My Only Comfort

As I recover a bit from a grueling five months, I find myself being drawn back into those things that stir my passions.

The ideas below the surface of things, and the history and movement of theology, and tearing away the barnacles that evangelicals have attached to the Bible.

It is what I love.

Every time I watch a Reformed or Presbyterian pastor, or a mega-church leader, or a money grubbing Pentecostal prosperity preacher, it causes me pain. I am reminded of the words of Jesus,

“… you shut the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither enter yourselves, nor allow those who would enter to go in.”

The experts of religion spend their time arguing over who is in and who is out. They miss the feast, because they are so concerned about the guest list.

They can’t enjoy the beauty and the taste and the smell of the new wine because someone they despise might be sitting at the table.

They build barriers against the gay man, the trans woman, the woman preacher, the one who baptizes wrong, or believes the wrong things about the flood or creation or abortion or gay rights or heaven or hell or women or men or on and on and on…

They’ve become the experts on everything except one thing. How to rest. How to just sit and enjoy the feast.

How to leave the questions about who is in and who is out in the hands of God and just learn to love their neighbor so fiercely you feel it in your guts (bowels of mercy – is how the old King James puts it. Weird huh?).

As Jesus said, you fight so fiercely about who belongs and who doesn’t belong that you miss the feast completely.

You wouldn’t even want to be in the kingdom of God because the wrong sort of person might be there.

You wouldn’t want to sit at the feast because someone might drink wine. Or hold hands with the wrong person.

And pretty soon it gets to the point when you can’t even tell the difference between beauty and filth. You can’t even see the kingdom of God, and you inexplicably mistook it for an orange foul-mouthed cretin, an over the hill 80s movie villain, a rapist, a scoffer, a contemptuous fool.

And you looked at the idiot and said, “He’s our guy”. Best president we ever had.

And all he had to do was promise a wall to keep the wrong sort of people from being happy and blessed and prosperous and you shouted Hallelujah!

Because he tapped into your religion. The religion of power and insider knowledge, and control and domination, and circling the wagons to keep the riffraff out…

And you were sent invitation after invitation. Come. Sit. Eat. Rest.

Here is the rest you have been looking for. Here is the peace you have been seeking.

But you turned into an angry pile of rage at the thought that the OTHERS were invited to rest as well. And they went in ahead of you.

You preferred to sit with the rapists and the pedophiles and the murderers and the abusers and the grifters because they spoke your language.

“We are entitled to it and you are not. You are not us. You deserve pain and isolation and death even if I have to take it too.”

And you didn’t even see the irony.

But here is the amazing thing – even now it isn’t too late.

Anyone who comes is invited to come.

But yes, there will be “undeserving” people there. There will be people who wear funny clothes and speak funny languages and love the wrong sorts of people and do things that you think are wrong…

They will still be there. So unless you throw down your hate and your weapons you won’t ever come. You’ll be left outside, not because God closed the gate, but because you would rather starve than sit with a “sinner”

That’s sad.

And this is my ramble for the day. This is why white evangelicals doubled down on Trump when every single other demographic turned away from the ugly.

White evangelicals like the ugly, because the god they serve is ugly.

I was raised a Christian Nationalist before that was a term.
We called it “postmillennialism” or “reconstructionism”. Some people called it “theonomy”. Others called it dominionism.

The idea is that the church (meaning the organization and the hierarchy, NOT the people) will gradually influence and take over all of the spheres of the world and make it all bend the knee to “Jesus”. God’s law (the Ten Commandments) would become the law of the land, as interpreted by the book of Exodus and Leviticus, through the insightful dominance of the preacher of choice at the moment.

That’s an oversimplification, but that is the root.

This also was 60 years ago. It now has lost any of the grace it used to have, and has been hijacked completely by hatred and contempt, as well as the vilest sorts of behavior – incest, pornography, murder, brawling, reviling – all those things that the Bible actually warned us would happen when we substitute power and money for grace and humility.

But I digress.

We were warned as children to guard what went into our minds. My father was deathly afraid of sex and forbad us to watch shows or listen to music that might mention sex. I believe that he truly believed that if he kept his sons away from every mention of sex that they would stay away from it as well. It didn’t work, of course.

But it did twist us all up pretty good.

How often did we hear “guard your hearts” or “garbage in, garbage out”?

Don’t love the world or things that are in the world.

The funny thing is, that they were right. They just didn’t understand what the garbage was.

For fifty years, the evangelical right has filled their minds with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Fox News, Phyllis Schlafly, Elisabeth Elliott, Bill Gothard, James Dobson and the myriad of conferences that we endured as children.

My father, so deathly afraid of sex that he dubbed “The Love Boat” a “jiggle show” and refused to let us watch it, started singing along to Rush Limbaugh singing “my ding-a-ling” in his stupid attempt to mock Madelaine Albright.

And that was when I started thinking. It does matter what we put into our minds. The evangelical right has been fed a steady and unrelenting diet of contempt, lies, arrogance and hate.

When I broke free, I started seeing it, but it was carefully hidden under a “righteous” veneer.

Perhaps you wonder how your friend from school, who was so kind and generous, is now cheering ICE and their cruelty. Perhaps your former pastor continues to assert that Trump, the most vile human imaginable, is “God’s Man”. Or your scientific minded friend has “done his own research” (ie, watched a youtube video, or saw it on Fox) and is now espousing the most crackpot ideas.

How did that happen? It has been hammered from the pulpits, joked about around the table, talked about at “fellowship meals”, fed with a steady diet of Fox News and every afternoon with Rush Limbaugh.

Libtards are evil devil worshipers, Wanting healthcare for all is communist and we aint russians, Jesus hates commies. Brown people descended from Ham and are under a curse. Women are too emotional to make rational arguments.

To vote Democrat is to turn your back on the Bible, on the church, on your family, and your whole community. It was understood.

Lots of historians have spoken about how we got to this place. But what are we going to do about it?

But now it is being exposed for what it is. After 50 years of choosing hate and lies, many are stuck there and can’t find their way to love and freedom. They will follow Orange Pustule to the grave. They will lose farms and go broke paying 7 dollar diesel to keep imaginary immigrants from eating their imaginary pets, and keep imaginary transgender athletes out of sports, while tens of thousands are slaughtered over seas, or are locked in torture chambers here at home.

That is what exposure does. It reveals the ugly that was always there. It is why Christians call God “light”. He exposes.

But then he also calls us to make our decisions based on that.

What will we choose?

I am tired of this timeline.

Many of you, like me, are discouraged and stricken silent by the enabling of the Republican party – we have a madman running us out of weapons and destroying the economy of the world because he is running out of treasuries to loot – and Republicans shrug. I am honestly exhausted.



But then I remember that this isn’t the only time in history people have felt this way.



Gideon was told by God to whittle his army down to 250.

Elijah didn’t know about the 7000 still awake and aware in Israel. He thought he was alone.

Nehemiah’s generation wept at the smallness of what they were doing.



And Paul said, “When I am weak, He is strong.”



There are battles beyond our senses that we know nothing about. The kingdom of God isn’t won with swords and spears and bombs. It is always won with love and joy, patience and faith.



The victors in this world are often mistaken as losers, just as Christ was mocked on the cross. They are hiding in caves, being run out of the pagan temples masquerading as churches, sometimes beaten, poor, hungry…

Think about Hebrews 11 –

“of whom the world was not worthy…” God says.



But far worse than all of this is the betrayal of family and friends, wondering what happened to their moral bearings. Were they just pretending? Why are they OK with rape, with bombing schools and churches, with taking money and healthcare from children.



The hardest is knowing that people you loved and trusted are racist to the core, sexist to the core, violent, irrational, morally repugnant, ignorant, foolish…



Romans 1:29–32

“They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips,

slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents,

foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.

Though they know God’s decree that those who do such things deserve to die, they not only do them but approve those who practice them.”



See…Paul dealt with it too.

This bothers me more than anything else. Watching the evangelical and reformed churches rot from the inside out…



And I feel alone and helpless and not at all confident that the midterms will fix anything, because no matter what the vote says, I don’t know how much of our infrastructure, our treaties, our social nets, our medical care, our food supplies – will remain.



But worse than that, are the millions who will still say, “But Biden’s laptop…”



But here is what I know. Throughout the history of the world, God delighted to do much with very few.

He uses the weak to confound the wise. The humble to confound the arrogant, love to overthrow evil.



Don’t lose heart. It isn’t about numbers. It is about shining the love of Jesus in this dark, dark world



It’s about building a prayer room for your Muslim neighbors and making sure they can worship in peace.

It’s about making sure your Jewish neighbors are free from threat.

Or your Palestinian neighbors can weep over the atrocities in their homeland without fear of reprisals.

Or your gay neighbors being able to live and love and shine their colors.

It’s about being a safe place for the one person that needs you to be a safe place.

Love is spread one person at a time.



Nowhere does the Bible say that we, as believers, are required to point out what is wrong with everyone. Jesus didn’t do it. The apostles didn’t do it. It is a holdover from American revivalism. The four spiritual laws are crap.



Yes, repent from YOUR sins, and report your neighbor’s crimes against others, but be at peace with one another. Love your neighbor as yourself. Talk about beauty and feasts and wine and joy. Talk about love and patience and shepherds and sheep.

Leave conviction to the Spirit. He knows how to do it without crushing and breaking.

And remember:



The kingdom of heaven is for those who mourn, those who are poor, those on the outskirts, those without strength –



And those are the exact qualities that crush Satan’s head.



That’s my evening ramble. And now to bed.

How God shines the light on who we are:

When God calls himself “light”, he means that his very nature is to reveal. It is inseparable from his being.
He reveals himself in all of creation. He reveals himself in the souls of humankind.
And like light, he reveals what lies in darkness. He cannot NOT reveal, for he cannot lie.

Human lie. Humans have darkness in the heart and hidden places where they think they are unseen. But God’s nature is to reveal, for he is light.

What we are seeing today which is so frightening to us is God’s revelation. Not only of himself, but also the darkness that lies in the hearts of evangelicalism.

God revealed the hearts of humans in the days of Jesus. He revealed their hurts to heal, the illnesses to take away, they pain and isolation to draw into community –

And he also reveals their darkness, their hatred, their schemes, their vicious lusts. He revealed himself to the woman caught in adultery and loved her. He revealed the murder and lies in the heart of the leaders of the Jews and they slunk away and plotted his death.

The heart of the huge evangelical corporate machine is revealed more so every day. There is no depth that they have not already reached and will continue to reach.

The broken contracts and promises of Reformed and Presbyterian churches are being revealed every day.

Donald Trump is a revelation. If those who claim the name of Christ will open their eyes, they will see their hearts revealed. It is an ugly, bloated, lying, lecherous, contract-breaking, amoral psychopath that knows nothing of love, beauty, wisdom, art or goodness.

The problem isn’t the slug in the white house. He is a mirror and that mirror is God’s light shining on who we are.

Look at your king, America. Look at the natives you tortured and raped and slaughtered in his bloated face. Look at the enslaved image-bearers you bullwhipped and traded like property to enrich yourself.

Look at the totalitarian dictators you set up throughout the world, impoverishing millions to rape their lands. Your golden ballroom and Temu-liberace decor in the oval office is a revelation of America. The dignity is erased for we had none. We tortured people of color, we raped women and children, we stole from the poor to enrich those that we already enriched and we called it the “American dream”.

And now the curtain is pulled away. Here is your god.
Let’s see if his bloated ugly corpse can save us in the day of trouble.

Before we reap what we sow, God is exposing us to the world. Will we move towards light and love and beauty and goodness, or will we continue to rape and pillage and destroy?

After this nightmare is over, we have a lot to rebuild. May we rebuild far better than we built. But maybe the first building has to come down.

Three years ago…

I have mixed feelings about this.

First, this is the week that my former denomination would hold its annual meeting. So those memories come up in my feed.

I remember how miserable those meetings were.

The horrible things that leaders of the church would say out loud.

The pride and entitlement that they didn’t earn

The hardened hearts and disregard of covenants

For the last ten years, I was just looking for an out. I stayed too long, but I kept thinking about the women and children still left there and the horrible things they were enduring and didn’t want to abandon them.

And it is hard to break away from the church of your childhood…

Then they tried me for “false teaching” without telling me what that false teaching was, tore my congregation apart, and left us to pick up the pieces. There were a handful of families left who hadn’t bent the knee to Baal, and we decided to sell the building and close the doors.

Three years ago, my wife and daughter and I said goodbye to my daughter, my son-in-law, and my grandchildren. We had one last breakfast at their house and hugged, and then left California for good.

This is where the mixed feelings come in. I miss them intensely and still get choked up.

I had a few very close friends that went through the fire with me and I miss them so much it hurts.

But when I think about everything else we left, there is a lightness in my heart and a spring in my step. I see the old pictures of our meetings and shake my head.

“I can’t believe I sat through that garbage. I can’t believe I participated in it.”

And I’m so, so glad I’m out. And I love our new town and our new community. I get asked so many times about “why I left California”, and it is always asked with a sort of hushed incredulous tone. I left because after spending most of my life there, and being born and raised there, it wasn’t home.

My niece told me a while back “You were just in the wrong circles…”

For the first time in my life I feel like I’m home, like I belong, like this is where I fit. I think she was right.

I know my old circles think that I’m a far left, liberal lunatic, who has gone off the rails. I know that they tell each other that I left the safety of the “church” and now I don’t have any rails on my thinking…I know that I am the topic of many conversations as a warning…but I don’t care.

Those in the cave never understand the ones who got away. Those who are afraid that God will punish them if they step out of line will never understand a God who loves freely and unconditionally and calls us to freedom. To release fear and suspicion and hatred of the “other”.

But those who got away understand completely. They are my people.

A lot has happened in three years. My thinking has become for firm, and less dogmatic all at the same time. The destruction caused by conservative Reformed churches is reaching its peak and will burst soon.

For those who don’t know, Pete Hegseth is a member of a cult lead by Doug Wilson, who has been corrupting Reformed churches for thirty years. Those who think like Wilson, have his books on their bookracks in church and follow him were those who destroyed my congregation.

The breaking of covenants that I saw repeatedly in my denomination is now carried out internationally and is destabilizing the whole world.

This is one area that I really wish I wasn’t right about. But I had warned about it for years. And then I see the architect of patriarchal rot standing in the Pentagon “preaching” and I say – I was right about this.

Those who whisper in hushed tones about feminism like it is a dirty word; those who crush the poor and the widow, those who mock the orphan and the fatherless…

By the way, in those circles a “feminist” is a woman who expressed disagreement with her husband or her (male) church leaders. They believe that “feminists” must be defeated or society will fall apart.

But this rot will tear itself apart. We live in similar times to Isaiah, who wrote to the faithful outcasts:

“Fear not, says your God, I will never leave you, nor forsake you.”

And he never has. Even through fiery trials, hard times, hard goodbyes, nights of vomiting, heart palpitations, heart attacks,

He is still there, walking with us. He hates what is happening because he hates injustice and cruelty. The one who loves me also loves Iranian schoolgirls and hates what happened to them. And he will come in vengeance when the time is right.

For now, he is giving us all a chance to reflect and turn away from this course before it is too late.

But I fear it might be too late.

Hold on. Be kind to each other. Encourage your neighbors. Give to the food banks. Fight for justice and integrity, and walk humbly with your God, and he will lift you up.

I moved to Minnesota a few years ago now. I joined a wonderful congregation of believers at First English Lutheran. It is called “First English” because it was the first English speaking Lutheran church in Faribault.

If my memory serves, we have recently celebrated our 168th year as a congregation. I wasn’t a member the whole time, but it is still a milestone.

Everyone is so kind and generous and loving. Most are Norwegian. They will engage in gentle humor towards the “Swedish” Lutherans from time to time. But I’ve found my people.

I have never been a part of a Scandinavian community of people before. They don’t expect me to eat lutefisk, but it is available at the local grocer. Hot dish is a real thing. Minus 15 isn’t really too bad. It’s the wind that makes it cold. I’m getting used to it.

They find the culture that I escaped from very strange. I think it is hard for Minnesotans to grasp what is actually happening with ICE, they seem a bit shellshocked. But they show up for the community.

But I grew up with the culture that spawned ICE. I grew up in Christian nationalism. I remember the potlucks where the members of the church would laugh and joke about killing Muslims, queers, libtards, Mexicans. The culture that I was steeped in celebrated the murder of George Floyd as a “righteous killing”, and the death of Breonna Taylor as her own just deserts.

I could see the men in my former culture in a pick-up truck stalking and killing Ahmed Arbery for jogging in the wrong neighborhood.

When I was writing about those things at the time, when I was appalled at the senseless slaughter, the response was so immediate and huge that my heart would palpate, I would wake up vomiting. My friends called me woke, liberal, a “Social justice warrior”. The church started splintering. I would delete the posts. Go house to house trying to explain.

But they were convinced I was communist, liberal, woke, feminist…

My new Lutheran friends have a hard time understanding it.

If you were a Democrat, you would never admit it. My father would have disowned me, screamed at me, denounced me. (He passed in 2016). He made life so miserable for my Democrat cousins That they had to block him on Facebook.

One man I know was alienated from his son because his son was a Democrat. His son would invite him over, but have to hide the Joe Biden sign or this man would just scream at him for hours. These aren’t isolated. It was the water we drank, the air we breathed, the atmosphere we lived in.

Anyone who didn’t comply to the right wing agenda would be shunned, ridiculed, or denounced publicly.

At church meetings the jokes were continuous. The assumption was that every good Christian was Republican, authoritarian, homeschooled.

Everyone either was homeschooled or went to Christian school. The curriculum was A Beka.

It is strange for me to be in a culture that doesn’t know a beka.

America was founded on Christian principles. Slavery was good. The wrong side won the civil war. The earth was 6000 years old. “Secular science” has an agenda to destroy Christian values.

For reading, everyone used McGuffey. Bad boys deserved to be beaten and shamed. Good boys have good things happen to them. Children are to be obedient and if they are not, there is the rod of correction applied to the backside.

Pain and fear purposefully inflicted are redemptive. Submit and you won’t be hurt. Cower in fear, and they might leave you alone.

Recite the catechism word for word. Don’t deviate from any declaration of the church.

If we say that cremation is evil, you say, “Yes. We will comply.”

If we say that creation happened in six literal days, you say, “Yes, we will comply.”

If we say that women can’t be trusted in positions of leadership, you say, “Yes, we will comply.”

Anyone who steps out of line is publicly shamed.

And if any girl finds herself pregnant and is stupid enough to ask the church for help, she will be compelled to stand in front of the congregation and ask their forgiveness. Sanctified slut shaming, you know. And then they would all wring their hands in concern over the “scourge of abortion.”

If we say that life begins at conception, you say, “Yes, we will comply.”

If we say that the nine year old girl seduced the grown man, you say, “Yes, we will comply.”

If we say that a man has the right and duty to train up his wife and discipline her as he sees fit, you say, “Yes, we will comply.”

My Norwegian friends would have no idea what to do with this.

Read Tia Levings. Read Valerie Hobbs. Read Rachael Denhollender. Read Sheila Wray Gregoire. Read Kristen Kobes Du Mez. Read Aimee Byrd. Read Rachel Miller Green. It is all there. Documented.

But they already have the answer. Paint them all with the “feminist” brush. They’re liberal women. They have an agenda. They reject motherhood so they try to fulfill themselves with progressive ideas….Yes. I’ve heard it all.

When you say, “I’m not going to comply anymore. This is wrong.” The fallout is immediate and huge.

I was diagnosed with severe anxiety. I lost my home, my church, my job and moved to Minnesota for my own health to start over.

And it was a wonderful move. And terrifying.

What happens is this – the thought of complying is terrifying. But the thought of not complying is even more terrifying. Satan tells you that you will lose everything if you do not comply.

He tells you that your life would be in danger. He tells you that you will be beaten or shot. He tells you that you will lose your job or your family or your kids or your community.

And for many people, that thought is too much. It is easier to comply. It is easier to just turn the mind off and go along.

And then we get ICE.

We groomed an entire generation to comply. Just obey.

But we forget that ICE isn’t about obeying the law. They don’t want to enforce immigration law. That was being enforced better under other administrations.

This is about returning to white power. This is about trying to get the world back where the murderers of black children can grow up free, bragging about it until they die.

This is about white men keeping black and brown people in their place. Cowering at their feet.

This is the KKK with new masks. The world that we were creating where the murderers of Ahmed and George were held accountable is unacceptable.

They were uppity. They stepped out of line.

They didn’t comply.

If we don’t make them comply, we will lose our place and our nation.

This is what it is about.

But something is different here in Minnesota.

The Norwegian Lutherans didn’t comply. They don’t play by the rules because they weren’t brought up with those rules. Comply or die isn’t really in the vocabulary in the Lutheran church like it is in the Reformed churches.

And ICE doesn’t know what to do with that. So they hit, beat, kick, spray, punch. And the more they do, the less Minnesotans are to comply.

So this is where we are.

By the way, if you think I’m talking about Trump, you missed it. Trump is a nasty human turd that only cares about money, vengeance and power for himself. He doesn’t care about white power. Trump only sees Trump. So he is the ultimate loser.

This is Steven Miller, Krisi Noem, Hegseth, Vance, Bondi, and that press talking barbie. They aren’t about the law. This is about “comply or die”.

They’ve been steeped in the same culture I came out of. CCM, Separatism, racism, misogyny. All baptized with a thin Christian veneer.

But if you stepped out of line, you paid a heavy price. If you sent your kids to public school, if you listened to Pink Floyd or Elton John, if you wore modern clothes, if you read “secular” literature – the fallout was immense.

I had a man visit my congregation for a few weeks who wrote me a scathing letter because he found out that my wife read books that I didn’t vet first for her. “How can you sanctify your wife if you allow her to read whatever she wants?”

His wife had a lot of stomach issues and wondered why.

I’m pretty sure my new friends think I make this stuff up.

This is why the Reformed and Evangelical world is still solidly behind the terror in our community.

They were raised with the “board of correction” beating them into submission.

And they still think that is Christianity.

The devil is a liar. You don’t actually lose everything. You gain your soul. Yes, you might lose family, friends, or community. But the reward is immense. You gain that which can never be taken away. You gain freedom, you can breathe again, you can laugh and sing and dance.

You could even get a tattoo if you would like, or an earring.

I kid. What you really gain is a wide space to stand in, infinite possibility, you are set free from the prison that you were in.

And there are those who may even lose their life.

But they will find a hundred fold more in the life to come. God will not let one drop of blood fall to the ground in vain.

More to come….but I’m tired.

One more thing. It is time for me to decide if I want to keep paying to keep this site open. I’m tired, and I wonder at times if anyone even listens, or if they ever did.

If you would like for me to continue this site, I’ve attached a donation form which would be helpful.