New Name, New Newsletter

Or come try to figure out how to be a Christian with me, in America, in the year of Our Lord 2025

Raise your hand if you and a family member, a friend, or someone you have deeply respected voted for opposing candidates in last year’s presidential election.

Great. Now keep it up if you share the same religious faith with that person, and if that faith somehow influenced both of your votes. (The rest of you: put your hands down, relax, and get some popcorn.)

For those of you with hands still raised: how many of you think your family member/friend’s/formerly-esteemed person’s vote is at least partly due to spiritual or theological malformation, misinformation, or wanting to stay in good standing with their tribe? If so, keep your hand raised. Give a little wave if they think the same about you.

(And to the one or two of you who just dropped your hands: either you are incredibly generous people, or you have managed to have helpful and sane conversations across difference. Please stick around, because we want to hear from you later.)

Okay, if your hand is still in the air: I know, your arm is getting tired. Sorry. How many of you have had painful conversations or increased distance in a family relationship, friendship, or at church because one or both of you just can’t summon the will to try and charitably understand the other’s hopes, loves, or fears? Or if you’ve been cast as taking the part of people who threaten our country? How many of you are distressed at what you suspect motivates someone you love, and who ostensibly shares the same bedrock faith convictions? Keep those trembling arms up.

Look around. There are a lot of us, aren’t there? Welcome to our own particular iteration of the broken, disfigured body of Christ. You can put your hands down.

We celebrated the Fourth of July this year at my husband’s family’s lake home in western Minnesota. Some of these divisions joined us at the table, alongside our brisket and blueberry crisp.

There are Donald Trump supporters in our family. They are confessing, believing Christians who are pleased that he was elected to the presidency again, and who embrace a wide range of the policies his administration is seeking to enact. They are people whose faith in Jesus is admirable, sincere, and ardently held.

For my own part: I would vote for the dead mud puppy floating face-up beside the dock before I would cast a vote for that man. I believe he is — by a generous margin — the worst President in American history, and I believe that many of the policies his administration is seeking to enact are cruel, dehumanizing, often outright stupid, and downright un-American. But underneath and informing my civic and political convictions is my Christian faith, and this is the source of my real distress — and likely yours too, if you had your hand up. I love Jesus. My family members love Jesus. We are hearing him say almost mutually exclusive things about our moment, and how to respond.

None of this is new, though, is it? I’d wager it’s a generalized cloud most of us have been living under — with occasional storm breaks at holiday tables or in family group chats — for almost ten years now. There are shelves and shelves of books, reams of tweets, enough blog posts to train a weird and maladjusted LLM model, all seeking to explain why some Christians have so enthusiastically boarded the Trump train and how those of us sitting desolate back at the station might respond.

And I have to confess: this many years in, I’m almost as bored as I am depressed by the never-ending patter of explanations, excuses, and solutions filling up pages, posts, editorials, and roundtables.

Reflecting on an unrelated controversy happening at an evangelical seminary — this one over what constitutes a faithful Christian understanding of sexuality — someone I worship with once remarked to me something along the lines of, “I’m so glad to be out of that world.” Her point, I think, was that the ongoing grind of argument and defensiveness that characterizes an institution cracking at the seams is exhausting. Constantly litigating questions of justice and dignity demoralizes those most in need of both, and it liberates exactly no one. Eventually it’s time to just shake the dust off your sandals. And I don’t think she’s wrong, at least not pragmatically. But I bristled inwardly all the same. Because if we take Jesus’ prayer for Christian unity seriously — let alone the entire New Testament witness! — we’re never really “out” of other Christian worlds. We may erect and fortify the walls between us, but at the end of the day we’re still in different rooms in our Father’s house.

All of this is a long way of saying: yes, I am weary of trying to understand why my family members — and why so many of my siblings in Christ — enthusiastically support Donald Trump.¹ I have heard all of the facile explanations, and have read plenty of the more complex analysis as well. I suspect that if you are like me, you may well acknowledge the truth in some of those reasons and still be unsatisfied. But I’m also starting to suspect that “why” might be the wrong question.

Or, if not the wrong question, then one that simply doesn’t get us very far. What I really want to know is how to live in my family, in my country, and in whatever this thing is that we call the American church with Christian integrity. And I want to do it without pretending to myself that we no longer belong to one another.

What I really want to know is how to live as though “our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” — that is to say, how to live in resistance against evil when it shows up in my neighborhood without giving in to hatred of God’s beloved creatures (even when those creatures are named Stephen Miller or Tom Homan).

What I really want to know is how not to be the Pharisee who goes home unjustified before God because she held herself apart from recognizable social and political sinners. But I also want to know how to speak the truth about the harm that sin — including the sin I’m complicit in! — is causing in my community, in my country, in my family, and in the broken and disfigured body of Christ.

What I really want to know is how to be a Christian — to really be a Christian, not a performative prophetic denouncer or fearful and defensive tribal partisan — “in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world.”

This is not a new or original endeavor. “How then should we live?” is one of the oldest and most-asked questions in the church! The tricky thing is that we have to keep asking it, because while history may rhyme it never repeats. And after all: I have to follow Jesus in my time, in my place, in my family. There’s no plug and play solution that doesn’t require prayer, discernment, fasting, seeking wisdom from others. And I don’t get a hall pass because I’ve read what someone else did in the past, though I’d be a fool to ignore what the ancestors in the faith have to teach.

I’m going to be exploring my way forward here, along a bunch of different pathways. I’ll be considering the possibilities and failures of language between people who say they believe in the Holy Spirit who ushered in Pentecost; offering musings from writers and poets in different times who may have what we call “a word” for us today; and even venturing into some reflection on Sin and Powers and demons, which — God help me — I still very much believe in. All in the service of trying to chart my next most faithful steps in the coming years.

Some of these pieces will be nerdy and verge academic: as much as I’d love to write like Kathleen Norris or Anne Lamott, I can’t shake my love for a philosophical or theological inside joke. Sometimes we might talk about Ani DiFranco, or having a teenage son whose politics are a mashup of the Hebrew prophets and hardcore punk. W.H. Auden is a friend of the newsletter, and so are Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Ted “Theodore” Logan. I’d love for you to become one, too. I just want to think out loud, hopefully with friends. Our salvation is bound up together, after all.

1. And yes, I know: some huge percentage of “evangelical” Trump supporters don’t go to church. There are more than enough writers out there dismissing the whole lot as essentially post-Christian, and certainly a lot of folks in the MAGA world are. I’m not really interested in them: or at least, not in trying to live with them inside the fellowship of the Body of Christ, because they’re not there! What I’m interested in is how to be a Christian in a diseased body and in figuring out how I carry my own contributions to the body’s weakness. There has never been a moment when the church has been “healthy” and “thriving” through and through — news flash! — and all we get to do is figure out how to live in our own particular period of wasting.