity differently. Darby’s innovation, which was genuinely novel in Christian history, was the idea of the Rapture, a secret catching away of believers before a seven-year period of global tribulation, culminating in the literal return of Christ to reign on earth for a thousand years. This framework made its way to American shores, got picked up by the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909, became embedded in fundamentalist and evangelical institutions throughout the 20th century, and then absolutely exploded in popular culture when Hal Lindsey published “The Late Great Planet Earth” in 1970. By the time the Left Behind series sold 65 million copies starting in the 1990s, dispensationalism became a worldview, a political posture, and for many, a reason to stop caring about the earth altogether.

The theological mechanics matter here because they have real consequences. If you believe the world is in an irreversible prophetic tailspin toward Armageddon, and that your job is simply to hold on until the rapture whisks you away, then working for justice, tending to creation, or pursuing peace starts to feel pointless. Worse, it can start to feel like you’re working against God’s plan. Some dispensationalist thinkers have explicitly argued that Christians should support military build-up in the Middle East because conflict there is a sign of the end times being fulfilled. The logic is circular and terrifying. War then becomes a prophecy to be accelerated.

The Bomb in the Sanctuary

This is where evangelical infatuation with militarism starts to make a certain kind of terrible sense. When your theology tells you that America is uniquely favored by God, that Israel must be protected at all costs because of its role in end-times prophecy, and that strength is the primary language God speaks in the world, you end up with a Christianity that looks less like the Sermon on the Mount and more like a defense contractor’s wish list. You get pastors blessing fighter jets. You get sanctuaries wrapped in flags. You get a theology where “Our God is an awesome God” quietly becomes “Our God is an awesome bomb.”

N.T. Wright (one of leading New Testament scholars) has spent decades arguing that the entire dispensationalist framework is a misreading of scripture, particularly the book of Revelation, which was written as first-century apocalyptic literature to encourage persecuted Christians under Roman imperial rule. Not as a coded roadmap for 21st-century geopolitics. The beasts and empires in Revelation are references to Rome and its collaborators, written in the symbolic language that Jewish apocalyptic literature had used for centuries. Reading it as a prediction of Russian military movements or a European Union antichrist is like reading a political cartoon and thinking the bear with a sash labeled “Russia” is a zoological report. It’s ridiculous actually.

The damage this does to actual Christian ethics is enormous. Jesus said blessed are the peacemakers. He said love your enemies. He said put away the sword. These ideas were the central ethic of the kingdom he was announcing. When a theology builds an escape hatch out of history, it quietly gives believers permission to stop being responsible for it.

What We Lose When We Can’t Wait to Leave

There’s a grief underneath all of this that I think gets overlooked. Many of the people who absorbed dispensationalism did so not because they wanted to baptize violence, but because the theology offered them something genuinely appealing. Certainty. A map. The sense that history is going somewhere and that God is in control of it even when everything feels like it’s coming apart. I have enormous compassion for that longing. The world is terrifying. Making sense of it with a schema that says “this chaos is actually the plan” can feel like relief.

But it produces a faith that is fundamentally passive in the face of suffering and structurally incapable of lamenting what should be lamented. If the bombs are supposed to fall, you don’t pray for the people underneath them. You check your prophecy chart.

The Christianity I’ve come to inhabit believes that God is redeeming this world, not evacuating it. That the resurrection of Jesus was not a divine escape trick but a declaration that matter matters, that bodies matter, that history matters, and that the arc of creation is bending toward renewal. Jesus did not come to help us escape the world. He came to redeem it.

Singing a Different Song

Rich Mullins died in 1997 in a car accident in Illinois. By most accounts he was a man of genuine holiness, deep poverty of spirit, and real love for people on the margins. His God actually did reign with wisdom, power, and love.

The invitation in all of this isn’t to stop believing in a God who is awesome. It’s to ask honestly what we mean by awesome. Is it a God whose greatness is measured in fire and force and the righteous destruction of enemies? Or is it the God revealed in a baby in a feeding trough, in a teacher washing feet, in a man hanging on a cross praying for the people killing him? Because only one of those gods has anything to do with the gospel. And only one of them is worth singing about.

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Nobody apologizes anymore. I don’t mean the Instagram story apology or the Notes app statement crafted by a publicist or the tearful press conference where someone reads from a script about how they’re going to “do the work” and then disappears for six weeks before launching a comeback tour. I mean actual apology. The kind where a person looks another person in the eye and says I was wrong and I’m sorry and I have no excuse. That kind of apology has become so rare in American public life that when it actually happens it makes the news. We literally do not know what to do when someone tells the truth about themselves without being forced into it.

I mean you know this. Watch what happens every time a politician or public figure gets caught in a lie or a scandal or a moral failure. The playbook is so predictable at this point. First comes the denial. Then comes the deflection. Then comes the counterattack where somehow the person who did the wrong thing becomes the victim and the people who pointed it out become the villains. Then come the surrogates flooding every cable news show and social media platform to rewrite the story in real time. And if enough time passes and enough noise gets generated the whole thing just fades into the background until the next cycle starts. At no point in this process does anyone ever simply say I was wrong.

We’ve built an entire culture around the avoidance of confession, and it’s killing us.

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The Email I Didn’t Want to Send

A few years into ministry I was living with a secret that was eating me alive. I had been addicted to pornography for years. Through college, and through the early days of pastoral ministry. It was the thing I carried with me into every sermon and every prayer and every leadership meeting. I knew it was there. God knew it was there. And I had become an expert at making sure nobody else ever found out.

I was good at hiding it. That’s what shame does. It teaches you to perform wholeness while you’re falling apart on the inside. And the evangelical world I grew up in made that performance easy because the unspoken rule was that leaders don’t struggle with things like this. Or if they do, they certainly don’t talk about it. You white-knuckle your way through it privately and you pray harder and you install accountability software and you never ever let anyone see the real mess because the moment you do your ministry is over.

One night I couldn’t carry it anymore. I was laying in bed and on my phone I typed out an email to our church leadership team. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote. I just remember that my hands were shaking and I felt like I was going to throw up and every instinct in my body was screaming at me to delete the draft and go to bed and keep pretending. I hit send instead.

The next day I sat in a room with those leaders and told them everything. And what happened next is the part I still can’t talk about without getting emotional. They didn’t shame me. They didn’t fire me. They didn’t quote scripture at me or give me a program to follow or tell me to get it together. They loved me. They prayed for me. They asked me what I needed. They helped me get treatment and enrolled into a recovery program. They walked with me into a season of healing that I never would have found if I had kept hiding.

That meeting is one of the most important things that has ever happened to me. And it only happened because I chose confession.

Why We Can’t Say It

There’s a reason vulnerability feels so dangerous right now. We’ve watched too many people get destroyed for admitting weakness. The internet has no grace. Social media has no statute of limitations. One honest moment can be screenshotted and decontextualized and weaponized and turned into the only thing anyone ever knows about you. So we learn to curate. We learn to manage. We learn to project strength and certainty and confidence at all times because the cost of honesty feels unsurvivable.

And the church has contributed to this. How many pastors have been removed not because they confessed but because they got caught? How many church cultures have made it clear through a thousand unspoken signals that vulnerability is acceptable in the congregation but never in the leadership? We say we believe in grace and then we build institutions that punish honesty. We preach a gospel of forgiveness on Sunday and run our organizations like the confession will be used against you in court on Monday.

Now I want to be careful here because I am not talking about abuse. I am not talking about pastors who exploit their power or harm the people in their care or cross lines that should never be crossed. When that happens there should be swift and serious consequences and the protection of victims should always come first. That’s not confession territory. That’s accountability territory and the church has been far too slow to recognize the difference.

What I am talking about is the ordinary brokenness that every human being carries. The struggles and failures and secret battles that don’t involve harming others but do involve the slow corrosion of carrying shame alone in the dark because you’ve been told that leaders aren’t allowed to be broken.

James 5:16 says “confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.” Not so that you may be managed. Not so that you may be evaluated and placed on a performance improvement plan. So that you may be healed. There is something that happens in the human soul when you stop hiding and start telling the truth that cannot happen any other way. I know this because I’ve lived it.

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The Bravest Thing You’ll Ever Do

Henri Nouwen wrote that “the great illusion of leadership is to think that others can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.” I think about that line constantly because it obliterates the performance model of faith that so many of us were raised in. The leaders worth following are not the ones who have it all together. They’re the ones who have been honest about the fact that they don’t.

Confession is not weakness. It’s not career suicide. It’s not the end of your ministry or your marriage or your reputation. It might feel like all of those things in the moment you hit send or open your mouth or sit down in that room. I know because I’ve been in that chair. But confession is actually the doorway to the only kind of freedom that matters. The freedom of being fully known and fully loved at the same time.

Lent invites us into confession not as punishment but as liberation. The season asks us to tell the truth about ourselves. Not the curated truth. Not the version we post online. The real truth. The stuff we carry in the dark. And it asks us to trust that the God who already knows everything about us is not waiting to condemn us but to heal us.

Try This

This week, tell someone the truth about something you’ve been carrying alone. It doesn’t have to be your deepest darkest secret. Start small if you need to. But find one safe person and say the thing you’ve been afraid to say. And I want to be really clear about that word safe. Not every person in your life has earned the right to hear your confession. Not every small group leader or pastor or friend is equipped to hold that kind of weight with the grace it requires. Use wisdom here. Use discernment. Confession is sacred and it deserves to be treated that way. Look for the person who has shown you over time that they can sit with hard things without flinching, without judging, without turning your honesty into gossip or a project to be managed. That person exists in your life. You probably already know who they are.

Confession was never meant to be a public spectacle. It was meant to be an act of courage between people who love each other enough to hold the truth gently. And when it happens in the right room with the right people it might just be the most healing thing you have experienced in a long time.

Becoming Mainline exists because I believe the church can be a place where people tell the truth and are met with love instead of judgment. If you believe that too, subscribe and walk this Lenten season with me. And if you want to support this kind of independent writing, a paid subscription is the best way to make that happen.

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Americans are the most consumed people in the history of the world. And I don’t mean that in some finger-wagging, shame-based kind of way. I mean it as an observation that should stop us in our tracks if we thought about it for more than three seconds. We are swimming in stuff. Our closets are full. Our pantries are full. Our streaming queues are full. Our inboxes are full. Our calendars are full. Our feeds are an infinite scroll of content we didn’t ask for and can’t stop consuming. We have more access to more everything than any group of humans who have ever lived on this planet and somehow the anxiety and depression numbers keep climbing.

There’s a reason for that. Consumption promises satisfaction and then immediately creates more hunger. That’s the engine. That’s how it works. You buy the thing, watch the thing, eat the thing, scroll the thing, and for about fifteen minutes you feel something. Then the emptiness comes back louder than before. So you reach for the next thing. And the next. The entire economy depends on you never feeling like you have enough. The whole machine breaks down if you ever sit still long enough to realize that you’re full and have been for a while.

And the church has not been immune. We’ve built a Christian consumption industry that would have baffled the desert fathers. Conferences, books, podcasts, apps, subscription boxes, merch. The faith has been packaged into content to be consumed and we’ve confused consuming Christian products with actual formation. You can listen to worship music twelve hours a day and never once sit in silence long enough to hear God say something you didn’t want to hear.

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Making Room

Every January for as long as I can remember I’ve also fasted the first two days of the year. No food. Just water and quiet and whatever God might want to say about the year ahead. I started doing this because I noticed something about myself that I didn’t love. By the end of every year I was so full of noise and opinions and plans and obligations that I couldn’t hear anything underneath all of it. The signal was completely buried under the static. And I found that the only way to recover it was to empty out. To stop taking things in for a little while and just sit in the hunger.

Those two days are never fun. I’m not going to romanticize it. By the afternoon of day one I’m irritable and distracted and thinking about tacos and chicken wings. But somewhere in the middle of day two something usually shifts. The noise dies down. The mental chatter thins out. And there’s this space that opens up that wasn’t available to me twenty-four hours earlier because I had filled every square inch of it with something.

That’s what fasting is actually about. It’s not punishment. It’s not a willpower test. It’s not a way to twist God’s arm. Fasting is the practice of making room. It’s the radical act of saying I have enough, I’ve taken in enough, and I need to stop for a minute so I can remember what matters.

The God of Empty Spaces

You don’t know what has a grip on you until you try to let go of it. Skip a meal and watch what happens to your mood. Leave your phone in another room for an afternoon and notice the low-grade panic that creeps in. Turn off the podcast on your commute and just drive in silence and see how long it takes before the quiet becomes unbearable. We are a people who have lost the ability to be empty.

And the problem with that is not just physical or psychological. It’s spiritual. Because the entire biblical story is built on the idea that God fills what is empty. Mary’s empty womb. The empty tomb. The disciples’ empty nets. God has always done his most profound work in the places where there’s nothing left but need. And if we never let ourselves get empty then we are essentially telling God there’s no room at the inn. Again.

Ronald Rolheiser writes that “we need to be overwhelmed, to be in over our heads, to be in a situation where our own resources are inadequate” because that’s where faith actually begins. I think he’s right. And I think that’s why fasting has survived for thousands of years as a spiritual practice. Because we need to remember what it feels like to need something we can’t provide for ourselves.

Lent invites us to fast. Not as a diet plan. Not as a performative spiritual flex. But as an honest admission that we’ve been consuming our way through life and it’s not working. The hunger is not the enemy. The hunger is the invitation. It’s the space where God’s voice has room to land.

Try This

This week, pick one thing to fast from. Pick one thing that has a grip on you and set it down for seven days. Maybe it’s the scroll before bed. Maybe it’s the noise in the car. Maybe it’s the constant snacking that fills every gap in your afternoon. Whatever it is, let yourself feel the emptiness that shows up when it’s gone. Don’t fill it with something else. Just sit in it. You might be surprised what you hear when you finally stop consuming long enough to listen.

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We are living in the golden age of self-improvement. And I don’t just mean the gym memberships and the meal prep containers, although those are part of it. I mean the entire ecosystem that has been built around the idea that you are a project. You are something to be optimized. There is a better version of you out there and if you just read the right book, follow the right routine, wake up early enough, journal with enough intention, meditate for the right number of minutes, and align your habits with your goals then you will finally arrive at the version of yourself that is worthy of love and admiration and success.

Do me a favor. Open your phone right now and count the apps designed to make you a better you. Fitness trackers. Habit builders. Sleep optimizers. Mood journals. Productivity systems. We have turned the human experience into a never-ending renovation project and we are both the contractor and the house. The message is everywhere and it is relentless. You are not enough as you are, but you could be if you just tried harder or tried something else.

And here’s the thing that nobody in the wellness industry wants to admit. The church helped build this. Evangelicalism in particular has been running its own version of the optimization gospel for decades. I experienced this firsthand in youth group. Pray more. Read more. Serve more. Give more. Be more disciplined, more obedient, more on fire for God. The language is different but the engine underneath is the same. You are a project. God is the project manager. And if you’re not showing measurable growth then something is wrong with your faith.

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Dirt on Your Forehead

Then Ash Wednesday walks in and flips the whole table over.

You are dust. And to dust you shall return. That’s it. That’s the whole message. No life hack. No action step. No five-day challenge to become a better version of yourself by Easter. Just the most honest sentence the church will speak all year. You are finite. You are fragile. You are going to die. And there is nothing you can optimize your way out of when it comes to that particular reality.

I think that’s why my first Ash Wednesday service hit me so hard. I had spent years in a religious culture that was obsessed with growth and progress and transformation, and all of that sounds great until you realize it’s built on the assumption that you aren’t acceptable as you are right now. Ash Wednesday doesn’t ask you to become anything. It just asks you to tell the truth about what you already are. Limited. Mortal. Dust.

And somehow that’s not depressing. It’s the most freeing thing I’ve heard in a church in years.

The Counter-Cultural Gift of Limitation

Richard Rohr writes that “we do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.” How good is that? I love it because it pushes back against the idea that transformation is primarily a mental exercise or a willpower project. Lent doesn’t start with a strategy, it starts with ashes. It starts with the body. It starts with someone touching your forehead and telling you something your Instagram feed will never tell you.

You are not a brand. You are not a project. You are not an algorithm to be optimized or a platform to be built. You are a creature. A human being. You are dust that God breathed life into and that breath is a gift.

In a culture that profits off your insecurity and rewards your hustle and tells you that rest is laziness and contentment is complacency, Ash Wednesday is an act of holy rebellion. It says slow down. It says stop. It says the most important thing you can do today is not accomplish something but acknowledge something. You are small. You are temporary. And you are loved not because of what you produce but because of whose breath you carry. Do you believe that?

What If We Actually Believed It

I wonder sometimes what the church would look like if we took Ash Wednesday seriously for more than one service a year. What if we built communities that weren’t obsessed with metrics and attendance numbers and growth strategies? What if we stopped treating discipleship like a self-help program and started treating it like what it actually is, which is learning to be human in the presence of God?

Jesus didn’t recruit people with a pitch about becoming their best selves. He said follow me. He said the last will be first. He said blessed are the poor in spirit. Everything about his ministry was an invitation to stop performing and start being honest about your need for grace.

That’s what those ashes are about. Not guilt. Not shame. Not some morbid fixation on death. Just honesty. Just the kind of radical, countercultural truth-telling that says you don’t have to earn your place at the table. You just have to show up with open hands and a dirty forehead and the willingness to admit that you are not God.

And that is genuinely the best news you’ll hear all year.

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A Word Before Lent

This is the first devotional in a Lenten series I’m calling “The Season We’d Rather Skip.” Each week between now and Easter, we’ll be sitting with a different way that Lent quietly pushes back against the cultural water we’re all swimming in. Next week we’ll talk about fasting in a culture of consumption. I hope you’ll stick around for the whole journey. Lent is better when you don’t walk it alone.

I write Becoming Mainline because I needed something like it when I was leaving evangelicalism and didn't have it. If these articles are meaningful to you, the best way to support this work is a paid subscription of $8/month or Buy Me A Coffee. But honestly the thing that helps the most is just showing up week after week or sharing with a friend. Blessings to you.

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I’ve been teaching a three-week class on biblical reliability, and we hit the third week last night. The first two weeks covered manuscript evidence and archaeology. Folks asked good questions. I shared what I learned here on Substack, and you seemed to appreciate it.

But week three was different. Week three is where things get spicy. Because week three is where we talk about how the Bible was actually put together. How did we end up with these 27 books in the New Testament and not others? Who decided? When did they decide? And was it actually decided at all, or did someone just announce one day that this was the Bible now and everyone had to deal with it?

The moment I put up the slide about canon formation, I could see the wheels turning. What about The Da Vinci Code? Was it Constantine? Did a bunch of bishops vote on which books to include?

Here’s the thing about how the Bible was assembled. Almost everything you’ve heard about it is probably wrong, and it’s not because you’re gullible. It’s because popular culture has been feeding us the same myths for decades and they’ve taken root in our collective consciousness. So let me tackle the three biggest misconceptions I keep hearing, because if you’re going to trust the Bible, you deserve to know how it actually came to be.

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Myth 1: The Council of Nicaea Decided Which Books Made the Bible

This is the big one. Thanks largely to The Da Vinci Code, millions of people believe that in 325 AD, Emperor Constantine called together a council of bishops at Nicaea, and they voted on which books belonged in the Bible. Maybe they took a show of hands. Maybe some books barely made it in while others barely missed the cut. The image is of smoke-filled rooms and political maneuvering and power plays that determined what Christians would read for the next two thousand years.

It’s a compelling narrative. It positions the Bible as a product of political conspiracy rather than divine inspiration. It suggests that different books might have made it in if different bishops had shown up that day. It makes the whole thing feel arbitrary and suspect.

There’s just one problem. None of it happened. Truly.

The Council of Nicaea met to address the Arian controversy about whether Jesus was fully divine or a created being. They hammered out what would become the Nicene Creed. They discussed church governance and the date of Easter. They did not discuss the biblical canon. Not even a little bit. There are detailed records from people who attended the council, including Eusebius and Athanasius. None of them mention anything about deciding which books belonged in Scripture.

By 325 AD, the books we now call the New Testament had already been circulating for over two centuries. Churches across the Roman Empire were already using them. The earliest complete list we have of the 27 New Testament books comes from Athanasius in 367 AD, but he wasn’t inventing anything. He was documenting what churches had already recognized for generations. The canon wasn’t created by vote. It was recognized through consensus over time.

The Nicaea myth persists because it fits a narrative we want to believe about institutional religion and power. But the historical record is clear. Nicaea had nothing to do with the Bible’s formation. The bishops were too busy arguing about theology to worry about which books belonged in their Bibles.

Myth 2: Early Christians Had Hundreds of Gospels to Choose From

This one usually comes up when people want to suggest the biblical canon is arbitrary. The claim goes like this. In the early centuries of Christianity, there were dozens or even hundreds of different gospels circulating. Some portrayed Jesus one way, others portrayed him differently. The church picked the four that supported their theology and suppressed all the rest. If different people had been in charge, we might have ended up with a completely different Bible.

The problem with this myth is that it conflates “texts that existed” with “texts that were serious candidates for inclusion.” Yes, there were other gospels floating around in the second and third centuries. The Gospel of Thomas. The Gospel of Peter. The Gospel of Judas. Various other texts that claimed to record Jesus’ teachings or life. But these weren’t all sitting on an equal playing field with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

The four canonical gospels were written in the first century, within living memory of eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life. They circulated widely from the beginning. By the mid-second century, they were already being treated as authoritative across diverse Christian communities from Rome to Syria to North Africa. When early church fathers like Irenaeus wrote around 180 AD, they referred to “the fourfold gospel” as if this was already established and uncontroversial.

The other texts? Most were written much later, in the second century or beyond. They came from specific groups with specific theological agendas, often Gnostic communities that held radically different beliefs about the nature of God, creation, and salvation. These texts were rejected because they taught a fundamentally different religion and they lacked apostolic origin.

The idea that early Christians were sorting through hundreds of equally valid gospels is simply ahistorical. The four gospels we have were recognized early and broadly. The others were regional texts that never gained widespread acceptance because they failed basic tests of apostolic authorship and theological consistency with what the apostles had taught.

Myth 3: The Canon Was Closed by Church Authority

This myth takes a different form than the first two. Instead of claiming the canon was decided by vote or chosen from hundreds of options, it suggests the canon was imposed from above by church leadership. A pope declared it. A council mandated it. Someone with authority said “these books and no others,” and that became binding on all Christians.

The reality is messier and more interesting. The canon formed gradually through what scholars call “corporate reception.” Churches across the known world, operating largely independently because there was no centralized authority in the early centuries, came to recognize the same set of books as authoritative. This was because these books bore the marks of apostolic origin, theological soundness, and spiritual power.

Different churches had different books they were uncertain about. Some questioned Revelation. Others debated Hebrews or James. But by the fourth century, there was remarkable consensus across incredibly diverse communities. Churches in North Africa agreed with churches in Asia Minor agreed with churches in Rome. Not because of top-down control, but because they recognized the same Spirit at work in the same texts.

When church councils eventually did issue official lists of canonical books, they weren’t creating the canon. They were ratifying what had already been recognized. They were documenting the consensus that had emerged over centuries of use, testing, and discernment. The Protestant Reformation later adjusted this consensus slightly by removing the deuterocanonical books, returning to the Hebrew canon Jesus would have known. But even that wasn’t an arbitrary decision. It was grounded in questions about which texts had always been considered fully authoritative versus which had been helpful but secondary.

The canon emerged through faithful communities recognizing which texts carried divine authority. That’s a much less tidy process than “the pope said so,” but it’s also much more compelling as evidence that these books genuinely are different from others.

What This Actually Means

I’m not trying to convince you that the canon formation process was perfect or that no human politics were involved at any point. Church history is messy because humans are messy, but the broad strokes matter. The Bible we have wasn’t cobbled together by a small group of powerful men making arbitrary decisions to protect their interests. It emerged over centuries through diverse Christian communities recognizing which texts bore witness to the Jesus the apostles proclaimed.

The myths persist because they’re simpler than the truth. A single council making a decision is easier to grasp than centuries of corporate discernment. A conspiracy theory is more dramatic than gradual consensus. But simpler and more dramatic doesn’t mean more accurate.

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The canon formation process was long, complex, and remarkably consistent across geography and time. Churches that couldn’t easily communicate with each other came to the same conclusions about which books belonged in Scripture. That kind of widespread agreement, emerging organically rather than by decree, is actually far more compelling evidence for the reliability of these texts than a single authoritative decision would have been.

So the next time someone brings up Constantine or Nicaea or claims the church suppressed alternate gospels, you’ll know better. The Bible wasn’t assembled by conspiracy. It was recognized through discernment. And that recognition happened because Christians across the world encountered the same living God in the same sacred texts.

And honestly, I think that’s a better story than any conspiracy theory could ever tell.

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I’m teaching a three-week class on biblical reliability right now, and a question that keeps coming up is this: “If I don’t believe everything in the Bible happened exactly as written, does that mean I don’t take it seriously?”

It is such a great question, and the honest answer? I believe there is some great archaeological evidence that actually gives us permission to take the Bible more seriously than ever before. Because when you understand what kind of texts you’re reading and the historical world they emerged from, you can engage Scripture with both intellectual honesty and deep respect.

For week 2 of this series, here’s what I’ve been sharing with the class about how archaeology helps us distinguish between historical grounding and strict literalism.

Real People in Real Places (With Real Literary Freedom)

In 1993, archaeologists discovered a broken stone monument at Tel Dan in northern Israel with six words carved in ancient Aramaic: “House of David.” This was an enemy inscription from the ninth century BC celebrating victory over David’s royal line. Before this, scholars debated whether King David was even real. Welp, that debate ended in 1993. He was real.

Then, in 2015, archaeologists found a royal seal impression: “Belonging to Hezekiah, son of Ahaz, king of Judah.” The Bible devotes multiple chapters to Hezekiah in Second Kings and Second Chronicles. You can walk through Hezekiah’s Tunnel today that he built to bring water into Jerusalem. The seal is there. The tunnel is there. No doubt, Hezekiah was real.

I mean these findings are cool, but here’s what I think this teaches us. Archaeological confirmation that David and Hezekiah existed doesn’t mean every detail in their stories happened exactly as described. Ancient historians had different standards than modern historians. They shaped narratives to make theological points and they arranged events thematically rather than chronologically. They also included speeches that captured essence rather than word-for-word transcripts.

Taking these texts seriously means understanding them as ancient historical narratives, and that is okay. The writers weren’t inventing characters in imaginary kingdoms or anything, they were describing real people in real places while using the literary conventions of their time to communicate theological truth and we can trust the historical grounding without demanding that every conversation happened verbatim or every number is precisely accurate. I hope that makes sense.

The Gospels Work Like Eyewitness Testimony

The same can be said about the New Testament. The archaeological evidence that has been found is remarkably specific. In John’s Gospel it describes the Pool of Bethesda near the Sheep Gate as having five covered colonnades. Well, in the late nineteenth century, excavations uncovered exactly what John described. They found a double pool with four colonnades around the edges and one in the middle. Five colonnades. John was describing an actual place he’d actually seen. How cool is that?

Then, in 1961, archaeologists found a limestone block with the inscription “Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judea.” That same year, construction workers found an ossuary inscribed with “Joseph, son of Caiaphas,” almost certainly the burial box of the high priest who presided when Jesus was tried.

The Gospel writers got the details right because they were there or talked to people who were. They knew Jerusalem and they knew the geography. They knew who held what positions and when.

But here’s what taking the Gospels seriously actually means. These writers weren’t court reporters producing transcripts, they were simply interpreting the significance of what they witnessed. They arranged events to make prove points that were significant to them. They shaped Jesus’ teachings into memorable forms. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John sometimes tell the same story differently because they’re emphasizing different aspects.

Taking the Gospels seriously means recognizing them as interpreted testimony but told by writers who cared deeply about communicating who Jesus was and what his life meant. You don’t have to harmonize every detail to trust that you’re encountering reliable witness to actual history. Four witnesses to a car accident will tell the story differently depending on where they stood. That doesn’t make them unreliable, it simply makes them human.

Why Historical Grounding Actually Matters

In 1968, archaeologists found an ossuary containing bones of a man named Yehohanan. A seven-inch iron nail was still driven through his heel bone. This is the only archaeological evidence of Roman crucifixion ever found, and it confirms exactly what the Gospels describe. Nails through feet. Legs broken. Brutal but accurate to what we see in the biblical text.

This discovery matters because it reminds us that the Incarnation is a claim about what actually happened in history. God became flesh, lived a real life, died under actual Roman execution, and according to Christian witness, rose again.

The archaeological evidence is extensive. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing around 116 AD and despising Christians, still confirms that Christ was executed during Tiberius’s reign by Pontius Pilate. Flavius Josephus, a Jewish historian born years after Jesus died, mentions Jesus twice in his work from 93 AD, confirming he lived, taught, attracted followers, was accused by Jewish leaders, and was crucified under Pilate.

No serious historian doubts Jesus existed. The evidence is too strong. But taking that historical grounding seriously doesn’t require believing every healing happened exactly as described in every Gospel. It means believing God entered human history in a real person at a real time in a real place. It means the resurrection claim is about something that happened to an actual body.

You can take the Incarnation seriously as a historical claim while still recognizing that the Gospel writers shaped their accounts theologically.

What This Means for How You Read Scripture Now

If there is anything I would like people to take away from this class/series, it’s that taking the Bible seriously actually requires not taking everything literally. Because forcing ancient texts into modern categories is actually doing it a disservice.

Archaeological evidence gives us permission to engage Scripture with both intellectual honesty and deep reverence. Sure, the people were real. The places were real. The historical grounding is there, but the texts use different genres, different literary conventions, and different ways of expressing truth.

When you read historical narratives, remember you’re reading ancient historical writing with its own conventions. When you read the Gospels, remember you’re reading interpreted testimony from people who were there. When you read poetry, let it be poetry. When you read prophecy, start with its original context. God gave us a brain, and we need to use it.

So yes, you can take Scripture seriously without taking everything literally. And archaeology, rather than undermining faith, actually strengthens it by showing us that our sacred texts are rooted in actual history, told by real people who knew what they were talking about.

Sometimes the most faithful reading is the one that lets Scripture be what it actually is rather than forcing it to be what fundamentalism demands it must be.

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Before we dive in: I typically write these longer essays a few weeks ahead of publication, which means I can't always respond to breaking news in this format. For real-time thoughts on current events, you can find me on Threads.

I’m teaching a three-week class right now on a question that keeps coming up in my conversations with people who are deconstructing their faith.

Can we actually trust the Bible we hold in our hands today?

Over the next few weeks here on Becoming Mainline, I’m going to walk through the same material I’m covering in the class, but in a way that’s hopefully very accessible. This is part 1 of 3, and I need to tell you something right up front that might make you uncomfortable.

If you didn’t know, we don’t have the original manuscripts of the Bible. Not one. Not Genesis. Not the Gospel of John. Not Paul’s letter to the Romans. The actual pieces of papyrus that Moses touched, that Paul wrote on, that John penned are all gone.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering if I’ve lost my mind bringing this up in the first week of a series on trusting the Bible. But stay with me, because what I’m about to tell you might actually be the most reassuring thing you’ll hear all week.

The Ancient World Didn’t Do Originals

Here’s something that helps put this in perspective. We don’t have Shakespeare’s original handwritten copy of Hamlet either. Or Plato’s original writings. Homer’s Iliad? Gone. In fact, we don’t have the original manuscripts of any ancient literature. Not one single piece. This is just how the ancient world worked, and it worked this way for a very practical reason.

Ancient people wrote on papyrus, which is basically pressed plant material, or on animal skins called parchment.

Think about how long paper lasts in your garage. Think about what happens to a book left in a damp basement. These organic materials decompose. They’re incredibly fragile. A few hundred years is pushing it for these materials. A thousand years is nearly impossible without absolutely perfect storage conditions that almost never existed in the ancient world.

So every ancient text we study today, whether it’s philosophy or history or religious writings, comes to us through copies. The originals crumbled to dust centuries ago. But here’s where the Bible’s story gets interesting.

The Manuscript Olympics

Even though we don’t have the originals, we have something that’s arguably even better. We have copies. Thousands and thousands and thousands of copies. Let me show you what I mean by comparing the Bible to other ancient texts that scholars trust and use every single day. Look at this chart:

The New Testament alone has roughly 24,000 manuscript copies. That includes nearly 6,000 copies in the original Greek, about 10,000 in Latin, and over 10,000 more in other ancient languages like Syriac and Coptic and Armenian. 24,000 manuscripts of the same text, all of them copied and preserved across centuries.

Now look at Homer’s Iliad, which is one of the most important pieces of ancient Greek literature. It’s taught in universities everywhere. Scholars quote it constantly. Nobody seriously questions whether we have an accurate version of what Homer wrote. How many manuscript copies do we have of the Iliad? About 1800. That’s genuinely impressive. But it’s not even remotely close to the New Testament’s numbers.

Julius Caesar’s account of the Gallic Wars, the one where he famously said “I came, I saw, I conquered,” has about 250 manuscripts. And again, scholars trust these works completely. They build entire academic careers on studying these texts. But the Bible has exponentially more manuscript evidence than any of them.

When I first saw these numbers laid out side by side, I realized something crucial. The question isn’t “Can we trust the Bible without the originals?” The question is “If we trust every other ancient text with far less evidence, why would we not trust the Bible with vastly more?”

It’s Not Just About Quantity

But having a lot of manuscripts isn’t the only thing that matters. We also need to talk about timing, about how close these copies are to when the originals were actually written. Scholars call this the time gap, and it’s crucial for determining reliability.

There’s this tiny fragment of papyrus called the John Rylands Papyrus, about the size of a credit card, that contains just a few verses from the Gospel of John. Specifically, it’s the part where Jesus is standing trial before Pilate. Scholars date this little scrap to somewhere around 125 to 200 AD. The Gospel of John was probably written around 90 to 100 AD. That means this copy was made somewhere between 25-110 years after John wrote the original.

Let me put that in perspective with those other ancient texts we trust. Homer’s Iliad was written around 800 BC. Our earliest manuscript copy is from around 400 BC. That’s a four-hundred-year gap between the original and our earliest copy. Julius Caesar wrote about the Gallic Wars around 50 BC, and our earliest manuscript is from about 1000 AD. That’s a nine-hundred-year gap.

The New Testament? In many cases we’re talking about gaps of just thirty to a hundred and fifty years. Some fragments are even closer than that. We have more manuscripts, and we have them from much closer to the original writing time. It’s not even a competition (refer back to chart above).

The Science of Figuring Out What the Original Said

Now here’s where things get really fascinating. There’s an entire academic discipline called textual criticism that exists specifically to handle this exact situation. Don’t let the word criticism scare you. It doesn’t mean criticizing the Bible or tearing it apart. It means carefully comparing all these thousands of manuscripts to figure out what the original text most likely said.

Think of it like this: Imagine your grandmother had this incredible chocolate chip cookie recipe, but she never wrote it down. She taught your mom, who taught you, and you taught your kids. But somewhere along the way, someone said “one cup of sugar” instead of “one and a half cups.” How would you figure out what Grandma actually said? You’d ask everyone. You’d compare notes. If fifteen people remember “one and a half cups” and only two remember “one cup,” you’d be pretty confident about what the original recipe was, right?

That’s essentially what textual critics do, except instead of asking family members about recipes, they’re gathering manuscripts from libraries and monasteries all over the world. They compare them line by line, word by word, sometimes letter by letter. When they find differences between manuscripts, they use specific rules and methods to determine which reading is most likely original. It’s rigorous academic scholarship that’s been refined over centuries.

One of the greatest textual critics of the twentieth century was a scholar named Bruce Metzger who spent his entire career at Princeton studying New Testament manuscripts. Metzger was recognized by believers and skeptics alike as one of the absolute leading authorities in the field. Here’s what Metzger concluded after decades of research. Because of the sheer number of manuscripts we have and because of how close they are to the original time period, we can reconstruct the original New Testament text with tremendous confidence. He put it at around 99% accuracy for the meaningful content.

99%. Let that number sink in for a minute. The remaining 1%? Those are mostly spelling differences, word order changes, or little scribal slips that don’t affect any doctrine or teaching whatsoever. We’re not talking about missing chapters or invented stories or anything that changes what the text actually means.

When Critics Say the Bible Has Been Changed

I know some of you have heard people say the Bible has been changed over the centuries. That it’s been corrupted. That we can’t really trust what we’re reading. I want to address that head on, because yes, there are differences between manuscripts. Scholars call these variants, and they’re completely open about them.

One example that comes up a lot is the ending of Mark’s Gospel. Some early manuscripts include Mark 16:9-20, and some don’t. You know what good modern Bibles do with information like that? They tell you right there in the footnotes. They don’t hide it. They don’t pretend the variant doesn’t exist. They lay it out in plain view and let you know exactly what’s going on.

Here’s the crucial thing though. Even with these variants, no major Christian doctrine depends on a disputed passage. The deity of Christ? That’s taught throughout the New Testament in passages nobody disputes. The resurrection? Confirmed in multiple books. Salvation by grace through faith? All over Paul’s letters in manuscripts that match each other almost perfectly. The variants exist, but they don’t change anything essential about what Christians believe or how we understand who God is.

Why Having Thousands of Copies Actually Protects the Text

A lot of people think of the Bible’s transmission like a game of telephone. You know, where one person whispers a message to the next person, who whispers it to the next person, and by the time it gets to the end of the line it’s completely different. “I like pizza” becomes “Mike’s in a blizzard” or something equally ridiculous. That’s how many people imagine the Bible was passed down. One guy wrote it, told another guy, who told another guy, and two thousand years later it’s totally different from what started.

But that’s not at all what happened. The Bible wasn’t passed down in a single line like telephone. It was copied and distributed widely and quickly from the very beginning. So you don’t have one line of transmission. You have hundreds of independent lines, then thousands, all running parallel to each other across different geographical regions.

If one scribe in Egypt makes a mistake copying John’s Gospel, but scribes in Syria and Rome and Asia Minor all have correct copies, we can easily spot the error. The manuscripts actually correct each other. It’s a self-checking system. By the end of the first century, Christian communities existed all over the Roman Empire. Spain to Syria. North Africa to Asia Minor. They were all reading and copying the same texts. This widespread distribution protected it.

Think about it practically. If someone in Rome tried to change a passage, Christians in Antioch would immediately notice because their copies didn’t match. The broader the distribution, the harder it becomes to corrupt the text because you’d have to somehow coordinate changes across dozens of independent communities that didn’t have phones or internet or any way to secretly collaborate on textual alterations.

What This Means When You Pick Up Your Bible at Home

So when you pick up your Bible at home, whether it’s the NIV or ESV or NRSVue (my personal favorite) or any other major translation, you can have confidence that what you’re reading is what the original authors wrote. Not because of blind faith. Not because someone told you to just trust it. But because of rigorous historical and textual scholarship that’s been tested and verified and peer-reviewed by scholars who spend their entire careers on this exact question.

So, we don’t have the originals. But honestly? We don’t need them. The multitude of manuscripts we do have gives us a window into the past that’s clearer and more reliable than for any other ancient text. Not even close. When I first found out that we don’t have the originals, I thought it was a crisis. Now I understand it’s actually the strongest evidence we could ask for that the text has been faithfully preserved.

I hope you can rest a little easier knowing that the book you hold in your hands is trustworthy because of the manuscript evidence.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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I used to think mainline churches were where faith went to die.

When people left evangelical churches for mainline congregations, we whispered that they’d “gone liberal” like it was a diagnosis of some terminal illness. Then, I found myself on staff at the largest mainline church in North America, and I discovered that almost everything I’d been told was either wildly exaggerated or completely backwards.

The Narrative I Inherited

The story I grew up with was that evangelical churches were Bible-believing, Spirit-filled, growing communities of genuine believers. Mainline churches were theological museums, preserving the forms of Christianity while abandoning its power. They’d compromised with the world, prioritized inclusion over truth, and were slowly dying as God’s judgment on their unfaithfulness. They were to be avoided at all costs.

When I finally stepped into a United Methodist church, I was shocked to discover a community that loved scriptur…

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A Special Edition of Becoming Mainline

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I was doomscrolling again the other day and I ran across a post with a photograph from a Brazilian hospital during COVID-19 that I can’t stop thinking about. It shows a patient’s hand clasped between two water-filled surgical gloves, the latex fingers interlaced with human ones. The nurses called it “maozinha do amor” or little hands of love. When families couldn’t visit and touch was forbidden, these nurses filled disposable gloves with warm water and placed them on both sides of isolated patients’ hands.

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Almost every single time I post something on social media about God being love, about Jesus saying his disciples would be known by their love, someone shows up in the comments with the same response: “But real love means telling people the truth!” And then, like clockwork, comes the baby running into traffic.

You know the line. “If a baby’s about to run into traffic, the loving thing is to grab them and yank them back, even if it hurts them. Sometimes love has to be tough.”

I’ve seen this analogy deployed dozens of times across X, Facebook, Instagram, and every comment section of every progressive Christian blog post ever written. It’s become the go-to defense for why Christians should be known more for what we oppose than what we support. Why our “truth-telling” often looks suspiciously like condemnation. Why love, apparently, requires us to police other people’s lives, relationships, and callings.

Here’s the thing: I used to believe this argument.…

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I’ve been writing into the void for a while now, and I need to know if anyone’s still out there. Not in the desperate way. More in the honest way. The way you’d ask a friend across the table, “Are we good? Are we still tracking together?” Because here’s the truth about writing a weekly newsletter for people on different faith journeys. You’re never entirely sure what’s landing.

What I Think You Need vs What You Actually Need

Here’s my confession. I make a lot of assumptions about what matters to you. I think about the questions I had when I was leaving evangelicalism, the gaps in my theological education, the things I wish someone had told me sooner. So I write about empire theology and biblical interpretation and why the gospel isn’t primarily about getting into heaven when you die. I write about progressive Christian thinkers who helped me and scriptures that took on new meaning when I stopped reading them through an evangelical lens.

But you’re n…

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