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We’ve looked at the fear at the center of American Evangelicalism, the way the teaching on Hell, actually owning more to Dante’s Inferno than the Bible, has been used to manipulate people into being perpetually terrified, first of God, and then of their neighbors. It’s also easy to see how a religious worldview where people are doomed and desperately in need of saving has groomed its rank and file to seek and welcome authoritarian leaders, both in the church and in government.

Add to that a theological system that has perpetuated both whiteness, maleness, and the myth of heteronormativity since its inception, and it becomes less and less a mystery why Conservative Christianity and politics have worked so hard to marginalize, diminish, and ultimately subjugate both queer people and women through distorted theology, sanctified misogyny, and through their late 1970s pivot from segregation to the issue of abortion as it’s center.

As my guests and I have discussed, a theology rooted in fear and dehumanization always needs an enemy to be defeated, a threat to be eradicated, an encroaching danger to be protected from. This is why, MAGA Christianity runs almost exclusively on manufactured culture wars, incessant alleged emergencies at our borders and in our streets, and halfway across the world. Whether it’s the inhumanity of ICE, the genocide in Gaza, or half a dozen military campaigns across the world, religious people who see everyone else through a lens of distrust and dehumanization can justify almost any kind of violence in the name of defending righteousness.

And ultimately, the single reason Conservative Evangelicals have abandoned empathy and made their bed with the powerholders of empire rather than the poor, hungry, and oppressed being prayed upon is that they now have a Jesusless Christianity.

Pay attention the next time you see a Conservative member of Congress parading their supposed faith in a press conference, stump speech, or Fox News fluff piece. (It shouldn’t take long.) You’ll notice they use words like “God” throughout, and they reference “The Bible” a whole lot and even mention “faith,” but they completely exclude the very namesake of their declared religious tradition.

This isn’t an oversight; it’s a necessity. There’s a simple reason for the omission: they can’t gaslight people with the words of Jesus.

You see, over the past few decades, these people have become experts at slapping a shiny veneer of religion onto the most abominable of ideas and the most sociopathic of behaviors. They know they can weaponize the rather generic idea of “God”, manufacturing a deity in their own bloodthirsty, morally inverted, predatory image: a vengeful, joyless, avatar. They can wield a few random, poorly-exegeted obscure scripture passages like a hammer to justify their every phobia and hangup, making frequent mention of a Bible they’ve torn a majority of the later pages from.
They can brazenly conflate Christianity and America and give life to the grotesque, Frankensteined violent nationalism they daily traffic in as if it were sacred, and they will find a small army of devoted disciples willing to suspend disbelief so they can ratify their hatred.

Republicans and Evangelical leaders can use all sorts of theological gymnastics, pseudo-piety, and performative religiosity to fashion something out of God and the Bible to build a theocratic order and fool their rank-and-file—but they can’t screw with Jesus.

They can’t make him say what they want him to say or get him to consent to their brutal wills—so they’ve simply erased him. The Sermon on the Mount, his central treatise, is antithetical to the Republican ethos. They are oppositional movements: the former rooted in empathy, focused on interdependence, and compelled to invitation—the latter built on fear, strengthened in cruelty, sustained on exclusion.

Jesus’ heart for the poor can’t be twisted into the open contempt the GOP regularly shows them.

His generous feeding of the multitudes can’t justify taking away free lunches for children.

His call to be peacemakers and caregivers doesn’t allow for their warmongering and gunlust.

His healing of the sick and suffering can’t be manipulated into denying people basic healthcare

His compassionate heart for the hurting and the vulnerable can’t be transformed into their unapologetic cruelty toward immigrants and foreigners.

His command to incarnate love for neighbor and stranger and enemy doesn’t mix well with strident “Don’t Tread of Me”, America First bullying.

There is literally nothing in the totality of Jesus’ words in the New Testament that does anything but convict and condemn the Republican Party and MAGA Christianity in both philosophy and in practice, and they know it.

Republicans and MAGA church preachers realize that if they were to even allude to Jesus, his life and teachings would swiftly become the loudest and most powerful public rebuke of their vile movement, that his words would come and violently flip their very tables. They would be forced to admit that not only do they have no interest in the compassionate, benevolent, open-hearted life of Jesus, they actively despise it.

So the vague GOP “God and guns” platitudes will come, and Jesus will be there to tell them that those who live by the sword, die by it.

They will speak about America being a Christian nation, and Jesus will be there to remind them that God so loved the world.

They will be there to trot out some antiquated tough guy, alpha male religion, and Jesus will be there to say the blessed will be the mourners and the last will be first and the humble will be raised.

Republicans will talk about legislating “Biblically,” and Jesus will be there to ask them where they are feeding and healing and loving and helping and welcoming.

They will revel in violence against the different and the disregarded, and Jesus will be there to remind them that he inhabits the least of these and they treat him the way they treat them.

So, the next time you hear a Conservative politician or Evangelical preacher sermonizing about the God they claim they’re listening to and speaking for and governing on behalf of—do something that will confound and infuriate and confront them: just bring up Jesus.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series and that you go back and check out any of the sessions you’ve missed. I’d like to thank my collaborators, Monte Mader, Kristian A Smith, Brian Recker, Diana Butler Bass, Mark Sandlin, and Gerlyn Henry for their wisdom and honesty. Please make sure you watch our conversations and follow them on social media.

Ultimately, though it’s going to be difficult to overcome a minority movement that has spent the last 5 decades preparing for what is now coming to fruition with its seizing of unprecedented power, we can hopefully begin to push back against the dangerous and incorrect theology MAGA Christianity perpetuates, we can continue to oppose the legislative assaults on vulnerable people, and to create a broad coalition that leverages its massive collective power.

And for those of us who claim a Christian faith that actually does concern itself with the teachings of Jesus, we’re going to need to be louder and more visible in individually and collectively living a faith rooted in love and not fear.

In the late 70’s, in the wake of Roe V Wade, Conservative Evangelicals were finding their racism was beginning to fall out of fashion, with cultural mores beginning to shift and the overt cross-burning Klan-Christianity finding greater resistance. In an effort to find a new central issue to reignite their rank-and-file in the pews, Baptist minister Jerry Falwell and a group of similarly heretical Evangelicals formed the Moral Majority, with the supposed “pro-life” agenda as its center. It turned out to be a master stroke of manipulation, allowing pastors and politicians to control the narrative, brand their opposition as baby killers, and manipulate easily fooled Christians, to disastrous effect.

The abortion issue has been named by millions of self-identified religious people as their moral deal breaker, hard line in the sand, singular hill to die on, but their lack of a consistent pro-life ethic regarding diverse sentient human beings beyond the birth canal, is something that a generation of faithful, once-faithful, and faithless people alike cannot make sense of our peace with. They rightly cannot reconcile how so many followers of Jesus are seemingly able to place the word “abortion” on one side of a massive moral scale—and have it far outweigh porn star affairs, caged children, mass shooting victims, murdered black men, generational poverty, systemic racism, and a litany of human rights atrocities that barely seem to register or matter.

There are a number of explanations for this highly selective zealotry by religious people, but ultimately, it comes down to laziness and self-preservation.

Embryos are relatively easy to advocate for. They don’t encroach upon people’s privilege or confront their politics or question their theology or require much from them in the way of lifestyle change. It is a clean form of activism, certainly far less messy and uncomfortable than having to defend people you don’t like or that you’ve declared the enemy, or people are afraid of because you’ve been conditioned to by your parents, pastors, and seminary professors. By putting all their eggs (so to speak) into fervent defense of life in utero, religious people can feel the intoxicating, easy high of self-righteousness and moral virtue—without having to actually love people: strange, disparate, uncomfortable-for-you-to-be-around, people. That’s because embryos can be idealized into something pleasant and palatable, devoid of any of the messy characteristics they find undesirable in actual human beings. They aren’t yet gay or Muslim or Liberal or black or poor or Atheist (or whatever other qualifiers trouble you), and so affinity with them is uncomplicated, solidarity with them not crossing the lines of their tribalism.

Anti-abortion believers get to feel like noble advocates for Life, and still hold onto their prejudices and hang-ups and hatreds. They can dispense all kinds of cruelty and expose human beings to staggering forms of bigotry—and still say they’re defending the living. People outside of this theocratic box recognize the problem with this narrow, crusading zealotry: that once these embryos are no longer embryos, these supposed life-lovers often don’t treat them like they’re at all human. Nine or thirteen or thirty-two or sixty-five years later, when they show up in their communities and in their emergency rooms and along their borders, in need of food or refuge or healthcare or compassion—they’re no longer something sacred or beautiful. Unless these lives conform to the narrowest and most stringent of criteria (usually being white, Republican), they’re more often treated as threats to be neutralized and adversaries to be destroyed.

Embryos that grow into LGBTQ teenagers aren’t worthy of their protection. In fact, they receive their contempt, bear the brunt of their jokes, and absorb the full damnation of their brimstone sermons. They can’t get married or use a public bathroom or get benefits for their partners without being assailed at every turn by these “lovers of life.”

Embryos that become terrified migrants fleeing crime and poverty and pressed up against the most urgent desperation, don’t merit the passionate defense once within their borders they might have received while inside the womb. Instead, they sustain their scorn and suspicion and every bit of their malicious, wall-building bitterness.

Embryos that become sick middle-aged adults fighting metastasizing tumors, facing astronomical chemotherapy bills, and desiring healthcare that will not drive them to bankruptcy don’t elicit a shred of the empathy they’d have garnered when they were still microscopic.

Embryos that one day need Government assistance to keep the lights on or food on the table for their children because they have endured unthinkable adversity along their journey—will not be met with tearful embraces by these so-called life-lovers. They’re derided as lazy and irresponsible, and told to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, while never having the benefit of boots.

Embryos that one day worship in Muslim communities around these white Christians aren’t afforded any passionate defense and aren’t celebrated with effusive social media soliloquies. They’re branded as terrorist sympathizers, their religious freedoms ignored, and their very existence resented with checkout line coldness, airport side-eye stares, and travel ban exclusion.

And perhaps most ironically of all, embryos that grow into women who desire the final say regarding their own bodies—will find their lives and wills are now of little concern. They will be legislatively subjugated by those who’d have once declared them precious. And they do all of this (they claim) because they believe that embryos are human beings and they want those beloved embryonic human beings to be cherished, defended, and protected at all costs, which all sounds quite admirable were that the whole story—though it isn’t. In a brilliant but terrifying bit of subterfuge, Conservative Christians, have been able to use the supposed defense of life to further control, subjugate, and silence women, eliminating access to birth control, legislating away healthcare decisions, and leave tens of millions of Christian women at the mercy of parents, partners, and spouses who are all too happy to further advance the antiquated patriarchy that they benefit from, all in the name of life, which they have little interest in.

Back in the first year of the COVID pandemic, the US lost over 300,000 people. The entire planet was shut down, and we were in the throes of death and suffering as we had never experienced. And in those terrifying, disorienting days, the supposed lovers of life were the ones refusing masks, shunning vaccines, and ignoring social distancing and other safeguards. It’s impossible to calculate just how many people needlessly died because of the negligence and obstinacy of pro-life Christians. It, perhaps as much as any event in our history, showed us the fraudulence of the Right when it comes to life. A consistent pro-life ethic regarding healthcare, poverty, the environment, gun violence, or the death penalty isn’t possible because they won’t let themselves sit with the hypocrisy of their current conduct toward vulnerable communities that this necessitates. They refuse to use the Scriptures as a mirror in any other capacity than what they claim is its establishment of life beginning at conception. To live with any consistency would require an empathy that is simply too high a price for them to pay, it would demand an equity that encroaches on their comfort, and it would mean facing the reality of their privilege. It would be to confront their phobias, their nationalism, and their whitewashed religion.

Back in 2019, at a campaign rally in Panama City Beach, Florida, President Trump was speaking about the supposed crisis of immigrants overrunning our borders, when someone in the crowd yelled, “Shoot them!” Trump erupted in a curled Cheshire cat grin, while sarcastically saying, “Only in the panhandle you can get away with that statement, folks.” The crowd laughed and roared in approval. Later, they reposted clips on social media in support. These “pro-life Christians” were proud of this moment. These declared defenders of human life were laughing at the suggestion of murder. A moment like that was revelatory because it exposed the duplicity that allows people to be selectively loving; to disregard so much of the humanity in their path.

If we’re going to begin to chip away at the seemingly unbreakable hold fundamentalist Christians have here in the US, we’re going to need to reclaim the narrative about what it truly means to care for the living. I suggest replacing the phrase “pro-life” with the phrase “for humanity.” We can then look at the way these religious people disregard the poor, the hurting, the vulnerable; the predatory legislation they support, the elimination of environmental protections, their inhumane treatment of the LGBTQ community, immigrants, refugees, and so many other at-risk human beings, and ask just how they are for humanity.

Diana’s latest book, A Beautiful Year, won the 2026 Wilbur Award for "excellence in the communication of religious issues, values, and themes in public secular media.

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In our first session, we began by talking about fear as the engine that drives so much of the toxic Christianity and White Christian Nationalism that we’re all so alarmed by (if you missed it I encourage you to check it out, in the link below); firstly, the theological teaching of Hell and the perpetual fear of God th…

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Hey, my friends. Welcome to my Loathe Thy Neighbor series.

The goal of this series is trying to understand how so many professed followers of Jesus have constructed a faith narrative that is bereft of compassion, one where they have contempt for so many of their disparate neighbors.

We’ll look at the path that led Conservative Evangelicals to align with Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, we’ll talk about the rise of Christian nationalism, we’ll get inside the heads of Trump-supporting Christians, and we’ll look at ways religious and non-religious people can help stop or at least slow the progress of the theocratic movement we’re seeing here in America.

Throughout this week, I’ll be joined by an incredible group of theologians, ministers, writers, and thought leaders who will be sharing their insights with us. Each day, in addition to my guest conversations, I’ll share a few thoughts for the day, based on my nearly three decades as a local church pastor.

I want to begin this series with a simple truth: No one is at their best when they’re terrified.

We need to start this series with fear. Fear is one hell of a drug, and it was one I was introduced to it early on.

Growing up as a good little Catholic boy, I can remember inhaling the pungent incense hanging in the air of our massive Gothic sanctuary, kneeling into a soft red velvet pew pad, resting my elbows on the hard polished wooden seat in front of me, and staring up into a cavernous stone and stained glass canopy—praying to a God who spoke the light and shape into being and numbered the very hairs on my head; one who fully adored me but whose anger was never far away. I knew that I was loved completely, as long as I didn’t screw it up in the infinite number of ways it seemed possible to do so: stealing, lying, masturbating, listening to Ozzy Osbourne, voting Democrat. As a result, I often prayed, “Whom shall I fear?” while being rightly terrified. I was taught that God was both steadfast in love and easily angered, and no adults around me seemed fazed in the slightest by that paradox.

And regardless of my confusion, I was told to share this God with others: to make sure friends and relatives and classmates and strangers openly accepted his limitless Love—so that He didn’t pulverize them or put a pox on their houses (whatever that was.).

Punitive religion, the kind many of us have been raised in and likely live in close proximity to, the kind we see in Conservative Evangelical Christianity, often preaches a conditional good news-bad news Gospel where things seem promising presently, but the massive cosmic shoe is perpetually about to drop.

Yes, God loves us unquestionably and effusively, but there are caveats and conditions under which we earn and keep that love: prerequisites for belonging among God and God’s people, the moral scores that need to be settled in order to be fully welcomed.

Enter, Hell.

“I miss Hell.”

It was a startling admission coming from the longtime pastor of a 1000-member church in a bustling neighborhood just inside the West Philadelphia city limits, just a few minutes before a Sunday morning service. He’d punctuated the statement with a deep, throaty laugh, but he wasn’t joking as much as he was marveling at the admission as it was coming out of his mouth. “Hell was helpful,” he said, his face growing solemn. “When I could leverage sin and hold eternal damnation over people’s heads, I could get them to do almost anything: volunteer, give, evangelize, vote—whatever needed doing. He explained that this fear was a kind of currency; a sanctified, ordained, and acceptable tool of explicit or just below-the-radar spiritual extortion. He went on to tell me that when his own faith shifted and his community slowly transitioned with him to a more progressive theology, he lost the ability to energize people easily through existential threat—and in a way he missed having something similarly catalytic to collectively move his people, lamenting that his congregation (while filled with engaged human beings who care deeply about the world), was far more passive than it had been before they get out of the condemnation business.

This is why the Conservative Evangelical movement in America is able to marshal its rank and file to vote for extremist candidates, to embrace nonsensical conspiracy theories, to tolerate abhorrent behavior from leaders, or to justify seemingly conflicting cruelty toward people: they’re terrified of getting it wrong and pissing off God. The fear of eternal torment (or the impulse to help other less morally-preferable souls avoid it) tends to drive religious people beyond what seems reasonable to more moderate believers or to the irreligious—and while it may be effective in mobilizing evangelistic outreach or moving voting blocks, it does little to perpetuate anything truly loving because it values conversion over conversation, and it’s also driving an exodus out of organized religion.

When someone has been weaned since birth in a story that tells them they are depraved and that punishment is always looming, what you end up with are generations of terrified terrorists, people who have this terrible combination of self-loathing combined with irrational fear of their neighbors. With this reality at work, suddenly, Conservative Christians’ weaponizing of the Bible, their constant crusades against others’ alleged immorality, and their religion of coercion and subjugation start to seem less like a mystery and more like the expected outcome.

I think the road to Hell is paved with the idea of Hell.

Once we sign on to it as a reality, the next decision we need to make is: who goes there and why do they go there? What are the precise rules and fine print of damnation? Is a profession of faith or a sinner’s prayer required for a reprieve, or does it depend on how you treat vulnerable people? Is deliverance based on belief or behavior? The Bible makes the case for both (Mark 16:16, Matthew 25:31-46) with the Gospel writers offering very different replies—so how do we decide where salvation is and who gets to enjoy it? If a clear consensus can’t be reached regarding how reservation to Hell is secured, maybe we should hold that idea loosely and be reticent to wield it as a weapon.

You need to check a lot of boxes in order to condemn someone to hell: you need to believe in God, to imagine you know that God’s character intimately, to consent to that God manufacturing a place where He or She would send human beings for a gruesome and torturous eternity, to be fully certain you know the extensive and precise requirements for such a sentence, to be sure the person you’re condemning meets those requirements, and above all, to be fully convinced that you don’t. I’ll argue that if someone reaches all these standards, they’re likely God—and if they don’t (and still have the nerve to tell someone they’re going to hell), they’re likely an insufferable human being. It’s almost impossible to love your neighbor as yourself if you believe that because of the color of their skin or their sexual orientation or their nation of origin, your neighbor is morally inferior to you. Holding hell over someone renders you unable to have the kind of proximity to them that love requires, the kind that sees people accurately.

I’ve lived a good deal of my formative years quite sure that Hell was real and trying desperately to figure out how to avoid it. It was simply something I accepted as part of my Christianity Starter Kit and incorporated into my religious worldview, my default theology, and my working spirituality. It shaped my understanding of myself, and it guided the agenda I approached others with, sometimes turning me into an oxymoronic self-hating, yet overconfident jerk. But with each passing day over the past decade or two, I’ve started to feel it eroding little by little; the unwavering certainty of something that had once seemed so critical and non-negotiable to my belief system, yet which had grown more and more paradoxical in my mind: eternal damnation at the hands of a supposed Loving God. At this state of my spiritual journey and in my current understanding of the character of God and my study of the Scriptures, I simply no longer can reconcile these two things. As hard as I have tried to (and believe me, as a good and guilty Catholic boy at heart, I have), I just do not have peace with a Creator who would give us life and force us to spend much of that life looking for a spiritual needle in a haystack to avoid torture for eternity in the name of fierce love. This unbelief is not a conscious decision, and it hasn’t come without decades of prayer, study, and reflection, so I can’t be argued or proof-texted out of it.

I see lots of terrified Christians in America every day, making a showy display of piety that masks how terrified they actually are.

These frightened faithful have a profound and fundamental spiritual problem: their God is simply too small. Though their words speak of an immeasurable maker with a limitless love, in reality, they passionately worship a deity made in their own image: white, American, Republican, male—and perpetually terrified of Muslims, immigrants, gay children, Special Counsel reports, mandalas, Harry Potter, Starbucks holiday cups, yoga, wind turbines, Science—everything. Their God is so laughably minuscule, so fully neutered of power, so completely devoid of functioning vertebrae that “He” cannot protect them from the encroaching monsters they are certain lurk around every corner to overwhelm them. They shower this God with effusive praise on Sunday mornings, they sing with reckless abandon in church services about “Him”, they brazenly pump out their chests on social media regarding His infinite wisdom, they defiantly declare this God’s staggering might at every opportunity—but their lives tell the truth: they believe He is impotent and scared and ineffectual. You can tell this because they insist on doing all the things that a God-sized God would simply do as part of the gig:

They need to be armed to the teeth at all times because they don’t really believe God will come through to defend them in a pinch—and will always be outgunned.

They want to change gay couples and transgender teenagers themselves, because they don’t trust God to work within people as He desires. (Apparently, God keeps making LGBTQ people, which really gets under their skin.)

They want to stockpile and horde wealth, health insurance, and opportunity—because this is a zero-sum game; because the God they claim turned water into wine and fed thousands with a few fish and some leftover bread—can’t make enough for everyone.

They are obsessed with building a wall and defending a border and turning away refugees—because their God isn’t generous or smart or creative enough to help them figure out how to welcome and care for everyone who requires it.

They want no other religious traditions to have a voice, because their insecure and terribly tiny God is mortally threatened by such things.

When we understand the power of fear and try and enter the headspace of someone who is perpetually terrified, we can see that it breeds terrified terrorists: people who are petrified of God and by everyone else around them who they believe anger that God, we can begin to make sense of their incessant culture wars, their obsession with the afterlife, their lack of concern for what happens to people in this life, their disregard for the environment, their pining for the end times, Armageddon so their white angry Daddy God can come and rescue them.

Fearless Christians don’t legislate rights away from other human beings,
don’t see someone else’s gain as their loss,
aren’t fixated on the perceived dangers of those who don’t look, talk, think, believe, worship, and love the way that they do.

Fear is a powerful drug.
It’s a fantastic political tactic.
It’s a wonderful manipulator.
It’s an effective motivator.
It’s a great rally speech or Sunday sermon.
But it’s a really lousy religion.

As you interact with Christians who wield a religion of hatred, look for the ways that their religious worldview is a product of the fear they are addled by: of God, of Hell, of the people they’ve been taught that God wants them to hate.

Good grieving, my friends.

What have been some takeaways from the series? What have you discovered or remembered about your journey of loss? How are you viewing your grief differently? What from the series will stick? Let me know in the comments.

If you missed any of the sessions, you can watch them on demand in the Video Series tab on the home page.

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You have suffered loss, and you’ve had your story rewritten, and you’ve inventoried your sorrows and struggles and measured the toll it’s taken on you. We’ve spent these past couple of weeks leaning into really difficult things, and I’m grateful for your presence and your investment in the messy places we’ve traveled into. Hopefully, you’ve found some comfort or had some clarity or discovered something you hadn’t realized or been reminded of something you forgot. Today, I want to ask you not to waste it by forgetting it.

The day my father died, I was at the grocery store buying bananas. I remember thinking to myself, “This is insane. Your dad just died. Why the hell are you buying bananas?” But we needed bananas. We’d be waking up for breakfast the next morning, and there wouldn’t be any bananas—so there I was. And lots of other stuff still needed doing too, so over the coming days, I would navigate parking lots, wait in restaurant lines, and sit on park benches, pushing back tears, fighting to stay upright, and in general always being seconds from a total, blubbering, room-clearing freak out. I wanted to wear a sign that said: I JUST LOST MY DAD. PLEASE GO EASY.

Unless anyone passing by looked deeply into my eyes or noticed the occasional break in my voice and thought enough to ask, it’s not like they’d have known what was happening inside me or around me. They wouldn’t have had any idea of the gaping sinkhole that had just opened up and swallowed the normal life of the guy next to them in the produce section. And while I didn’t want to physically wear my actual circumstances on my chest, it probably would have caused people around me to give me space or speak more softly or move more carefully—and it might have made the impossible, almost bearable.

As we think about the grieving that we carry inside us, as we reflect on how lonely the journey can be, and as we sit with the universal nature of loss, one of the greatest gifts grief can give us is the awareness of how much pain we are surrounded by. It can remind us of the trauma that we have proximity to and position us to be attentive to it. A few days after my father died, a good friend said to me, “I know you’re in pain right now. I know it’s all terrible, but I also know there’s something else for you here.” She said, “This experience is going to give you a layer of empathy you’ve never had before. You’re going to understand, and you're going to speak the language of grief more fluently, and you’ll be able to help people.” I didn’t want to hear that at the time, but she was right. It was true of me, and it’s true for you. Since you know how impossible it is to go through this life free from loss, you assume that everyone is mourning something.

Everyone around you: the people you share the grocery store line with, pass in traffic, sit next to at work, encounter on social media, and see across the kitchen table—they’re all experiencing the collateral damage of living. They are all grieving someone, missing someone, or worried about someone. Their marriages are crumbling, or their mortgage payment is late, or they’re waiting on their child’s test results, or they’re getting bananas five years after a death and still pushing back tears because the loss feels as real as it did that first day.

Every single human being you pass by today is fighting to find peace and to push back fear; to get through their daily tasks without breaking down in the grocery stores or in the carpool line or at the post office. Maybe they aren’t mourning the sudden, tragic passing of a parent, but wounded, exhausted people are everywhere, every day, stumbling all around us, and yet most of the time we’re fairly oblivious to them: Parents whose children are terminally ill. Couples in the middle of a divorce. People grieving the loss of loved ones and relationships. Kids being bullied at school. Teenagers who want to end their lives. People marking the anniversary of a death. Parents worried about their depressed teenager. Spouses whose partners are deployed in combat. Families with no idea how to keep the lights on. Single parents with little help and little sleep. Everyone is grieving and worried and fearful, and yet none of them wear the signs, none of them have labels, and none of them come with written warnings reading, I’m Struggling. BE KIND TO ME.

And since they don’t, it’s up to you and me to look more closely and more deeply at everyone around us: at work or at the gas station or in the produce section, and to never assume they aren’t all just hanging by a thread. Because most people are hanging by a thread—and our simple kindness can be that thread. One of the enduring truths I’ve discovered along this journey is that so often, my grief has negatively altered the way I interacted in the world. It’s made me irritable at times and at other times impatient. It’s caused me to withdraw, be quick to argue, or to be emotionally fragile. On many occasions, my grief has left me not at my best. I’ve wanted during those times to be known in my grieving. I’ve wanted to be given the benefit of the doubt that I was doing my best. Most human beings are not at their best but are doing their best. And here’s a secret: this is true of the people you love and live alongside and have trouble living in proximity to. It’s true of the people we don’t like. It’s true of the people we despise. It’s true of the people whose politics make our blood boil. Billions of people are all here together—and all not at their best.

That’s perhaps the greatest thing we can hold onto: no one is immune from the collateral damage of being human, as uncaring as they seem, as insensitive as we think they are, as callous as they may appear from the outside. They are doing their best. Part of good grieving is making other people’s grief central. We need to remind ourselves just how hard the hidden stories around us might be, and to approach each person as a delicate, breakable, invaluable treasure—and to handle them with care. As you make your way through the world today, people won’t be wearing signs to announce their mourning or to alert you to the attrition or to broadcast how terrified they are—but if you look with the right eyes, you’ll see the signs. There are grieving people all around you. Allow yourself to see them and to go easy.

Daily reflection:

"Perhaps they are not stars in the sky but rather openings where our loved ones shine down to let us know they are happy." – Unknown

From John:
When I lost my father, I wasn't prepared for the way it brought an existential/spiritual crisis. I know the story I'd be raised in about what happens after we die, but now in his absence, I was really pressed up against what I actually believed. While my old narrative no longer resonates quite the same, I haven't discarded spirituality or let go of aspirations of a reconnection with him beyond this place. There's just a lot more mystery to sit with.

Question: How have your experiences of loss solidified, reshaped, or completely shattered your religious/spiritual beliefs, or the way you view the idea of the soul or afterlife?

NOTE: This is a free preview of the Good Grieving video series, which is available to all paid subscribers of the Beautiful Mess. If you’d like to upgrade to a paid subscription at a 20 percent discount, you can do it here!

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We all know that change is an inherent part of this life. We understand that intellectually, and we may even welcome it sometimes. We actually all selectively love change when it feels pleasant or positive or beneficial: a birth, a wedding, a raise, a new house. But when change comes through loss and injury, we are rarely prepared for it, let alone warmly welcome it. At first, it is always unnatural and wrong. When we experience trauma, no matter how prepared we may think we were prior, we invariably ask the question of “Why?” Why us or why this person or why my career or why now? We try to make sense of something that seems (and actually is) largely senseless. And the more sudden or unexpected or violent the circumstances, the more the question of why seems to burden us. When we lose a beloved pet, when a relative we’ve cared for passes away, when a 40-year career is suddenly over, we don’t just face the pragmatic implications of the situation: the practical tasks we need to tend to, the physical stuff that needs doing—we face the existential shaking of what we believe about ourselves, about the world, about the whole system that holds it all together. It is a fully disorienting experience.

Today, we’re going to talk about the reorientation that comes through what is often called meaning-making. The idea of meaning-making is an attempt to reacclimate ourselves to the world post-loss, and to respond in a way that makes some sense to our brains, that gives us a sense of agency in the uncontrollable, that helps us reinterpret the big picture, and that gives us a path forward in whatever normal will now look like. Author David Kessler writes: “Loss is simply what happens to you in life. Meaning is what you make happen.” Or to use an idiom we’re all familiar with, meaning-making is taking the lemon-bitterness of loss and making lemonade. When we grieve a letting go or a goodbye or a changed plan, it impacts us in a number of ways: how we see ourselves (the sense of identity that we’ve talked about previously), the way we now view the world and our place in it, and how we imagine the future—and the possibility or lack of it we anticipate there. Part of meaning-making is certainly about coping: it is an attempt to soothe the agony we’re feeling and to ground us in something stable, but in a more powerful way, it’s about crafting a response to painful change that makes that change redemptive.

Depending on how long you’ve been grieving and the circumstances of your loss, you may have done some of this work, but some questions can be helpful no matter where you are on the journey.

One question is: What am I learning or what have I learned about myself in the wake of this loss? How have I surprised myself?

For example, if my partner has died, where have I discovered a self-sufficiency that I hadn’t needed or felt in a long time? In the aftermath of a career detour, how have I been resilient and creative in finding new ways to provide for myself and my family? Faced with the long-term care of a relative, how have I tapped into a patience and empathy I’d never realized I possessed? Mean-making in this way allows us to honor our growth in a season of adversity, to celebrate the Plan B version of ourselves.

Another question we can ask is, What good can I do tangibly, based on my post-loss experience, new insights I’ve had, or clarified beliefs that I can embody?

How has the letting go or the adjusting to attrition or the separation revealed something to me— and what am I going to do now as a result? You might have shifted your priorities or adjusted your schedule to reflect those priorities. Your loss might have illuminated a need that you feel burdened and positioned to address by volunteering or giving financially, maybe starting a social media support group, or launching a nonprofit or scholarship. Or, it might simply have changed a mindset that has made you more aware of people’s needs and more intentional about reaching out to them. As we often talk about, what is the here, now, small, close, and doable response to this loss?

A third question in this meaning-making reorientation is, As part of my role or social status has changed (from being married to single, from being a caregiver to no longer carrying that, from being employed to unemployed), what are the positive aspects of my new status—even if I’d not have chosen it?

What are the positive, healthy, and life-affirming parts of this new version of myself? These questions can help become a new lens through which we can view life beyond our loss. Something important to remember is that meaning-making in this way is not disrespectful to those we’ve lost to death. It is a rational response to the reality of their loss, and it’s a way to honor their impact on us: on what they’ve shown us that we value, and to perpetuate what they were passionate about, while we are still here.

Our family lost a young man named Steve at the age of 23. Throughout his life, he was a compassionate and supportive presence, expressing kindness in a variety of ways and to all sorts of people. His parents launched an organization called DoBetter4Steve as a way of honoring their son’s life and to continue to celebrate his presence and his priorities. This hasn’t given them answers to the “Why?” of losing Steve, but it has given them a path forward that they could walk into without him. Natalie Weaver’s daughter, Sophia, was born with several health challenges and eventually passed away at the age of ten. Natalie became an advocate for families navigating the complicated healthcare system, and she founded Sophia’s Voice, an organization that supports children and adults with disabilities, as well as caregivers and disability rights activists.

But don’t feel compelled to measure yourself by these examples. Meaning-making doesn’t have to be something as complicated or labor-intensive as creating a fundraiser or starting a non-profit. It can simply be about the smaller alterations: about changing the way we see people in our path, about the incremental ways we incorporate the learnings from our loss into daily practices, about a new way of being in a world that isn’t our first choice, but can still be beautiful.

It’s also important to clarify that meaning-making isn’t an effort to answer the question of why? regarding our tragedies and injuries (as that is unanswerable and really useless), but the question of What now? The meaning we make is not about the loss itself—but about our lives, from the loss-forward.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve never liked the phrase “everything happens for a reason.” I don’t believe there is a satisfactory or rational reason we can intellectually grasp for some of the terrible and painful things we go through in this life, but I do believe we can do something in response that is incredibly meaningful. In the coming days, catalog the ways you’ve grown or surprised yourself in the wake of your losses, look at how you have or can embrace a new role or status in the present, and consider the agency you’ve had and still have, to craft a life that isn’t the same or even ideal, but faced with the bitterness of grief, can still be pretty sweet.

Good grieving, my friends…

NOTE: This is a free preview of the Good Grieving video series, which is available to all paid subscribers of the Beautiful Mess. If you’d like to upgrade to a paid subscription at a 20 percent discount, you can do it here!

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Reflection:

“Grief is not a disorder, a disease or sign of weakness. It is an emotional, physical and spiritual necessity, the price you pay for love. The only cure for grief is to grieve.” - Earl Grollman

From John:
Grieving over people who have died is gut-wrenching. It’s breathtaking. It’s horrible. But it’s also often a whole lot easier than grieving someone who is still here. When someone we love leaves this place, even the hard edges have a way of softening over time. We eventually find ourselves holding on the best parts of them. But when we’re estranged from someone, it’s often impossible to do that because the person is still actively damaging us, the injuries are still current.

Question: What kinds of relational grief are you struggling with right now?

My father had died a few months earlier, and I’d recently taken a job at a new church in Raleigh, North Carolina. I’d only been there for five months, when I like to say that I heard God calling me to leave that church. It came in the form of my pastor’s voice saying, “You’re fired.” It wasn’t in my quiet time or in a spectacular…

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Growing up in a fiercely passionate Italian family, that’s a phrase I heard more than a few times. It’s admittedly a bit harsh-sounding, but in a way, it’s actually a simple and fairly eloquent expression of complicated relational grieving. Most of us have experienced a physical loss to death, and we are processing the subtractions that come from our collective mortality, from the fact that our time here is finite. In any relationship between two people, one of the only guarantees about that relationship is that a goodbye will one day take place. We sign up for this in the user agreement of loving and being loved.

And we gather here as “survivors,” which means we are still here, and we are living in the wake of some of those goodbyes, now here without someone else. When death interrupts, since we are the half of the relationship that is still living, one hundred percent of the burden of healing falls upon our shoulders. We are the only ones who can find closure for us. And though there are no hard and fast rules to grieving, there are certain methods of processing “that” kind of loss; ways we can accept and embrace the reality of the finality of that interruption. In fact, when people we love die, it is the impossibility of the continuation of that relationship that eventually makes it possible for us to move ahead. At some point, we intellectually come to terms with the fact that there is a decisive ending, at least to our physical connection. Even if we have unresolved negative feelings toward those who have died, we can sometimes transfer the majority of our anger ultimately to death itself or to the fact of their death. We can accept that the person we love would still be here if they could, and with time, that can smooth the jagged edges of the sadness and the anger.

But what do we do when the person we grieve is still living? When it isn’t death that has severed the connection, but something else? When the cause of the separation is one or both of us? What do we do when the divide has been a choice made on one side or the other? Of the thousands of people we surveyed as part of this series, a massive 90 percent have expressed feelings of grief related to politics alone, with over 15 percent of them experiencing a complete relationship separation in the last few years. That is a massive amount of collective and largely unprocessed pain. Political affiliations, religious beliefs, interpersonal conflicts, the natural challenges of relationship dynamics, and the injuries others have inflicted upon us—can all drive wedges between us and those we love and have lived life in close proximity to, and that introduces a complexity to our grieving that is incredibly challenging. In fact, often it takes us a long time to even realize that we are grieving. When relationships experience a loss of intimacy, we often feel the emotional distance before we lose physical proximity. It can be tough to identify those more nuanced losses.

A woman named Rachel came up to me at a Texas tour stop and said, “I am a Fox News orphan.” She continued, talking about the way politics has become a divide between her and her 74-year-old mother. She said, “I don’t recognize her anymore. She just believes everything she watches on partisan media.” Rachel said. “It’s gotten to be nearly impossible to find common ground with her. She isn’t the mother I grew up with, and things just aren’t the same between us anymore. I feel like I’ve lost her and she’s still here.” Nearly every day, I hear from people like Rachel, who are mourning a death that is both unnatural and ongoing.

It’s easier to eulogize someone after they leave the planet. Often, when someone we love dies, we can find ourselves remembering the best of those we’ve lost. We can sometimes eventually let go of the anger and animosity we held toward them, perhaps simply because we realize that we have no way to resolve it between us. In the absence of any possibility of an actual conversation with the person we’ve lost to death, we know that we have no choice but to move forward. But when the person on the other end of the divide still exists, and (in the case of family obligations or in a divorce, where children and grandchildren need to be considered or fellow church members or neighbors), we still have to remain connected in some way, there is a messiness and unfinishedness that we live with. It’s almost more difficult to figure out how to move forward from relational deaths because the person on the other end of our grieving may still be doing damage, and because grieving a physical death is easier for other people to understand from the outside.

A friend once described the end of a relationship as “having someone who is dead to me but still alive to the people around me.” He shared that this reality made it almost impossible to process his negative feelings about the other person, because many of the people who comprise their shared tribe are still connected. The tribal fractures that accompany relational death are complex and always shifting. We find ourselves in triangulation or having to navigate a disconnection with one person while still being connected to others who are still in a relationship with them. This makes talking about that kind of grief extremely tricky. The most difficult challenge when we experience a relational fracture or separation, as opposed to a physical death, is that our strategies for finding closure or healing aren’t the same. In fact, grieving over people who are still alive is so much more complicated because we are faced with the decision of whether or not we will attempt to retain some kind of emotional connection or sever it fully. Are they truly “dead to us,” or do we hold out the possibility of relational resurrection? Can we live without contact with the other person, or is there a surface-level interaction or uneasy truce that we have to make on behalf of others?

With the relationships we’ve found in crisis due to politics or religion, we sometimes vacillate wildly between cutting people out and giving them another chance; between hoping for progress and writing them off completely. If I had a dime for every person who’s reached out to me to tell them how to handle this decision, I’d have a mountain of dimes. And unfortunately, there are no hard and fast rules, other than “Make the best decision you can in this day and be willing course correct the next day. The human heart’s capacity to heal is almost unfathomable. Many of us have had relationships that we assumed were beyond salvaging, somehow be reconciled with time and circumstance, in ways we’d have sworn were impossible. And in some ways, it is that possibility that keeps us in a state of suspended pain. Even if we have lost all connection points, we know that they still exist, and that keeps a part of our grieving unresolved.

There are a few ideas I’d like you to keep in mind as you face the in-between of relational grieving and the challenges it brings:

1. Accept your “at this moment” perspective toward the other person or group, whether your family, your church, or a group of friends. Be OK with your vacillation, your inconsistency, your conflicted feelings, and your lack of tolerance toward those you are estranged from. Don’t burden yourself with how you feel you’re supposed to be responding, and simply be authentic about what you can and can’t abide right now, in this moment.

2. Be willing to change that perspective. You are not beholden to how you feel right now, and you will likely not always feel the way you feel. Seek wise counsel, continually reflect, take time to heal and get perspective, and be ok changing your mind if you find yourself believing that to be necessary or healthy for you.

3. Acknowledge your de-tribing. Any kind of relational break is destabilizing, and it leaves you in a deficit or with a relational absence. It pulls apart some of the communal threads that are critical to all of us. Important: Even if the break between you and someone else is ultimately healthy, it will not seem so at the time. Grieve the loss of the tribe that you are experiencing.

4. Lean into re-tribing. Intentionally build connections with others, especially those who may share your values. This may be volunteering for a local nonprofit, participating in social affinity groups, or cultivating new friendships—not as a replacement for the person or people you may have lost or become separated from, but because community is non-negotiable for this life and you need to cultivate and seek it out continually.

And 5. Be selfish. We mentioned previously that you are the world’s leading expert on your experience of grief, so err on the side of yourself when you don’t know what the best response is. Do what you need to feel safe or at peace.

These relational divides brought on by politics and religion, and by the injuries we sustain, are not trivial, and they are not arbitrary. They are sometimes the collateral damage of us being our most authentic selves. They are often signs of moral divides, opposing worldviews, or the result of profound differences with people with whom we once felt at home. While not having the finality of physical loss, these fractures are real and painful and ones that we need to name and confront and move forward with. We’ll talk more about grieving people who are still alive, but for now, make the wisest choice you can and rest in that.

Reflection:

Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life. - Anne Roiphe

From John:
As I said in one of the weekly videos, in the aftermath of a death, we are called “the survivors”, but that is merely the part of the story that we have no control over. The loss happened, and by virtue of the fact that we’re still here, we have survived it. The rest of our time becomes about how we respond, about us choosing what we will do now, about how we will continue to live post-loss. If death or tragedy twists the plot of our story, we have agency in deciding the next chapter.

Question: What have been the biggest challenges that you’ve faced since experiencing your loss, and how have you remade your life in the days since? What challenges do you still face?

NOTE: This is a free preview of the Good Grieving video series, which is available to all paid subscribers of the Beautiful Mess. If you’d like to upgrade to a paid subscription at a 20 percent discount, you can do it here!

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After his death, one of the things that became my constant companion has been the idea of thinness; of the stark, brutal, incomprehensibly small space between living and leaving. Bruce Springsteen has written a song about this called “One Minute You’re Here, Next Minute You're Gone.” My father died in his sleep on a cruise ship following a birthday dinner filled with food and laughter, and with the usual excitement and promise of the first day at sea. As far as any of us can tell, he experienced no pain, no trauma, no anguish. He simply went to sleep and stayed asleep. As he closed his eyes, it probably never occurred to him that these were his last hours here. No soul-searching, no fond looking back, no final words, no dramatic speeches. I wanted to feel relief, but what I really felt was cheated. (As we’ve spoken about previously, both losing someone or something suddenly without any time to prepare, and seeing a person or relationship or our health change slowly over time, each has its unique difficulties. The bottom line is, there is no perfect way to lose what we love.)

I’ll never forget one of the first things my mother said when I spoke to her on the phone the morning after my father died was: “He had a beautiful death.” And it was, in its gentleness and swiftness, indeed beautiful in a way, but it was that same silent suddenness and the immediacy of the event that began an existential crisis in me. I remember having a question rise up in my head shortly after that day: “Where is my father now?” Like, “What happened to him?” I mean, I knew what I was supposed to believe, and I knew what the story I’d accepted up until this point was, but this was rubber-meet-road, gut-check stuff. Was there a place called Heaven, and was he now there? Was he an invisible presence hovering in my room? Was he actually encountering people he loved who’d died previously? None of it made much sense, and I kept turning to my dad, sleeping there that night. I pictured his face in that moment, lying there in bed, as he quietly passed from this life into what is beyond it; no fanfare or drama or bombast. He just breathed—and then he didn’t. His heart was beating, and then it ceased to. And in that most infinitesimal of spaces, my father’s 70-year life was over, and so many others were irrevocably, completely altered. In the width of one breath, everything changed for me. In the width of one breath, my dad moved from here to hereafter. I’d heard and spoken all the words about how quickly life moves and about how fragile it is, but those words were different now. They were close and personal and invasive.

My faith told me that on a September night in a cruise ship bed, in that thinnest of expanses, my father went from conscious to much more than conscious; that without ever waking up, he suddenly received the answers to the questions that everyone on this side of the thinness wonders about. And yet, some days I confess, as I ponder all of it, that my faith, too, becomes the thinness. It sometimes stretches to a paper-width place, as hope and grief pull from opposite ends, and where I strain to look for the light breaking through. The circumstances of our loss often thrust us into the crucible of our most sacred and fundamental beliefs, and we find out in that excruciating and disorienting place whether they can bear the weight of the ugly reality of our suffering. When we grieve, everything that was once relegated to theory becomes tangible—or it doesn’t. A dear friend of mine lost his son to an unthinkable act of violence when he was in his early twenties. In the years since that terrible pivot point in his family’s store, he has shared with me his continual struggle to make sense of the nature and the circumstances of his son’s death: the ways that although he was eventually able to understand it as a horrible act committed by an unwell human being—he still can’t completely buy into the existence of a God who is all-powerful and all loving. My friend is still a sojourner, and he still has a working spirituality, but he’s not sure he can ever go back to the old story and the welcome comforts and easy answers he once found there.

Often, when someone dies, people do spiritual damage without even intending to. When my father died, people saw my total, alarming devastation, and in their urgency to alleviate some of it, did what good people do when other people they care for are grieving: they said things. And often the things they said, as birthed from a beautiful place as they were, really hurt. What they so desired to be healing and helpful actually poked the already massive wound in my heart, and made it worse. You may recognize a few of the things I heard. You may recognize a few of the things I heard.

“They’re in a better place.” People imagine this will feel comforting to those who mourn; the idea that those we’ve lost are somewhere more beautiful, enjoying the afterlife. There is rarely solace in this, because the absence of those we love means that this place (the place we live and need to stay) has grown much worse without them. It is this place that we now have to inhabit, forever disconnected from them, that weighs the heaviest on us. We don’t want to imagine our parents and best friends and siblings and children, blissful without us.

People of faith will say, “God needed another angel.” The moments after a death are rarely a good time for a spontaneous sermon, even the most well-meaning one. Religious people tend to want to make theological sense of really senseless loss, and they often resort to platitudes that again, feel helpful—but are more likely injurious. Painting for a survivor, the image of a selfish Creator somewhere in Heaven who actually engineered their blinding sadness by taking someone from them, doesn’t just exacerbate the trauma—it makes it the work of a God they are likely to resent.

One of the most common existential crisis-inducing statements in response to tragedy is: “Everything happens for a reason.” On the surface, this seems like a safe declaration, but it’s a minefield for a grieving person. Now, they not only have the face the emotional wreckage of their loss, but they also have to somehow figure out the whys of that loss; the purpose for God or Fate or the Universe taking their loved one in that manner and at that time. That’s far too great an ask for a person on their best day—and this is not their best day. If there is a reason for such despair, it’s probably not possible to comprehend on this side of the hereafter.

And it isn’t just death that can cause us to lose our religion. When we’ve endured abuse or when we’ve been the victims of violence; when we’ve watched a loved one battle a debilitating addiction; when we’ve experienced financial collapse, or simply witnessing the ugliness and suffering that others have endured—we can easily question what we once rested in and found solace in, about God or goodness or the purpose to us being here. I’d like you to spend some time this week tracing the path of your spiritual journey or simply your existential security, in light of the losses you have experienced. Try to do more than vaguely process these ideas, but name with as much specificity as you can, the kind of loss you experienced, the precise questions that you’ve found yourself asking, and do your best to really press into how you feel you believe differently about God or faith or prayer or humanity because of them.

Sometimes, our profound crises: whether the death of a loved one or the ending of a relationship, or the changed plans of a failed career or physical injury can actually deepen our spiritual journeys, causing us to press into prayer or confirming what we’d believed to be true surprising us with a presence in our pain that confirmed for us the truth that though mysterious, there is something good holding this all together. So many of you have shared with me the ways in which you have found a counterintuitive experience of gentleness your mourning, the ways other people showed up for you and pointed you something greater about humanity, or the ways that you’ve found a sense of purpose and calling in the wake of your own trauma that you know you’d likely never have found without grief as its catalyst. And here’s the thing about all of this spiritual nausea and existential motion sickness that comes with our losses of people and relationships and health and security—it’s all perfectly natural, and again, none of it is wrong.

This week, as you reflect upon the impact your pain has had on your belief system or on your working theology or simply about the conclusions you’ve come to about the meaning of life or the goodness of people, don’t be as concerned about whether you feel more or less religious, more or less spiritual now than you used to, but just realize that part of good grieving is being OK with the changes that come with trying to believe while experience a pain that is beyond belief.

Reflection:

“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o'erwrought heart and bids it break.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Grief can feel like pressure, moving outward from the deepest parts of our hearts. At times, the anguish can build up within us until one day, it erupts violently. Giving words to our emotions is a release valve. Whether we are mourning the loss of a person, a relationship, a friendship, a dream, or a plan, we have to find ways to speak, write, sculpt, or sing what our hearts feel.

Question: What has been your experience of putting words to your grieving, and how has it helped you on your journey?

NOTE: This is a free preview of the Good Grieving video series, which is available to all paid subscribers of the Beautiful Mess. If you’d like to upgrade to a paid subscription at a 20 percent discount, you can do it here!

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