Rants in Person

In that gospel, Jesus does not cross the road to beat the shit out of somebody and then make a joke about it to applause.

Tony Spell crossed the road, put hands on a man half his age, got arrested for second-degree battery, then walked back into church and turned it into a joke about “laying hands on the sick” while the congregation clapped (1). That is not revival. That is not courage. That is not some holy masculine moment for the Facebook saints to have a circle jerk over. That is the flesh wearing a pastor’s suit and asking the church to call it Jesus. And that is exactly the diseased heart of American Christianity. Not because a man got angry. Men get angry. Fathers get scared. Husbands hear threats against their wives, their children, their grandchildren, and something old wakes up in the blood before the brain even gets a vote. I understand that animal. I understand the part of a man that would want to cross the street and turn somebody’s mouth into gravel if he threatened the people you love. I understand the rage completely, which is exactly why the Christian claim matters here.

Christianity, according to its own language, is not supposed to be the religion of whatever your animal nature already wanted to do. It is supposed to be the place where that animal gets named, dragged into the light, and told it does not get to call itself God. That is the part these people keep skimming over or do not read at all. That is the part that gets buried under pulpits, flags, Facebook comments, cheap warrior memes, and all the little chest-beating fantasies built for men who want Jesus to cosign what their ego already wrote in blood. The whole point of claiming to follow Christ is not that you get to do whatever your rage demands and then sprinkle scripture over the mess afterward. That is not discipleship by any honest reading of the text. That is a taxidermic Jesus stuffed with human appetite and stood up in the sanctuary so everybody can pretend he still breathes.

Spell claimed the man threatened to rape and kill members of his family, and there were already police reports and disputes between the families before this happened (2). Fine. Put every bit of that in the record. Let the court sort the facts from the theater. Let the police reports, the video, the witnesses, and the timeline do what they are supposed to do. But none of that cleans up what happened in the pulpit afterward. None of that turns a violent confrontation into a sermon illustration. None of that makes “laying hands on the sick” less disgusting when it is being used as a punchline after a man got beaten and a pastor got arrested. The fight is one thing. The applause is another. The applause is the sermon.

That is where the mask falls off, because the congregation did not clap for repentance. They did not clap because a man stood before them broken by his own failure, ashamed that rage got the best of him, asking God to help him stop confusing protection with revenge. They clapped because he made it funny. They clapped because violence sounded holy for a second. They clapped because their preacher took the language of healing and twisted it into a joke about harm, and deep down, that scratched something in them that their own Jesus was supposed to crucify. That is not the Holy Spirit, even by their standards. That is spiritual cowardice.

These people love to preach about “the flesh” when the flesh belongs to somebody they already hate. Gay people are the flesh. Trans people are the flesh. Women who will not submit are the flesh. Poor people asking for help are the flesh. Addicts are the flesh. Immigrants are the flesh. Anybody outside the holy country club is apparently just a walking appetite waiting to be condemned. But let a preacher’s violence get caught on camera, and suddenly the flesh becomes courage. Suddenly the flesh becomes leadership. Suddenly the flesh becomes protection. Suddenly the flesh becomes funny. Suddenly the flesh gets a Bible verse wrapped around it like a bloody napkin and passed around the room as proof that God is still moving. God is not moving in that. That is the old man refusing to die and demanding worship music for his survival.

This is why the whole thing smells like holy bullshit. It is not just hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is too polite a word for it. This is spiritual rot dressed up like masculine virtue. This is what happens when a church spends more time worshiping dominance than formation. They do not want Jesus to transform them. They want Jesus to authorize them. They do not want the cross. They want a permission slip. They want a savior who lets them swing first, preach after, and still feel they have a place in heaven. That is not Christianity as their own book describes it. It is more like a militant monotheistic cult where everyone’s favorite book is not the Bible. It is Lord of the Flies.

In the story Christians claim is sacred, Jesus was accused. Jesus was mocked. Jesus was beaten. Jesus was spit on. Jesus was stripped, humiliated, tortured, and executed by religious cowards manipulating state power to finish what their theology started. According to that story, he did not fight back. That is literally the entire point being revealed there. The cross is where Jesus exposes human violence by refusing to become its mirror. He does not defeat the religious elite by becoming one. He does not expose the religious machine by becoming another version of it. He stands inside the machinery of accusation, humiliation, torture, and death, and reveals the whole thing as morally bankrupt. Then American Christianity looks at that and says, “Cool story, but what if Jesus had better hands?”

That is where we are. A religion that claims to worship a crucified man while constantly lusting after crucifiers. It wants strength, but mostly the animal kind. It wants authority, but mostly the kind that can dominate. It wants holiness, but only if holiness never asks the ego to die. It wants resurrection without crucifixion, salvation without surrender, forgiveness without repentance, and Jesus without the inconvenience of actually following him. That is why this was never just about Tony Spell. This is about a version of Christianity that has become so addicted to power that it cannot even recognize its own contradiction anymore. It can condemn lust while celebrating rage. It can preach self-control while applauding a beating. It can warn everybody else about “the flesh” while giving the flesh a microphone, a pulpit, and a standing ovation. It can quote scripture with blood still drying under the fingernails and call the whole thing faith.

And do not hand me the cheap little defense that “a man has to protect his family.” Of course a man has to protect his family. If someone is actively harming your wife, your children, your grandchildren, or anyone under your care, you defend them. You stand in the gap. You stop the harm. That is not the argument. The argument is that protection and retaliation are not the same thing. Defense and vengeance are not the same thing. Courage and ego are not the same thing. A pastor should know that, especially a pastor who stands up every week and tells other people how to crucify their flesh. If a man wants the pulpit, he does not get to act confused when people hold him to the story he claims to represent. He asked for the microphone. He accepted the authority. He wears the role. He tells other people how to live, repent, obey, forgive, submit, believe, and be holy. Fine. Then he can be measured by the same damn gospel he keeps preaching.

In that gospel, Jesus does not cross the road to beat the shit out of somebody and then make a joke about it to applause. That is Peter swinging the sword in the garden before Jesus tells him to put it away. That is the people yelling, “Give us Barabbas.” That is those who think they speak for God desecrating anything pure in the thought of God. That is empire. That is the religious machine getting caught counting the money with their pants down. That is human appetite wearing religious cologne. The sickness is not that people fail. Everybody fails. The sickness is turning failure into proof of strength. The sickness is taking the moment where repentance should happen and replacing it with applause. The sickness is watching a congregation become an audience for violence and still pretending the room is holy. That is not holiness. That is moral cosplay. They are all just blinding each other.

If Spell had stood in front of his congregation and said, “I was wrong. I let rage rule me. I have to face what I did. Pray for my family, pray for that young man, and pray that I do not confuse my anger with God’s will again,” then maybe there would be something worth talking about. That would at least smell like repentance within the system he claims to represent. Instead, he turned it into a punchline, and they clapped. That sound should haunt every honest Christian in the room, because if the church cannot tell the difference between healing and harm, between protection and revenge, between Jesus and the flesh, then what exactly is it forming in people? Not Christ, but something else. Something meaner. Something older. Something that knows how to quote scripture but not how to be transformed by it. Something that can talk about love while salivating for dominance. Something that can condemn the world while becoming indistinguishable from it. Something that calls itself faith because “bloodlust with a Bible” does not look as good on the church sign.

A pastor who cannot tell the difference between protecting his family and glorifying violence from the pulpit should not be a pastor. He can be a husband. He can be a father. He can be angry. He can be scared. He can be a man who failed and now has to face consequences like every other human being. But he does not get to make violence sacred because his congregation liked the punchline. He does not get to put blood on his hands and call it anointing. He does not get to drag Jesus across the street with him, because the Jesus in their own text already showed these people what he does when violence comes for him. He does not become it.