Rants in Person

Beaten by the Cross

I remember being 20 years old at Teen Mania’s Honor Academy, getting ripped out of sleep to the Braveheart soundtrack like somebody thought Jesus needed his own boot camp trailer. It was theater, sure, but it was also conditioning. Adrenaline. Siege mentality. Holy-war pageantry for kids too young to know the difference between devotion and manipulation. I wasn’t watching it from the cheap seats either. I was in that world. I sat in meetings with Ron Luce. I was a raging bear. I saw the machine from the inside. And what chills me now is not just how intense it was back then. It’s how familiar it feels again. The recent Shiny Happy People: A Teenage Holy War brought a lot of that world back into public view, and it hit because it wasn’t exaggerating the militarized, theatrical insanity of Teen Mania. That world was real. I lived in it. [1]

That same emotional architecture is all over America right now. Same trembling sense of divine emergency. Same fantasy that the nation belongs to one sanctioned version of God, one approved tribe, one loud righteous mob with a flag in one hand and a cross in the other. Back then, they woke us up with cinematic war music and told us we were chosen for the battle. Made us spread their gospel and made us pay them for the “opportunity.” Now grown adults are being fed the same apocalyptic syrup through politics, media, pulpits, and presidential branding. Different costumes. Same fever. I watch it now and it feels like watching an old trauma put on a suit and walk into government. [1][2]

And that is the part that pisses me off. Not in some cute internet way. Not in some detached “well, everyone has their beliefs” kind of way. I mean the kind of pissed off that comes when you realize people built your inner world out of fear and called it love. The kind of pissed off that comes when you realize your longing for God got used like fuel. This country was not supposed to become somebody’s Christian revenge fantasy. People came here fleeing religious coercion, sectarian domination, and governments tangled up with churches. The American promise was never “welcome, now conform.” It was supposed to mean you get to be who you are without the state picking theological winners and losers. The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom said people should not be compelled to support religious worship or ministry, and that principle fed directly into the broader American fight against state-backed religion. [3]

That’s why when I hear the language coming out of this era—when I see a White House Faith Office, a federal task force aimed at so-called “anti-Christian bias,” and the state inching toward acting like the official customer service desk for one religious identity—I don’t hear revival. I hear the same old manipulative drumbeat with federal lighting and a presidential seal slapped on it. Reuters reported those moves in February 2025, and even the White House framed them as protecting Christians specifically through the machinery of government. That is not neutral. That is not pluralism. That is the government stepping onto the altar in cowboy boots and pretending it’s there to mop the floor, or if you’re lucky wash your feet. [2]

And of course it never stops with symbolic bullshit. It bleeds into schools, public life, law, and culture. Reuters reported that lawmakers in 29 states proposed at least 91 bills in 2024 pushing religion into public schools, including Ten Commandments displays and Bible-centered mandates. That’s how this stuff works. It always arrives dressed as heritage, morality, values, tradition. But underneath the pressed suit and Sunday cologne, it’s the same old power grab: define the nation as religious, define dissent as rebellion, define outsiders as a threat, and call the whole thing righteousness. [4]

That’s why this hits me in the bones. I know what it feels like when faith gets weaponized into identity formation. I know the smell of that room. It smells like money. I know the language. I know how easy it is to make young people feel electrified by fear, purpose, and belonging. Teen Mania’s whole machine ran on that current, and Shiny Happy People: A Teenage Holy War documents just how militarized, theatrical, and psychologically intense that culture became. Dude, I had a card. I spoke to youth pastors. Other than my actual military service, training and actual deployment to war, I have only two scars. Get me? Teen Mania collapsed into bankruptcy in 2015, but Ron Luce never really disappeared. Public reporting and his own current ministry materials show he remained active through Generation Next and related youth programming. That matters, because this ideology didn’t die. It rebranded. [1][5]

And that right there is where the heartbreak lives. Because when you finally start seeing it clearly, it does not feel like winning an argument. It feels like getting your heart ripped out in slow motion. It feels like finding out the thing that formed you also deformed you. It feels like realizing that some of the adults you trusted most handed you a spiritual script full of fear, dominance, obedience, and spectacle, then acted like they were handing you truth itself. That kind of realization doesn’t just make you smarter. It makes you grieve. It makes you furious. It makes you look back at your younger self and want to pull him out of the room by the shoulders and say, “None of this theater is God. None of this manipulation is love.”

And I’m not saying America is literally becoming Teen Mania with better hair and worse suits. I’m saying the operating system looks real damn familiar. Make people feel under siege. Tell them they are chosen. Feed them urgency. Wrap politics in sacred language. Hand them enemies. Promise them destiny. It is old machinery, and it still works. That is what makes it dangerous. PRRI’s 2025 American Values Atlas found that about 10% of Americans qualified as Christian nationalism adherents and another 20% as sympathizers. That means this is not some fringe campfire hallucination anymore. It is a live current running through the bloodstream of the country. [6]

What enrages me is how cheap it makes faith. It turns mystery into marketing. Conscience into branding. Worship into optics. The cross becomes a prop in a campaign ad. Jesus gets dragged into state power like he’s running for sheriff of the empire he told people to resist. And the people selling this garbage always want to act persecuted while they are reaching for the biggest microphone, the biggest law, the biggest classroom wall, the biggest federal stamp they can get their hands on. That isn’t spiritual depth. That’s domination anxiety dressed up as holiness.

I already lived through a version of that world. I know what it sounds like when the music swells and somebody starts telling young souls that God needs warriors more than he needs honest human beings. I know what happens when intensity gets mistaken for truth. I know what it feels like to realize you were beaten by the cross before you ever understood what they had nailed to it. So when I look at this country and hear that old soundtrack rising again beneath the politics, I don’t feel nostalgic. I feel warned.

America is not supposed to be a holy war camp with better branding. It is not supposed to be a place where one theology gets to crawl into the wiring of government and call itself freedom. People came here to get away from that kind of suffocating religious control, not to reinvent it with eagles and flag pins. I’ve already seen what happens when faith becomes a recruitment tool and power starts talking like God. It doesn’t make people freer. It makes them obedient. And that should scare the hell out of everybody.

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Sources

• [1] People Magazine — Teen Mania / Shiny Happy People documentary coverage
• [2] Reuters — White House Faith Office and anti-Christian bias task force (Feb 6, 2025)
• [3] Library of Congress — Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom / Jefferson materials
• [4] Reuters — US public schools religion legislation (2024)
• [5] People — Ron Luce and Generation Next reporting
• [6] PRRI — Christian Nationalism Across All 50 States / American Values Atlas

They Sell You a Shepherd

People love handing out the velvet verses first, the soft-focus Yahweh lines, the little narcotics of devotion printed on coffee mugs for people who have clearly never read the chapter before or after the line they’re quoting. “Be still, and know that I am God” gets served up like a warm towel for the nervous soul, when in context it lands like the voice of absolute power ordering the world to freeze and acknowledge who runs the machinery [1]. That is not tenderness. That is command. If some man leaned over a woman at a bar and said, “Be still, and know that I am a man,” nobody would call it comforting. They would call the police. It is just domination and control wrapped in a sentence. But in church, with enough distance and enough repetition, command gets mistaken for comfort, and fear learns how to wear perfume and drink the Kool-Aid.

Then there is Job, that old theological fever dream that believers keep calling profound because they have already decided God is innocent no matter what the text says. The story opens by telling you Job is blameless and upright [2]. An innocent man with clean hands. No hidden clause in the contract. Then Yahweh lets the Adversary—Lucifer, by the way; why is he in Heaven? Thought he was kicked out—wreck him anyway: children dead, wealth gone, body destroyed, mind dragged through the mud of cosmic humiliation, all to settle a wager inside the divine court [3]. And when God finally speaks, he does not explain himself with mercy or moral clarity. He thunders from the whirlwind with the ancient equivalent of, “Who the hell do you think you are?” [4] Strip away the stained glass and the worship soundtrack, and what you have is raw asymmetry: infinite power crushing an innocent man, then demanding awe as the proper response. My studies and experience tell me I should say, “Go fuck yourself, Yahweh.” It is literally the attitude of billionaire elites: I can do whatever I want to whomever I want, and I want praise and respect in return.

The contradictions do not help the case. Yahweh introduces himself as “compassionate and merciful… filled with unfailing love,” then immediately says he lays the sins of the parents upon their children and grandchildren [5]. That is not mercy. That is inherited punishment being justified. Imagine sending a two-year-old to jail because his father robbed a liquor store. Then Ezekiel comes along and says the child will not be punished for the parent’s sins; each person is responsible for their own guilt [6]. Good. Fine. Excellent. So which one are we bowing to here? The God who punishes descendants for what they did not do, or the God who says that would be unjust? This is where a lot of believers start tap-dancing in doctrinal circles, because most of them do not actually know their Bible. They know the trailer. They know the greatest hits. They know the verses stitched onto blankets, slapped on bumpers, and spoken at funerals. They do not know the whole case file, because the whole case file is violent, contradictory, and deeply inconvenient to the fantasy that the Old Testament presents some seamless portrait of moral perfection. Almost like an ancient Epstein Files. Believe me, it is all in there.

And then Amalek comes through the drywall like the Kool-Aid Man. In 1 Samuel 15, Yahweh orders the destruction of men, women, children, infants, and even the animals [7]. Not just enemy soldiers. Not merely political leadership. Infants. Livestock. Total eradication. Ancient genocide with a divine auto-pen. And this is not some dead relic buried safely in the amber of the Iron Age. The Amalek language has modern political afterlife. Netanyahu explicitly invoked “Remember what Amalek did to you” in an official statement on October 28, 2023, and current reporting has traced the renewed “Greater Israel” narrative in Israeli and regional political discourse [8]. So when people pretend these texts are harmless Sunday school fossils, that is either ignorance or dishonesty. Old theology still bleeds into modern policy. Sacred violence does not stay safely in the sanctuary once politicians discover it can be weaponized. This weaponization began long ago and ruled the world with an iron fist—Constantine, Catholicism, Islam.

And this is where the Isaac and Ishmael ghost starts pacing in the hallway. People keep pretending one side inherited covenant and the other inherited grievance, as if the family feud somehow matured into moral wisdom. But from where I stand, after reading the texts and watching the modern fallout, both streams have been used to sanctify violence. Different tents, same old fire. Different prophets, same God, same blood theology once the knives come out. Most ancient gods were violent. Most ancient empires were violent. That part is not shocking. The shocking part is that modern people, especially dumb American Christians who could not survive a knife fight with source criticism, still act like the Abrahamic archive dropped from heaven as the final word on ethics instead of reading like what it often is: tribal memory, political theology, conquest literature, priestly revision, and generations of men explaining power in the language of God.

Imagine if we made foreign policy by the Emerald Tablet. Imagine Congress solemnly quoting Hermes before approving missiles. Imagine cable preachers yelling that the Necronomicon clearly justifies bombing runs. Imagine some governor invoking Marduk, Odin, or a passage from the Mahabharata to explain why more children need to die in the name of destiny. Christians would laugh that madness straight out of the room. And they should. But attach the same fever dream to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Zion, covenant, prophecy, or end-times charts, and suddenly lunacy gets treated like wisdom in a necktie. Same species of superstition. Same ancient urge to baptize tribal conflict in cosmic meaning. The difference is not rationality. The difference is familiarity. People will mock another man’s mythology while dying for the one their parents taught them before they had a chance to think.

And before the sentimentalists rush in with “but God is love,” let’s put this bed under the black light. Egypt’s firstborn are killed from palace to prison [9], and then Psalm 136 turns that horror into praise: “Give thanks to him who killed the firstborn of Egypt. His faithful love endures forever” [10]. Read that like a sane mammal. Sit with it for a full minute without the worship music. Children die, and the congregation is told to call it love. Then you get Elisha, mocked by boys for being bald, and two bears come out and maul forty-two of them after the prophet curses them [11]. That is not hidden. That is not fringe. That is in the text. So when believers clutch their pearls because somebody dares say the Old Testament God often acts like a universal dictator and complete asshole, I am left staring at the page wondering whether they have actually read the damn thing or just inherited a devotional filter thick enough to blur out the screams. It feels like weakness to me, not strength. Like the old song, “I’ll Fly Away,” because I am too weak to be a human and love the life I have been given.

They sell you a shepherd and hand you a sovereign with a kill list. They quote the still waters and skip the blood in the street. They talk about love while defending inherited punishment, massacre, terror, and conquest, because once power gets called holy, millions of people will kneel before what they would condemn in any human ruler. That is the fallacy at the rotten center of the whole machine: if God does it, it is good by definition. If it looks cruel, your conscience is the problem. If it sounds contradictory, your reading is too shallow. If it reeks of empire, you are supposed to call it mystery. That game can justify anything. It has justified plenty. And yes, I know many people of many faiths. If your faith helps you in your heart and makes you kinder, more honest, more human, wonderful. But if you use it to become a bigot, to excuse cruelty, to sanctify war, to flatten other people into enemies of God, then fuck you. And like Paul said, we see through a glass, darkly [12]. Maybe the problem is not the glass. Maybe they just hate what is staring back at them.

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Source Spine

• [1] Psalm 46:10, NLT
• [2] Job 1:1, NLT
• [3] Job 1:8–12; 2:3–7, NLT
• [4] Job 38:1–4, NLT
• [5] Exodus 34:6–7, NLT
• [6] Ezekiel 18:20, NLT
• [7] 1 Samuel 15:2–3, NLT
• [8] Netanyahu statement invoking Amalek, Oct. 28, 2023
  “Greater Israel” narrative / current political discussion — Al Jazeera, Feb. 26, 2026
• [9] Exodus 12:29, NLT
• [10] Psalm 136:10, NLT
• [11] 2 Kings 2:23–24, NLT
• [12] 1 Corinthians 13:12, KJV

War Jesus

They took the brown-skinned preacher from a dusty Roman backwater, the one who said “Blessed are the peacemakers” and “Blessed are the merciful,” and turned him into a flag-draped airstrike mascot with a nuclear hard-on. They took the Sermon on the Mount and fed it through a Pentagon shredder until all that came out was smoke, campaign cash, and a grinning televangelist telling the flock to keep one eye on Revelation and the other on the weapons market. Jesus said the meek inherit the earth. War Jesus says level the neighborhood first and sort out the theology later. Jesus said love your enemies. War Jesus says bomb them, sanction them, starve them, call it prophecy, and pass the plate on Sunday. That is not Christianity. That is empire in a choir robe.

And now the costume is slipping. Pete Hegseth stood at a March 10 Pentagon briefing and called the Iranian regime “barbaric savages,” bragged about “ruthless precision,” and framed the whole thing like a holy-duty action trailer for damaged men with too much power and not enough history. Mike Huckabee said Israel had a biblical right to much of the Middle East, remarks Reuters reported drew regional condemnation as “dangerous and inflammatory.” Greg Laurie, in his own March 2 prophecy write-up, said 1948 was a prophetic “super sign,” said Iran is a major end-times player, and laid out the usual dispensational conveyor belt: rapture, tribulation, Second Coming. That is the trick right there. You turn blood into a countdown clock, rubble into a sermon illustration, and dead kids into proof that your chart from 1987 was right all along.

The Beatitudes don’t survive contact with these people because the Beatitudes are an indictment of these people. Blessed are those who mourn does not mean monetize grief for geopolitical leverage. Blessed are the merciful does not mean cheer collective punishment because your favorite minister said Ezekiel is trending. Blessed are the peacemakers sure as hell does not mean baptize escalation because some political ghoul thinks God wrote foreign policy in code. If your version of Jesus needs cruise missiles, ethnic supremacy, and a lobbyist’s talking points to stay alive, then congratulations: you didn’t defend the gospel. You skinned it and wore the hide.

And let’s stop pretending Benjamin Netanyahu just woke up yesterday worried about Iran. This drum has been beating for years. Reuters reported his 2012 UN “red line” moment, where he theatrically warned about Iran’s nuclear program. In 2015 he went to Washington insisting an Iranian bomb would be an “existential threat” to Israel. In June 2025, after the 12-day war, he said Israel had removed “two immediate existential threats”: nuclear annihilation and ballistic missiles. Same song, new stage lighting. Different year, same apocalypse salesman. At some point it stops being a warning and starts looking like a business model.

Then you get the machinery around him, especially the far-right psychos in the coalition who say the quiet part with a bullhorn. Reuters reported Itamar Ben-Gvir calling to “encourage emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza because “the Land of Israel is ours.” Reuters also reported Bezalel Smotrich saying, “We are finally going to conquer Gaza,” while elsewhere describing most of Gaza as soon to be “totally destroyed.” That is not fringe static anymore. That is governing rhetoric. That is what happens when nationalism, grievance, and biblical entitlement start drinking together at the same bar and nobody cuts them off.

And yes, AIPAC belongs in this conversation. Reuters reported that in 2014 Obama blocked a campaign backed by AIPAC for new Iran sanctions, and in 2015 Reuters reported AIPAC’s plans against the Iran deal were being coordinated with allied groups expected to spend upwards of $20 million. AIPAC’s own recent materials keep hammering the same line: tighten sanctions, increase pressure, prevent Iran from gaining nuclear capability, dismantle the program for good. So when people act like this whole war fever just floated down from heaven on an angel feather, no — there has been money, organization, messaging, and political enforcement behind it for years. Prophecy for the pews. Pressure campaign for Congress. Same beast, different wardrobe.

The ugliest part is how easily millions of Christians swallow it because they were trained to. AP has reported that evangelical Christians are among Israel’s strongest and most influential supporters in the United States, with many viewing Israel through end-times prophecy. Reuters reported Israel even named its 2025 operation against Iran “Rising Lion” from a Bible verse. That is how War Jesus works: wrap modern state violence in ancient text, cue the worship band, and tell the faithful that dissent is rebellion against God. But the actual Jesus from the mountaintop sermon is still standing there like an unwanted witness, saying mercy, saying peace, saying blessed are the meek — while the empire boys keep trying to nail a rifle sling across his chest and call it righteousness.

So call it what it is. Not revival. Not discernment. Not courage. It is the old heresy of power wearing a Sunday face. It is Christian language hijacked by men who trust bombs more than beatitudes. It is Christianity turning Jesus into War Jesus because a suffering servant does not poll well with empire, but a sky-king who blesses retaliation can move votes, money, and bodies. And once you’ve seen that trick clearly, you can’t unsee it. The question is whether the church wants the carpenter from Galilee — or just another mascot for the war machine with a cross jammed into the barrel.

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Research Spine

• Matthew 5 — The Beatitudes
• Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7)
• Reuters — Huckabee comments condemned in region
• Greg Laurie — Israel, Iran and Bible prophecy
• AP News — Evangelical support for Israel
• AP News — Huckabee Israel remarks controversy
• The Guardian — Huckabee interview
• The Guardian — condemnation of Huckabee remarks
• Al Jazeera — Christian Zionism explained