The Sound at the Foundation

In 539 BC, Cyrus the Great issued a decree that changed the ancient world. The Persian emperor, having conquered Babylon, permitted the Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple. For the displaced Jews who had spent nearly seventy years in a foreign land, the decree must have felt like the world turning right side up again.

The return was not triumphal. The people who walked back to Judah found a city in ruins: broken walls, a temple site reduced to rubble and overgrowth, a landscape that matched the desolation they had carried in their hearts. Many of the returnees had never seen Jerusalem at all; they had been born in Babylon, raised on stories of a city they carried in memory but had never touched.

When the foundation of the new temple was finally laid, something strange happened. The younger generation, seeing the fresh stones, shouted with joy. But the old men, who remembered Solomon’s temple in its scale and splendor, wept aloud. The sound carried far, and according to Ezra, no one could distinguish the shouts of joy from the weeping; it was all one noise, rising together.

That image has stayed with me. Not because the elders were wrong to grieve. They had carried a memory across decades and distance, and what they were looking at now was modest by comparison. Their grief was holy.

But grief has a second life. Left alone, it becomes longing; left longer, it becomes a blueprint. The ache for what was lost becomes a plan to rebuild it, stone by stone, exactly as it was. That is the moment when something sacred hardens into something dangerous, not because the past wasn’t good, but because the past isn’t a place you can return to. It is a place you carry.

We are living in an age of attempted restoration. Across the political spectrum, the dominant instinct is not to build something new but to recover something lost. The language varies. The blueprints point to different decades. But the conviction is the same: the good world is behind us, and the task is to go back.

It never works. Not because the longing is foolish, but because time is not that kind of road.

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The Vocabulary of Return

Consider Britain. The campaign to leave the European Union ran on a promise that was, at its core, restorative. “Take back control” carried an image of a self-governing Britain that had existed before Brussels, before open borders, before the world became so entangled that even fishing required multinational negotiation. The emotional engine was not hatred or ignorance. It was homesickness, a longing for a country that felt recognizable.

The frustration was legitimate. The dislocation was real. But the destination was not. The world Britain had once governed had already changed shape. Supply chains, labor markets, and finance had reorganized beyond any clean return. Sovereignty could be reclaimed in law; the world it was meant to govern had moved on.

What emerged was not the Britain that was promised, not simply because the promise was flawed, but because restoration never delivers what it advertises. The blueprints were drawn from a building that no longer exists on a street that has been rezoned.

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The Mirror on This Side of the Atlantic

We are not observers of this pattern. We are living inside it.

“Make America Great Again” is, grammatically and spiritually, a restoration project. It points backward to an earlier version of the country, though the specific decade varies. Its progressive counterpart is less explicit but structurally similar: a longing for a recent past when institutions felt stable and the trajectory seemed predictable. Different decades, same instinct.

Both sides are grieving something real. The loss of industrial stability, of cultural coherence, of institutional trust. These losses are not imaginary. They deserve to be mourned.

But mourning is not a policy platform. And grief, however holy, makes a poor architect.

Technology has reorganized labor. Demographics have shifted. Artificial intelligence is rewriting the economy while we argue about which version of the past to restore. The America of 1955 and the America of 2014 are both gone, not because someone broke them, but because time does what time does: it moves.

We want to go home. All of us. That is the most human thing in the world. But home, as we remember it, is not a place on the map anymore. It is something more like the temple in Ezra: a promise carried forward, not a structure we can reconstruct.

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What Renewal Actually Looks Like

Restoration is the easier choice, not because people are foolish, but because the past provides a picture. We know what the old house looked like. Building forward means working without that certainty, and uncertainty is hard to bear.

That is why the years after the First World War produced Versailles. Exhausted and grieving, the victors reached for familiar patterns: punish the aggressor, restore balance, return Europe to something like the old order.

Within twenty years, the house was burning again.

After the Second World War, something different happened. Scarred by that failure, the architects of the postwar order refused the old blueprints. The Marshall Plan invested in former enemies rather than punishing them. The European Coal and Steel Community bound together the very industries that had fueled war. West Germany was not restored to what it had been; it was invited into something that had never existed before.

It was not a return. It was a decision to build forward, and it produced the longest sustained peace in European history.

This is what renewal looks like when it is chosen honestly. It does not deny the past. But it refuses to let old blueprints dictate new construction. Jean Monnet captured the shift: “We are not forming coalitions of states, we are uniting people.”

Václav Havel described the posture this requires: hope is not the conviction that things will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.

Christian hope names that same posture in different language. The resurrection of Jesus is not a restoration of the world as it was; it is the beginning of a world made new, continuous with the old yet transformed beyond it. To belong to that story is to trust that building forward in love is never wasted, even when we cannot see the outcome.

Renewal, it turns out, is not a feeling. It is a practice: the daily decision to build with what we have rather than mourning what we have lost.

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The Mingled Sound

I keep coming back to that scene at the temple foundation: the weeping and the shouting, so intertwined that no one could separate them. Perhaps that is what honest renewal sounds like. Not pure joy. Not pure grief. Something more tangled and human than either.

The elders were not wrong to weep; the young were not wrong to celebrate. The mistake would be to let the weeping harden into a blueprint, to insist that the new house must look like the old one.

The postwar generation understood this. They grieved what had been destroyed, and then they built something that would have been unrecognizable to the world that came before. It was smaller, less certain of itself. But it held, because it was built for the world that existed, not the one that was remembered.

Refusing the comfort of old blueprints when they no longer fit the street you live on is costly. It may also be the only way to love your actual neighbors rather than the ones you wish you still had.

What would it look like, in our politics, our churches, our own lives, to stop reaching for the old plans and build honestly with what we have? I suspect it sounds like that temple foundation: grief and hope, rising together until no one can tell them apart.

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Robert Mueller is dead.

He served in Vietnam when he could have avoided it. He came home, built a career in law, and spent his life in public service. He was a father of two daughters. He was, by his own account, a man of Christian faith.

He was also, to many Americans, a villain. A political enemy. A symbol of everything they believed was corrupt about institutional power.

That is allowed. Political opposition is the lifeblood of democracy. Contempt, even, has its place in the rough grammar of public life.

But on the day he died, the President of the United States posted this on Truth Social:

“Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!” (Truth Social, 1:26 PM EDT, March 21, 2026 — verified by Fox News, CNN, NBC, and Axios)

I want to stay with that for a moment.

Not to relitigate the Mueller investigation. Not to argue about what he did or did not deserve. Those debates will continue, as they always do, long after the man is in the ground.

I want to stay with what that sentence does.

In the Gospel of Matthew, Christ says: “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.”

Words are not accidents. They are revelations. They tell us what has taken root inside the one who speaks them. And more than that, they do work in the world. The Book of James calls the tongue a small fire capable of setting an entire forest ablaze. Not because of volume. Because of nature. Words give permission. They redraw the boundaries of what is acceptable.

To say good, I’m glad he’s dead about any human being is to make a claim about that person’s worth. It is to say: his death is a gain for the world. His absence makes us better off.

That is a serious thing to say about a man who waded ashore at Danang and came home with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.

Augustine of Hippo wrote that we are formed not only by what we believe, but by what we love and what we celebrate. To rejoice at the wrong things is not neutral. It is deformative. It reshapes the soul of the one who rejoices, and of everyone who hears it and nods along.

Let me be clear about something.

This essay would be the same essay if a Democratic president had written those words about a Republican adversary. The standard here is not partisan. It cannot be. The moment the standard bends to our preferences, it is no longer a standard. It is just another weapon.

What I am writing about is not a political figure.

It is a posture.

And the posture on display here is contempt for the dead, expressed with satisfaction, amplified to millions, and cheered by thousands.

Thomas Aquinas taught that virtue is not built in grand moments. It is built in the accumulation of small acts and small permissions. We become just by doing just things. We become callous by permitting callousness. The moral atmosphere we breathe is not given to us. It is made by us, choice by choice, silence by silence.

What happens when the small act is a president celebrating a death, and the silence is ours?

Children are watching.

Not for doctrine. Not for policy positions or constitutional arguments.

They are watching for posture. They are learning, right now, what it looks like to speak of another person. What it means to treat an enemy. What it means to respond to death itself.

C. S. Lewis wrote that there are no ordinary people. Every person you meet is a being who will live forever, and is to be treated accordingly. Robert Mueller, whatever you believed about his conduct, was not ordinary. He was an immortal soul, made in the image of God, who fought for this country and raised two daughters and attended church and died.

To speak lightly of that death is to forget who he was.

To celebrate it is to forget who we are.

This is the question I want to leave with you.

Not whether the statement was justified. Not whether Mueller deserved better.

The question is: what are we becoming?

Because we do not become what we argue for. We do not become what we post in response, or what we debate on podcasts, or what we vote for in November.

We become what we excuse.

Every time contempt passes without resistance, we make a small adjustment to the moral atmosphere our children will inherit. Every time we apply one standard to our side and another to theirs, we participate in our own reshaping. Every time we hear a man’s death celebrated and say nothing, we have said something.

The Christian tradition has never been gentle on this point.

Even judgment is to be carried with gravity. Even enemies are to be prayed for. Even in death, there is a finality that should quiet us.

Not because the dead deserve protection.

Because the living do.

Because we do.

And because the children watching us right now are learning, in the only way children learn anything real, what kind of people we have decided to be.

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The word came not from a fringe preacher broadcasting from a strip mall church, but from a military commander addressing troops preparing to deploy. According to a complaint filed with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), one of more than two hundred filed in the first days of the war and reported to span more than forty units across at least thirty installations and every branch of the armed forces, the commander opened a combat readiness briefing by telling the men and women under his command not to be afraid. What was happening in Iran, he said, was all part of God’s divine plan. He cited the Book of Revelation. He named Armageddon specifically. He told them that the president of the United States had been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire.

He had, by the complainant’s account, a big grin on his face.

In the public square, the same register has surfaced in official language. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters that the Iranian regime had been “utterly crushed,” and that Iran’s leaders were “paying for their crimes against America, and they are paying in blood.” Words like these are not only descriptions. They are permissions. They train a nation to imagine violence as cleansing and final, and they fit too naturally inside a theology that expects history to end in blood.

I am not writing this as a political critic. I am writing it as someone who takes the faith seriously enough to be alarmed, not by the mention of God in a briefing room, but by what version of God is being invoked, and to what end. The Christian tradition has seen this pattern before. It has words for this temptation: the marriage of certainty and coercion, the conversion of providence into permission, the sanctification of violence as destiny.

What follows is not an attempt to read hearts. It is an attempt to name the moral hazard of importing apocalyptic certainty into command authority. When power speaks in God’s name, the first question is never whether the speaker sounds sincere. The first question is what the speech does to conscience.

But first, we need to understand the map.

The Map

To understand why a military commander might grin at the prospect of a bloody war, you have to understand the theological system that can make that grin coherent. I want to be careful here. The complaints filed with the MRFF have been reported and summarized, and the pattern described is serious. Still, I am not in those briefing rooms. I cannot say with certainty what is in anyone’s heart. What I can say is that the theology exists, that it is held by a very large number of Americans, and that it can create a framework in which catastrophic conflict is not something to be prevented but welcomed. Whether that framework is driving policy, shaping it at the margins, or being invoked opportunistically is a question I cannot answer. The moral problem does not depend on my ability to prove it is the engine of the state. It depends on what happens when it enters the bloodstream of authority.

It is not madness. It is a map, a detailed, internally consistent account of how history ends, and the polling data alone should give any reader pause about its reach. According to Pew Research Center, one of the most methodologically rigorous survey organizations in the world, 39 percent of all American adults believe humanity is living in the end times right now. Among evangelical Protestants, that figure rises to 63 percent. LifeWay Research (a Southern Baptist organization, not a liberal institution) and Yale’s Program on Climate Change Communication have found similar numbers. Depending on how the question is asked, between 40 and 60 percent of Americans embrace key elements of the end-times framework: a sudden removal of believers, a period of tribulation, a final battle, and Christ’s return. The Left Behind novel series, essentially a fictionalization of this theology, sold more than sixty-five million copies beginning in the 1990s.

That breadth matters, but it requires a further distinction. Most people who hold an end-times hope do not hold it as a weapon. For many, the map does what anxious modern life rarely does. It offers coherence. It turns chaos into storyline, suffering into sequence, history into something legible. It promises that frightening headlines are not random and that God is not absent. The danger is not the desire for meaning. The danger is what we permit ourselves to do to our neighbors when meaning becomes certainty, and when certainty takes a seat behind a microphone in a room where no one can opt out.

The map in its modern popular form originates not in the early church, and not in the Reformation, but in the work of a nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish clergyman, John Nelson Darby. In the 1830s, Darby developed a system often called dispensationalism, the idea that God governs history through distinct eras, each ending in human failure. In Darby’s reading, the final era ends in catastrophic collapse followed by Christ’s direct intervention. Darby was not a fringe figure. He was a serious, prolific theologian who traveled widely and influenced American evangelicalism deeply. The system was codified for mass consumption in the 1909 Scofield Reference Bible, which sold millions of copies and made dispensationalism the default eschatology of American fundamentalism. Hal Lindsey’s 1970 bestseller The Late Great Planet Earth brought it to a popular secular audience. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins then embedded it in evangelical imagination at a level that no sermon ever could.

The sequence runs like this. At a moment of God’s choosing, believers are “caught up” (language drawn from 1 Thessalonians), leaving the rest of the world to endure seven years of tribulation. A final conflict culminates near Megiddo. Christ returns at the moment of maximum catastrophe. He defeats the enemy. He reigns. History, as we know it, ends.

Within this framework, specific preconditions matter. Israel must exist as a nation. It did not, for nineteen centuries, which is why 1948 carries enormous prophetic weight for dispensationalists. Jerusalem must be in Jewish hands, and 1967 confirmed that. The coalition arrayed against Israel in the final conflict is often connected to Ezekiel 38 and 39, where the prophet describes an invasion led by Gog, from the land of Magog, accompanied by nations including Persia.

Persia is Iran.

That identification has been a staple of modern prophecy teaching for decades. Mark Hitchcock, a pastor and prolific writer on biblical prophecy, has written entire books arguing that Ezekiel anticipates a future conflict with Iran as part of a coalition against Israel. John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel and one of the most influential evangelical voices in American political life, has built a ministry substantially around this framework. When Hagee celebrated the recent strikes as prophetically significant, aligning them with biblical feast days and End Times timelines, he was not improvising. He was reading from a map he has been teaching for decades.

The map can also explain the grin.

Revelation is not subtle in its imagery. In Revelation 14, the “winepress” of wrath yields blood in quantities that overwhelm the imagination. The text describes blood stretching for nearly two hundred miles, rising to the height of a horse’s bridle. In Revelation 19, Christ returns in conquering symbolism, his robe dipped in blood, to tread the winepress of the fury of God’s wrath. For those who read Revelation as a literal timeline, the horror is not a detail to be spiritualized. It is confirmation.

A war that is terrible enough, bloody enough, catastrophic enough, centered on Israel, involving Iran, threatening the survival of the Jewish state, begins to look, through this lens, less like a geopolitical disaster and more like the first chapters of the end. And for those who believe the end brings Christ’s return and the resurrection of the dead, the beginning of the end can start to feel like something to welcome.

That is what Mikey Weinstein of the MRFF has said he is hearing in the complaints: a posture of delight, even fixation, on how graphic the battle “must” become for prophecy to be fulfilled. Pastor and theologian Josh Olds, writing for Baptist News Global, named the central irony plainly: a faith centered on loving enemies and making peace can become, when distorted, a framework that welcomes violence and damages the witness of the church.

One nuance deserves acknowledgment. Pew’s data also shows that even among evangelicals who hold this framework, roughly seven in ten say they are uncertain whether Jesus will return in their lifetime, or believe he probably will not. Believing the map is accurate and believing you are personally positioned to trigger its fulfillment are different things. Most people who hold this theology hold it with humility about timing. The disturbing possibility raised by the MRFF complaints is not that millions of ordinary Christians want war. It is that a smaller number of people in positions of authority may be crossing a line from belief into enlistment, moving from “God will do what God will do” to “we know where we are on the timeline, and this conflict is part of it.”

To understand why that crossing matters so much, we have to go further back than Darby. We have to go back to the second century, when the church faced a similar temptation and knew what to do with it.

The ancient error

In the second century, a charismatic leader named Montanus arose in Phrygia, in what is now central Turkey, and declared that the end was not merely coming but imminent. He and his prophets, most famously Priscilla and Maximilla, claimed direct revelation from the Holy Spirit. The New Jerusalem was about to descend near a village called Pepuza. Believers were called to gather, to purify themselves, and to embrace suffering and martyrdom as spiritually meritorious. God had chosen this moment, and he had chosen them.

The movement spread. It attracted serious minds. Tertullian, one of the great early Christian intellects, eventually aligned himself with it. In an age when persecution was real, the intensity of the movement could look like courage.

But the church pushed back, and the reasons are worth recovering.

The bishops who condemned Montanism did not object to belief in the Second Coming. Every Christian believed in the Second Coming. They objected to something more specific: the claim that the timeline could be known, that special revelation entitled leaders to command the faithful toward it, and that suffering and danger were therefore not merely endured but sought. The tradition named this a distortion on multiple grounds.

First, “no one knows the day or the hour” is not a riddle to be solved by sufficiently clever interpreters. It is a boundary. Second, using spiritual authority to send people toward danger on the grounds that their suffering serves prophetic purpose is not faith. It is manipulation. Third, and most precise, the movement treated God as a mechanism to be triggered rather than a sovereign to be trusted. Human urgency was mistaken for divine instruction.

The dispensationalist map is not identical to Montanism. Yet its application can commit a similar error when it enters a chain of command. Telling soldiers that the timeline is known, that the conflict is foreordained, and that their deaths serve a prophetic purpose treats human interpretation as divine instruction. It turns providence into permission. It substitutes certainty for discernment.

When the warning went unheeded

The church has not always remembered its own answer. The most consequential instance of forgetting is also the most relevant to the phrase that shadows this essay.

In November 1095, Pope Urban II addressed a crowd at Clermont. The speech wove together grievances and fear with a promise of spiritual reward and sacred destiny. The crowd’s response became one of the most famous phrases in medieval history: Deus vult. God wills it. The First Crusade was launched.

What followed was not only war abroad. It was blood at home. Jewish communities along the Rhineland were massacred before the armies even reached the Holy Land. Constantinople was eventually sacked by crusaders who were supposedly defending it. The project culminated in failure and left behind a moral stain that still haunts Christian memory.

What matters here is the structural logic. God wills this conflict. Therefore moral constraints are loosened. Those who die serve a sacred purpose. Escalation becomes evidence of faithfulness. Exit conditions vanish, because you do not negotiate your way out of God’s plan.

Missions that are claimed to be righteous missions do not tend to observe the established rules of engagement.

That phrase, Deus vult, is now tattooed on the body of the man responsible for the United States military. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth bears it on his skin alongside the word kafir — Arabic for “infidel.” In his 2020 book American Crusade, he praised the medieval Crusades as necessary to “push Islamism back” and described the present era as “much like the 11th century.” He has hosted monthly Christian prayer services in the Pentagon auditorium during working hours, circulated videos featuring Bible verses overlaid on footage of fighter jets and paratroopers, and at this year’s National Prayer Breakfast connected the deaths of soldiers directly to the fate of their eternal souls, saying that the warrior who lays down his life for his creator finds eternal life.

Symbols do not prove motives. They reveal what stories we find worth inhabiting, what versions of history we wish to embody, and what forms of holy violence we are tempted to romanticize. The danger is not that history repeats itself with identical costumes. The danger is that the moral logic returns: certainty, sanctification, and the quiet suspension of restraint.

Three theological distortions

It is worth being precise about what is wrong here, because imprecision gives this framework room to hide. Three distortions do most of the work.

The first is the attempt to engineer the end times. A detailed prophetic map can become a practical script. If history must end this way, then actions that “move the pieces” can start to feel not merely permissible but obligatory. Faith becomes strategy. But this treats God as a mechanism that human beings can set in motion rather than a sovereign who acts in his own time. The prophets who actually received revelation about history’s end were not issued a geopolitical to-do list. Daniel received visions he struggled to understand. John saw things for which he had no adequate vocabulary. Neither presented policy as prophecy. They presented judgment as warning.

The second distortion is the weaponization of spiritual authority. When a commanding officer frames a war as divinely mandated in a setting where subordinates cannot simply decline to listen, faith becomes coercive. It is not an argument offered to conscience. It is an atmosphere imposed upon it. If a briefing tells service members not only that God governs history, but that this particular war is the fulfillment of Revelation, and that leadership has been “anointed,” then religious language is no longer pastoral. It becomes a tool of psychological pressure. The tradition has a word for using spiritual claims to override the conscience of those with no recourse: coercion. That is not evangelism. It is the mirror image of what the early church experienced from its persecutors, and vowed never to imitate.

The third distortion is the evacuation of just war reasoning. Augustine and Aquinas insisted that the use of force must be morally constrained: undertaken for a just cause by legitimate authority, pursued with right intention, and bounded by proportionality and a reasonable prospect of success. Those constraints are not decorative. They are meant to keep violence from becoming sacrament. But they cannot survive if “success” is defined as escalation toward apocalypse. Armageddon, by definition, cannot be achieved by good strategy. It requires divine intervention. When war is framed as a sacred step toward the end of history, the moral architecture built to restrain war collapses. What remains is zeal.

The most corrosive part is not the presence of God-talk. It is the way certainty makes restraint feel like disobedience.

What the prophets actually did

There is another tradition available — older than dispensationalism, older than the Crusades, older than empire’s temptation to baptize itself. It looks almost nothing like triumphalist prophecy.

The Hebrew prophets did not celebrate the armies that marched. They wept. Isaiah, who saw visions of history’s end, also spoke of the servant who would not break a bruised reed. Jeremiah dictated warnings from confinement. Ezekiel performed grief with his own body. Amos confronted comfortable religion and warned those who longed for the Day of the Lord that they had misunderstood what they were longing for. The Day of the Lord, he said, would be darkness and not light.

The vision of swords beaten into plowshares appears more than once, as if the tradition feared we would miss it. The eschatological hope is not righteous people finally getting to spill the blood of their enemies. It is the end of the need for battle at all.

Jesus’ own posture sharpens the point. When disciples wanted fire from heaven against a village that refused them, he rebuked them. When Peter drew a sword in the garden, Jesus told him to put it away. Those who live by the sword, he said, will die by the sword. The earliest Christians, for centuries, refused to treat imperial violence as their instrument — not because they were indifferent to evil, but because they believed another Kingdom was coming and could not be built by coercion.

None of this settles every question about statecraft or defense. The just war tradition exists precisely because the tradition has always known these questions are real, and that easy slogans are not the same as moral seriousness. Christians can serve with integrity. A nation can defend itself. There are tragedies in history where force may be the least-wrong option.

But there is a vast distance between sober moral reasoning about the use of force and euphoric certainty that welcomes bloodshed because it confirms a timeline. That distance is the distance between faith and its distortion.

The question worth sitting with

The early church understood that the most dangerous distortions are rarely outright denials of the faith. They are more often real threads of the faith amplified until they drown out the rest: hope without humility, providence without restraint, courage without love.

The Montanists were not inventing a new religion. They were claiming the authority to command others toward danger because they believed they knew the schedule of God. The crusaders were not disbelieving in God. They were so certain of his will that they stopped listening for it. The commanders in those briefing rooms, if the complaints are accurate, are not merely speaking about God. They are using God to thicken the air around violence until it feels inevitable, even holy.

They are grinning.

Augustine warned that power’s great temptation is to confuse the City of God and the city of man, to mistake contingent human politics for the unfolding of divine will. The cost is measured first in the lives of those who could not refuse, and later in the credibility of the church that gave sacred cover to what should have remained morally agonizing.

The faith has an answer to this. It found that answer in the second century, when a movement insisted it knew the timetable and demanded obedience to it. The answer still stands. The timing belongs to God alone. The boundary is real. Those who claim the authority to engineer what God has reserved for himself are not hastening the Kingdom.

They are mistaking themselves for it.

The faith has an answer to this. It found that answer in the second century, when a movement insisted it knew the timetable and demanded obedience to it. The answer still stands: The timing belongs to God alone. The boundary is real. Those who claim the authority to engineer what God has reserved for himself are not hastening the Kingdom.

And God does not need a signal fire.

Sources and further reading

Primary reporting on the MRFF complaints: Jonathan Larsen, independent journalist, Substack (jonathanlarsen.substack.com): original reporting on complaints from service members across more than forty units in at least thirty military installations, published March 2, 2026.

Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), Mikey Weinstein, founder and president: public communications describing more than two hundred complaints received and summarizing reported briefing-room rhetoric.

HuffPost / Yahoo News: reporting on MRFF complaint details, including specific language used by commanders in briefings, published March 3, 2026.

Theological analysis from within the Christian tradition: Josh Olds, pastor and theologian, Baptist News Global: “The end-times theology driving US intervention in Iran,” March 2, 2026.

Baptist News Global: “US military personnel object to Armageddon talk,” March 3, 2026.

Baptist News Global: “Dispensationalism is going to get us all killed,” March 4, 2026.

Good Faith Media: “Franklin Graham’s Crusade: Extremist Theology Behind Strikes on Iran,” March 1, 2026.

On Hegseth, the Pentagon, and Christian nationalism: Interfaith Alliance: “Pete Hegseth’s Christian Nationalist Crusade Is a Threat to Religious Freedom,” documenting American Crusade, Hegseth’s public praise of the historical Crusades, and the Deus Vult tattoo.

PBS NewsHour, interview with scholar Brad Onishi, December 2024: context on Crusader tattoos and Christian nationalist symbolism.

Religion News Service: “Defense Secretary Hegseth tests Constitution in Pentagon worship services,” September 2025.

CNN Politics: “Hegseth invited pastor who calls for Christian theocracy to lead Pentagon prayer service,” February 2026.

Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF): press release documenting Huckabee’s appeal to Trump to “hear from heaven,” Hagee and Wallnau’s prophetic celebration of the strikes, and Hegseth’s National Prayer Breakfast remarks, March 3, 2026.

MS Now Opinion / Sarah Posner: “Christian nationalism is surfacing in the war on Iran in a shocking way,” March 4, 2026.

Military.com: “Commanders Accused of Framing Iran War as Biblical Mandate,” March 3, 2026.

Middle East Eye: “US troops told Iran war ‘anointed by Jesus’ to bring on Armageddon, watchdog says,” March 4, 2026.

On the dispensationalist theological tradition: John Nelson Darby, The Collected Writings of J.N. Darby. C.I. Scofield, The Scofield Reference Bible (Oxford University Press, 1909). Timothy Weber, On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Best Friend (Baker Academic, 2004). Mark Hitchcock, Iran and Israel: Wars and Rumors of Wars (Harvest House, 2013). Pew Research Center: “About Four in Ten U.S. Adults Believe Humanity Is Living in the End Times,” December 2022. LifeWay Research: pastoral surveys on end-times theology and the Second Coming, 2016 and 2019.

On the Montanists: Christine Trevett, Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy (Cambridge University Press, 1996). William Tabbernee, Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments (Brill, 2007). Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, Book V.

On the just war tradition: Augustine, The City of God, Books XIX and XXII. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, Q. 40.

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The Hand

I was walking in the woods when the thought arrived. Before I had finished thinking it, my hand was moving toward my pocket.

Not to capture anything. There was nothing remarkable to photograph. It moved because that is what hands do now when the mind stirs. Reach. Unlock. Scroll. A liturgy performed dozens of times a day without decision, without asking what it interrupts.

I stopped it that time. Stood there feeling foolish, caught in the act of fleeing something I could not name. The woods were quiet. The light was still falling.

What was I reaching away from?

Mercy

We talk about distraction as if it were purely a failure of will. The mind wanders. The discipline breaks. We reach for the phone because we are weak, because the world is engineered to steal focus.

All of that is true. But it is not the whole truth.

Distraction is often mercy. It rescues us from boredom. From loneliness. From anxiety, grief, guilt, and the weight of decisions we have not made. Sometimes it rescues us from prayer, from the silence where we might have to listen.

We do not reach for noise because we love noise. We reach because silence contains something. The phone is the exit we always carry, the door that opens onto anywhere but here.

The Thing in the Silence

My silence, when I let it arrive, sounds like this: my own breathing, louder than I expect. Wind in branches. A bird I cannot identify. My footsteps on leaves.

And underneath, fainter: a conversation I had handled badly. A decision I had been postponing. The low hum of guilt about nothing in particular and everything at once.

This is what I was reaching away from. Not the woods. The interior life the woods made audible.

Distraction is a way of managing conscience without confronting it. The mind raises a question, the thumb opens an app. The soul tries to speak, the feed drowns it out. We do not decide to avoid the interior life. We simply keep it at bay, one small interruption at a time, until avoidance becomes atmosphere.

The loss is not time, though we lose that too. The loss is depth: the ability to remain with reality long enough for conscience to form, for conviction to settle, for the world to become fully visible.

Darwin’s Worms

In 1837, a young naturalist presented a paper to the Geological Society of London on an unlikely subject: the common earthworm. His name was Charles Darwin. He would spend much of the next four decades returning to them.

The work was not glamorous. He observed how worms dragged leaves into their burrows and noticed they pulled them in by a narrow end, a detail suggesting practical intelligence in a creature with no eyes. He tested what they could sense. He measured what their castings did to the land. He watched long enough to notice changes invisible to anyone in a hurry.

His final book, published in 1881, was about worms.

What Darwin found was this: the surface of the earth is shaped, in part, by patient, invisible labor. Not dramatic forces. Not visible events. The slow work of small creatures, unnoticed, over time.

He could only see it because he stayed.

What the Worms Know

There is a moral claim hidden in Darwin’s worms, though he would not have put it that way.

The world is reshaped by the slow labor of the small. What is most consequential is often least dramatic. Reality yields itself to patient attention, and only to patient attention. The worms were always there, always working. It took a man willing to watch them for years to see what they were doing.

We have nearly lost the capacity for this kind of seeing. Not because we are less intelligent than Darwin, but because we have built an environment that makes sustained attention difficult. The feed wants the next click, the next scroll, the next small hit of novelty. It does not want us to stay with anything long enough for the slow truth to surface.

But the things that matter most, conscience, conviction, love, the gradual reshaping of a life, are not fast. They are worm-work. They happen beneath the surface, over time, and they become visible only to those who stay.

Patience of this kind is not only scientific.

The Noonday Demon

In the third and fourth centuries, thousands of men and women left the cities of the Roman Empire and walked into the Egyptian desert. They were not refugees. They were seeking something the cities could not provide: a place to face God without distraction. They built cells, lived in silence, and discovered that the mind generates its own noise.

They called the condition acedia, a restless inability to remain present. The eyes wander to the door. The thoughts drift to what is happening elsewhere. The soul becomes convinced that real life is anywhere but here. Evagrius Ponticus named it the noonday demon because it arrived when the day stretched out, when nothing was happening, when the cell became unbearable.

The symptoms sound uncomfortably modern: compulsive restlessness, inability to stay with a task, a longing for something, anything, other than what is in front of you.

They did not treat this as a minor failing. They considered it a slow evacuation of the soul. The remedy was simple and brutal: stay in your cell. The cell will teach you everything.

We carry the opposite of a cell in our pockets. The endless exit. The door that never closes. The assurance that we never have to stay with any silence long enough to hear what it contains.

Return

I went back to the woods last week. Same trail. Same light through branches.

The thought came again, not the same thought, but the same shape. A flicker of something half-formed. And the hand moved.

This time I watched it. Felt the pull, the small urgency, the voice that said capture this or check that or simply elsewhere. The hand hovered. The moment stretched.

I let it stay.

Nothing dramatic happened. No epiphany. Just the woods, growing slowly more visible. A mushroom on a fallen trunk I had not noticed. The sound of my breathing. The thought I had been half-thinking, allowed to finish itself: a small grief I had been carrying, now heavy for a moment, now allowed to be set down.

This is what attention makes possible. Not productivity. Not mindfulness. Just the slow return of the world, the self, the real, emerging like shapes from fog when you stop interrupting them.

The worms are still working. The silence still has something to say. And the hand, for now, learns to remain where it is.

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There’s a movie called Groundhog Day about a man who wakes up to the same miserable day over and over again. Same cold town. Same bad coffee. Same faces. Nothing changes. Nothing moves forward. He is stuck, and for a long time, he handles it badly.

But somewhere in the repetition, something shifts. He stops fighting the day and starts living inside it. He learns to play piano. He remembers how people take their coffee. He catches a kid falling from a tree. He shows up, not because the day has changed, but because he has.

And then one morning, the loop breaks. The sun comes up on February 3rd. The world is covered in snow, and it feels new. Not because he escaped the hard days, but because he finally met them with open hands.

I think about your year. The hospital visits that blur together. The phone calls that come at the wrong hour. The weight of worry for people you love, fighting battles you cannot fight for them. Your own body asking for rest you haven’t been able to take.

It can feel like the same day. The same worries and aches. The same impossible morning.

But here’s the difference I can’t stop noticing. In the movie, the man has to learn how to show up for people. You never did. You were already there. You have been there every repeated day: present, stubborn, faithful, tired, and still standing.

The groundhog is supposed to tell us whether winter will last. But you already know winter lasts exactly as long as it lasts, and you get through it the way you always have, not by seeing the end, but by getting up again.

Happy birthday, Mom. The light is closer than it feels.

Pages from the journal of an able seaman from Leith, later set to carpenter’s work. Recovered after the expedition.

December 6, 1914, Grytviken, South Georgia

Left the whaling station this morning. Men on the quay waved as if we were away to be ghosts. The Boss went straight to the charts.
Wrote Mary a note. Tore it up. Brave words feel like lying.

December 24, 1914

Christmas Eve. The galley did its best. Pudding tasted like rope. We ate it anyway. A few songs. Too loud, too cheerful, like whistling past a graveyard.

January 10, 1915, Weddell Sea

Ice now. Broken plates. Slush that steals your boots. White that is not pure, only endless.
We moved when we could. When we could not, we waited.

January 18, 1915

Beset. That’s what the officers called it. “Held fast.” Sounds tidy on paper.
The pack closed round the hull and that was that. Engines ran hot for nothing. Sails might as well be bedsheets. The ship shuddered once, like she tried to argue, then settled into the ice.
The Boss said we would drift till the ice opened. The men nodded. Nobody said what we were thinking.

February 3, 1915

The ice made sounds at night. Pressure beneath us, like a hand on a lid. There was nothing to be done about ice but listen to it.
Daylight was worse. Same white plain in every direction. Same pale sun dragging itself along. A stillness so complete your head started making up movement. You could walk a mile out, turn, and the ship was exactly as she had been. Going nowhere.

February 20, 1915

She was called Polaris once. One of the old hands told me that like it was a joke. The Boss renamed her Endurance for a virtue he thought we’d need.
Names didn’t matter, Harris said. He said plenty those days.

March 6, 1915

They put me to carpenter’s work more often. Patching, bracing, keeping small things from becoming big things. It suited me. A man likes to be useful.
My mittens were wearing thin. I’d stitched them twice already. I would stitch them again.

March 15, 1915

Routine is a fence. You don’t notice it till somebody steps through.
Harris stopped shaving. Said there was no point. I didn’t shave either. Felt myself slipping and didn’t like it.

April 7, 1915

Football on the ice. For half an hour we were boys again. Then the ball rolled against the hull and stopped. It was ridiculous and it made me angry.
Later I wrote Mary’s name in frost on the rail and watched it fade before I finished.

June 22, 1915, Midwinter Day

Midwinter. They dressed it up like a holiday because otherwise there’d be nothing to mark. A candle. Extra biscuit. A dram for some. We laughed too loud.
For an hour the dark felt lighter. It wasn’t the dark.

July 19, 1915

Pressure in the night. Not a single groan, but a hundred small complaints. You lay there listening to timber talk to ice.
Harris asked me, quiet-like, if I thought we’d get home. I told him aye. I didn’t know why I said it.

September 22, 1915

The ship complained more now. Beams, bulkheads, a sound like teeth grinding. We went down with lanterns and looked at her insides as if looking would keep her whole.
I started checking lashings that didn’t need checking. It gave my hands something to do when my head had nowhere to go.

October 24, 1915

The pack had teeth that day. Ridges pressed up beside us like a slow animal.
Harris said, “She’s done.” Like a man naming the weather.

October 27, 1915

Abandon ship.
The words hung there. Men stood like they were waiting for the Boss to take them back. Then we got on with it, because work is what you do when you’ve nowhere to put your fear.
We hauled out stores, then tools. My kit first. Planes, chisels, nails. Things that make you useful.
Harris tried to drag a chair out. Somebody laughed. He left it and didn’t laugh with them.

November 2, 1915, Ocean Camp

We camped on the ice then. Tents low. Wind sharp. The world smaller and more honest. You were either warm or you weren’t. Either useful or you weren’t.
I fixed a latch on a provision box. It would break again. I fixed it anyway. Leaving it broken felt like agreeing with the ice.

November 21, 1915

She went down that day.
Not in a grand way. Slow. Stubborn. Like an animal refusing to perform. When the mast finally disappeared, Harris took off his cap. No one spoke.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I checked a lashing that didn’t need checking.
It’s a strange thing, watching the place you slept turn to water.

December 14, 1915, Patience Camp

We drifted. We waited. The Boss kept the men busy. He knew what idleness does.
Harris said we’d be paid in stories. I told him stories don’t buy coal in Leith. He smiled, just a flicker, then went quiet.

February 12, 1916

Frost took the tip of my finger that day.
Harris told me to keep my mittens on when I was working. I nodded. I didn’t tell him my mittens were mostly holes and I’d been pretending they were fine.
I wrapped it up and went back at the lashings. One less finger. Same watch. Same jobs.

March 30, 1916

Talk of launching the boats. The officers spoke quietly. The men listened loudly.
There was relief in the idea of movement, even toward danger. Waiting makes a man strange.
Harris said he’d rather drown than sit another month on ice. Then he mended a boot sole like he planned to live forever.

April 9, 1916

We launched that day.
The boats looked too small. We dragged them like coffins and climbed in like it was a prayer. Sea water hit my face and I was grateful for pain that moved.

April 15, 1916, Elephant Island

Land. Not the land we wanted. Rock all the same.
I kissed it without thinking. Felt daft after. Harris didn’t laugh. He sat and stared at the sea as if it had offended him personally.

April 24, 1916

They pushed off in the wee boat and the sea took them like it was nothing.
The Boss stood in the stern a moment, looking back at us. Then the James Caird dipped behind a wave and was gone. I watched until my eyes hurt and my throat did that tight thing.
After, the camp sounded different. Smaller.

May 18, 1916

Harris almost stopped talking. When he did, it was sharp, like a knife that hadn’t been used in a while.
He missed breakfast. No reason. No one pressed him.
A man can give up without declaring it. He can just stop keeping the small fences.

June 7, 1916

Someone slept through his watch. No punishment. The watch was covered anyway. Still, something felt thinner after. Like rope wearing through.
I thought about skipping mine that night. Nobody would notice. Then I pictured the beach empty in the dark and felt ashamed. I went.

July 3, 1916

We ran out of tobacco. I thought men would become wolves. Instead we became accountants. Counting crumbs. Counting minutes. Counting each other’s tempers.
Harris gave me the last of his tea without making a show of it. I pretended not to notice.

August 29, 1916

Clear sky for a moment. Stars. Cold and exact. I caught myself looking for Polaris out of habit, then remembered the ship and felt something tighten in my chest.
I tried to pray. Couldn’t find the words. I knelt anyway.

August 30, 1916

A ship.
I stared so long my eyes watered. I didn’t trust it. Thought it might be a trick of light. Then it came closer and we heard voices and men started moving like they remembered they had legs.
Harris stood up slow, like he was afraid he’d break if he moved too quick. He looked older than he should. So did I.
They called names and counted heads.
We were aboard.

I shaved.

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How easily we learn to follow the wrong story

We watched Edward Scissorhands last night. My children saw a familiar film: snow falling, pastel houses glowing, a fairy tale about someone different finding love. I saw something else. I saw a parable about how easily communities are persuaded, and how fragile kindness becomes once a new story takes hold.

The film is not really about Edward’s difference. It is about the neighborhood’s response to it. And in that response, we see something uncomfortable about how welcome works, how quickly admiration turns to fear, and how readily people move together from care to cruelty without ever deciding to do so.

This is not a story about monsters.
It is a story about crowds.

Kindness With Conditions

The neighborhood Edward enters is a study in suburban order. Identical houses. Manicured lawns. Politeness as social currency. Everything in its place, everyone performing a role.

When Edward first arrives, the neighborhood does not reject him. It celebrates him. He trims hedges into art. He cuts hair into beauty. He makes the ordinary extraordinary, and the neighbors respond with delight.

But notice what drives their welcome. Edward is embraced not because of who he is, but because of what he can do. His difference is tolerated as long as it is entertaining and useful. The moment his presence becomes inconvenient, the moment his difference threatens rather than decorates, admiration dissolves.

No one appears to decide this alone. The neighborhood moves as one, pivoting not because new truth has emerged, but because a new story has.

This is conditional virtue. It looks like kindness until tested. The neighbors do not ask whether Edward is good or dangerous. They ask whether he still belongs. When the answer changes, so does their judgment.

Who do we welcome only while it is popular to do so.

Hospitality Without Interrogation

Edward is discovered alone in a decaying mansion by Peg, an Avon saleswoman. When she first encounters him, she sees what others will later fear. Blades where hands should be. Scars. A body unfinished.

She does not interrogate him. She does not demand explanations. She does not calculate risk.

She simply decides that someone so alone should not remain that way.

Peg invites Edward into her car, into her home, into her family. When he nearly injures her by accident, she accepts the blame herself. When others stare, she corrects them gently. When her son gawks, she reminds him that staring is impolite. She does not deny the danger. She refuses to let it be the first or final word.

This is hospitality in its most radical form. Welcome that precedes understanding. Love that does not wait for credentials.

The Christian tradition has a name for this. Welcoming the stranger. Not the vetted stranger. Not the safe stranger. Just the stranger.

Peg’s kindness stands out precisely because it does not follow the neighborhood’s cues. She acts before consensus forms, and she remains steady even when the crowd begins to turn.

Learning to See Through Proximity

Kim, Peg’s daughter, is repulsed by Edward at first. She is embarrassed. She laughs at him. She wants him kept at a distance. His presence disrupts her sense of normal.

But proximity changes her.

Kim does not come to understand Edward through argument or explanation. She comes to understand him by being near him. By watching his restraint. By seeing his gentleness even when provoked. By noticing how, even when humiliated or misunderstood, he steps back rather than strike back.

Her transformation is not dramatic. It is gradual. Born of shared space and unguarded moments. It turns when she sees him alone, carving ice into something delicate and precise, absorbed in an act of care rather than performance, unaware of who is watching as snow begins to fall.

She stops seeing Edward as a problem to manage and begins seeing him as a person to know.

Still, Kim hesitates. She senses the truth before she is ready to stand apart from the crowd. She follows the prevailing mood longer than she should, not because she believes it, but because leaving the group carries its own risk.

How many of our judgments would survive genuine proximity.

When the Story Turns

The neighborhood’s turn against Edward does not happen all at once. It happens through whispers. Through rumors. Through fear repeated until it feels like fact.

Edward himself does not change. His hands are the same. His gentleness remains. What changes is the story told about him.

Once that story takes hold, resistance disappears. Fear does not need to convince everyone. It only needs to convince enough.

This is how societies drift into wrongdoing. Not through conviction, but through imitation. People follow not because they are cruel, but because cruelty has become the prevailing direction.

The vulnerable are always the first to feel that turn.

Fear That Protects Itself

Jim, Kim’s boyfriend, embodies this fear most clearly. His hostility toward Edward predates any injury. It is not born from harm, but from threat. Edward’s presence destabilizes a hierarchy Jim assumes is his by right.

Edward loves Kim without possession. Without entitlement. Without demand. And this exposes something hollow in Jim’s claim. So fear hardens into cruelty. Manipulation escalates into violence. The neighborhood follows his lead not because his story is true, but because it gives their unease a voice.

Power rarely needs proof. It only needs agreement.

Mercy That Refuses to Follow

In the final chase, the crowd demands completion. Edward must be caught. The story must end the way fear requires.

A police officer arrives with the authority to finish it. Instead, he looks. He sees. And he fires his gun into the air, letting Edward escape.

“Run,” he whispers. “Get out of here.”

The film does not explain his choice. It simply shows someone refusing to follow where everyone else is headed.

Mercy, here, does not undo the harm. But it breaks the momentum. It interrupts the lie by declining to participate in it.

Sometimes moral courage looks like nothing more than stopping.

What Remains

The neighborhood returns to normal. Lawns are trimmed. Houses glow again. Gossip fades. Life continues as if Edward never existed.

Edward is alone once more, creating beauty in isolation. Snow falls because of him, a gift the neighborhood receives without acknowledgment, without gratitude, without ever asking where it comes from.

This is peace without reconciliation.
Order without justice.
Safety preserved by forgetting.

Kim alone carries the truth, preserving it privately rather than naming it publicly. The community, by following along, has been spared the discomfort of reckoning.

The Question Left to Us

Edward Scissorhands is not a warning about villains.
It is a warning about how easily we learn to follow.

Edward’s hands were dangerous, and he restrained them.
The neighborhood’s hands were ordinary, and they did not.

The question is not who is different.
The question is how quickly we move when the story changes.

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Legend attributes a simple, stubborn creed to Abraham Lincoln: “I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true.”

Nothing was certain when Lincoln governed. The Union might not survive. Emancipation might not hold. His name might be remembered, if at all, with contempt. He had no assurance that what he was doing would work. What he had was clarity about what he could not do and still remain himself, and conviction about what he must do whatever the cost.

That sentence, whether spoken or distilled, is not inspiration. It is resistance. Resistance to the belief that moral action requires guaranteed outcomes. Resistance to the idea that conscience must wait until the future is visible.

Lincoln did not claim to see far. He claimed something smaller and more demanding: responsibility for what little he could see, and the courage to move toward it.

THE MISUNDERSTANDING

We tend to think direction requires certainty. That moral clarity means knowing how things will turn out. That conviction must feel confident.

This belief sits beneath much of our paralysis.

We wait to act until outcomes are assured. We delay judgment until consensus forms. We call this prudence, but often it is just fear. While we wait, time does not pause. Decisions are made around us. Silence becomes its own answer.

History is not shaped by people who knew how things would end. It is shaped by people who held to conscience and conviction while not knowing the final outcome. The difference is subtle but decisive.

Direction is not the same thing as destination. It is not a map. It is a bearing.

CONSCIENCE AND CONVICTION

We often speak of conscience and conviction as if they were the same thing. They are not. They are two lights, and we need both to navigate.

Conscience is the lighthouse. It warns us away from the rocks. It tells us what we cannot do without becoming someone we refuse to be. Its beam is narrow but unambiguous: not there. Conscience does not show us the whole sea. It shows us where the sea will kill us.

Conviction is Polaris, the North Star. It does not warn. It summons. It tells us what we are sailing toward even when the journey is long and the outcome uncertain. Conviction is not confidence about arrival. It is commitment to direction.

Direction requires both: the constraint that keeps us from ruin, and the summons that pulls us toward what is true.

LINCOLN AT THE CENTER OF PRESSURE

We remember Lincoln as monument. The settled face carved into stone. The figure history has decided was right.

But the man himself lived without that verdict.

He governed a country tearing itself apart. He faced incompatible demands that could not be harmonized. Abolitionists accused him of cowardice. Border states accused him of betrayal. His own cabinet fractured around him. Every decision cost him support he could not afford to lose.

There were no clean options. No action without consequence. No assurance that the war would end in union rather than dissolution.

Lincoln did not possess certainty. He possessed conscience and conviction.

Conscience told him what he could not do. He could not abandon the Union. He could not retreat on emancipation once committed. He could not become the kind of man who traded principle for peace. These were the rocks.

But conviction told him where he must go. The Emancipation Proclamation was not merely the path left after others closed. It was a summons he walked toward with open eyes, knowing it might destroy him. He did not issue it because it was safe. He issued it because it was right, and because his sense of what the nation must become would not let him rest.

He once wrote, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” This was not passivity. It was humility about outcomes paired with resolve about direction. He could not control the sea. He could keep his hand on the wheel.

MORAL DIRECTION

Moral direction is not seeing far. It is refusing to move against what you can see, and having the courage to move toward what you must.

Conscience closes paths. Conviction opens them. Conscience says you cannot go there and remain whole. Conviction says you must go here whatever it costs. The first restrains. The second summons. Both are necessary.

There is a kind of moral action that heeds neither light. It moves when the crowd moves. It speaks when speaking is safe. It measures direction by consensus rather than conscience, by comfort rather than conviction.

This is not direction. It is drift.

DIRECTION WITHOUT VINDICATION

Direction means orientation toward something true regardless of whether that truth is rewarded. It means fidelity to conscience when conscience warns, and courage to follow conviction when conviction demands. It means accepting that being right does not guarantee being vindicated.

Lincoln did not know he would be vindicated. He suspected, more than once, that he might not be. But he held to what he could see: the rocks his conscience warned him away from, the star his conviction would not let him ignore. He moved within those lights because the alternative was to sail blind, or not to sail at all.

BEARING

Most of us will never face decisions at Lincoln’s scale. We will not hold nations together or sign documents that alter history. Our choices will be smaller and largely invisible.

Still, we face moments when clarity is partial and cost is real. When competing voices demand allegiance. When conscience warns and conviction calls. When the question is not what will work, but what we can live with and what we are willing to move toward.

Somewhere, the lighthouse still flashes its warning. Somewhere, Polaris still holds its place. These lights are yours. They are enough to set a bearing.

The rest is holding to that bearing.

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THE PLUNGE

Every New Year’s Day in the Netherlands, thousands of people walk into the sea.

It is a party before it is a plunge. Music blares from speakers. People stretch and warm up, jumping jacks and nervous laughter, arms wrapped tight against the cold. And then the signal comes, and they run, shouting, stumbling, pushing toward the water. For a moment they are under. Then they surface, gasping, grinning, shaking from the shock of it.

The sky is usually a flat January gray. The air smells of salt and wet wool. The North Sea does not soften itself for ceremony.

The Dutch call it Nieuwjaarsduik. The New Year’s Dive. It has no spiritual origin, no formal liturgy, no doctrine. It is simply a thing people do together when one year ends and another begins. And yet something in the act speaks to an instinct older than any calendar.

What are they looking for, these thousands standing at the water’s edge?

Not endurance. The cold lasts only seconds.
Not spectacle. No one is watching who is not also shivering.
Not achievement. There is nothing to win.

They are looking, I think, for a feeling that is hard to find elsewhere: the sensation of being, for one clean instant, released.

It is not a new instinct. We have been stepping into water like this for a very long time.

THE ECHO

There is an older story about a man at a river.

He was not famous yet. He had built nothing, healed no one, delivered no sermon that anyone remembered. He was simply a man from a small town in an occupied country, approaching middle age, standing among strangers who had come to the water for reasons of their own.

A prophet was there, waist-deep in the Jordan, calling people forward. One by one they came. They confessed what burdened them. They went under. They came up. And then they walked back to their lives, not sinless, not perfected, but lighter.

When the man from the small town stepped into the water, the prophet hesitated. But the man went in anyway. Not to be cleansed, for he had nothing to confess, but to stand where everyone else stood. To begin not with a proclamation, but with submission. To enter public life the way the rest of us must: by getting wet.

The story does not say what that water felt like. But I imagine it was cold.

LAYING IT DOWN

January offers something rarer than a fresh plan. It offers release.

Not the erasure of memory. We cannot unlearn what we have learned. But relief from its weight. The past year may have taught us much. It may also have pressed down on us in ways we did not notice until we tried to stand.

There is a difference between remembering and carrying. Conscience asks us to be honest about who we have been. It does not ask us to drag every failure behind us like a sled through mud. Growth requires reckoning, yes. But it also requires mercy. We cannot move toward who we are becoming if we are forever tethered to who we were.

The cold water does not make anyone pure. It does not undo what was done. But it marks a line. It says: Here, something ended. Here, something else begins.

We do not step out of the river or sea as different people. We step out as the same people, still dripping, still imperfect, still cold, but no longer holding so tightly to what we were carrying on the way in.

That may be enough.

The year is new. The water is near. And whatever you have been dragging, whatever weight pressed down on you in the months behind you, you are allowed to set it down.

Not because you have earned release.
But because you need it.

As this year begins, what weight are you most ready to set down?

I’d welcome your thoughts in the comments. If this piece resonated, consider liking or sharing it with someone who might appreciate it.

Thank you for being here.

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Every year, Charlie Brown runs toward the football. Every year, Lucy pulls it away. He lands flat on his back, stares at the sky, and mutters those two words that became a national catchphrase: “Good grief.”

And every year, he tries again.

This isn’t optimism. Charlie Brown knows he will fail; he has failed every time before. The pattern is so predictable that even new readers know what’s coming. Yet something in him refuses to learn the lesson experience keeps teaching: stop trying.

Charles Schulz spent fifty years drawing this scene and variations of it. A boy who loses every baseball game but shows up for the next one. A kid who checks his mailbox every Valentine’s Day and finds it empty. A dog who keeps writing novels that get rejected. Schulz understood something American Christianity often struggles to remember: faithfulness isn’t about winning. It’s about showing up, even when failure feels inevitable.

This December, as we mark the birth of a child whose life would end in apparent defeat, Schulz’s theology of perseverance deserves a closer look.

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The Man Who Drew Sadness

We remember Schulz as the creator of Peanuts, the strip that ran from 1950 to 2000 and became part of American consciousness. We remember A Charlie Brown Christmas, which has aired every year since 1965. We remember that he taught Sunday school for two decades and spoke openly about his faith.

What we forget, or never knew, is that Schulz wrestled with depression much of his life. Fame never dissolved his loneliness. His first marriage ended in heartbreak. Spiritually, he hovered between belief and uncertainty, never entirely comfortable with easy answers.

In 1997, three years before his death, he offered a line that revealed the tension he lived with: “I think I’ve discovered the secret of life: you just hang around until you get used to it.”

That wasn’t cynicism. It was honesty about what endurance actually feels like: not triumph or breakthrough, but the daily decision to continue when continuation itself becomes the victory.

And Schulz continued. Every day for fifty years, he stepped to his drawing board and created a world where failure was normal, disappointment was expected, and yet the characters kept trying anyway.

That persistence (drawing failure for half a century) is its own sermon.

The Patron Saint of Inadequacy

His baseball team loses every game. The scores are absurd. His pitching is so disastrous that line drives literally knock him out of his clothes. His team openly despises his leadership. Lucy calls him a blockhead to his face. And every spring, he organizes another season.

The little red-haired girl never notices him. The kite-eating tree always wins. On Halloween, he gets rocks while everyone else gets candy.

He is, by any measurable standard, a failure.

But Schulz knew that failure is not the opposite of faith; failure is the arena where faith takes shape.

Charlie Brown never becomes cynical. He doesn’t lash out or withdraw. He absorbs disappointment, mutters “good grief,” and returns the next day. Not because he expects a different outcome, but because something in him refuses to give failure the final word.

When Jesus said to forgive seventy times seven, He wasn’t offering a strategy for success. He was describing what love looks like when it refuses to quit. Charlie Brown embodies this: he keeps trusting Lucy not because he’s naïve, but because hope in him is more stubborn than cruelty in her.

This is grace in ordinary life: not dramatic transformation, just the courage to keep showing up.

Faith Without Reward

Every Halloween, while other children trick-or-treat, Linus sits in a pumpkin patch waiting for the Great Pumpkin. He believes with total sincerity that the Great Pumpkin will rise from the most sincere patch and reward the faithful.

The Great Pumpkin never comes.

Year after year, Linus waits. His friends mock him, Sally resents him, and even Lucy calls him a blockhead. Yet he returns to the pumpkin patch, certain that sincerity must matter.

Still he believes.

Faith that persists only when rewarded isn’t faith. It’s a transaction.

Linus’s belief costs him something: time, friendships, reputation. And he keeps believing anyway. That is fidelity. Not because expectation is fulfilled, but because commitment is chosen.

The biblical prophets understood this. Jeremiah preached for decades and saw no revival. Hosea’s faithfulness didn’t cure his marriage. John the Baptist died in a prison cell, never seeing the kingdom he announced.

They were not rewarded for their faith. They simply lived it.

Linus embodies that same stubborn hope, a hope that refuses to die even when nothing arrives.

The Illusion of Quick Fixes

Lucy’s psychiatric booth sits on the sidewalk with its hand-lettered sign:

“The Doctor Is In: 5¢.”

Her advice rarely helps, and she often caused the problem in the first place. Yet she charges a nickel and presumes authority.

Schulz wasn’t just poking fun at therapy. The booth is a critique of cheap grace, the desire for quick solutions to deep problems.

Lucy represents our longing for formulas: say this prayer, follow these steps, read this book, apply this insight, and your struggles will vanish.

But wisdom is not a commodity you buy. It’s a character you become. And character forms slowly, through failure and endurance, through the long work of getting back up.

Lucy sells advice. Charlie Brown practices faithfulness.

That’s transformation, not information.

Dancing Anyway

Snoopy’s life is, on paper, small. A doghouse. A food bowl. A yard.

And yet he imagines himself a World War I Flying Ace. He writes novels. He travels the world in his mind. Most of all, he dances constantly, joyfully, for no reason at all.

Joy, Schulz suggests, is not the absence of suffering. Joy is the decision to delight in life as it is.

Snoopy doesn’t wait for improvement. He moves through ordinary days as if they are worth celebrating, and in doing so, he makes them so.

The Christian tradition calls this gratitude. Not sentimental positivity, but practiced attention to what is good even when much is hard.

Snoopy dances not because life is easy, but because life is a gift.

The Sadness Schulz Wouldn’t Hide

Peanuts is often melancholy. The strip ends not with punchlines, but with sighs: a character staring at the sky, a disappointment lingering in the final panel.

Schulz refused to sanitize life. Children feel loneliness. Adults carry disappointment. Faith coexists with grief. His characters voice the sadness people usually hide:

“Nobody likes me.”
“I got a rock.”
“My anxieties have anxieties.”

This honesty is its own form of grace.

Advent acknowledges darkness before light, longing before fulfillment. Schulz lived in that space. Charlie Brown doesn’t stop being anxious. Linus doesn’t abandon his blanket. Lucy doesn’t suddenly become kind. They remain who they are, and somehow grace finds them there.

Schulz trusted honesty more than cheerfulness: that naming sorrow is more faithful than denying it.

What We Forget

Our culture equates blessing with success, faith with winning, struggle with spiritual failure. We elevate testimonies about breakthroughs, not testimonies about endurance.

Schulz offers a counterpoint: faithfulness is not measured by outcomes. Losing does not negate dignity. Perseverance is moral formation.

Most of what sustains the world happens in obscurity: by parents caring for aging parents, teachers in underfunded schools, friends who keep calling when calls aren’t returned.

We want faith to make us winners. Schulz believed faith simply makes us people who keep showing up.

Scripture on Prime Time

In 1965, CBS gave Schulz a Christmas special. Executives hated it: too slow, no laugh track, and far too religious. They begged him to remove Linus’s recitation of Luke 2.

Schulz refused.

The scene is simple. Charlie Brown asks, “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” Linus steps forward, asks for the spotlight, drops his security blanket, and recites the nativity story.

No commentary. No apology. Just Scripture, offered with tenderness.

A Charlie Brown Christmas became the most-watched special of the year and remains a December tradition. Schulz didn’t win by compromise. He won by trusting that truth, spoken simply, can stand on its own.

The Point Is Returning

“Good grief” is a contradiction. Grief and goodness should not coexist. And yet they do. Grief can shape compassion. Disappointment can form humility. Failure can teach perseverance.

Charlie Brown will try again next year. Lucy will pull the football away. He will fall, stare at the sky, and mutter “good grief.”

And then he will get up.

This is Schulz’s moral world: the point isn’t victory. The point is returning: to hope after disappointment, to trust after betrayal, to love after loss. Not triumph, but courage. Not success, but faithfulness.

The cross was a failure by every measure that mattered to the powerful. Yet Christians call it good: the day everything went wrong is the day everything changed.

Maybe the gospel isn’t about never falling down.
Maybe it’s about getting back up.
Maybe faith isn’t the certainty you’ll win.
Maybe it’s the stubborn hope that refuses to let failure have the last word.

Good grief, indeed.

Selected References

Charles M. Schulz, Peanuts comic strip (1950–2000)

A Charlie Brown Christmas, CBS television special (1965)

David Michaelis, Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography

Luke 2:8–14

Matthew 18:21–22

Late at night, when the noise of the day has thinned, the world feels different. A scientist studies an image of a distant galaxy. A widow sits beside an empty chair. A child asks where he was before he was born. A person who does not believe in God whispers into the silence, unsure who she is speaking to or why the impulse is there at all.

We have split the atom, mapped the genome, and photographed black holes. We have explained thunder, lightning, disease, and death. We have reduced the cosmos to equations and the mind to neurons firing in patterned ways.

And yet, in the most secular age in history, the question refuses to disappear.

Is there something more?

Not only among the faithful. Among the uncertain. Among people who do not believe yet still wonder if love is more than chemistry, if beauty points beyond the visible world, if conscience is more than social conditioning, if the longing for transcendence is something other than evolutionary residue.

If the world is only material, why is the hunger for meaning so persistent?
If the question is irrelevant, why does it keep returning?
If God is a fiction, why do we struggle to outgrow the question?

Perhaps the place to begin is not with the arguments, but with the endurance of the question itself.

What Great Minds Could Not Ignore

Across history, some of the most serious thinkers have wrestled with the ache beneath the surface of things. They did not come to faith through fear or superstition or tribal loyalty. They came because they encountered something they could not dismiss. Not a proof, but a recognition.

They were moved not by arguments alone but by what reality refused to let them ignore.

Augustine: The Restless Heart

Augustine sought fulfillment everywhere: philosophy, rhetoric, acclaim, relationships, spiritual movements. None of it quieted him. He described the longing as a wound that refused to heal.

He later wrote the line that has echoed across centuries:

“Our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”

He did not deduce this; he discovered it through exhaustion. The restlessness itself became a kind of evidence.

Pascal: Terror and Wonder

Blaise Pascal looked at the stars and felt fear.
“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.”

He refused to dismiss the terror as imagination. The vastness, the loneliness, the sense of disproportion between who we are and who we feel we should be pointed toward something logic alone could not contain.

His fear and wonder became a form of spiritual awareness.

C. S. Lewis: The Argument from Joy

Lewis described sudden moments of piercing longing. A melody. A scent. A childhood memory. These flashes filled him with desire for something he could not name.

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy,” he wrote, “the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

For Lewis, joy was not escapism. It was a clue.

Simone Weil: Beauty as Intrusion

Simone Weil believed beauty was not decoration but disclosure. Beauty carried a weight that exceeded the material world. It was attention turned into prayer, an ordinary moment revealing something beyond itself.

Alan Lightman: The Physicist in the Boat

MIT physicist Alan Lightman calls himself an atheist. Yet one night, drifting off the coast of Maine and staring at the stars, something happened.

The boat dissolved. The boundary of his body faded. He felt an overwhelming connection to the stars, as if he were part of them. He later wrote that even if every neuron were mapped, the experience would not be fully explained.

Lightman remains an atheist, but he calls the moment a form of spiritual awareness. Even for those who reject religion entirely, the longing persists. The question refuses to die.

What We Struggle to Explain Away

The thinkers above did not share doctrines or worldviews. What they shared was recognition. They encountered something that felt more real than the explanations meant to contain it.

Longing

We hunger for meaning, beauty, justice, and love. Survival does not require symphonies, self-sacrifice, or poetry. Yet these impulses endure.

Conscience

The sense of “ought” feels revealed, not invented. It has an authority that preference cannot explain.

Beauty

Beauty arrives like a messenger. A sunset. A line of music. The face of someone we love. It awakens a hope we did not know we were missing.

Love

Not attraction or mutual benefit. Love that gives itself away. Love that recognizes infinite worth. Material explanations can describe love’s mechanics, but not its meaning.

The Persistence of the Question

If the world were only material, the hunger for meaning would not be this stubborn. The question would have died long ago. Yet it survives every cultural shift.

The question has outlived empires, ideologies, and every attempt to silence it.

Not Proofs but Signposts

You cannot weigh longing, graph beauty, or measure love. Yet these experiences feel real and refuse to be flattened.

Maybe they are not proofs. Maybe they are signposts.
Echoes.
Breadcrumbs.

Not conclusions. Invitations.

Doubt as Companion, Not Opponent

None of these thinkers lived without doubt.

Augustine questioned for years.
Pascal wrestled with silence.
Weil lived between desire and distance.
Lewis admitted faith often felt fragile.
Lightman remains an atheist who experiences transcendence.

They did not chase certainty. They lived with tension.

Doubt did not erase longing.
Longing did not erase doubt.

If God were obvious, faith would not exist.
If God were absent, the question would not survive.

What the Question Asks of Us

If the question persists, then it cannot be trivial.
It asks us to pay attention.

To beauty we did not earn.
To conscience we did not create.
To love that exceeds calculation.
To longing that refuses to settle.
To the moments when the world feels too fragile and too luminous to be an accident.

The question does not demand certainty.
It demands honesty.

The Proof Is the Question

The thinkers above did not arrive at belief through a single argument. They were drawn by the shape of reality: the way truth, beauty, goodness, and longing converge.

Maybe the proof of God is not a theorem.
Maybe it is the question itself, the one we cannot silence, the one that rises unbidden in moments of beauty, grief, wonder, and love.

We do not need certainty to feel the pull.
We only need honesty.

The question persists because something in reality keeps calling to us. Because the hunger for meaning is written into human experience. Because even in our most secular moment, we sense that we are made for more than what we can see.

Perhaps the truest question is not “Can we prove God exists?”
Perhaps it is, “Why can’t we stop asking?”

And maybe the asking is the beginning of the answer.

The longing is the evidence. The restlessness is the proof.

If you have felt this restlessness, I would be grateful to hear from you. What longing refuses to leave you alone? What questions do you carry? Reply to this message and tell me.

Selected References

Augustine, Confessions
Blaise Pascal, Pensées
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; The Weight of Glory
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
Alan Lightman, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

Thank you. I’m genuinely glad you are here.

This is the first note you are receiving here. I write for readers who want something quieter and more thoughtful than the noise that often surrounds public life, culture, and moral debate. If you found your way here, you are likely looking for a place where questions can be examined honestly, without ideology, performance, or easy answers.

That is my hope for this space.

You can expect one substantial essay each month, with occasional shorter notes in between. There are no hot takes here, no outrage cycles, and no pressure to pick sides.

The 2026 Arc

This year will follow a simple, seasonal arc. Each month centers on a human capacity or virtue. These themes are lenses for reflection, not a self-help program, and the cycle is meant to deepen as it returns.

• December: Release

• January: Direction

• February: Endurance

• March: Attention

• April: Renewal

• May: Fidelity

• June: Humility

• July: Delight

• August: Limits

• September: Responsibility

• October: Courage

• November: Gratitude

• December: Back to Release

The First Anchors

To begin:

• December (Release): Cold Water

• January (Direction): The Light You Have

• January (Direction’s shadow): Drift (a lighter reflection)

• February (Endurance): Endurance (a recovered journal from the ice)

Why This Exists

This project grew out of conversations with people who care about truth and virtue but feel worn down by how moral language is used in public life. It is for readers who want clarity rather than certainty, and seriousness without partisanship.

You do not need to share any particular beliefs to find something meaningful here. Honest attention is enough.

A Note on Pace

I will not crowd your inbox. This is a slow project, built on trust and careful thought.

If this space resonates, you are welcome to reply with a brief hello or share the work with someone who might appreciate it.

Thank you for being here.
Wilson Locke

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