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Flourish Pride Month Live Event

Sunday, June 28, 2026
7:00 PM Eastern / 6:00 PM Central / 5:00 PM Mountain / 4:00 PM Pacific

Flourish Live: Pride, Human Becoming, and the Future of Faith

Join me for a special Pride Month edition of Flourish Live.

During this live gathering, I’ll read selected passages from Flourish: An Open and Relational Queer Theology, reflect on what I’ve learned since publication, and share where the project is heading next.

We’ll also explore my newest work-in-progress, Human Becoming, a project focused on the capacities that make us human and the ways we grow toward wholeness, belonging, creativity, justice, and love.

The evening will conclude with an open Q&A and conversation through Substack Live.

Whether you’ve been part of this journey from the beginning or are just discovering Flourish, you’re welcome here.

Topics include:

• Readings from Flourish

• Pride Month reflections

• The future of open and relational queer theology

• Preview of Human Becoming

• Audience questions and discussion

Date: Sunday, June 28, 2026
Time: 7:00 PM Eastern / 4:00 PM Pacific
Location: Substack Live

I’m sharing this image because for the next few days I will plan to come back to this to unpack these two questions.

Can God Choose Not to Love? Essential Kenosis, Human Freedom, and the Possibility of Divine Rejection

I have increasingly argued that divine love should function as the very essence of God’s nature and that God’s other attributes need to be understood through hesed (selfless, other-empowering love). Oord’s doctrine of “essential kenosis” proposes that God necessarily and eternally acts in self-giving, others-empowering love. Consequently, God cannot coerce creatures, withdraw divine love, or act contrary to the divine nature. God does not choose love occasionally or strategically; God loves necessarily because God’s nature consists in love itself.

This claim raises a profound theological and existential question: if God cannot choose not to love, does divine love lose its meaning? Human relationships often appear meaningful precisely because they involve risk, reciprocity, and the genuine possibility of rejection. If God lacks the freedom to abandon, condemn, or cease loving humanity, does the divine-human relationship become inevitable rather than relational?

The concern intensifies when Scripture appears to portray God as rejecting persons or communities. Jesus warns the church in Laodicea about spiritual lukewarmness (Rev. 3:16). Matthew’s Gospel contains the frightening declaration, “Depart from me, I never knew you” (Matt. 7:23). Paul describes humanity as “given over” to distorted desires (Rom. 1:24–28). The Hebrew Bible contains numerous narratives of divine judgment, exile, abandonment, and wrath. At first glance, these texts seem incompatible with the claim that God cannot reject creatures.

Yet theologians such as Greg Boyd and Eric A. Seibert suggest that Scripture requires a cruciform and love-centered hermeneutic. Rather than reading every biblical depiction of God univocally, they argue that Christians should interpret Scripture through the lens of Jesus Christ, particularly the self-giving love revealed in the incarnation and crucifixion. Divine revelation reaches its fullness not in coercive displays of power, but in kenosis, enemy-love, forgiveness, solidarity with suffering, and resurrection hope.

Within such a framework, divine judgment need not imply divine abandonment. God may reject systems, behaviors, and distortions that destroy flourishing while never ceasing to love the persons trapped within them. The biblical narrative repeatedly demonstrates divine persistence toward resistant humanity. Adam hides, yet God seeks him. Cain murders, yet God protects him. Israel rebels, yet God continues covenantal pursuit. Peter denies Christ, yet Christ restores Peter. The prodigal son abandons the father, yet the father waits, watches, and runs toward him.

This distinction proves crucial: God may oppose that which destroys creatures without rejecting the creatures themselves.

Essential kenosis therefore reframes divine freedom. Classical theism often defines freedom as the ability to choose among alternatives. By contrast, Oord suggests that God’s freedom functions as perfect faithfulness to divine character. God cannot act contrary to love because God cannot act contrary to Godself. Divine inability does not imply deficiency. Christians already affirm that God cannot lie, cease existing, or become evil. Essential kenosis simply extends this logic to coercion and rejection. God cannot abandon creation because God’s very being eternally consists in self-giving relational love.

Human freedom, however, remains genuine. a framework centered on love rejects both theological determinism and absolute creaturely autonomy. Humans exist as relational participants within an unfinished creation. God influences creation persuasively rather than coercively, calling creatures toward greater beauty, justice, communion, and flourishing. Humans retain the capacity to resist divine love, distort relationships, participate in evil, or refuse healing. Hell, in this sense, may represent not divine rejection of humanity, but humanity’s persistent resistance to divine love.

Theologically, this approach preserves both divine faithfulness and meaningful creaturely freedom. God never stops loving, but creatures may continually refuse participation in that love. The relationship remains significant not because God might arbitrarily withdraw affection, but because love always requires response. Divine love persists universally; reciprocity does not.

For Wesleyan theology, such claims resonate deeply with longstanding commitments to prevenient grace and sanctification. God continually works toward human flourishing before, during, and after conscious human response. Grace precedes repentance. Grace empowers holiness. Grace restores communion. Humans may resist grace, but divine love continues pursuing restoration rather than annihilation.

Ultimately, the question may not concern whether God possesses the freedom to stop loving. Rather, the deeper question concerns whether perfect love would ever desire such freedom at all. If the fullest expression of power emerges through kenotic self-giving rather than coercive domination, then divine steadfastness does not diminish relational meaning. Instead, it grounds the possibility of trust, healing, transformation, and hope.

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This is a preview of my presentation. It’s not final because I am still writing the book, so the presentation is likely to change.

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At least that’s my excuse. This get’s back to basics for me. I don’t have a lane, but this is the one I’ve been driving in that got me started on Substack. But…

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Death Becomes Us: Grief, Companioning, and Open and Relational …

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• What does healthy solitude look like versus isolation?

• Why do some creatures require more aloneness than others?

• Why does attachment still matter in a fundamentally solitary species?

• Why do even solitary creatures maintain bonds at critical developmental stages?

• What does it mean that withdrawal can be ad…

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God During and/or After Grief

STARTING NEXT WEEK!

A Five-Week Course on Lament, Theodicy, and Resilience

June 1 – July 6, 2026 (Mondays, 7:30 - 8:45pm EST)
Registration Open Now

Grief changes everything.

It changes how we see the world, how we understand ourselves, and often how we understand God.

For many people, traditional answers about suffering collapse under the weight of real loss. Platitudes stop working. Easy or simple theology is insufficient. Faith, if it survives, must mature.

God After Grief is a five-week course for people trying to rebuild meaning, faith, and hope after pain.

Through theology, literature, philosophy, and guided reflection, we will explore grief not as a problem to solve, but as a reality to navigate with honesty, courage, and wisdom.

Using the biblical tradition of lament, allowing for honest dialogue about God’s role in it, and insights from Open and Relational Theology, this course examines how suffering reshapes us. And how resilient, life-giving faith can emerge on the other side.

This Course Is For:

• People deconstructing or reconstructing faith after suffering

• Christians wrestling with where God was during grief or trauma

• Those who have experienced loss, disappointment, betrayal, or spiritual disillusionment

• Readers, thinkers, and seekers who want a deeper framework for suffering than “everything happens for a reason”

• Pastors, teachers, and leaders seeking richer theological language for lament and resilience

• Anyone interested in grief, spiritual formation, and the human search for meaning

Important Note

This course is not grief counseling or therapy.

While we will engage deeply with grief, suffering, and resilience, I approach this material as a theologian, educator, and scholar—not as a licensed grief counselor or mental health professional.

My role is to provide theological, philosophical, literary, and spiritual frameworks for understanding suffering and rebuilding faith after loss.

If you are in acute grief, trauma, or crisis, this course may complement, but should not replace, professional counseling or mental health care.

About the Instructor

Michael Joseph Brennan is a theologian, educator, writer, and speaker specializing in Open and Relational Theology, spiritual formation, and human becoming.

He holds a doctorate in theology with advanced work in Open and Relational thought and has spent years teaching, writing, and speaking on topics related to suffering, faith, freedom, identity, and resilience.

Michael’s work explores how theology can move beyond simplistic answers and help people cultivate more honest, mature, and life-giving faith in the face of suffering.

What We’ll Explore

Over five weeks, participants will examine:

• Why inherited theology often fails in the face of grief

• The biblical tradition of lament as faithful protest

• What is God’s role in suffering and loss

• How grief reshapes identity and forces existential reconstruction

• Open and Relational perspectives on God, suffering, and divine love

• Practices for resilience, meaning-making, and post-traumatic growth

Course Details

Dates: June 1 – July 6, 2026
Length: Five Weeks
Format: [Microsoft Teams: links provided later]
Registration: Open Now

Closing Invitation

Grief may change your theology.
And it may change your identity.
It may change your understanding of what faith even is.

But change does not have to mean ruin.

Sometimes grief destroys what was too small to survive reality so that something truer might emerge.

Join us for God During and After Grief.

Enroll Now

God After Grief

A Five-Week Course on Lament, Theodicy, and Resilience

June 1 – July 6, 2026 — 6:30-7:45pm EST - Mondays.
Instructor: Michael Brennan, Th.D.

Course Description

Grief changes more than emotions.
It reshapes identity, memory, relationships, embodiment, imagination, and often theology itself.

God After Grief is a five-week reflective course exploring lament, suffering, resilience, and spiritual reconstruction through theology, poetry, journaling, discussion, and narrative reflection. Rather than offering simplistic answers or formulas for healing, the course invites participants into intellectually honest and emotionally grounded exploration of what remains after loss disrupts certainty.

Drawing from a theology of love and consent primarily based in Open and Relational Theology, participants will explore literature, grief studies, Scripture, philosophy, and creative reflection. Participants will also examine how humans reconstruct meaning and identity in the aftermath of suffering.

This course is not group therapy or grief counseling.
It is a guided theological and reflective exploration of grief, meaning, and human becoming.

The course is organized as a five-week movement with guest speakers:

1. 6/1: Introduction and Grief disrupts the story we thought we understood

2. 6/8: Christy - Lament, survival, and harmful language

3. 6/15: Tracy - Death, mortality, and the problem of evil

4. 6/22: Jonathan - Memory, identity, and theopoesia

5. 6/29: Reconstruction and becoming

Course Mission Statement

This course exists to create compassionate, intellectually honest space for people wrestling with suffering, doubt, loss, trauma, mortality, and spiritual reconstruction.

We cultivate curiosity, compassion, and partner with others and with God in the aftermath of grief.

• Theological language for suffering without coercion
  Many survivors struggle not only with trauma itself, but with harmful theological explanations attached to trauma: “God allowed this for a reason,” “everything happens for a purpose,” “forgiveness means reconciliation,” etc. A course engaging lament and open-relational theology could provide alternative frameworks that preserve meaning without justifying abuse or suffering.

• A deeper exploration of lament as resistance rather than weakness
  Survivor care often focuses on stabilization, empowerment, and recovery. Biblical lament traditions introduce another layer: protest as faithful speech. The Psalms, Job, Lamentations, and even Jesus’ cry of abandonment model grief that refuses silence. That perspective may resonate strongly with survivor-centered advocacy.

• Expanded language around resilience that avoids toxic positivity
  Many resilience narratives unintentionally pressure survivors to “move on,” “heal correctly,” or become inspirational. Your framing seems more interested in honesty, ambiguity, survival, reconstruction, and becoming. That distinction matters.

• Interdisciplinary dialogue between theology and trauma studies
  Since she already works professionally in survivor care, she might appreciate engaging theology as a conversation partner rather than an authority imposing answers. The course could create space to examine where theology has harmed survivors and where it might still offer resources for repair.

• Open and relational theology’s view of power and love
  The idea of divine love as non-coercive, relational, and participatory may provide useful contrast to authoritarian religious systems that many survivors experienced as spiritually abusive.

• Professional enrichment and reflective practice
  Even highly trained professionals benefit from spaces where they are not the provider, expert, or caretaker. A course like this might offer reflective room for her own spiritual and emotional processing around long-term exposure to grief narratives and survivor testimony.

Course Objectives

By the end of the course, participants will:

• Examine theological responses to suffering and evil

• Explore lament as a faithful spiritual practice

• Reflect on how grief reshapes identity and belief

• Analyze harmful and healing language about God and suffering

• Engage resilience without relying on toxic positivity

• Practice reflective journaling as meaning-making

• Consider how humans reconstruct hope after loss

Primary Texts

• God After Deconstruction. -Thomas Jay Oord and Tripp Fuller

• God Can’t. -Thomas Jay Oord

• Indigo -Jonathan Foster

• Can We Talk About Death? -Tracy Tucker

• Survivor Care -Christy Gunter

• A Grief Observed -C.S. Lewis

• The Crucified God - Jurgen Moltmann

Recommended Texts

• The Body Keeps the Score

• It’s OK That You’re Not OK

Learning Objectives & Outcomes

· Upon completion of this course, participants will be able to:

· Analyze how grief, suffering, mortality, and loss shape human identity, relationships, spirituality, and meaning-making across the lifespan.

· Examine how cultural, theological, relational, psychological, and embodied factors influence experiences of grief and resilience, including the roles of gender, race, ethnicity, age, disability, sexuality, religion, and community.

· Identify and reflect upon forms of disenfranchised grief, ambiguous loss, traumatic grief, and socially unrecognized mourning experiences.

· Explore major theological, philosophical, literary, and psychological approaches to suffering, lament, death, resilience, and human becoming.

· Evaluate how language about God, suffering, death, healing, and resilience may either support or harm grieving individuals and communities.

· Demonstrate increased awareness of the relational, emotional, ethical, and spiritual dimensions of caregiving, accompaniment, chaplaincy, survivor care, and grief support.

· Reflect critically and compassionately upon personal experiences of grief, memory, suffering, uncertainty, and reconstruction through journaling, discussion, and narrative reflection.

· Examine the role of poetry, storytelling, memoir, ritual, and creative expression in processing grief and reconstructing meaning after loss.

· Develop thoughtful and interdisciplinary perspectives on resilience, hope, compassion, and co-creative participation in an open and uncertain future.

· Recognize the emotional, relational, and existential impact that working with suffering, death, trauma, and grief may have on caregivers, ministers, clinicians, educators, and helping professionals.

About the Instructor: Michael Joseph Brennan, Th.D. is a theologian, educator, author, and speaker specializing in Open and Relational Theology, suffering, human becoming, and spiritual formation.

He holds a doctorate in theology and has spent years studying how faith traditions respond to suffering, freedom, trauma, identity, and the problem of evil. His work seeks to help people reconstruct intellectually honest, emotionally resilient faith after harmful or inadequate theological frameworks collapse.

6/1 Week 1 — When Grief Disrupts the Story

Essential Question

What happens when suffering destroys the story we believed about God, ourselves, or the world?

6/8 Week 2 — Christy Gunter Sims

Theme: Lament, Survival, and Harmful Language

Essential Question: Is lament a failure of faith, or one of its deepest expressions?

6/15 Week 3 — Tracy Tucker - God, Power, and the Problem of Evil

Theme: Death, Mortality, and the Problem of Evil

Essential Question: Is the movie Hook right? Is death a great adventure?

6/22 Week 4 — Jonathan Foster - — Memory, Identity, and Continuing Bonds

Theme: Reconstruction, Theopoetics, and Becoming

Essential Question: How does grief reshape identity, memory, and relationships?

If you are interested in taking the course for credit, send me a message

Assessments

1. Reflective Journaling

Participants will maintain a reflective journal throughout the course in order to explore grief, suffering, memory, spirituality, identity, and meaning-making through honest personal reflection. Journals do not need to be polished or formally structured; the emphasis remains on thoughtful engagement, curiosity, and emotional honesty rather than performance.

Participants may respond to course prompts such as:

• “What brought me to this course?”

• “What language about suffering has helped or harmed me?”

• “Who do I hope to become after surviving this loss?”

2. Philosophy of Grief and Suffering

Participants will develop a personal philosophy or theology of grief, suffering, resilience, death, or human becoming by integrating course discussions, readings, poetry, theology, and personal reflection. This assignment invites participants to think critically and compassionately about how humans respond to suffering and what kinds of beliefs or practices help cultivate meaning, honesty, and hope.

3. Conduct an Interview

Participants will interview someone whose work or lived experience intersects with grief, death, trauma, caregiving, spiritual care, or resilience. The goal of the assignment is to deepen understanding of how real people navigate suffering, accompaniment, healing, and meaning-making in practical contexts.

Possible interview subjects include hospice chaplains, survivor advocates, therapists, funeral directors, clergy, healthcare workers, caregivers, or individuals who have experienced profound loss.

4. Final Research Presentation

Participants will complete a final interdisciplinary project exploring a topic related to grief, suffering, theology, resilience, death, spiritual care, embodiment, memory, trauma, or human becoming. The project should demonstrate thoughtful engagement with course themes while integrating research, reflection, and practical or creative application.

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A panda does not strive for empire. It eats bamboo, rests, and survives within limits. T…

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I want to show the image I created to you first, but I also want this story to make sense, so bear with me, the point is more theological than historical or analytical or art.

This essay is called God and Human because I want to do a Theodivergent thing with how we think about both God and Humanity. Fo…

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I am working on a project about the human ability or inability to respond to God, which leads to a lot of fun and interesting questions, like this one:

What Is on the Inside of God?

I find myself doing one of a small variety of things when I talk about God. Sometimes I look up at…

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Mike Brennan has been angry about Christendom and this post is an attempt to explain why he seems like an atheist. The views here at Theodivergent welcome many ways to think about God, religion, and humanity. Mike’s views often represent the fullnes…

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We bombed Iran this weekend.

He lied, again, after just delivering the longest State of the Lies, a senile rant and a MasterClass in spin, gaslighting, and deception. And they bought it, hook, line, and sinker because they used to believe that classrooms had litter boxes in there for the kids that thought they were cats. It’s evil and I just …

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Why does reality consistently generate greater relational complexity instead of collapsing into disorder?

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Most private schools have some sort of advisory time (a little like a homeroom for those of us who were in public schools. There are a ton of books, but none seem to be one size fits all. In the advisories I have participated in, they have have been co…

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I used to be very protective of “sound doctrine” in my purview. As a Nazarene, this looked like defending the mystery of the trinity and trying to get pastors to stop saying the trinity is like ice or an egg; and it looked like articulating two works of grace, entire sanctification, and so on. It looked like telling my students that if they love guns more than Jesus, that is the precise definition of idolatry (a conversation I was fired for having because his dad was on the board of the Christian school and really loved his guns and he wanted me to keep my liberal views out of the classroom).

But after a while you realize the more you try to protect doctrine, the more people just think you’re a dick. And I am that still, a dick—not a doctrine protector.

I don’t want to be either those things. I’m off to a bad start still referring to myself as male genitalia, I suppose.

I am responding to a few friends that won’t read this, but I’m writing it for you if you find yourself with the same kind of friends or family or coworkers. I think they may be beyond conversation, but I’m curious what you think, so if you read this, please comment.

Or this is just my unintelligible rant of a crazy, old-ish curmudgeon.

I Avoid Referring to Myself as a Christian Anymore

…because these are the kinds of questions people ask me when they find out that I am a person of faith. Weird that I feel better referring to myself as genitalia, conversation for another time?

Do they hate science?

Do they the “alphabet people” or are you just mad that they don’t know or care about the letters?

Do they hate women? —this one is easy, of course not, they just want women not to be slutty or bossy or bitchy…it’s not too much to ask and it’s probably Biblical (capital B for authority, not reverence).

In contrast, I ask:

What is a Christian? Following Jesus used to be the answer, but then money and power corrupted this and now Jesus offends the Christian people of privilege.

Many…most? Christians have become political followers of Trump, but how? —law and order; entitlement; sexual preference…

They Use the Phrase ”Sound Doctrine” Incorrectly

In two cases just this morning I saw this phrase. It’s a fairly effective way to shut down a conversation.

Notice how Christians tend toward “all abortions are birth control” and they treat women like they should keep their legs closed. Why should they be expected to have empathy for the girls they rape? I mean trump literally said the women he assaulted enjoyed it, so why shouldn’t the Christians that support him take him at his word. “He’s a billionaire because he’s a genius!” — how many times I have had to endure this conversation.

What Metric Are They Using for Soundness?

The Bible says…

God told me…

My pastor preached a sermon on this…

trump says…

One of trump’s goons says…

My mom or dad says…

The giants in the… (just throwing this in for good measure).

Augustine / Aquinas / or some other person from antiquity says…

or… I believe…

A Better Lens

Shalom is about wholeness and overall well-being. Divine love seeks overall well-being. This is a consensual, mutual, and intimate relationship.

What would change if you started to believe God cares about you and your needs? You might respond to God’s love rather than God’s wrath and that might change WHY you do the things you do. A fear of hell and punishment and divine anger makes people hide from God, but God wants an authentic relationship with the people he helped to create. Christians don’t know how babies are made because science books “are the devil trying to confuse you.” —This was a real conversation I have had several times recently with adult humans. Again, God said He formed you in the womb, so I don’t know about these genes or hormones or whatevers, but God…

So…love.

What’s shalom got to do with science?

Let’s not make leaps. Shalom allows us to take a step back and ask if things are good and harmonious. If not, it’s probably not God. Violence, stupidity, abuse—out. What if God does it? The Bible says…

Mom says…I remember being told that thunder was angels bowling. Everything is God…ok, but we have meteorological evidence of the origins of thunder.

Yeah, but now I’m just doing the same thing. The scientist says…

Before AI, we had a little (a lottle) more trust of our senses and personal experiences. Now I can watch something and Pam Bondi will say that I did not see that thing that I saw. And AI will show videos of raccoons rescuing puppies from burning buildings and 1000 car pile-ups and plane crashes—my algorithm is bizarre.

All that to say, we can test the nature of God. God doesn’t want us to believe that thunder is angels. I believe…

I believe that God wants us to seek truth and beauty genuinely. To confront tradition. To confront ignorance even when it’s our friends or family or teachers or preachers, but of course confront in the spirit of love and grace and nurture. Confront Scripture, and tradition, and reason, and experience. Ask questions. Seek the best possible outcomes. Work together. Have fun. I’m working on a chapter where I elaborate on the fun that can and should be had in the presence of God.

Shalom or Love is a good lens. It’s a good place to ask questions.

I think you will find that the real sin and demons are NOT minorities and scientists and educators.

The real sin (harm, danger, abuse, misguidance) often comes from clergy, politicians, and other people who manipulate people using their authority and abusive interpretative lenses by which they promote harmful views of God and Scripture.

Jesus warned about these people. It was church leaders and political leaders he rebuked and the blind, the lepers, the disadvantaged that he had compassion for, healed, dined, etc.

Love wi…has a fighting chance.

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You know what, after 10 seconds of thought, skip this one. I wrote this for like two people, and I think one of them was me. So just move along. I can see if you opened it, so even though I include an anti-trigger warning in the next lines, don’t say you haven’t been warned.

The Refiner’s Fire Is Not My Fault

It’s cute the Refiner’s Fire is always depicted as a cute little candle-flame.

You don’t get a fucking trigger warning, just expect that my posts include fucking unless you’re told otherwise. Here’s your fucking warning!

The Refiner’s Fire purifies precious metal. It’s fucking hot. It’s probably where we get the idiom “hot as hell.” Imagine a fire so intense that it can burn away any kind of blemish. That’s the cost of repentance. For the three of you leaving MAGA, I’m glad, but you don’t get a get out of jail free card. Welcome to the fucking refiner’s fire. I will sit in it with you I guess either to show you that it’s worth going through or to hold you the fuck down so that you don’t just run back to the cheeto-tyrant. It’s becoming obvious that I could use a little refinement too, but I was happy forcing you to stay in the bed you helped make. The Holy Spirit is trying to show me that I need a nap and a snack because I am about to help save Ninevah—against my fucking wishes, but while I don’t cheerily wish for your repentance, I have consented to God to seek the best possible outcomes and so…here I am, send me. Foul mouthed and angry and ready for a fight. But today that fight will be prayerful and honest and just a letter (like Paul used to send).

As always, enjoy!

I need to say something plainly, because some of you seem surprised that progressive Christians feel anger right now.

We did not wake up yesterday.

We did not suddenly discover authoritarian impulses in 2024. I still remember calling out the Nazi flags I was seeing in Howell and in West Palm Beach.

We did not miss the warning signs in 2016.
We did not hallucinate the racism, the sexism, the cruelty, the mockery of the disabled, the bragging about assault, the Muslim ban rhetoric, the “very fine people,” the children in cages, the lies, the insurrection.

The gaslighting when you called the insurrection a “Day of Love.” I’m so angry I could stop right here, but my Girardian-scholar friends would not be happy with me. I get mad at them too even though I am pretty sure they are right that counter-scapegoating is just as harmful and unproductive.

We watched it unfold in real time. We named it. We were told we were hysterical.

For a year and a half—no, for nearly a decade—we endured lectures about eggs, gas prices, communism, patriotism, “real America,” and how we would not even have a country if we resisted this man. We were told character did not matter. We were told power mattered. We were told we lacked faith.

It’s still fucking happening. The Patriotic Half-Time Show? At least my half-time show was produced by an America who won album of the year and tried to make his message about love. Actual love, acceptance, seeking overall well-being, seeking unity and wholeness…I’m trying to lean into that. I have counted back from ten so many times. I should have started at a million. My fucking family…You don’t think I miss them? You don’t think I want to make those…people…proud of me? They are so stubborn. They love the orange derange-maker, but I’m the one with TDS. Why am I even writing this now—I’ve written this so many different ways and I get TL:DR in return.

It’s you. It’s the Christian who says she wants to be welcoming. That leaving the cult is the right move and we shouldn’t scare them back into their tribe.

I’m not sure if I care if they sink on their shitty ship—that has so fucking little to do with me. I grieved these losses. They are dead. But God wants to brings these dry bones back to life—all of a sudden I’m Jonah again asking God why I can’t just curse Ninevah and God is going on about the greatness and potential of the people…So God wants to make America Great Again? Same question to the God in the back with his hand up…When the fuck was America great? I don’t love the country because it used to be great…I love this country because it used to WANT to be great. Then we started up with the same old hate and entitlement and bullshit.

Progressive Christians have lived in a peculiar exile through all of this. We believe in accountability, in human dignity, in the Imago Dei. We also believe Jesus meant what he said about the least of these. When we said nationalism distorts the gospel, we were called Marxists. When we said cruelty corrodes the soul, we were called naïve. When we said a cult of personality contradicts Christian discipleship, we were told to sit down and submit.

So forgive me if I struggle when I now hear, “I didn’t realize it would go this far.”

You did.

Or you very fucking well should have.

The evidence did not hide. The insurrection did not hide. The sexual assault verdict did not hide. The documented racism did not hide. The authoritarian rhetoric did not hide. It all sat in plain sight, bold and inauspicious, daring anyone with moral imagination to look.

And now some want to apologize as if they tripped over something invisible.

No. You stepped over warnings. Fuck that, you stepped right into it. Happily. Giddily.

This is where my frustration rises, and I will not pretend otherwise. Accountability does not evaporate because your regret finally arrived. Consequences do not dissolve because someone finally feels uncomfortable. Harm leaves receipts. Families fractured. Communities destabilized. Institutions eroded. Fear weaponized. Christian witness compromised.

If Trump appears in the Epstein files, hold him accountable.
If Bill Clinton appears, hold him accountable, too. Liberals have not been subjected to the cult of personality—not even with Obama. I regret not appreciating Obama more then. I never wore a blue HOPE hat, but hope is way better than MAGA. MAGA has their heads way up the asses of slave-holding grand-daddies. HOPE is biblical.

Accountability does not belong to a tribe. It belongs to integrity.

But here is the tension in my own chest: I do not actually want anyone devoured by shame. I do not want exile. I do not want annihilation. I want repentance that understands the full cost.

Heaven, if it is real, will not function as a celestial amnesia machine. Holiness requires illumination. Every soul will see clearly the ripples of its choices. The refiner’s fire burns not because God delights in pain, but because seeing the light stings your eyes.

The fire exists whether I say so or not.

I did not make it hot.

When I say, “The refiner’s fire hurts,” I do not threaten you. I describe reality. Discipleship costs something. Hell, it costs everything. Political idolatry costs something. Silence costs something. Voting out of grievance costs something.

If you begin to see the damage now, I do not deny you the possibility of growth. I do not deny you the image of God in you. I do not deny the potential for decency. But do not ask me to pretend the last decade did not happen. Do not ask progressive Christians to skip the lament and rush to absolution.

When the thief on the cross repents, he didn’t fall off the cross—he died there. So why do I feel even remotely compelled to ease your suffering that you caused so many people? You should fully make repayment for you choices.

Forgiveness without truth cheapens grace.

Holiness in this moment looks like this: we tell the truth about harm. We refuse cult dynamics. We refuse gaslighting. We hold our own leaders accountable. We require repentance that includes repair.

The fire will refine us all.

And yes, it will fucking burn.

Fuck you for making me write this before I was ready.

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