This morning I sat at Beatniks with breakfast in front of me, and somebody asked how my week went. I laughed. Not the polite chuckle you give a stranger reaching past you for their coffee. A real one, from somewhere down low, the kind that surprises you on the way out. And it had nothing to do with anything being funny. The laugh was doing a job. The laugh was holding something up.

There is a version of “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” where Donny Hathaway gets hold of it, and the song, that I baptized into being a hymn stops being a tune and becomes a confession. Other folks sing it like a nice idea. Donny sings it like a man who knows the actual weight it holds, who has lifted somebody he loved and kept walking anyway, who understands the line is not bragging about how strong he is. The line is telling the truth about love. The brother, the person, the issue, the place is heavy. Love just refuses to file him under burden. Love does not register it as undue or too much. I carried that song around all week, because all week I was carrying. That is the job. That is the call. A pastor is a person who agrees, on purpose, to help shoulder what other people cannot lift alone.

The only way I stayed upright under this week was a thing I am going to call load-bearing laughter, the laugh you reach for so you can keep your feet under a weight that would otherwise fold you. If you have ever stood in a repast line, foil pans steaming, somebody’s auntie pressing a plate into your hands whether you asked or not, then you have heard it. The casket spray is still fresh and somebody starts telling a story about the one who passed, and the whole fellowship hall falls out laughing, wiping our eyes, no longer sure whether we are crying or cracking up, and the answer is yes. Both. At once. That is the sound my people made in the hush harbor and the cotton row, in our barbershops and at the kitchen sink. The laugh holds the weight so that love can keep carrying it.

Let me tell you about the week.

Monday

Monday started ordinary. Emails. A meeting. The small obedient work that convinces you that you run your own days. Then the evening came, and the evening took our community somewhere it had no business going. By the time the night was over, two men were gone. I am compelled to speak one of their names, Robert Johnson, and that compulsion is not random. It is inheritance. My people have always known that the first thing this country does to us is forget us, so we built a counter-tradition, a long memory, a discipline of saying the name out loud so the record cannot close clean. Robert Johnson. Cody Hull. A library, of all the places. A library, the one building in America built on the radical idea that everybody deserves to know more than they did when they walked in. They turned it into an address none of us ever wanted on our town.

Robert Johnson was somebody’s whole world. A brother. So I say his name, and in saying it I pick up my corner of him and help carry him a little further down the road, because that is what the name is for. He ain’t heavy. He’s my brother.

I went to bed Monday a pastor with a normal week ahead. I woke up Tuesday a pastor in a community split open.

Tuesday

Tuesday did not wait for me to catch my breath. Before the sun had decided what it was doing, I learned that my faithful sister Lynn Gamble had lost her mother. Bernice Ward. Ninety years old. The kind of ninety you do not so much mourn as stand up and applaud, except your hands are too heavy to clap.

You need to know who Bernice was. Ninety years carries history in it. That is a daughter of the Great Migration, the generation that packed cardboard suitcases and rode the train north chasing a dignity the South kept promising and refusing, and built churches in cold cities where the welcome was thin. Youngstown was her home, and she raised a healer that has blessed the West. She poured into Lynn for decades, poured until the pouring became a person, until her daughter turned into medicine for a whole community. Lynn rearranged her entire life to care for Bernice at the end, the way our women always have, bending her own comfort around the work of loving somebody home. For all those years Lynn lifted her mother, and you already know she never once called it a weight. Mama was never heavy. Mama was the reason she knew how to carry anybody at all. The end came anyway, indifferent to how faithfully she served. Next week Youngstown will gather and do what we do. They will not have a funeral. They will have a homegoing. They will read the obituary slow, sing “Soon and Very Soon,” let the organ rise, and celebrate a woman who finished her course. I will carry her name west while they carry it home.

So that was Tuesday morning. Then I got in the car.

I drove to Sacramento to make the case for the social safety net. To beg, with funding attached, that we hold the net. I argued for things like 211, that quiet three-digit lifeline that connects a person in crisis to food, to shelter, to help. And the whole time, I kept thinking how Black folks invented the safety net long before the state assigned it a number. The benevolent societies. The burial associations. The usher board that knows which member did not eat this week. The church mother with a deep freezer and a long list. We were each other’s 211 because the state was never going to be ours, and we knew it. We carried each other because nobody else was going to, and we did not call it heavy. We called it church. Then I drove back up the 99 and watched the net I had just begged for fail in real time, the holes already cut, people I love falling clean through. I spent the morning begging the state to fund the catch and the rest of the day watching it break. Somebody mail me an invoice for the mileage.

By seven I was back in Chico at the Ecumenical Service at St. John’s. Different collars, different traditions, all of us in one room because grief had become the only language Chico was suddenly fluent in. I listened as the weight of the moment sat with the liturgy, each speaking to the other, tears flowing as clergy, and faithful spoke in faith, but also in vulnerbility. By eight I was at the library with my wife and my son, hoping to drop off water, pray and get home. We sat in it. Not over it, not above it, in it. Addison’s hug, Tami’s pointing at me, Mike’s presence, Momo’s smile and my wife’s faith, all on the same grounds. With our neighbors. And I did the only thing I know to do when the bottom drops out. I pointed past myself. I pointed to the only help I have ever found that holds, and I let the people see a pastor who did not have it all together either, only one who knew which direction to look. By the time we got home I could hardly believe the calendar still said Tuesday.

Wednesday

Wednesday I tried to teach Bible study like a normal man on an ordinary night, tried not to let the whole sky fall into the room, and I will not pretend I succeeded. The text sat open in front of me and the whole town sat right behind my eyes. Somewhere in the middle of it I reached Robert Johnson’s sister, made contact, said his name to the one person on earth who has carried him longest. We chatted on the phone as I packed up to leave the sanctuary - her voice filling a sanctuary, she has yet to see in a community at this point she had been in.

Thursday

Thursday I and my sister Mary, a chaplain, believer and kind soul sat with her. Robert’s sister. In between work and work, in the cracks of a schedule that does not pause for sorrow, I made the time, because some appointments are not appointments. They are ministry, and you keep them with your whole chest. I sat with a sister learning to live inside a sentence that now ends with her brother in the past tense, and I helped her hold what no person should hold alone. He ain’t heavy. He’s her brother. He’s ours now too.

And while I was doing that, the Supreme Court was busy too.

Six justices spent Thursday discovering, after what I am sure was deep constitutional reflection, that a Haitian family and a Syrian family had enjoyed America’s protection long enough, and that the word “temporary” was always coming to collect. Then, in a companion ruling, the same Court did a little geometry and decided that a human being standing on the far side of our border has not yet “arrived” enough to ask us for safety. Read that twice. Safety is now a matter of inches. Step on the soil and you may plead for your life. Stand one boot short of it and you are scenery.

Watch what they actually did, though, because this is the whole sermon. They picked up a Haitian family, weighed it, and ruled it too heavy to carry. That is the opposite gospel. That is the anti-song. Everything in me, everything my grandmother put in me, everything Donny was confessing on that record, says you do not get to set a brother down on the side of the road because his weight is inconvenient to your schedule. But that is precisely what six robed adults did, in writing, and called it lawful. Alito writes cruelty in the passive voice, the way you do when you would rather not leave fingerprints. A lower court had already named the smell of it, anti-Black and anti-Haitian animus, right out loud. The dissent quoted a president’s own mouth back to him, the “shithole” line, the lie about people eating pets. Justice Sotomayor read her dissent from the bench, which in that building is the equivalent of a mother raising her voice in church so the record will at least show somebody objected.

Now sit with the timing. We are days from the Fourth of July. Frederick Douglass stood up in 1852 and asked a comfortable room what their independence day meant to the slave, and answered his own question with a verdict. The holiday was theirs, not his. This week the Court filed its own answer to Douglass, 6 to 3. The fireworks are not for everybody. They never were.

Here is the part Huey Freeman would say with that flat little stare. This country will give a Black body a flag, a folded triangle, and a twenty-one-gun salute, but it will not give a living Black body a chair to sit in while it asks not to die. We have always been scenery to America until it needed labor, and now it has decided it does not even need that. We bury the drowned with honor and turn away the swimming. That is not a glitch. That is the design, and the Court just stamped it. So there I was, holding a grieving Black sister with one arm and reading my government call grieving Black and brown families too heavy to carry with the other. Tell me where the laughter goes when there is no room left for it. It goes underground. It becomes load-bearing. It holds up a man who would otherwise sit all the way down on the courthouse steps of his own heart and refuse to get up.

Friday

Friday I thought maybe the week was finished with me. The week was not finished with me.

Friday I learned that Robert Hines had joined his wife in heaven. A blind man. And I want to be careful with that word, because Brother Hines saw more without his eyes than most of us manage with ours wide open. There is a whole lineage of that in our tradition, the blind seer, the singer who lost the sight and gained the vision, the elder who reads the room in the dark while the rest of us miss the truth in full light. A little under a month ago I sat with him and left knowing I had been in the presence of vision. Carrying him was never a chore. The man carried me. Friday he closed his eyes here and opened them there, and the first thing he saw, after a lifetime of seeing without sight, was his bride. I dare you to find the joke in that. There is none. There is only a husband crossing the one border that holds no court and no ruling and turns nobody away. Tender does not mean it does not cut. It cut. One more name on a week that had become a litany.

The thing nobody put in the bulletin

Underneath all of it, the ordinary kept happening, because the ordinary does not check whether your heart has room.

Our daughter graduated, packed her life into boxes, and left our home to live with her father and his family as she starts college. That is a good thing. It is supposed to be a good thing, and it is, and it is also a small private grief that gets no ecumenical service.

Rachel put photographs up in the hall this week. New ones to me, old ones to her, all down the wall. And she keeps working on them. Not whether they belong there, that question is settled, but how they sit. The spacing. The frames. Whether the arrangement is right. She will straighten one, step back, and study the wall like it owes her an answer. I have been married long enough to read that. When my wife works that hard on how a thing looks, she is usually working on something she has not said out loud yet. Here is what she may not realize she is telling me. Of all the bare walls in our house, she hung those pictures in the hallway right outside our daughter’s room and our son’s room. You do not decorate the doorways of the children who are leaving unless those children are sitting heavy on your mind.

My wife has spent her whole life expanding the net. While I was in Sacramento begging the state to widen the net, she has been at home widening it the harder way, one child at a time, for years. And you do not pour those years into children and then wave the last one off down the driveway without feeling some kinda way about it. She is a strong Black woman, and I am going to tell you what that costs, because everybody loves to praise the strength and nobody wants to read the bill.

Zora (Neal Hurston) told us a long time ago that the Black woman gets handed the heaviest load this world has and then gets called strong for carrying it, as if the carrying were a compliment and not a sentence. The church does it too. We make our women the mother of everything, the one who cooks the repast and holds the family and feeds the saints, and we forget that the woman holding everyone up has nobody assigned to hold her. So here is the part of the song we like to skip. Somebody has to turn to the strong one and say it back. You ain’t heavy either. Let me carry you for a stretch. I want to be that for my wife, even when she is too strong to admit she needs it. I got you babe.

Likewise, I am on our first child. I cannot honestly imagine what is moving through her right now, and I will not pretend I can. So let me confess the funnier truth instead. Between the two of us, I am almost certainly the more emotional one. She holds it. I leak. When I say I watched my wife be strong this week, hear the whole thing. I watched her be strong, and I suspect she is grieving, and she will probably read this very sentence before she ever says that word out loud.

Why I carry, and why I laugh

Here is what I believe, standing on the far side of a week like that.

The laughter is not denial. The laughter is theology. When my ancestors stole away to the hush harbor and sang in a minor key and somehow smiled through it, they were not pretending the chains were light. They were declaring the chains would not get the last word. The ring shout was load-bearing. The spirituals were load-bearing. The blues were load-bearing. Fannie Lou Hamer got sick and tired of being sick and tired and turned the exhaustion into freedom songs. Dick Gregory turned a microphone into a weapon, and every one of them was doing the same old work my grandmother did at a kitchen sink, laughing so the crying would have somewhere safe to live.

And then there is Donny. The man who sang that nobody is too heavy to carry was himself carrying a heaviness the world never managed to lift off of him. He struggled, in a season when nobody had language for what was pressing on a brother’s mind, and we lost him too soon. I think about that every time I cue the song. The one teaching us to carry was rarely carried. That is the warning folded inside the gospel. If we are going to sing he ain’t heavy, then we had better mean it about the strong ones too, about the gifted ones, about the singers and the mothers and the pastors, about the people so busy lifting that nobody notices they are sinking.

James Cone spent his life insisting that God is not neutral, that the Most High sets up tent with the lynched and the locked out and the turned away at the border. I have to believe that, because this week I needed a God who knows the inside of a casket and the far side of a courthouse and chooses the grieving anyway. Howard Thurman said the disinherited need a faith that does not break when the world does its worst. That is the faith I leaned on. Not one that explains the library away, or makes that Court righteous, or hands me a tidy reason for any casket. A faith that refuses to set me down, even on the days I am too tired to grip it back. Trouble, the old folks promised, does not last always.

So I laughed this morning, over breakfast, downtown, with all of it still sitting on me. The laugh was load-bearing. It held up a pastor, a husband, a father, and a plain tired human being who buried and built in the same breath this week and is somehow still here to tell you about it.

If you are carrying your own week right now, hear me. The weight is real. I will not insult you and call it light. But the brother on your back is not a burden. The sister is not a burden. The grief you are hauling has a face you love stitched into it, and that is the only reason any of us keeps walking. Let the laughter bear the load it was forged to bear. Let somebody carry you for a stretch when your knees start to go. And when even the laughter runs out, do what I did at that library with my family beside me. Point past yourself, to the only help that has ever held.

The week was heavy.

But he ain’t heavy.

He’s my brother.

And I am still here.

There is a space between the blow and the swing back. Most of us never feel it. Someone hits us, and before the mind catches up the hand is already moving, because somewhere along the way we were taught that if someone hits you, you hit them back. But there is a space in there, small as a breath, where a different person could make a different choice. I have spent a good portion of my short life watching the few people who learned to live in that space.

There have been a few times where I can say for certain that I watched people show their faith. Let me qualify that. Their faith in Christ. A faith that does not shrink, but in the middle of what looks like a loss, increases in size and hands the one who holds it a kind of miraculous strength.

On the other hand, I know how to show my proverbial tail too. We called it something else, something that would make many of you cringe and question whether I am as “saved” as I proclaim. It rhymes with past, and until this moment it never occurred to me that it is a rather archaic name for a donkey. I tell you that so you know I am not writing this from some perch above the fray. I am writing it as a man who swings back, studying the people who do not.

That swinging is common, but it is not the flow of life Christ handed the early followers of the Way. In the middle of pressure, Christ asked us to do what Howard Thurman called yielding the nerve center of our consent. Give God the wheel. That is the space in between, the place where your steering and your decision making get hijacked by the storm, and a true follower of Christ remembers that the God who made the road knows it even in the worst weather.

I will leave it to the psychologists and the sociologists and the anthropologists to tell us why we fight losing battles with energy we should be saving for what we still have to endure. Let them have the wiring, the systems, the history of how these reactions get embedded in our culture, our families and our bodies. I am after something their disciplines can describe but cannot give. I am after the faith.

We see all of this in our society, and it happens so often that it does more than become familiar. It becomes the default. We were taught to hit back for reasons that made sense. Part of it is to set a boundary. Part of it is to meet force with force. Part of it is to challenge the belief that you are vulnerable. And part of it is memory, the kind built to stop the next person from trying you.

In the process we have produced two kinds of people. There are those who hurt others because they want company in the void that pain and trauma and tragedy carve into the psyche. And there are those who, because of their wounds, become permanently impaired, immobile, frozen, unable to move, because the fear of being hurt again keeps them pressing on the wound, not understanding that some wounds need air, need life to continue, in order to heal.

So when I meet someone who does not take the normal path through tragedy, someone who can hold their emotions and regulate, it is noteworthy. For me, I pay attention.

I ask questions of myself while I watch, and I watch with a depth of perception that borders on creepy. In those moments I wish I could have the position, but not the rap sheet, of a fly on the wall.

How do you keep smiling in the middle of a tragedy?

How do you keep your head up in hard times?

Is the problem, and what could happen next, stuck on repeat in your head?

How do you find the courage to keep living when the shambles of your own life are laid out at your front door?

Where are you drawing strength from when it looks like you are running on zero sleep and nothing has changed?

Where is this reserve you have to reach for after trauma, after a transgression, after a tragedy?

And if there is a reserve, how did you build it? What materials did it take, and how do you keep it stocked?

These questions and more are the ones that move through my mind, and I will admit it is rare that I think them, because it is rare that I see what prompts them.

Some of what I could share comes with restrictions. A few of these encounters happened with people who would prefer I not make public what I witnessed in private, and while it might make for good reading, it would not be good form. It would be distasteful.

Then there are the stories still spinning in me. I am still processing them, still making sense of them, still wrestling with the pieces, still trying to pull out some nugget, some speck I can think through and use.

And then there are these four. My mother, my grandmother, my mother-in-law, and the sister of Robert Johnson. I could tell them in the order they happened, or I could tell them in the order that makes sense to me. I could even ask ChatGPT which sequence would help this thing go viral. But that would rob me of the joy of writing them, and rob you of seeing the order as it lives in my mind. The value of these stories is not weighed by when they happened. It is weighed by the residue they left on me, and by how that residue keeps feeding my faith.

Angela Morton

Born the middle child and forever stuck in that mold. I cannot tell you the exact moment I knew she was my mom, but I can tell you the moment I saw her carrying something divine.

There were years of physical abuse from my father. His hands left her body bloodied, and to be honest I don’t give a damn why. It could have been his own repressed rage from being beaten as a child, which he turned around and used to beat my mother into compliance, whatever in the hell that means. It could have been because that is how he saw women handled. It could have been a long night of work, then gambling away the day’s earnings, and the disappointment on a face that cannot hide what is floating a few inches behind it. Or maybe he was just crazy. Either way, she experienced him at his worst.

The worst of it came late one night, when I was in the fourth or fifth grade. She had told him she knew he found someone else, that he had moved in with the woman who would become his wife. He came by the house, and after he saw my mom on the back porch of that inner city two family home, he grabbed her by the hair and dragged her through the house, beating her as he went. My mind is still unforgiving toward me that I did not do more to help her. All these years later I can still see him pulling her long beautiful hair while he used her face as a punching bag. That beautiful face, the one that carried her to the Miss Ohio Teen pageant, was being brutalized over nothing. There was no reason. A man who cheated and walked out on his common law wife and the four children they had together from 1983 to 1992 had no reason to be angry that she was talking to another man.

Shout out to the adult coward who watched her get dragged. I am sorry, but this is my peace, and my piece. As the beating woke my siblings, our cries did not stop him. What stopped him was that he could not get the bullets into a gun we kept in the house. That did not keep him from hitting her, briefly, with the handle of it, I think. I do not actually remember that part, and even now I am wrestling with it. Why do I not remember that?

Her external injuries healed. The wounds underneath, from that night and countless others, plus her own father’s abandonment, left her with a lifetime of questions about her worth that no one but God could honestly answer. Then at thirty-six she heard from a physician that she had a debilitating disease, and from that same physician that she would not live much longer, given the complicated nature of Raynaud’s Phenomenon and systemic scleroderma. And yet she persisted. She has kept believing in a God who pays attention to her. My mother has lived her whole life in the space between a wound and an answer, and she has refused to let the wound get the last word. Those questions I listed above are the ones that come to mind when I think about her, which is daily, and every time we talk.

Ruth Marie Biggs Cowan

Our time was far too brief. I met her and asked if I could marry her daughter. She was kind, funny and full of life, but measured, calm, carrying a wit and a wisdom in her witness that let you know she was not putting on. She believed what she professed. She said yes to my asking for Rachel, and I got a little less than a year of her as a mother-in-law before she passed.

I sat at her bedside in Lincoln City, Oregon, and she showed me what real faith looks like. She knew her body was failing. Instead of fighting death like someone unsure of what comes next, or angry at what was happening, she met it differently. The finality of death can terrify you, unless you see it as a passage to something better. Something grander, eternal, unbound. Ruth smiled at the thought of eternal communion.

I saw her leaving as something terrible. I had just gotten to know her, and the two of us shared a connection that felt almost divine. We had just learned RJ was on the way, and Ruth said she saw a baby with a head full of hair.

We sang with her. One moment has stayed with me. After our oldest, Josiah, left the room, broken by what he knew was coming, I went in to say goodnight, since we would be there another day or so. Ruth said something close to, it is well with me. That is not the hymn. It is deeper than the hymn. She was not reading death as closure, she was reading it as faithful extension. For Ruth, death held no conclusion and no finality. It was a continuance, a portal, and her faith told her that unbroken presence with God waited on the other side. If my mother lives in the space between a wound and an answer, Ruth taught me to see death itself as a space in between, not a wall but a doorway. In that sense she remains, in my mind, a tower of real faith.

Robert Johnson’s Sister

Who knew Facebook could hold that much power, and that much empathy. A tragedy hit our community on a grand scale this past week, and that is where I met her. Trying to balance her grief against the little information she had, she went to Facebook, picking up snippets of what is said to have happened. It was a post that described her brother as an “old man at a desk” that hit her at the core. I do not know what that phrase intended, but it pierced her. But it angered me!

I will not share her name, because she wants the world to know her brother, not her. She wants people to know he had a story worth knowing, a narrative worth weighing, and a value far greater than the act that tried to snuff out his flame.

The act?

Well.

A gunman violated a sanctuary of learning, a place of quiet curiosity and open dreaming, a public library. Two lives ended. I keep wanting to call them lost, but when you know where something is, you do not count it lost. So I will say it plainly. Two lives ended as the gunman exercised brutality. According to our District Attorney, his case will get its due, so his story is not my focus here.

Three people were permanently impacted, and countless others, family, friends and loved ones, were left to hold the pieces this heinous act shattered. A young girl who will carry the shrapnel of that day in her mind. A young child who witnessed something most of us have only seen in movies. The detail that took me apart was this. She got cuts on her abdomen as she ran through the glass to safety. Read that a few times. A child running for her life, and the scars she carries will forever speak to that hour, that minute, that experience, the one some of us have the privilege of only ever thinking about from a distance, adding our own supposition to it.

The reporting says the child can tell the story because the person she was with either shielded her or pulled the gunman’s attention away long enough for her to escape. That man did not. That man was Cody, also known as Jacob Hull. His photo and story moved across our region, on Facebook pages, in reels and groups, before it was picked up as a national story.

His narrative is neat, while our community is still grappling with the messiness of murder on this scale. And our community will have to face itself too. The ways we read these incidents. The ways one story travels clean and national while another man becomes an old man at a desk, until his sister picks up the work of giving him his name back. There is a power in narrative, the way it shifts depending on the lens of whoever hears it, the way it lets people see pieces of themselves in a story no matter how far they stand from it.

This week I watched her gather her strength and work, in the space between the act and the story everyone wanted to tell about it. Work to make sure her brother’s business in death was handled properly, with care and compassion, while her own grief kept arriving in waves. She knew she could not sit still, so she took the energy that has shaped her life, her faith and her courage, and pressed forward with a grace that was unmatched and tethered to nothing but God.

All of this while carrying the questions of the incident and the new title now fixed to her. Victim’s family.

A few of my colleagues, her close friend and I stood with her as she processed it and gathered his effects, the symbols that say a man passed through this world. Since words cannot express it, all I can say is that she showed what the old folks called a strong constitution.

I named four women when I started, and I have only walked you through three. My grandmother is the fourth, and I am not going to rush her here. Some stories are still forming inside me, sitting in that same space in between, the gap between what happened and what I can finally bear to say out loud. Hers is one of those. She is holy enough to wait until I can tell her right, so I am going to let her keep until then. There is a piece coming with her name on it.

For now, this week is enough to carry. One day we sat with her at Nobby’s, and in the middle of her own ruin she kept asking about the young girl who survived. How she might get a gift to her. Sit with that for a second. A woman whose brother had just been taken from her, holding a grief most of us could not stand up under, and the weight on her heart was a child she had never met. Her motherly wit, her compassion for a stranger, reached clean past her own wound, the same way I am sure she trusted us to reach for her brother. She answered, without a word, the question I keep asking. Where the reserve comes from, and what it looks like when it is real. Faith that turns your grief outward when everything in you has earned the right to curl in.

Another day we came back, this time as the whole community gathered for Robert Johnson and Cody Hull. The place was packed, a tent pitched outside, and not a smile in the building, which felt about right. They sold out of food by two in the afternoon. I nodded to the owner, then pulled out my phone and sent her the photos, so she could see what I saw. That we are a community of love. I just hate that she had to see it like this.

It is not enough. None of it is. A packed restaurant does not bring her brother back, and a fund cannot unmake what that little girl will carry now. But it is what we have, and we are going to keep showing up with it. At least we are going to try.

If you are anywhere near here and want to stand with these families, the love did not end with one packed restaurant.

The Cheesesteak Shop is donating one hundred percent of its profits this Sunday, June 28th. I plan to head over for some fries after worship service, so come find me there. Tea Bar is giving one hundred percent of its profits on Monday, June 29th and Tuesday, June 30th, and The Arc is doing the same on Wednesday, July 1st.

If you cannot make it to a table, the Northern Valley Community Foundation is holding two memorial funds. One in Robert Johnson’s name, directing support to the Chico library at his family’s request. One in Jacob “Cody” Hull’s name, for his family and for the young girl who was injured. That second fund reaches the same child his sister kept asking how to bless. If you have been looking for a way in, there it is.

A word for anyone giving on a fixed income. The foundation is not taking an administrative cut, and if you would rather not lose anything to a card fee, you can mail a check straight to them at 1811 Concord Ave., Suite 220, Chico, CA 95928. Every dollar lands where you sent it.

So go eat. Order more than you need, tip like it matters, and give where you can. Let these families feel the full weight of a community that shows up.

The front of the box is the pitch. The back is the truth. Most of us never turn it over.

We are a people who buy the name. We reach for the loud box, the one whose colors found us from three aisles over, the mascot grinning like he knows something we do not. We buy the cereal because we trust the cartoon. We buy the brand our mama bought, because the logo feels like home and home does not require a second look. And almost none of us, standing right there with the thing in our hand, turn it over. We do not read the back. We do not run a finger down the list of ingredients, half of which read like the roll call at a chemistry department graduation. We bought the front. We never once met the back.

And that is by design, not by accident. The front of the package is where they put what they want you to feel. Bold letters. Heart healthy. All natural. A sunrise and a happy family who has clearly never argued about money in their lives. The back is where they put what the law made them admit. The fine print. The serving size that turns out to be three crackers and a prayer. The side effects rattled off at the tail end of the commercial by a voice moving too fast to catch, underneath a video of beautiful people strolling through a field, smiling about a medication that may, in rare cases, end them. Our whole society is built on that gap. They show you what they are required to. They sell you what they want to. And they are betting, correctly, that you will not slow down long enough to notice the difference between the two.

Here is the trouble. We do not save this habit for cereal and crackers and pills. We do it with people. We do it with churches and jobs and movements. We do it with the people we marry. And, God help us, we do it with our own selves. We learn to live by the front of the box, the version with the good lighting and the bold claims, and we go years, sometimes decades, never turning the package over to read what is actually inside. I know this because I married somebody before I ever read my own label. And I am only now, years in, learning how to turn the box around.

Last time I told you about the armor. The bracing, the scanning, the four-hundred-year habit of walking into every room already half ready for it to go wrong. I told you it kept us alive, and it did. What I did not tell you, because I was still working up the nerve, is that there is one room where all of that training turns on you. One room where the armor that saved your life will quietly wreck the best thing standing in it. That room is your marriage. And I am writing this as a man still learning how to set the armor down without feeling like I am standing in the doorway naked.

Here is my first confession. I did not read a single book on marriage before I walked into one. Not one. I hold a Master of Divinity. I can sit with a Greek verb for an hour and come out the other side changed. I have studied the wedding at Cana more carefully than the marriage in my own kitchen. I prepared for the sermon and skipped the syllabus for the life. So I entered the most demanding covenant a person can make the way a whole lot of us entered adulthood, on confidence and vibes, fully prepared to improvise the one thing you cannot improvise. And God, in that patient way that is never in a hurry to embarrass you but will absolutely let you find out, let me find out.

My second confession is heavier. I did not come up surrounded by healthy marriages. I had a few. I could count the truly healthy ones I watched up close on one hand and still have fingers left over to hold my coffee. You cannot copy a blueprint nobody ever handed you. So most of what I knew about being a husband, I knew the way you know a neighborhood by the houses that burned down. I learned what not to do with great precision and almost nothing about what to build instead. Which left me, a grown man, going to God not for a touch-up but for the original drawings, because the family archive was running thin and I needed an architect who was actually present at the foundation.

Somewhere around almost forty, I decided I was done living solo. That is the clean way to say it. The honest way is that I wanted the company, the witness, the somebody who confirms out loud that the day is in fact starting like this, and I had no real idea what I was signing up for. I thought I was adding a person to my life. Like a subscription. Premium tier, better features, same operating system. Nobody told me, or maybe somebody did and I was not built yet to hear it, that you do not add a person to your life. You let your life get taken apart and put back together with somebody else’s hands down in the engine. I thought I was getting a roommate with benefits and a shared calendar. God was handing me a refining fire that knows my middle name.

This is where the thread from last time pulls tight. We men are trained to bring a version. The presentable cut. The edited self that tested well in the focus group of public life. We RSVP for the relationship with the part of us that photographs nicely, and we leave the rest at home in the closet, right next to the armor. But my wife did not marry the highlight reel. She married all of it, including the parts I had hidden so well I had hidden them from my own self. That is the tension living inside a lot of us. She said I do to the whole man, and the whole man showed up about sixty percent, with the other forty still upstairs arguing about whether it was safe to come down. Bringing your whole self is not a wedding-day event. It is a daily eviction notice you serve to your own hiding places, and it is the hardest thing I have ever tried to learn on purpose.

Let me get pastoral on you for a second, because this is where my faith stopped being theory and started being homework. The state gave me a contract. The contract is real and I am not knocking it. It handles the property and the taxes and who gets the dog if the whole thing goes sideways, and it can be dissolved by the same office that issued it, like a fishing license. But scripture does not traffic in contracts. Scripture traffics in covenant. The Hebrew word is berith, a binding, a cutting, a thing you walk into knowing it may cost you something you cannot get back. And the word for glory in that same tradition, kavod, also means weight. Heaviness. The thing that presses down because it is full. Covenant is supposed to carry kavod. It is supposed to be heavy, not because it is a burden, but because it is full of something the courthouse has no instrument to measure. So I keep asking God to teach me the weight, because the legal complexity I can hire somebody to explain. The weight I have to carry myself.

Last time I imagined bell hooks turning to the brothers and asking when was the last time we let ourselves be held without first checking the exits. I have been sitting in that question like a hard pew. Because the same Black manhood that trained me never to be soft, never to be caught needing, never to be easy to read, is the exact manhood I have to lay down at my own front door if I want to be married and not just legally adjacent to somebody. Covenant requires being known, and being known is a special kind of terror for a man who built his entire survival on being unreadable. I am learning, slow, that the sanctification does not happen on the mountaintop. It happens in the kitchen, at eleven at night, tired and wrong, when somebody who loves you is waiting to see whether you will tell the truth or reach back for the armor.

So here is where I have landed, for now. Love, at its core, when it is the real thing, is a very strong glue. Its adhesive properties are unmatched. The good carpenters will tell you that when you join two boards with real wood glue and give it time, the joint becomes stronger than the wood itself. Put it under pressure and the board will snap somewhere else before that seam ever lets go. That is covenant. That is the kavod. A bond so true that the two of you will break in a hundred other places before the seam between you gives. But, and I need the cheap seats to hear me on this one, not everything we are calling love is that glue. Some of us, if we are honest under the fluorescent lights, need to walk down a different aisle in the hardware store and actually read the label on what we brought home. Because some of us are holding command strips and calling it a covenant. Damage-free. Removable. Engineered from the factory to come off clean and leave no mark. Some of us caulked a gap and called it a foundation. And some of us have been clamping two people together by sheer external pressure, the money, the kids, the image, the fear, and calling the pressure love, when love was never the thing doing the holding. Take the clamp off and you find out nothing was ever bonded. It was just squeezed.

I am still in the aisle. That is the truth, and I am not going to dress it up. I am a pastor and an author and a man years into this, and I am still standing there with the package in my hand asking God to help me read the label, because the label on my own heart has been smudged and hard to make out for a long time. But I trust the one who set the whole store up. I believe covenant glue is real, because I have seen the rare joint that would not break, the marriages that took the pressure and held while everything around them cracked. And I believe God is patient enough to keep teaching a man who showed up to the most important bond of his life without ever reading the directions.

So I will ask you what I have been asking myself, late, with the house finally quiet. The thing you are calling love. Have you read the label, or are you just trusting the aisle you happened to wander into? Is it bonded, or is it only clamped? Pull up a chair. I am still working it out too.

A few days ago my wife said something that has been renting space in my head ever since. She said it feels like we are the main characters in a video game, and somebody else is holding the controller. Somebody bored. Somebody who keeps spawning new enemies just to see how much the little guy on the screen can take before he stops getting back up.

I laughed when she said it. Then I sat with it, the way you sit with a diagnosis after the doctor leaves the room.

Because she is not wrong. There is a particular kind of tired that does not come from doing too much. It comes from bracing too long. It is the tired of a man who wakes up already flinching, who reads the news with one eye the way you watch a dog you are not sure about. You scroll and there is a war. You scroll again and there is a ruling. You scroll again and gas went up, eggs went up, rent went up, and your patience went somewhere it has not bothered to send a forwarding address. The notifications do not stop. The boss is bored and the boss is fast, and you are the little guy on the screen, jumping over the same fire you jumped over yesterday, wondering when somebody is going to put the controller down.

We were trained for this, and that is not a compliment

Here is the thing nobody says out loud. We are good at this. Black folks, and Black men in particular, are extraordinarily, almost suspiciously well prepared for seasons like this one.

We come from people who learned to read a room before they could read a book. People who could tell from the angle of a deputy’s hat whether tonight was going to be a long one. We inherited a nervous system that scans the parking lot, reads the tone, clocks the exits, and calculates the temperature of a white man’s smile in the time it takes most people to say good morning. We were raised on it. Code switch in the lobby. Soften the voice on the phone. Keep the receipt. Keep your hands where they can see them. Keep a little laugh ready so nobody decides you are a threat.

That is a skill set. It is also a wound that learned a trade.

Because preparedness is a beautiful thing right up until you realize it never turns off. The same vigilance that kept your grandfather alive is the thing pulling your blood pressure up at forty-one. The scientists have a word for it. They call it weathering, the way a body ages faster when it has spent decades absorbing stress it was never designed to hold. The cortisol that should clock out at night keeps showing up for the overnight shift. We are not falling apart because we are weak. We are wearing down because we have been strong, on duty, hyper-alert, and uncompensated, for about four hundred years and counting. Strength that never gets to rest is just slow-motion injury wearing a Sunday suit.

So yes, we manage. We are functional. We make the meeting, preach the sermon, walk the dog, spill the coffee, laugh about the coffee, and show up for the next thing slightly damp and fully present. But functional is not the same as well. There is a residue. It collects in the jaw you cannot unclench, the sleep that will not come, the short fuse you apologize for later, the anxiety that hums under everything like a refrigerator you stopped noticing. We are out here keeping it together so convincingly that even we forget it is held together with tape.

The part where they tell you it does not hurt

And here is where it gets cruel, because it is not enough to carry it.

This is so messed up!

You also have to carry the official position that you are not carrying anything at all.

This is the gaslighting, and it is not a feeling, it is a policy.

Somebody decided, somewhere up the chain, that the most efficient way to avoid paying a debt is to deny anybody was ever robbed.

So now we live in a country that did the thing, watched the thing land, and then looked us dead in the eye and asked why we are still talking about the thing. The stuff that happened to us could not possibly have affected us, because affected people might be owed something, and the whole machine runs on the fiction that nothing is owed.

Let me show you what that feels like.

Imagine you walk into the emergency room with a real wound. You are bleeding. You can feel life leaving you. And the doctor glances at you, then glances at a chart, and tells you, calmly, that people like you do not feel pain the way other people do. You say, but I am bleeding. He says the data does not support your level of distress. You say, look at the floor. He says you are being dramatic, and have you considered that the bleeding is, in fact, a personal choice you keep making, or worse that the spill isn’t really blood, but red paint.

I want to be clear that I am only half making that up. There are real studies, on the record, showing that medical students believed Black bodies literally feel less pain. They wrote it down. It is in the literature. So when I tell you the gaslighting is structural, I am not waxing poetic.

The chart exists.

They have us down as a people who do not hurt the way hurting people hurt, and then they are surprised, almost offended, when we will not stop bleeding on their nice clean floor.

That is the residue talking. You start to wonder if maybe you are the dramatic one. Maybe it is not that bad. Maybe you are imagining the weight. That doubt, that little crack they slip into your own mind, is the most expensive thing they take from you. It is one thing to be wounded. It is another thing to be wounded and then assigned the job of pretending you are fine so that everybody around you can stay comfortable.

This is exhausting and seriously overrated….

Say the quiet part: this is also about power

And lest we get too abstract about it, let me name the thing standing in the doorway. On April 29 of this year, the Supreme Court, by a vote of six to three, took a hatchet to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in a case called Louisiana v. Callais. They looked at a state with a third of its people being Black, and decided that drawing a second district where Black folks might actually choose their own representation was the real discrimination. The dissent said plainly what the rest of us already knew. Section 2 is now, for all practical purposes, a dead letter.

Sixty-one years. That is how long that protection stood. It was the crown jewel of the movement, paid for in Selma blood and Mississippi nights, and a Court in robes erased it on a Wednesday and went to lunch. Then they rushed to finalize it so new maps could be drawn in time to lock in the loss before the next election. They were not even slow about it. They were efficient. That is the part that should keep you up. Not the cruelty, the efficiency.

So no, this is not anxiety in a vacuum. The body knows what the body knows. The vigilance is not paranoia when the eviction notice is real. We are not imagining the controller. Somebody is, in fact, holding it.

Resolve has to live somewhere they cannot reach

Which brings me to the only move that has ever worked.

If your resolve is built on what you can see, they will dismantle it on schedule, because they own the visible. They own the chart, the map, the ruling, the news cycle, the price of eggs. If your peace depends on the scoreboard, you will never have peace, because they keep moving the scoreboard into a back room you are not allowed to enter.

So the old folks anchored their resolve somewhere the boss with the controller could not reach. They fixed their eyes on the unseen, on a justice that has not arrived yet but is owed, on a God they refused to let anybody segregate. That is not escapism. That is strategy. You cannot let the people who rigged the visible world be the same people who define whether you are okay. You have to draw your water from a well they did not dig and cannot poison. Call it faith. Call it the long memory. Call it the stubborn, holy refusal to let your worth be set by an appraiser who has hated you since before you were born. Whatever you call it, it has to live deeper than the headlines, or the headlines will run you ragged and then bill you for the privilege.

I called the roll, and the ancestors had questions

When I get like this, I do what we have always done. I call the roll. I sit down at the table with the ones who already walked through their own version of this, and I let them ask me the hard things. Here is what I imagine they would want to know.

James Baldwin would lean in close, the way he did, cigarette burning, and ask whether we have confused surviving with living. He spent a lifetime insisting that to be Black and awake in this country is to live in a low and constant rage, and then daring us to do something with that rage besides die of it quietly. He would want to know: do you still love a place that has never once loved you back, and if you do, what is that love costing your body tonight?

Langston Hughes would ask it gentle, almost sung. What happens to the dream now, the one we deferred so long it started to smell like a wound that would not close? He would ask whether we still pull a chair up to the table we keep getting sent away from, and whether the laughter in our mouths is joy, or just the blues in its good clothes, keeping time so the hurt has something to dance to.

Toni Morrison would not raise her voice. She would ask whether we are still letting them hold the pencil that defines us, still measuring ourselves against an eye that was never going to call us beautiful. She built cathedrals out of the labor of remembering what we were ordered to forget. So she would ask, simply: what are you refusing to forget, and whose freedom are you using your own freedom to buy?

bell hooks would turn to the men in the room specifically, with a tenderness that never once meant soft. She would ask whether we have let ourselves feel any of this, or whether we did the thing we were trained to do and packed the pain behind the armor where it sits and rots. A people cannot heal what it refuses to name. So she would ask the brothers, plainly, when is the last time you let yourself be held without first checking the exits.

Ralph Ellison would almost laugh. He would ask if they can see us yet, or if we are still the man in the room everybody steps around and nobody quite names. He would ask whether we have been looked through so many times that we have started to doubt our own outline, started to wonder if the invisibility is something we are doing to ourselves now, just to save them the trouble.

Amiri Baraka would not ask politely, because he never did. He would want to know who is getting paid off our exhaustion, and why we keep saying please to a house that was framed and nailed specifically to keep us standing on the porch. He would ask when we intend to stop performing patience for people who keep mistaking it for permission.

Octavia Butler already asked her questions, decades ago, in books that read less like fiction now and more like minutes from a meeting we skipped. She wrote the demagogue and the country on fire before either one showed up on schedule, and she did not need a crystal ball, just an honest look at the trend line. She told us God is change, and then she handed us the only practical question in the room: so what are you shaping, and what exactly are you building while the building burns?

Thurgood Marshall would set down the morning paper with the Callais ruling folded inside it, and he would ask us, in that low and even voice, whether we finally understand that the law is not a possession but a tide. He gave his whole life to bend it toward us, district by district, brick by brick, and then watched a Court he once sat on hand the bricks back. So he would ask the question that actually matters now. They have made your protection a dead letter. What are you prepared to do that does not require their permission?

I do not have clean answers for all of them. But I notice the questions do not let me marinate in despair. They put me to work.

I am not allowed to wallow in it

There is work yet to do..

We laugh because the crying never got us a thing

So let me tell you why I open a piece about grief with a joke about a dog and a spilled coffee, and why I will keep doing it.

We laugh to keep from crying. That is not a cute saying in my house, it is a survival ledger. We laughed at the soup-bowl haircuts our daddies gave us, because crying about it would have just given them something else to be disappointed in. We laughed at the repast louder than anywhere else in the building, because grief that cannot afford a vacation has to take its breaks where it can find them. We made comedy out of catastrophe because somewhere along the way we learned the brutal math of this country. Our tears have never once moved them. They have watched us weep on national television and changed the channel. Crying did not get us respect and it did not get us relief, so we traded it in for something that at least keeps the lungs working and the table full.

That is the Huey Freeman of it. You sit there straight faced and you say the most devastating true thing in the calmest possible voice, and the room laughs, and the laugh is real, and underneath the laugh is a boy who already knows too much and is choosing, on purpose, not to let it close his throat. The deadpan is a decision. The joke is a tax we pay so the sorrow does not foreclose on us.

So manage yourself. Brace less than you think you have to. Put the controller down for an hour even if you cannot make the boss put it down. Anchor your resolve somewhere they cannot reach, do the work the ancestors put in front of you, and laugh, loud, on purpose, as an act of war.

Now talk to me. What is the thing wearing you down that everybody keeps telling you is not that serious? And what is the joke you have been using to keep from crying about it? Pull up a chair. The roll is still being called.

I am writing this as a citizen. Not as a title, not as an office, not as anybody’s representative. A citizen. A Black millennial father raising a son in Butte County. A descendant of people who were counted as property in this country before they were ever counted as people. A man who lives here in the North State, the stretch of California the rest of California likes to forget, and who loves his neighbors enough to tell them the truth.

So here is the truth. We are losing. Not because we are outnumbered, but because we have confused public purity with public power. While we are busy proving who is most correct, somebody else is busy governing our future. We cannot stay in the room with each other long enough to win.

We did it to ourselves first with Joe Biden. And let me be fair. There were real questions. Presentation matters in politics, and pretending otherwise insults the voters we say we want. But we let one cruel media frame swallow an entire governing record. The work was getting done. The numbers were moving. The hardest problems on the planet were being handled by someone who had spent fifty years learning how to handle them. We let the headline beat the record. We confused optics with outcomes, then acted surprised when the other side understood power better than we did.

Then we did it again with Kamala Harris. Not because she was perfect. Nobody is. Not because every voter owed her uncritical applause. They did not. She was a sitting Vice President, effective and imperfect, with enough momentum that she could have been the one taking the call. The 3 a.m. call. The one history hands to whoever is willing to carry the weight. But too many of us could not practice political maturity long enough to back eighty percent of what we wanted while organizing around the other twenty. We wanted a flawless vessel for a fractured moment. That is not politics. That is fantasy dressed up as principle. So we let it fall.

We wanted a flawless vessel for a fractured moment. That is not politics. That is fantasy dressed up as principle.

My best friend has a phrase for when something refuses to add up. Make it make sense. So make it make sense for me. What has all our purity bought us?

Now look across the aisle. I disagree with nearly everything they are building. I find the fealty disturbing, the bending of the knee to one man as though obedience were a virtue. But watch what they do, not just what they are. They focus. No matter how deplorable the play, they run it. They flood the zone. They hold the line in public and fight in private, and they keep their eyes fixed on the agenda while we keep ours fixed on each other. Frederick Douglass warned us that power concedes nothing without a demand. We have the demand. What we lack is the discipline to make it together.

Imagine flooding the zone for the common good. Imagine that kind of coordination aimed at feeding people, housing people, protecting the ballot, healing the sick. The strategy is not evil. The strategy is just a tool, and we have refused to pick it up because we would rather be right out loud than effective together.

Here is something we have to be grown enough to hold in both hands. Modern politics wears two faces. There is persona, the part people see, the posture, the performance. And there is policy, the actual language that becomes the actual law that lands on actual people in places like Southside Oroville. The two are not always the same. Sometimes they are not even close. A leader can carry a persona you find exhausting and still write policy that protects your grandmother’s medication, your daughter’s classroom, your neighbor’s right to vote. We do not lose because our ideas are weak. We lose because we quit engaging one another before we ever reach the language that wins. We break up in the group chat before anybody drafts the bill.

So let me offer a different test. Not a checklist of every position a person holds. Three questions. Is this person here for the common good? Are they selfless enough to serve something larger than their own brand? And are they open to feedback that might change their mind? If the answer is yes, they belong in the coalition.

Those are not side issues. Those are soul issues.

Then we name the things we will not bend on. Voting rights. Bodily autonomy. Equal protection under the law. Protection from state violence. The basic dignity of workers, children, elders, immigrants, disabled people, poor people, and communities that have been targeted for generations. Those are not side issues. Those are soul issues. We name that short and honest list, and then we agree that everything else gets settled in the room. Not in the chats. Not in the quote tweets. Not in the green room confessionals and the unnamed sources. In the room, where grown people who love the same people can disagree, push, sharpen, and still walk out unified. Ella Baker spent her life teaching us that strong movements do not need strong leaders nearly as much as they need disciplined people who keep showing up. She built the room. She never needed to be the loudest voice in it. We hold each other accountable face to face, because that is the only place accountability has ever worked.

The stakes are no longer theoretical, and the price of our pettiness has climbed too high to keep paying. A government is being hollowed out on purpose. Project 2025 was not a warning we dodged. It was a blueprint, and more than half of it has already been put into motion, room by room, from gutted agencies to a federal workforce stripped for parts. The Voting Rights Act, the thing our elders bled for, the thing John Lewis carried across a bridge in his own body, was gutted this spring in a single decision by a Court that needs reform we are barely permitted to name aloud. The very machinery that lets a man like me cast a ballot is being quietly dismantled while we argue over whose candidate was insufficiently pure.

I am not asking anyone to abandon their convictions. Convictions were never the problem. I am asking us to stop letting the perfect murder the possible. I am asking us to carry our fights inside, into the room, and bring our unity back out, into the public. I am asking us to look honestly at what our division has already cost. A Court reshaped for a generation. Voting rights weakened in real time. Trust fractured. A decade of hard ground lost. Communities left exposed. And then I am asking us to decide that the next thing we lose will not be lost by our own hands.

We can disagree all the way to victory. We can argue, sharpen, challenge, correct, and still come out of the room with enough discipline to protect the people we claim to love. But we cannot keep losing because we needed to be right in public more than we needed to be useful together.

Let us get back in the room. Let us deal honestly. Let us come out unified. And then let us go win. Because We CAN!

If this said something true, send it to one person you have been arguing with instead of organizing with. That is where the room starts.

Notes and sources

On Project 2025: the Center for Progressive Reform and Governing for Impact tracker reported in February 2026 that the administration had initiated or completed 283 of 532 domestic policy recommendations, about 53 percent, in its first year (one-year report). The community-run tracker documents specific agency actions, including stripping collective bargaining from federal departments.

On the Voting Rights Act: Louisiana v. Callais was decided April 29, 2026, in a 6 to 3 ruling that raised the bar for Section 2 vote-dilution claims so high that the dissent called the provision effectively unenforceable. See analyses from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Brennan Center for Justice.

I Refuse to Become the Lie

I’ve been thinking about the head nod.

You know the one. That slight downward tilt Black folks give each other in passing. No words. No handshake. No context needed. Just a nod. Quick enough that most people miss it. But we don’t miss it. We never miss it. Because in that half-second, something ancient passes between two people who didn’t plan on meeting but recognize each other anyway. I see you. You’re real. We belong to the same story. You good? Alright then.

I’ve been a pastor long enough to know that most of what people call worship happens outside the building. And that nod? That nod is worship. It’s the imago Dei doing what it was designed to do before we dressed it up in stained glass and turned it into a production. One image-bearer recognizing another without a bulletin, a program, or a membership form. There’s a name for that in the Hebrew Bible. El Roi. The God who sees. Hagar gave God that name in Genesis 16 when she was thrown out, abandoned, pregnant, alone in the wilderness, and God showed up. Not with a rescue plan. With presence. With “I see you.” That’s the theology of the nod. We see each other the way God saw Hagar, in the places where we were never supposed to survive long enough to be noticed.

But there’s more than theology in it. There’s sociology, because that nod only hits the way it hits when you know what it means to be invisible in a room you built with your own hands. And there’s anthropology, because that gesture didn’t start in America. That’s ancestral. Older than the Middle Passage. That’s genius operating under surveillance. We built a whole communication system that doesn’t need Wi-Fi, a platform, or a permit. You can’t defund a head nod. You can’t gerrymander it. You can’t write a bill to make it illegal, although honestly, give them time. We’ve been passing resistance back and forth in parking lots and grocery aisles since before half these legislators learned how to tie a tie. And it still works. That alone should tell you something about who we are.

Because Black folks didn’t just survive this country. I need to say that clearly so nobody confuses endurance with passivity. We invented inside of it. We created whole genres of music, entire economies of style and language and movement, while the Constitution was still calling us fractions. We turned survival into culture and culture into something so magnetic that everybody on the planet started sampling it without credit, citation, or a check. Then they trademarked it, sold it back to us at a markup, and made a documentary about how they discovered it. Every. Single. Time. And we still kept going. Because what we carry isn’t hustle. It’s source code. They can mimic the output forever, but they will never be able to reverse-engineer what it means to make something beautiful out of what was specifically designed to break you. That recipe doesn’t come with measurements. It’s a pinch of this, a prayer over that, and a grandmother who didn’t explain how. She just said do it.

So when I tell you I see what’s happening right now, understand that I’m not speaking from fragility. I’m speaking from a tradition that built altars in exile and wrote psalms in captivity. A tradition that looked at Pharaoh and said, “Let my people go,” and meant it even when the answer was no. But I’m also a man who is running out of patience for smiling through the demolition.

Let’s keep score. This is a horror series, and it drops new episodes daily. War on Woke, which was never about wokeness. It was always the war on Black consciousness with a friendlier font. They couldn’t say what they meant, so they gave it a focus-group name and a primetime rollout. Then they reimagined slavery as a cooperative economic arrangement. I need you to sit with that sentence. Grown adults in actual positions of power approved that language for children’s textbooks. They didn’t stumble into it. They workshopped it. Somebody brought snacks to that meeting. Somebody proofread it and said, “Yeah, this is good.” The Voting Rights Act of 1965, gutted so efficiently that John Lewis’s body was barely cold before they started carving it up like it was Thanksgiving leftovers. Kneeling during the anthem was too provocative. A man took a knee in silence, the most restrained form of protest imaginable, and half the country responded like he burned down the Lincoln Memorial. You know what’s actually provocative? The fact that kneeling was necessary in the first place. And the 1964 Civil Rights Act has to be sitting in the corner right now looking nervous, like, “So we’re just not gonna talk about the pattern?” Because the pattern is obvious. They’re not coming for our rights in a single explosion. They’re dismantling them one session at a time, like a horror movie where the villain doesn’t run. He walks. And somehow still catches you.

I’m tired of acting like I don’t see all of this. I’m tired of sitting in coalition meetings with my pastoral composure on, nodding politely while somebody two seats down debates whether my children deserve to learn their own history. I’m tired of writing grant applications for things that should just be called dignity. Of showing up to planning tables where my presence is the diversity checkbox but my perspective is treated like a disruption. I’m tired of the unspoken rule that says Black men in leadership are supposed to metabolize this kind of violence quietly and keep showing up with a fresh shirt and a full calendar. I feel attacked. Not philosophically. Not as an intellectual exercise. In my chest. In the pit of my stomach at six in the morning. And I’m done pretending otherwise.

Because this is not theoretical for me. I have two boys.

RJ is young enough to believe that people are mostly kind. DJ is old enough to have started checking. And I’m their father, standing in the space between those two realities every morning, trying to figure out how much truth fits into a conversation between the first pour of cereal and the last bite of toast. Nobody writes about that part. Everybody writes about the marches and the legislation and the op-eds.

Nobody writes about Tuesday morning at 7:15 when your pre-teen looks up fwith something heavy behind his eyes and asks you a question you were hoping wouldn’t come for another two years. And you have about three seconds to decide whether to protect his childhood or prepare him for a country that is actively, publicly, legislatively debating whether his full humanity is up for discussion. Three seconds. And the list of to-do’s is locked and loaded. And you still have to walk into a meeting and be articulate and composed and professional by nine o’clock. Somebody tell me that’s not a superpower.

Except nobody’s making that movie, because it doesn’t end with a cape or a villain in handcuffs. It ends with a to-do list and a quiet prayer in the car after the drop-off that God will let them come home the same way they left.

But here’s where the head nod comes back.

Last Tuesday, I passed a brother in the Walmart parking lot. Didn’t know him. He didn’t know me. But he gave me the nod. And I gave it back. And for half a second, something in my chest unclenched. Every episode of the horror series paused. Not because the nod fixes anything. It won’t restore the Voting Rights Act. It won’t rewrite the textbooks. It won’t make that Tuesday morning any less impossible. But it does something that no legislation, no executive order, no policy memo ever could. It says: I see you. You’re not losing your mind. This is really happening. And you are not carrying it alone.

That’s what they can’t legislate away. They can gut every act on the books. Sanitize every curriculum. Turn kneeling into a fireable offense. But they cannot kill the nod. And they cannot touch what lives underneath it, which is a people who have looked at every single thing this country designed to destroy them and responded, “That’s cute. Watch this.” We didn’t just survive. We set the standard for what survival looks like when it refuses to be quiet about it. We seasoned the cast iron. We built the kitchen. And yeah, somebody else might still hold the deed to the building. But we hold something no bank can foreclose on and no court can overturn. We know how to build it again. And again. And again. Each time with our names on it. Each time teaching our children where the nails go and why the foundation matters.

That’s incarnation, by the way. Not just the theological concept. The practice of it. God didn’t love the world from a distance. God showed up. In flesh. In a specific place, under a specific empire, in a body that the state considered disposable. And that body changed everything. That’s what we do every time we show up in a country that keeps debating whether we belong here. We incarnate. We make the invisible visible by refusing to disappear.

So tonight, when the house gets quiet and the screens go dark, I’m going to sit with RJ and DJ and tell them the truth. Not all of it. They’re not ready for all of it, and honestly, neither am I.

DJ is wise enough to get some of it. Not all of it.

But enough. I’m going to tell them that people will try to rewrite their story, and some of those people will smile warmly while they do it.

I’m going to tell them that their great-grandparents built something extraordinary on ground that was never promised to them, and that the building was always the point.

Not the guarantee.

The building. I’m going to tell them that the world will try to hand them a version of themselves that is smaller, quieter, and more convenient than who they actually are.

And then I’m going to teach them the nod. Not because it saves us. But because it reminds us, every single time, that we were never just one person carrying this. We have always been a we. And that “we” is the thing no executive order on earth has the power to repeal.

I refuse to hide behind politeness. I refuse to perform calm for people who are comfortable with my erasure. I refuse to become the lie this country keeps trying to write over my name.

And if you’re Black and reading this, consider this my nod to you.

I see you. You’re not alone in this.

A follow-up to “When Gerrymandering Wears a Robe.” If you have not read that piece, start there.

Let me tell you something about Clarence Thomas that Black people already know but that nobody in polite company wants to say out loud.

He has been uninvited from the cookout. Not officially. No meeting was called, no vote was taken, no formal resolution was passed. It happened the way most things happen in Black communal life, organically, collectively, and without needing explanation from the people who already understand. You just notice one summer that his name stopped coming up in the same sentence as pride. You notice that when somebody mentions him, the response is not celebration but a long, tired exhale followed by a subject change. You notice that his picture does not hang on anybody’s wall next to Thurgood Marshall, and everybody in the room understands exactly why without it ever being said directly.

Here is what makes it complicated: he is brilliant. Genuinely. The man writes a legal opinion. He holds a coherent constitutional philosophy that he has maintained with remarkable consistency for over three decades. I do not dispute any of that.

What I dispute is what he has done with the brilliance. What I dispute is the direction he has pointed it. What I dispute is the choice, made repeatedly and deliberately over thirty years, to use one of the most powerful legal minds of his generation to dismantle the exact protections that made it possible for a Black child from Pin Point, Georgia, to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States in the first place. That is not conservatism. That is not constitutionalism. That is a man who got in the building, found the stairs, and spent his career quietly removing them so the next generation could not follow.

And then there is Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Same institution. Same table. Same briefs. Completely different assignment.

On May 4, 2026, five days after the Court buried the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, Justice Jackson wrote four pages that made unmistakably clear she would not let the Court pretend that what it was doing was normal, principled, or procedurally honest. She named the power play directly. She cited the abandoned principles by name. She signed her name to the truth and let it stand permanently on the official record.

The old folks have a saying that is relevant here: skinfolk ain’t kinfolk.

Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson are both skinfolk.

Only one of them showed up as kinfolk when it counted.

Let us talk about it.

They Could Not Even Wait Thirty-Two Days

When the Supreme Court issues a ruling, standard practice requires the Court to wait thirty-two days before sending the certified judgment to the lower court. The purpose of this window is simple: it gives the losing party time to file a petition for rehearing if they believe the Court made an error.

Thirty-two days. That is the rule. A rule the Court wrote for itself.

Five days after Callais dropped, the Court issued a separate order skipping that window entirely and releasing the judgment immediately. They called it issuing the judgment “forthwith,” which is legal terminology for: right now, no waiting, we are moving, clock starts today.

They did this while Louisiana’s primary elections were actively in progress.

Let me give you the timeline because the timeline is the testimony, and I need you to sit with every date.

April 1: Louisiana mails ballots to overseas and military voters.

April 26: Louisiana mails ballots to all other qualified mail-in voters.

April 29: The Supreme Court drops Callais, striking down Louisiana’s congressional map.

April 30: The Governor of Louisiana suspends the ongoing primary elections. New lawsuits immediately appear, filed by voters who had already submitted their ballots and would very much like those votes to count in an election that was supposed to be happening.

May 4: The Supreme Court, five days after releasing the original opinion, issues the judgment forthwith, bypasses the standard thirty-two day window, and accelerates the ruling’s implementation into an election already drowning in chaos.

Ballots had been mailed. Some had been returned. Voters had followed every rule that existed when they voted. And the Court decided that urgency of implementation outweighed the disruption to an active election in a state where Black voters carried the most to lose from the disruption.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. And what she wrote needs to be read slowly, carefully, and with the full weight of what it means for a Black woman to say these words from inside that institution, about the colleagues sitting beside her at that table.

She wrote: “The Court unshackles itself from both constraints today and dives into the fray. And just like that, those principles give way to power.”

Sit in that sentence.

Those principles give way to power.

That is not procedural objection language. That is not a technical dispute about rule interpretation. That is a sitting Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States telling you, in writing, on the permanent official record, that her Court abandoned its own stated principles the moment those principles became inconvenient to the outcome it preferred.

She said it plainly. She signed her name to it. She was right. And she knew exactly what it would cost her to say it.

The Purcell Principle and the Art of Selective Memory

Here is the part that should raise your blood pressure if you are paying close attention.

Five months before Callais, in December 2025, the same Supreme Court invoked something called the Purcell principle to stop a federal district court from making changes to election rules during an active campaign. The Purcell principle holds that courts should not insert themselves into ongoing elections because last-minute changes to election rules create confusion, undermine public trust, and harm voters who made their decisions based on rules as they existed.

The Court cited this principle in December to stop a lower court from acting.

In May, the Court abandoned this same principle to accelerate its own action into an election already in progress.

When a rule serves the outcome they want, the rule applies with force and citation. When a rule complicates the outcome they want, the rule receives a footnote and a polite wave goodbye.

Justice Jackson named this directly. She noted that in twenty-five years, the Court had only granted a forthwith order over a party’s objection twice. This was the third time. It happened in the middle of a primary election, with votes already cast, with multiple active lawsuits filed by voters whose ballots now floated in legal uncertainty, with a political undercurrent so obvious that Justice Jackson felt professionally obligated to name it explicitly on the official record.

She wrote that Louisiana’s response to the ruling unfolded “against the backdrop of a pitched redistricting battle among state governments that appear to be acting as proxies for their favored political parties.”

Proxies. For their favored political parties.

A sitting Justice wrote that. On the official record. About a process the majority of her Court just voted to accelerate past its own procedural guardrails.

The majority’s response, authored by Justice Alito with Justices Thomas and Gorsuch joining, amounted to: how dare you say that. The dissent is being irresponsible and insulting.

Which is a fascinating response to an accurate description of observable events. When you cannot dispute the substance, you attack the tone. That is not a rebuttal. That is a deflection wearing judicial robes.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Is Not Your Symbol, But She Is Our Witness

I want to be careful here and honest here at the same time.

Justice Jackson does not belong to a movement. She belongs to herself, to her formation, to the extraordinary intellectual discipline she built over a lifetime, and to the oath she swore on the day she joined that Court. She is not performing for us. She is doing her job with the full weight of her preparation and her conscience.

But I cannot pretend that watching her in that room carries no weight beyond legal analysis. It carries enormous weight. And pretending otherwise to seem objective is its own kind of dishonesty.

She is the first Black woman to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States. She occupies a body that, in three years, has dismantled affirmative action, gutted the Voting Rights Act in stages, and now rushed the implementation of that gutting into an active election. She has written dissents in case after case that read less like legal briefs and more like dispatches from someone documenting a building fire while professionally required to cite the municipal code as the flames spread.

Her dissent in the forthwith order runs four pages. But those four pages do something that longer opinions sometimes fail to accomplish: they say the thing directly. They name the political undercurrent without euphemism. They cite the abandoned principles by name. They decline to dress up what is happening in language designed to make it easier for comfortable people to dismiss.

That requires a specific kind of courage. It is the courage of someone who understands that her presence in that room does not obligate her to perform institutional comfort in the presence of institutional dishonesty. She has read the history. She has lived adjacent to the history. And she has decided, apparently with full awareness of what it costs, that she will not help this Court appear more principled than it is currently acting.

“And just like that, those principles give way to power.”

Write that sentence on a wall. Put it in a curriculum. Teach it to a generation of young Black lawyers, activists, organizers, and voters who need to understand what principled dissent from inside a hostile institution actually sounds like when someone does it with precision and without flinching.

It sounds exactly like that.

And Then There Is Clarence Thomas. And We Have to Have This Conversation.

I have been circling this. But we cannot have an honest conversation about this moment without going directly at it.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a concurrence in Callais describing forty years of Voting Rights Act jurisprudence as a “disastrous misadventure.” He went further than the majority, arguing that Section 2 should not apply to redistricting at all, that the entire enterprise of using the Voting Rights Act to create majority-minority districts carried constitutional illegitimacy from the beginning, and that today’s decision should “largely put an end” to the whole framework.

He has held this position for over thirty years. He first articulated it in 1994. He has never wavered from it.

I will give him consistency. He has been entirely, relentlessly consistent.

But consistency in the wrong direction is not intellectual integrity. It is a commitment. It is a decision, made and remade across decades, to apply a framework that structurally leaves the conditions of racial inequality intact while removing the legal tools specifically designed to address those conditions. That combination, intact conditions and removed tools, does not produce equality. It produces the legal protection of inequality under the language of principle.

Howard Thurman wrote about the way that sustained oppression sometimes produces, in some of its survivors, a deep and sincere identification with the logic of the oppressor. Not from malice necessarily. Not from self-hatred necessarily. But from a genuine philosophical conviction that the path to dignity runs through colorblindness, through removing racial categories from the law, through a future in which race stops figuring into the calculations of power and therefore stops being a mechanism of harm.

It is a coherent vision. Thurman took it seriously. He understood why people held it.

He also understood why applying that vision before the conditions it assumes actually exist produces not racial equality but the legal protection of racial inequality dressed in the language of transcendence. You cannot declare the race finished when half the runners are still wearing chains from the last lap.

Justice Thomas grew up in Pin Point, Georgia, under legal segregation. He carries the historical memory of exactly the conditions the Voting Rights Act was designed to remedy. He has spoken publicly about the discrimination he experienced. He is not ignorant of the history.

He has simply decided that the remedy is worse than the disease, that race-conscious protection produces more harm than race-blind neglect, that the arc of his own individual biography provides the template for a collective legal framework.

I am not going to call him a traitor. That word is too simple and too comfortable because it lets us stop thinking while feeling righteously indignant.

What I will say is this: his jurisprudence builds a theology of individual transcendence with no architecture for addressing collective harm. And individual transcendence, however genuinely hard-won and real in his specific life, cannot function as the legal standard for twenty million Black Americans whose daily conditions are not defined by his biography or determined by his survival.

Most people do not transcend the system. Most people live in the conditions the law either addresses or ignores. Most people attend the school the district funded or quietly defunded. Most people live in the neighborhood that policy shaped or neglected. Most people vote in the district the legislature drew with their power in mind or deliberately without it. What the law does to those conditions matters enormously to those people, regardless of what any individual, however brilliant and accomplished, managed to achieve in spite of the conditions rather than because of their absence.

Justice Jackson sits at the same table as Justice Thomas. She reads the same briefs. She operates under the same institutional constraints. She carries a formation shaped by the same American history.

And she arrives at fundamentally different conclusions. Not because she lacks his rigor. Not because she operates from emotion rather than principle. But because she asks a different question. She does not ask whether colorblindness is a beautiful ideal in the abstract. She asks whether colorblindness is an honest description of the world in which the law actually operates, in which the maps actually get drawn, in which the votes actually get cast or suppressed or cracked or packed or rushed through a constitutional crisis five days after an opinion lands.

Her answer, written in four pages on May 4, 2026, is: no. And the Court’s decision to rush this judgment, past its own rules, past the Purcell principle it cited five months earlier, past the active election already in progress, proves precisely why the answer has to be no.

When the principles disappear this quickly, in this specific direction, producing this specific effect, colorblindness is not the operating doctrine.

Power is. Raw, undisguised, selectively principled power.

And the willingness to name that plainly, from inside the institution, on the record, is exactly what separates witness from complicity.

The Prophetic Office and the Cost of Telling the Truth From Inside

The Black Prophetic Tradition carries a specific category for the person who tells the truth from inside the institution, at personal cost, with precision, without softening the indictment to protect the feelings of the people being indicted.

Jeremiah told the truth from inside Jerusalem when every institutional voice was managing the king’s comfort. Amos walked into the sanctuary and told the priests their worship was an offense to God because justice was running dry in the streets outside the building. Ida B. Wells told the truth from inside a country that had decided her safety was negotiable and her documentation of its crimes was the real threat to public order. Fannie Lou Hamer stood at the 1964 Democratic National Convention while Lyndon Johnson, terrified of what her testimony would cost party unity, tried to prevent it from reaching television screens across the country.

None of them waited for institutional permission. None of them softened the indictment to preserve professional relationships. None of them confused faithfulness with quietness.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson performed that same prophetic witness on May 4, 2026. She looked directly at what the Court was doing, named the political undercurrent without euphemism, cited the abandoned principles by name, and refused to sign her name to a procedural fiction designed to make an aggressive political maneuver look like routine judicial administration.

That matters institutionally because the dissent is the official record, and the official record is what historians and future courts read when they try to understand what was actually happening in this moment beneath the legal grammar and the footnotes.

It matters prophetically because truth told from inside the institution, at cost, without apology, is one of the primary ways the moral accounting of history gets completed. The majority writes the ruling. The dissent writes the truth. And across time, the dissent is often what endures.

But here is what I need us to hold: Justice Jackson’s dissent, as important and as right as it is, cannot be the end of our response. She is one voice inside an institution that has, by her own account, allowed power to overrun principle. She cannot organize our communities. She cannot register our voters. She cannot run for our school boards, show up to our city council meetings, build the redistricting coalitions, or construct the kind of sustained, disciplined political infrastructure that makes the next generation of this fight winnable.

That work belongs to us. That is the assignment she does not carry and we do.

What We Do Now, Because the Court Has Told Us Exactly Who It Is

The Court has shown us who it is. Louisiana has shown us what a state with political ambition and legal cover will do when the constraints come off. The forthwith order has shown us that the majority will not slow down for procedural norms when urgency serves its preferred direction, will not defer to principles it cited five months earlier when those principles become inconvenient, and will not be embarrassed into restraint by a dissent, however accurate and however precisely right.

Knowing all of that, we have one real question: what do we do?

We stop waiting for a better Court and start building the power that makes the Court’s composition a question we have more influence over through elections, advocacy, and sustained civic pressure.

We stop waiting for Congress to act and start building the organizing infrastructure that makes congressional action politically necessary rather than politically optional.

We stop retreating into a theology of otherworldly consolation that tells us our reward arrives in the next life while this life gets organized against us in real time. We carry our faith into the streets, the precincts, the redistricting hearings, the school board meetings, and every other room where decisions shaping the lives of our people get made by people who are counting on our absence.

We stop performing outrage in three-day cycles on social media and start converting that energy into disciplined, sustained, locally rooted political work that is still happening two years from now when the news cycle has moved on to the next crisis.

America has a long and well-documented pattern of hitting Black people and then expressing shock when we object loudly and organize seriously. It maintains a pattern of dismantling our protections and then calling our response divisive. It constructs the conditions of our marginalization and then demands that we prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, with a smoking gun and a notarized confession, that the conditions were constructed with racial intent.

We are done accepting those terms.

Not loud and scattered and reactive.

Organized. Disciplined. Clear-eyed. Persistent. Funded. Locally rooted and nationally coordinated. And grounded in a theology that has never once confused faith with passivity, worship with silence, or the Kingdom of God with the comfort of those who benefit most from things staying exactly as they are.

Justice Jackson wrote the dissent.

Now we write the next chapter.

We write it with our presence, our votes, our organizing, our candidates, our money, our time, our refusal to be managed, and our absolute insistence that this ruling is not the last word on Black political power in America.

The robe holds the power of the institution.

We hold the power of the people.

We have not yet decided to use it at full strength.

It is time to decide.

Robert A. Morton Sr. is the Senior Pastor of Oro Vista Baptist Church in Oroville, California, and the Founding Executive Director of The Black Resiliency Project. His writing examines the intersection of faith, justice, and public life in the tradition of Black prophetic witness.

You know that one auntie at every family cookout, the one who has been saying the same thing for twenty years, the one everybody rolls their eyes at, the one they whisper about in the kitchen, the one they call “too negative” and “always bringing up race” and “can’t just enjoy herself for one afternoon”? The one who said, back in 2013, when the Supreme Court gutted the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act: “They are not done. Watch. They are going to keep pulling threads until the whole thing unravels.” And everybody said, “Auntie, relax. The Voting Rights Act is settled law. Stop being so dramatic. You want some potato salad?”

That auntie was right.

She has been right every single time. At every cookout. For twenty years. And she is still not getting an apology, still not getting a thank you, and the people who told her to relax are still somehow surprised every time the next thing happens.

This piece is for her. This piece is also a formal acknowledgment that she was right, that she has always been right, and that the rest of us need to stop waiting to be surprised by a system that has been telling us exactly what it intends to do and then doing exactly that, with the calm, unhurried confidence of people who have never once believed they would face any real accountability.

On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court finished what it started in 2013. They gutted the Voting Rights Act. Completely. Methodically. With footnotes. And they called it a constitutional update.

Tell auntie she gets the first plate.

Now let me explain what actually happened, why it matters theologically and politically, and why the response cannot be limited to a social media post, a prayer, and a sigh.

Grab your coffee. This is going to take a minute.

What the Voting Rights Act Was Actually Supposed to Do

To understand what we lost, you have to understand what we had, and why we needed it in the first place.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was born out of Selma’s Bloody Sunday. It emerged from a century of what the dissent in this very case called “unremitting and ingenious” state-level efforts to strip Black Americans of their constitutional right to vote. Poll taxes. Literacy tests. Good character exams that required Black sharecroppers to interpret the state constitution to the satisfaction of a white registrar who had already decided the answer before the question left your mouth.

These were not aberrations. These were systems. Built with intention. Maintained with precision. Designed to render the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, nothing more than ink on parchment.

Louisiana’s own numbers carry the full weight of this story, and I need you to hold these numbers because they are not ancient history. They are architecture. In 1896, Louisiana counted 130,000 Black registered voters. By 1904, the state had administratively reduced that number to 1,342. Not a typo. Not a rounding error. One thousand, three hundred and forty-two registered Black voters. In the entire state. Achieved in eight years. Without a single fire hose. Just paperwork, bureaucratic discretion, and a system that had decided your citizenship was conditional on its convenience.

That is what a committed system does to a constitutional right when it decides to. File that away. We are going to need it again before this piece is over.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act provided the legal remedy for what scholars call “vote dilution,” which is exactly what it sounds like. When you cannot stop people from voting outright, you arrange the political geography so their votes mean nothing when they arrive. You pack a large Black community into one impossibly drawn district to contain their influence, or you crack them apart, scattering them across districts where the majority always outvotes them. The ballot gets cast. It just never lands anywhere that changes anything.

Section 2 said that when an electoral system “results in” a minority group having “less opportunity than other members of the electorate to elect representatives of their choice,” that constitutes a violation of the law. Not if you prove someone intended it. Not if you produce a leaked email from a legislator confessing his racism in writing. Just if the result, measured objectively and evidenced thoroughly, produces unequal opportunity.

Effects mattered. Results mattered.

Congress designed the law this way deliberately in 1982 because they had already watched what happened when courts required proof of intent. Intent hides easily behind a press release, a race-neutral justification, and a lawyer with a straight face. Discrimination in its results cannot always hide. So Congress followed the evidence instead of the excuse.

That was the law. For forty years, that was the law.

What the Court Just Did

Here is the short version: the Court killed Section 2 in practice while keeping it alive on paper.

Which is a very American way to kill something. Leave the nameplate on the door, gut the room, change the locks, and then express confusion when people say the house is empty.

The case started with Louisiana’s congressional redistricting after the 2020 census. Black voters make up about one-third of Louisiana’s population. For decades, the state maintained only one majority-Black congressional district. Civil rights plaintiffs argued that this constituted vote dilution, that a second majority-Black district could be reasonably drawn, and that Louisiana was intentionally cracking its Black electorate to prevent it. A federal district court agreed, after five days of testimony and 110 pages of careful factual analysis, and ordered the state to produce a new map.

Louisiana drew one. Called it SB8. Added a second majority-Black district. Then a different set of plaintiffs argued that the new district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander because Louisiana used race as the dominant factor in drawing it.

So a court told Louisiana: you probably violated the law by not having a second Black district. Louisiana drew one. Then another court said: that district violates the Constitution because you drew it with race in mind.

If that sounds like a trap, it is because it is a trap. And Black voters in Louisiana are the ones who got caught in it.

The Supreme Court resolved the contradiction by deciding that the Voting Rights Act never required the second district in the first place, and therefore no compelling constitutional interest justified drawing it. Louisiana now moves toward a map with only one majority-Black district again, which is the whole game hiding underneath the legal grammar.

But the ruling did not stop there, and this is the part that matters beyond Louisiana’s borders.

The majority used this case to fundamentally rewrite how Section 2 operates in every future redistricting case across the country. Every single change the majority made to the legal framework makes vote dilution claims harder to prove. The core move is this: if a state points to any race-neutral reason for how it drew its maps, including pure partisan advantage, the vote dilution claim fails.

You want to crack the Black district? Just call it a partisan gerrymander. That is not legal clarity. That is a loophole with a law degree and a straight face.

Here is the specific cruelty of this construction. In most Southern states where these cases arise, Black voters overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates and white voters overwhelmingly support Republican candidates. Race and party operate as deeply correlated variables. The majority now says that because plaintiffs cannot easily prove the state was thinking about race rather than party, Section 2 cannot protect them. The very conditions that make vote dilution most likely to occur are now the conditions that make it hardest to prove in court.

Justice Kagan named this directly in her dissent. The majority reimposed the intent requirement that Congress specifically and deliberately rejected in 1982. She wrote that the new framework “will effectively insulate any practice, including any districting scheme, said by a State to have any race-neutral justification.”

Announce a partisan gerrymander. Leave no smoking gun behind. And Section 2 cannot touch you.

The majority called this “updating” the law.

I need a moment.

Imagine examining a forty-year legal framework specifically designed to protect Black voters, deciding it was functioning too effectively, systematically dismantling it piece by piece, and then calling the process a software upgrade. That is what happened here. The people most directly harmed by it were not consulted, not considered, and are not the least bit surprised. Because auntie already told us. We just did not listen.

This Is Not New. This Is the Pattern. And the Pattern Has a Purpose.

Hold the history here, because history is the only honest lens for reading this moment, and I am genuinely tired of watching us react to each ruling like it fell from the sky without a sender.

In 2013, the Court gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. The majority eliminated the preclearance requirement that forced states with documented histories of voter suppression to obtain federal approval before changing their voting laws. The majority said things had changed. Progress had been made. The old protections had outlived their necessity.

A flood of discriminatory voting laws followed almost immediately. Several states had new restrictive voting measures in place before the ink dried on the opinion. Some courts later struck down those laws as intentionally discriminatory. But the preclearance wall was gone, and every battle now required individual litigation, after the damage was already moving through the system.

In 2021, the Court strangled Section 2’s application to voting restrictions in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, making it nearly impossible to challenge laws that place procedural burdens on voting even when those burdens fall disproportionately on minority voters. Not a single Section 2 suit challenging a voting restriction has succeeded since that ruling. Not one.

In 2026, Louisiana v. Callais finishes the job on redistricting.

Section 5: gone. Section 2 for voting restrictions: functionally gone. Section 2 for redistricting: now functionally gone.

The Act still lives in the United States Code. The words remain on the page. Which is how you know this is a quintessentially American story. Keep the monument. Hollow out the meaning. Point to the monument when anyone complains and say: see, it still exists. What exactly are you upset about?

What we are upset about is that you hollowed out the monument while people were still trying to live inside it.

Frederick Douglass understood this pattern more than a century and a half before this Court perfected it. He watched the promise of the Fifteenth Amendment get systematically hollowed out after Reconstruction, not by repealing the amendment but by refusing to enforce it, by constructing procedural barriers that made enforcement practically impossible, by reinterpreting the language until it said the opposite of what the framers intended. He knew then what remains true now: a right without a remedy is not a right. It is a prop. It is a document you display while the condition it was meant to correct continues undisturbed behind the curtain.

The costumes have changed. The script has not moved an inch.

And I need the church to hear this clearly, because this is not merely a political observation. This is a theological one. When systems construct themselves deliberately to neutralize the political power of a people, and when those systems persist, adapt, and receive legal protection across generations, that is not policy. That is principality. That is what Paul described when he talked about wrestling not against flesh and blood but against powers and structures that organize themselves against human dignity. The names change. The structure persists. The assignment remains.

We do not get to be a prophetic church and treat this as someone else’s problem to solve.

Why This Has to Be a Theological Conversation and Not Just a Political One

I am a pastor, and I need to say this without flinching and without apology: voting rights are not outside the concern of the church. They are not worldly issues reserved for the politically inclined. For communities whose schools, hospitals, housing, policing, wages, water, and neighborhoods are shaped by political power, representation is not an abstraction. It is the difference between whether our children inherit possibility or policy-shaped neglect. It is the difference between a budget that funds your school and one that quietly defunds it while holding a press conference about fiscal responsibility.

That is a theological statement. It is also just Tuesday in Southside Oroville.

Howard Thurman wrote in Jesus and the Disinherited that the religion of Jesus addressed itself specifically to those who stood with their backs against the wall, people for whom the social order functioned as a mechanism of exclusion. Thurman’s question to the church was never whether Jesus cared about the marginalized. His question was whether the church was honest enough to name what was actually happening and courageous enough to respond with more than comfort and a casserole.

James Cone offered considerably less patience on the same subject. Cone argued that any theology that refuses to reckon with the material conditions of the oppressed is not Christian theology. It is ideology wearing liturgical robes. It is a distraction dressed up as devotion. It is the church writing a permission slip for inaction and signing Jesus’ name to the bottom.

Here is the direct application: the Supreme Court has now confirmed in writing, with citations, what activists and civil rights lawyers have been saying for over a decade. The legal infrastructure protecting Black and Brown political power is being systematically dismantled. Every majority-Black district in the South now exists, in Justice Kagan’s words, “on sufferance.” Louisiana’s District 2, which has carried a Black majority since 1983 and which was itself born from a previous vote dilution lawsuit, is now legally vulnerable. Any state with partisan ambitions and a competent attorney can draw a map that cracks it, announce a political rationale, and dare anyone to prove racial motive in federal court under these new standards.

If Black voters lose the ability to elect representatives who will fight for their communities, the downstream consequences reach into every policy domain the church claims to care about. Healthcare access. Housing. Criminal justice reform. Public school funding. Economic development in communities that have been systematically disinvested. Environmental justice. Disaster response. Political representation is not an abstract democratic virtue. It is the mechanism by which every other justice issue advances or stalls. It is the room where the budget gets written. It is the committee where policy takes shape before it ever reaches a public floor.

The church cannot spiritualize a problem that has a ZIP code and a congressional district number attached to it.

And let me say this as plainly as I know how: if your theology sits comfortably in the presence of organized voter suppression, if you can read this ruling and conclude that the appropriate response is prayer alone and not also organized, disciplined political resistance, you need to spend serious time asking yourself whose interests your theology is actually serving. Because the prophetic tradition is not neutral on this question. Amos was not neutral. Micah was not neutral. Fannie Lou Hamer was not neutral. She absorbed a beating on a Mississippi bridge for the right to register to vote, and she did it because she understood in her bones that the Kingdom of God carries legislative consequences and the people of God carry civic obligations.

We have been patient long enough. Patient does not mean passive. Faithful does not mean quiet. And a God who liberates people from bondage is not well-served by a church that makes peace with the updated version of the same bondage because it now arrives in legal language instead of chains.

What This Demands From Us, and It Is Not Just Prayer

The legal landscape after Callais is narrow. Without congressional action to strengthen the Voting Rights Act, which requires political will that does not currently exist in both chambers, federal courts are largely unavailable for the most important redistricting claims. The dissent was right. The demolition is functionally complete within that arena.

That means the work shifts. It does not end. It shifts. And the shift demands that we stop waiting for institutions to protect us and start building the power that makes protection politically necessary.

The work now moves from courtroom dependency to community discipline. And before you nod and keep scrolling, understand that community discipline means something specific, demanding, inconvenient, and absolutely non-negotiable.

We need state-level redistricting advocacy, and we need it before maps get drawn, not after the damage gets certified and we are left managing the consequences of decisions made in rooms we were not in. Many states have independent redistricting commissions and state constitutional protections that operate outside the now-gutted federal framework. Those processes require organized community presence, public testimony, and sustained attention from people who understand what is actually at stake. If Black and Brown communities are not in those rooms before the lines get drawn, they spend the next decade living inside someone else’s political calculations.

We need voter registration that does not only activate during presidential election years. Black voter turnout in recent cycles has been genuinely impressive and the data reflects it. But turnout without representation runs like a treadmill. You work hard, you move fast, and you end up in exactly the same place. Registration and civic education must operate year-round, every cycle, at every level of government.

We need churches that treat civic education like discipleship and not like an optional side ministry for the politically inclined. Helping your congregation understand how their city council, county board of supervisors, school board, and water district actually function is not partisan activity. It is pastoral care. It prepares people to navigate a world that has organized itself to make their participation feel irrelevant and their power feel invisible.

We need organizers who understand maps, budgets, school boards, county supervisors, city councils, water districts, and all the unglamorous rooms where power makes decisions before the public ever sees a press release. Most of the decisions shaping daily life happen at the local level. Those races get decided by embarrassingly small margins, which means a small, organized, disciplined community shifts outcomes in ways that ripple upward for years.

We need to stop treating democracy like a holiday we celebrate every four years and start treating it like infrastructure we maintain every single day. Because the people on the other side of this fight are not celebrating holidays. They are doing the sustained, unglamorous, disciplined work of consolidating power while we wait for the next presidential cycle to get activated.

And somebody needs to say all of that on a Sunday morning, from an actual pulpit, without apologizing for a single word of it.

We Come From People Who Read Maps Drawn Against Them

Justice Kagan closed her dissent with this: the Voting Rights Act was “born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers. It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality.”

She was right. And the majority in Callais delivered what she called the final chapter in the Court’s “step-by-step slaying of voting rights.”

I think about John Lewis, whose skull cracked open on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, who then spent the rest of his life building the very legal infrastructure this Court has spent a decade disassembling with the precision of people who understand exactly what they are doing and have decided the consequences for Black communities are acceptable.

I think about what it means to inherit that legacy. Not as a trophy to display. As a charge to carry. As an assignment that does not expire because the institution responsible for protecting it has turned hostile.

The map has been redrawn. Again.

But we come from people who learned to read maps drawn against them. We come from people who found roads where the law built walls. We come from people who crossed bridges with blood on the pavement, hymns in their chest, and a righteous refusal in their spirit that no court order could legislate out of existence.

So no. We do not surrender because the Court has turned hostile. Hostile courts are not new to us. Hostile laws are not new. Hostile rooms are not new. What is also not new is our refusal to accept the terms being offered.

We have never won by waiting for the system to correct itself out of goodwill. We have won by building enough organized power that the system had no choice but to respond. That is how the Voting Rights Act was born in the first place. Not from judicial generosity. Not from the kindness of those in power. From Selma. From Montgomery. From the sustained, costly, disciplined work of people who decided that enough was enough and backed that decision with their bodies and their lives.

The Court may have updated the law.

But they cannot update our assignment.

We organize. We educate. We register. We litigate where we can. We build power where we must. We run for the seats in the rooms where the maps get drawn. We show up to the school board meeting and the city council meeting and the county supervisor hearing and the redistricting commission and every unglamorous room where our absence is profitable for someone else. And we keep telling the truth, loudly and publicly and without apology, until the lie loses its breath and the liars lose their nerve.

That is not just political work.

For those of us shaped by the Black Prophetic Tradition, it is holy work.

The Court may have the robe.

But we have the assignment. And we have not finished.

Robert A. Morton Sr. is the Senior Pastor of Oro Vista Baptist Church in Oroville, California, and the Founding Executive Director of The Black Resiliency Project. His writing examines the intersection of faith, justice, and public life in the tradition of Black prophetic witness.

I was not looking for a story.

It was a Tuesday morning at the Starbucks inside the Safeway on East Avenue in Chico, California, which is a specific American experience worth sitting with before we get to the rice.

Somebody had a meeting at some point where the idea was pitched. What if we put a place where people slow down inside a place designed to make people move fast? What if we placed artisan espresso beside the ready to eat meals, frozen food and cat/dog food aisle? What if the same building selling your Tide pods also sold you something called a Caramel Macchiato at a price that would have made your grandmother call the pastor?

And America said yes.

Because of course it did.

The result is this peculiar and entirely American institution. A small island of aspirational café culture pitched under the same fluorescent lights as the paper towel section, with the self checkout machines beeping in the distance, the PA system cutting through every thirty seconds to announce a deal on something nobody specifically came in for, and somewhere in the bread aisle a worker restocking shelves with the focused indifference of someone who has been here since before the parking lot filled up. You are surrounded by the infrastructure of domestic necessity. You are technically at a café.

You are not at a café.

You are in Chico.

But the coffee is warm and the vantage point is spectacular.

Morning at a grocery store is its own civilization, different from the afternoon crowd, the after-work rush of cart gridlock and low blood sugar. Morning brings the planners, the ones with the lists organized by department and the reusable bags already sorted before they left home. It brings the retirees moving at the pace of people who have finally earned the right not to hurry, navigating the produce section like they have nowhere else to be and are at peace about it. It brings the parents who showed up in the narrow window between school drop-off and the rest of the day collapsing, moving with a focused intensity that belongs in military documentaries. It brings the man buying energy drinks and nothing else, the woman on her phone managing a situation that clearly started before she pulled into the parking lot, the couple who have apparently agreed to disagree about something in the chips aisle and are now conducting separate negotiations with the shelves.

If you have never people watched from a Starbucks inside a Safeway, I genuinely feel something for you. It is a front row seat to American life in all its complicated, unfiltered glory. It is magnificent.

I had my Ethiopian beans in the cup. I had nothing pressing for the next eleven minutes. I was at peace.

Then she walked up to the self checkout.

Now, I want to be a fair witness here. I watched the whole thing unfold in real time, and what I can tell you, with pastoral certainty, is that she knew.

She knew before she got to the register.

The body already knew.

There was a specific hesitation in her step, a half second pause that the self checkout machine absolutely clocked and did not care about, that said the money situation was uncertain at best.

But she stepped up anyway. Committed to the bit. And I respect the audacity. I really do.

$5.19.

That was the total.

For a bag of rice that, and I need you to hear me clearly, would not feed ten people. Would not feed five. Would not feed three people who were genuinely hungry and had not eaten since breakfast. This was not a meal. This was a suggestion. This was rice that required supplemental faith to make work.

She went for the purse first. Reasonable.

Then the other section of the purse. Still reasonable.

Then the little zipper pocket inside the purse that nobody has put anything in since 2011. Getting warmer.

Then the coat pocket.

Then the other coat pocket.

Then, and this is where the performance peaked, she looked down at the floor.

Ma’am.

The coins were not on the floor.

The coins were never on the floor.

This was not a floor situation.

And the whole time she was looking around, I was turning my head when she glanced this way, and then having that left eye return to her before my right one followed.

I am so glad she was not reading minds, because she would have heard me shouting over this makeshift barrier filled with Starbucks cups and collectibles.

And then came the pocket. The pocket with the hole. Which she found by putting her hand in and pulling it out the other side, looking genuinely betrayed, as if that pocket had conspired against her without warning.

Beloved.

That hole did not appear this morning.

That hole has been there.

That hole had a whole history before this moment. It had seen things. And what I will not do is let that pocket take the fall for what was fundamentally a preexisting financial condition that she walked into this Safeway carrying, hole or no hole.

She does not have to admit it to me. She does not even have to admit it to herself. But in the court of what actually happened at that self checkout on a Tuesday morning, the verdict is in.

The hole is not guilty.

I stepped up and paid it.

$5.19.

I put the card to the machine before she could finish the sentence she was starting about being so sorry and not knowing how this happened and being able to Venmo me later.

I just nodded. Because I did not need a production. The Ethiopian coffee was not even ready yet. I was as committed to paying for it as she was to acting like the change had fallen out of her pocket at self checkout.

But here is where God, who has a sense of humor that is both deeply holy and genuinely unhinged, decided this moment was not complete.

Because standing there, watching her gather her aspirational rice and her relief and her dignity, a thought came to me. And I am not blaming the Holy Ghost for this one. This was not the Spirit. This was that corner of my mind where Huey Freeman keeps office hours.

The thought said, what if she voted for the very people who helped make this bag of rice cost $5.19?

And I had to just sit with that.

Right there.

Between the self checkout and the display of reusable bags nobody is buying.

Me, a Black progressive pastor and nonprofit director from Cincinnati, living in Chico, having just funded the grocery run of someone radiating a particular energy that I have learned to recognize in Northern California. The energy of somebody who watches certain news channels, has opinions about certain bumper stickers, and calls people like me “political” when we have the nerve to exist loudly.

Now, let me be careful. She did not say any of that to me. She did not announce her voting record at the register. I did not ask. That would have been weird, even for me.

But the thought came anyway.

And that is the trouble with being honest. Sometimes the truth does not just expose other people. Sometimes it exposes you too.

Because I paid it anyway.

Not because she deserved it. Not because I knew her. Not because I agreed with her. Not because she had passed some ideological purity test at the register.

I paid it because that is what community actually is.

Not the version we perform on social media. Not the version we hashtag after a tragedy. Not the version that lets us love people in theory and ignore them in the checkout line.

Community is what happens in the Safeway when somebody’s pocket has betrayed them, the rice costs too much, and you are standing close enough to do something.

Community is loving people through the very consequences of the choices they made that you warned them about.

That is the trouble with following Jesus in public. Sometimes the neighbor in front of you is not your ally. Sometimes they are not your demographic. Sometimes they might even be committed to the politics that helped create the crisis they are standing in.

But Jesus did not tell us to love our neighbor only after they passed a political education course.

So I paid the $5.19.

Sometimes God just stands there with the commercially available Ethiopian coffee blend and a raised eyebrow, waiting to see what you will do.

I got back in my car and opened my phone.

The President of the United States had his face included in a new American passport design. The document representing every citizen. Two hundred and fifty years of complicated, unfinished, contested American identity. Turned into a branding opportunity. For a man.

His signature was being placed on future U.S. paper currency.

The White House was being pulled into a $400 million ballroom controversy while people in actual neighborhoods were searching their pockets for grocery money.

James Comey was being prosecuted over a picture of seashells arranged in the sand.

Gas prices were climbing because war has consequences, even when the people selling the war would rather talk about strength than cost.

Food prices were climbing like they had personal ambitions, and ordinary people were being told to absorb the impact.

I looked at my phone.

I looked back at the Safeway.

I thought about $5.19 and aspirational rice and a pocket that told on itself.

Then I started writing.

Cue Montell Jordan.

This is how we do it.

This Is How We Got Here

Let me set the scene more plainly.

It is 2026, and America is not merely having a policy disagreement. We are having a spiritual crisis that keeps dressing itself up as politics.

A passport is supposed to represent the people. Not a personality. Not a brand. Not a campaign souvenir. Not one man’s hunger to be seen in places where the country itself should be visible.

Currency is supposed to carry the weight of public trust. It should not become another stage for personal branding.

The White House is supposed to be the people’s house. Flawed, contested, complicated, yes. But still ours. Not a $400 million palace renovation project, Welfare Project 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, while working people are being told to tighten their belts until their belts are basically theological concepts.

And a former FBI director being dragged through a legal process over seashells in the sand should make every person who claims to care about free speech pause long enough to be honest.

Seashells.

In sand.

On a beach.

As in the place where seashells have traditionally minded their business.

We are several exits past normal, and too many people are still sitting in the passenger seat saying, “Maybe the driver knows where we are going.”

Beloved, the driver does not know where we are going.

The driver is trying to put his face on the map.

And while all of that is happening at the top, down here on the ground a woman in Chico is trying to buy $5.19 worth of rice with a pocket that has already entered its wilderness season.

That is the part we cannot miss.

The spectacle is never separate from the suffering.

The ego at the top always becomes the burden at the bottom.

Huey Freeman, in the back of my head, is taking notes and shaking his head slowly.

When leaders choose vanity over stability, regular people pay for it. They pay for it at the pump. They pay for it in the grocery aisle. They pay for it in the rent. They pay for it in the delayed prescription, the postponed dental visit, the school fundraiser, the second job, the credit card minimum, the text message that says, “Can you help me until Friday?”

Policy does not stay in Washington.

Policy walks into Safeway.

Policy stands at the self checkout.

Policy puts its hand in a pocket and finds a hole.

The Pocket Was Not The Problem

That is what I kept coming back to.

The pocket was not the problem.

The pocket was evidence.

The bag of rice was not the whole story.

The bag of rice was testimony.

That woman’s embarrassment was not personal failure. It was public policy made intimate. It was the economy showing up in somebody’s body. It was the consequence of a country that keeps telling working people to blame somebody poorer, darker, newer, stranger, or more vulnerable than themselves while the cost of ordinary life climbs past dignity.

This is how bad politics survives.

It convinces hurting people to misname their pain.

It teaches a woman at the register to blame the pocket.

It teaches a worker to blame the immigrant.

It teaches a parent to blame the teacher.

It teaches a congregation to blame the stranger.

It teaches the poor to blame the poorer.

It teaches the country to call cruelty “common sense” and compassion “weakness.”

And then, after it has trained everybody to look sideways, it quietly lifts the cost of living, strips the safety net, threatens the press, bullies the courts, rewards the donors, hollows out the agencies, and calls itself freedom.

No.

That is not freedom.

That is organized neglect with a flag pin.

And because I am a pastor, I have to say this clearly.

A nation can have crosses on every campaign sign and still crucify the vulnerable in its budget.

A nation can quote Scripture and still fail the stranger.

A nation can sing God Bless America and still design systems that make God’s children beg for what should have been protected.

So no, the pocket was not the problem.

The hole was just honest enough to show us what the politics had already done.

Say The Thing

I know how this goes.

Somebody will say I am being dramatic. Somebody will say this is all just politics. Somebody will say the language is too strong, the tone is too sharp, the critique is too Black, too progressive, too pastoral, too much.

But some seasons do not require less truth. They require cleaner truth.

So here is the cleaner truth.

When the presidency becomes a personal brand, democracy is in danger.

When government documents begin to carry one leader’s image as a symbol of national identity, democracy is in danger.

When currency becomes a stage for political self celebration, democracy is in danger.

When the people’s house is treated like a monument to one man’s appetite while people struggle to buy food, democracy is in danger.

When political opponents, critics, and officials are targeted in ways designed to punish dissent rather than serve justice, democracy is in danger.

When food, fuel, housing, and healthcare become harder to afford and the answer from leadership is more scapegoating, democracy is not merely in danger.

It is being discipled into submission.

Say that in your church. Say it at your dinner table. Say it to the person who keeps telling you to calm down.

What we are watching is not conservatism in any meaningful sense. It is fealty. Personal, unconditional, backbone optional fealty to one man. It is almost like watching a failed business venture from New Jersey that once sold steaks. Just loudly bullying its way toward bankruptcy while calling it strength. A political party that cannot say no to vanity will not say yes to justice. A political party that tells you the Constitution matters only when it serves their desired outcome is not protecting the Constitution. It is using the Constitution like a prop in a church play where nobody learned their lines.

This is not left versus right in the old sense.

This is democracy versus domination.

This is public service versus private worship.

This is a republic versus a personality cult with better lighting.

Call it what it is.

Our fear of sounding extreme has become one of the ways extremism protects itself. It keeps doing extreme things while demanding moderate descriptions. It takes the passport, the currency, the courts, the agencies, the press, the schools, the libraries, the voting rules, and then looks at us and says, “Why are you being so dramatic?”

We are not being dramatic.

We are being late.

What I Am Really Asking

I am writing this as a Black man from Cincinnati, Ohio, living in Chico, California, which is not exactly the center of the political universe.

I pastor a small church in the Southside of Oroville.

I run a nonprofit serving people the political conversation often treats as afterthoughts.

I work with families who do not need another theory of suffering. They need the rent paid, the lights kept on, the appointment scheduled, the ride arranged, the paperwork explained, the phone call returned, the pantry stocked, the fear lowered, and the future made slightly less heavy.

I drive through this region and I see the distance between what is being promised in Washington and what is happening on the ground. Real distance. Not talking point distance. The kind you can measure in closed clinics, underfunded schools, waiting lists, overdoses, evictions, broken cars, empty refrigerators, and the particular exhaustion on the faces of people who have been working hard their whole lives and still cannot get ahead.

I am writing this as a father raising a son named RJ in a country that is actively debating whether he belongs in it fully. Whether his future is as American as anyone else’s. That is not abstract to me. That is Tuesday morning.

I am writing this as a pastor watching people invoke God’s name while stripping mercy from public life.

I am writing this as a Christian who still believes Jesus was serious when Jesus said good news belongs to the poor, release belongs to the captive, sight belongs to the blind, and freedom belongs to the oppressed.

Howard Thurman reminded us that Jesus stood with the disinherited, with the people whose backs were against the wall. Thurman was not writing theology for the comfortable. He was writing survival literature for people trying to stay human under systems designed to make them forget their own dignity.

That is the Christianity I recognize.

Not the one that baptizes cruelty and calls it order. Not the one that confuses whiteness with holiness. Not the one that thinks the kingdom of God is a gated community with a flagpole. Not the one that can weep over a monument and shrug at a hungry child.

The Jesus I follow does not ask us to choose between compassion and justice. Jesus shows us that compassion without justice becomes charity that never asks why the wound is there. And justice without compassion becomes ideology with no tenderness.

We need both.

That is why I paid for the rice.

And that is why I am asking you to vote.

Vote Like You Remember

The rice was $5.19.

That is not the whole story, but it is enough of the story to tell the truth.

The woman knew before she got to the register.

The pocket had a hole before she reached inside it.

The rice was too small for the price.

The embarrassment was too large for the moment.

And the country that helped create that scene would rather teach her to blame herself than ask who benefits from her suffering.

That gap is not an accident. It is a policy outcome. It was produced by specific choices made by specific people who were put in office by specific votes.

Which means it can be corrected by specific votes.

That is what we are up against. Not just candidates. Not just parties. Not just policies. We are up against a machine that produces pain and then sells people enemies to aim it at.

So in 2026, we vote like people who remember.

Every seat. Every level. School board. City council. County supervisor. State legislature. Congress. Senate. All of it.

We are not electing saviors. We are removing arsonists and then inspecting the contractors.

Not blind loyalty. Not political fandom. Give Democrats the power to stop the bleeding, then hold them accountable for whether they actually heal the wound. That is the strategy. And if they get the power and waste it, we will hold them to that too.

Frederick Douglass said power concedes nothing without a demand. Not a suggestion. Not a strongly worded letter to a representative who will not read it. A demand. With numbers behind it. With bodies at the polls.

Go register somebody this week. Not someday. This week.

Make Election Day the kind of thing that gets in the group chat three weeks early. Make voting the thing your crew does together, with food after, with rides arranged, with childcare covered, with the full weight of the understanding that this is not decorative. Democracy is not a sticker. It is not a speech. It is a mechanism, and if we do not use it, the people trying to take it from us will thank us for making their job easier.

Ask who is running for school board like it matters, because it does. Ask who controls the county budget like it matters, because it does. Ask who appoints the boards, who funds the clinics, who protects the libraries, who draws the maps, who answers the phone, who disappears after election night.

And the next time somebody tells you politics is boring, or your vote does not count, or both sides are the same, remember the Safeway.

Remember $5.19.

Remember the hole that told on itself.

Remember the woman who knew before she got to the register.

Remember the rice that would not feed three hungry people but still cost more than she had.

Remember that the pocket was not the problem.

Remember who wants you blaming the pocket.

Then vote like you remember.

This is how we do it.

It feels to write about myself as a writer, but here it goes; Robert A. Morton Sr. is a pastor, public theologian, and founding executive director of The Black Resiliency Project in Butte County, California. He serves as Senior Pastor of Oro Vista Baptist Church in Southside Oroville, Regional Manager for the Building Bridges Initiative, and Program Director for Breaking Barriers 2 under United Way of Northern California. He holds an M.Div. from Emory University, writes The Christian Daily on Beehiiv, and publishes long-form essays here on Substack. He prefer a traditional black and white mocha with contemporary oatmilk (until they come up with a smoother non-milky milk) and his preference is always Ethiopian beans. He has opinions about most things and regrets about very few of them.

If this piece landed for you, forward it to someone who has given up on voting. That is the only ask.

The once delicate fibers have now, as a result of time, grown frayed.

Edges, once impeccably woven with precision, intention, awareness, and craft, have begun to untangle themselves. They are no longer attached, at least not in the same way, to the artist’s original intention. They have been moved, used, worn, washed, stretched, pressed, folded, and used again. So now, the thing no longer has the same umph it once had.

I am talking about a shirt.

I am talking about a marriage.

I am talking about a soul.

The colored fabric, the one with detailed stitching, is no longer as vibrant as it used to be. The color variations that once made it attractive, the ones that caught the eye of so many, are now muted. Having lost its luster, it sits in the used section, collecting dust and whatever else happens when time moves past you without asking permission.

And somewhere in all of that, the questions in you become louder.

When did my use case shift from regular to special, from special to optional, from optional to expendable, and from expendable to “you can have it”?

It is a little past four in the morning on this Sunday, and I am sitting in a space in my life where I am realizing just how fragile things become when left unattended.

Some of this reflection comes from navigating conflict. Some of it comes from trying to understand my own fragility. Some of it comes from realizing that the shirt, the marriage, and the soul all have something in common. None of them can keep being handled carelessly and still be expected to hold their shape.

We have a knack for getting things, people, experiences, and even miracles, then using them up until we no longer see them as essential, necessary, or intricate to our lives. We treat the sacred like it is durable enough to survive our neglect. We assume love can keep loving without care. We assume covenant can keep covenanting without tenderness. We assume what God gave us will just stay shiny because God gave it.

But time does not just pass.

Time reveals.

Like really.

It reveals whether we have been tending or taking. It reveals whether we have been cherishing or consuming. It reveals whether we know the difference between something being available and something being valued.

It is that friendship that was once full of intrigue, shared joys, tears, laughter, and the kind of connection no quick trip or one-time encounter could imagine. Those moments where life taught lessons that have yet to be recorded in books still in hopeful progress, those memories that created something in you and them, begin to decay.

Then time comes.

More experiences happen, and they seem to do what we did in the ‘90s with cassette tapes. They record over those memories with new ones because we lack capacity, time, or an honest understanding of either.

Somewhere between bills, babies, burnout, church meetings, text messages we forgot to answer, old wounds we never named, and sleep we keep pretending we can catch up on, something sacred gets recorded over.

Not because it did not matter.

Because we stopped acting like it did.

As a Black man managing through adulthood, with a trauma-centered awareness of my own story, I am becoming aware of how sharp life has made me.

I am sharp. Astute. Educated. Erudite. A man with culture, compassion, and an energy for life, wrapped inside a cantankerous little boy, wide-eyed with a head full of zeal, unaware and limited in sightlines.

But I have also learned that sharpness can be complicated.

Being sharp in intellect has too often made me sharp in how I cut. Sharp in how I deflect tenderness. Sharp in how I protect myself from danger, whether that danger is real, perceived, remembered, imagined, inherited, or just suspiciously dressed like somebody who hurt me before.

And let us be honest, some of us have trauma with a security system. A bad one at that. A knockoff Ring system with antiquated tech but the same price. A leaf blows wrong and the whole house goes on lockdown.

Admittedly, I believed up until now that sharpness had helped me survive.

But survival tools can become relationship weapons when we do not let God and love retrain our hands.

All I knew was church.

Church became my elixir, the fixer of the week’s struggles, a momentary esoteric high away from the drug, violence, and failure-laced experience of my childhood and teenage years.

Sunday morning was full of adventure for me.

This was Cincinnati. Not the postcard Cincinnati, but the Cincinnati that raised me, pressed me, confused me, and still somehow gave me enough rhythm to survive.

After getting dressed in whatever wrinkled and decently clean attire I could find, I would begin figuring out my path to the church.

If the bus was my path, then I needed to connect with Mom to get bus fare, or I had to go around the house to the spots where Mom often dropped change. I knew the spots. The last drawer in the kitchen. Mom’s coats, especially the work coats. Especially that jean one with the white ruffled neckline.

That coat smelled like Rally’s and weed. The latest strain, I could not even tell you. Add in those incense-man varieties of cherry vanilla scent, and baby, that coat had a full personality. That coat had trauma, testimony, and two loose Newport filters in the pocket.

My mother was doing what many Black mothers have had to do. Survive the day with whatever strength, smoke, scent, shift, and sacrifice she had left. That coat was evidence she had been somewhere trying to make something stretch.

I would dig in and likely find the right amount of quarters, nickels, and dimes to get me from here, then lean on grace, charm, or the welfare of a kind bus driver for a transfer.

Well before the internet became a household commodity, I would grab a bus schedule and negotiate between the time on the house clocks, which likely had the misfortune of having a battery or two run out, or having batteries taken out by my siblings and me to use in a TV remote or toy.

And when we placed the batteries back in, we never really updated the clock. We just let that thing lie with confidence.

So I would run to the kitchen and check the only authoritative clock in the house, the oven clock.

If the oven clock said it, that settled it.

That oven clock was the only adult in the house consistently telling the truth.

I would hope the next bus could get me from Burnet and Erkenbrecher to downtown’s Government Square in enough time to catch Route 11 or 69, plan B. Unless the Route 51 was running, then I could cross town to catch the 11 or 69 if a downtown connection had me getting to the church past the 10:45 start time. But that bus took forever and a day, like it had a personal grudge against my destiny, and I needed that Sunday drug more than the route planners did, apparently.

I did not want to miss the choir march in.

So I managed, even from a young, tender, almost too tender of an age to admit, to get to the church house by myself. I would not dare let my sons navigate a city bus the way I did, but they also live in rural Northern California, with the B-Line having a much more privileged experience than the characters and reverberations I experienced on SORTA Metro in Cincy.

Back to me though.

Sometimes all of those smells were remixing in my clothes, because I believed if I could just get there, something could happen. I can say now, emphatically, as a pastor, father, and believer, that I had no clue whether Jesus was in fact real. But things did happen when the name of Jesus was mentioned.

Things I hoped to see happen in my life.

So the image of our church, a red brick and mortar building at the end of short Ravenna Street, held hope. In the words of Dr. Cornel West, hope was on a tightrope.

I hoped against all lived reality that God would deliver me from some things.

And I did not think, and you cannot blame me for this, that God would not just deliver me from things, but that God would deliver me to something.

I did not know what the to was.

I still do not always know.

But deliverance alone was what got me to board the bus. The expectation of something great. The excitement. The pure bliss that would cross my face after I got off the Route 11 and began the short walk from the bus stop to the front doors.

Since I was running late, I knew I had to avoid going through the bottom door, because that meant seeing the Superintendent of Church School. And I was not interested in getting caught in a conversation that sounded like, “Young man, what time does Sunday School start?”

I knew what time it started. That was the problem.

Nor was I interested in playing catch up with the few folks I called friends. The aim for me was to erase the ugliness of the week. The experience of living in a community that was riddled with crime, but still somehow felt safe to me. The sting of low expectations, generational violence, and poverty stuck to me like a moth to a flame.

One I could not extinguish on my own.

Therefore, I needed my weekly fix.

Because joy and peace were found there.

I could not always find them at home.

Once I reached those front glass doors and opened them, I could smell relief in the atmosphere.

Peppermint wafted through the air, hiding the truth that some of us, like me, had left home without brushing our teeth and hoped against hope that those Starlights would keep our stank breath out of sight.

The church had entire ministries built on peppermint and plausible deniability.

Add in the mixture of cheap and expensive colognes and perfumes, and the smell was almost, dare I say, intoxicating. Black church cologne clouds had the power to make you confess sins you had not committed yet.

From the hallway, I could hear the organ warming up, the drummer testing the pocket, somebody humming before they were supposed to be singing, and the sanctuary beginning to gather itself like it knew hope was about to walk in wearing choir robes.

Just a few short stairs away from my goal, I would see the choir members putting on their robes, getting ready to process into the sanctuary.

It was almost time.

The choir marching in was the start of worship. It was the chance of fresh hope. Aspirations of joy were in each individual’s weary throat as they marched up that aisle.

Their faces are forever etched in my brain.

As an eager child filled with hope, their presence moving into the choir stand gave hope a face.

Not hope as an idea.

Not hope as a sermon point.

Not hope as a word we say when we do not know what else to say.

Hope with breath in it.

Hope with robes on.

Hope with tired feet still willing to march.

Hope with alto, soprano, tenor, and bass all trying to find the same key while life had been playing everybody in different ones all week.

Now, while some had no clue of the barriers I had to surmount to make it there, there were a few who did. My godmother. My godfather. Rodney. Quincy. But each of them had their own motivations and their own things pushing them toward that place too.

I think of this because now, as a pastor, as a leader of a people in a dispossessed neighborhood in Northern California, I realize how often I have forgotten that feeling because I am no longer sitting in that experience.

That deep sense of hunger, what Howard Thurman helps us understand as the inward cry of a person pressed by life and still reaching for God, made church consequential for me. Church was a place where miracles could happen, but it did not automatically mean God was fully included in the equation.

That is, in fact, a different process, timing, and experience altogether.

Yet here I sit now.

Aware that God has provided deliverance in so many ways.

I am married to Rachel. A queen. Not in the social media caption kind of way, but in the lived, weathered, deeply rooted kind of way. A woman of impeccable character, kindness, and virtue. Those things are embedded in her. They are not decorations. They are not accessories. They are not performative. They are woven in.

Her eyes do not reveal her struggles to the common neighbor.

But I know her story.

And the joy I see in her is the real thing.

I believe God gave her to me so I could discover the difference between happiness and joy. Happiness visits. Joy has a forwarding address and still finds you when life changes locations.

Her “good morning” most days seems excited to see me, like she is wishing the best over me before the day has had a chance to act foolish. That kind of greeting can mess around and become liturgy if you are paying attention.

And then there is her willingness to flex her culinary muscles to make sure I get a taste of Cincinnati. That is her California flex. She will be standing in a Northern California kitchen trying to bring Ohio back through seasoning, memory, and love. And listen, if you have ever been Black, Midwestern, and homesick, you know that food is not food. Food is a witness.

But after a season or two, and in our case three, I realize that I can forget that God delivered me from what I was in and delivered me to her.

RJ watching me love his mother is a mirror I cannot preach my way around.

That is the part that has been bothering me in the quiet.

Because the modern task for me is no longer having to navigate travel on a bus or figure out how to get to where I want to be. The modern task is learning how to make sure I do not begin to relegate what God has given me to the expendable, “you can have it” section of my life.

It is one thing to praise God for deliverance from poverty, chaos, trauma, neglect, violence, uncertainty, and a childhood where bus fare felt like a theological debate.

It is another thing to honor what God delivered you to.

Because sometimes the blessing does not leave because the devil stole it.

Sometimes the blessing starts fraying because we wore it, used it, leaned on it, assumed it, and stopped tending to it.

Sometimes the fabric loses its luster because we kept washing it in old habits.

Sometimes the thing God gave us starts looking dull because we have been handling it with hands that are still trained by scarcity.

As a Black man thick with realities and experiences, which at times feel suffocating, like catching a ride to school with my older cousin who chain-smoked marijuana, hotboxing me into his addiction and making me wonder why I did not just ask for bus fare, life is complex.

And while I sincerely do not want for nothing, I do not want to take for granted what God delivered me from.

But more than that, I do not want to mishandle what God delivered me to.

I do not want to become so fluent in survival that I become careless with sanctuary.

I do not want to become so used to fighting that I forget how to hold.

I do not want to become so sharp that I cut the very fabric I am praying will cover me.

I do not want to become so good at leaving Egypt that I do not know how to live in promise.

I do not want Rachel, my calling, my children, my peace, or my own soul to ever feel like I moved them from essential to optional, from optional to expendable, from expendable to an easy “you can have it.”

Because deliverance is not complete just because you got out.

Deliverance asks what you will do once you arrive.

And maybe that is the word for me, and maybe for somebody else too.

Remember what has become common.

Return to what has been left unattended.

Embrace what you have lost interest in simply because it stayed long enough to become familiar.

Do not just shout about what God brought you from.

Look around with clear eyes and a tender heart at what God brought you to.

Then tend to it.

Before the colors mute.

Before the stitching loosens.

Before the sacred thing you prayed for ends up sitting in the used section, collecting dust, while you wonder when it stopped feeling like a miracle.

Every clinic visit starts the same way, and every single time it catches me off guard.

Not in some dramatic way. Not like I am in there clutching my chest and staring into the middle distance like a Tyler Perry close-up. Nothing like that. I mean it catches me in that quiet, regular-life kind of way. The kind that makes you remember your body is not a machine. It is a witness.

And before I go any further, let me say what needs to be said.

If these people really cared about public health, they would stop weighing folks before taking their blood pressure.

Like, I dont care what medicine I took, that act alone is about to raise it.

why?

That scale got a mean spirit on it.

There is no reason for me to be trying to calculate my mortality before 9:30 in the morning.

And somewhere along the way they switched from pounds to kilograms, like metric shame was gon be more respectful.

Oh, so now I am even more distressed and trying to do conversion math, for a math conversion that I know I am going to need my phone for.

Darn it, Public Education failed me again.

Beautiful. Excellent. Love that for us.

But the whole routine does something to me. The cuff. The numbers. The quiet, efficient measuring of whether you are still holding together. It all reminds me how thin the line really is between normal and not.

Between making plans and becoming a prayer request. Between an ordinary Tuesday and a phone call that changes everything.

These days, my doctor visits feel like yearly maintenance. I am not going in for some crisis. I am not often bracing for bad news. Because, I am not often fighting something acute.

And I say that with gratitude, because that is grace, whether I act like it or not.

For a long time, that was not my story.

At my heaviest, I was over five hundred pounds. Not quite television-worthy, but close enough that the producers could have at least called and asked about my availability. And now, being on this side of that chapter, I think about how close things really were. How easily this story could have ended different. How a Black man in his thirties, already carrying the usual weight this country puts on Black men, was out here carrying several hundred extra pounds too, and everybody was just supposed to call that living. Carrying the weight of three people in a body barely made for one.

I made it through that season.

Let me say that again, because sometimes survival gets talked about too casually.

I made it through that season!

That is not a footnote. That is the paragraph.

So now I sit in the clinic and let that blood pressure cuff squeeze the life out of my arm like it has a personal issue with me, and I still do not understand how it works. I do not know how choking my bicep or wrists tells you what is happening with my soul. I do not know why the machine always feels like it is having second thoughts before it decides whether I get to live respectable for another year. Like, it squeezes the life and then only releases, a little at a time, hold, then a little more…

There are moments I am convinced it is not medical technology at all, just a stress ritual dressed up in healthcare.

And let us tell the truth. The moment they put that cuff on me, something in me tightens too. Not quite panic. Just enough anxiety to make me wonder whether the number is about my health or about the fact that I am being evaluated like a used car.

Hmmm…Is this a Doctors office or Carvana??

More than once I have wondered whether the act of being measured is what throws the measurement off in the first place.

Like, maybe I was peaceful until y’all started asking questions.

Still, when that cuff loosens and the numbers appear, I feel something underneath the routine. Something heavier than relief. Gratitude, yes, but the kind that has a little grief mixed in with it. Because this ordinary appointment, this yearly box-check, is mercy. And not the cheap kind either. The kind you only really understand when you know what it is to have lived close to the edge and kept going anyway.

I sit with that for a second every time.

Because what I really want to talk about is faithfulness. Not the Instagram quote version. Not the church anniversary program version. I mean the kind that costs you something. The kind that leaves a mark. The kind that walks back into rooms that already showed you the door.

And it makes sense to start with the body, because that is where faithfulness actually lives. Not in a mission statement. Not in a sermon. Not in a strategic plan with too many bullet points and not enough heart.

Faithfulness lives in a body that keeps showing up.

In lungs that keep breathing.

In knees that keep bending.

In hands that keep working when the work has stopped making emotional refunds.

I have stayed in rooms I should have left.

I have stayed in institutions I had every reason to walk away from.

And I have stayed in my own life, which may be the hardest and holiest kind of staying there is.

The first piece was about the weight.

This one is about what it costs to keep carrying it anyway.

Because that is the part I did not say out loud last time. I named the pressure. I talked about the heaviness. I said something about what we inherit and what it does to us. But I did not quite touch the thing sitting under all of it.

The confession is this.

Some days, I do not know why I am still doing any of this.

Not in a lose the faith kinda way. Not in a burn it all down, though let me not lie, some islands look very anointed in this season. I mean in the regular, tired, unsexy way that a whole lot of leaders probably feel but will never say, because everybody needs the leader to stay inspired so the rest of the room can keep pretending this is sustainable.

But I am trying to write less for the people who need me to perform wellness.

And more for the folks barely holding it together.

So when I say institutions fail, I am not saying they are imperfect.

Please. I knew they were imperfect. Imperfect is entry level. Imperfect is the cover charge. If you work in church, nonprofits, public systems, or anything involving humans, imperfection comes free with the used furniture on Marketplace now, used to be craigslist.

I am talking about something deeper than imperfection.

I am talking about the sting of pouring yourself into something, praying over it, building it, carrying it, losing sleep over it, and then realizing that the thing you gave yourself to is more committed to preserving itself than serving the people it claims to love.

I mean the board that protects the institution instead of the community.

The denomination that would rather keep things together than tell the truth.

The government program that knows how to count outputs but cannot recognize a changed life if transformation sat directly in its lap and introduced itself.

The coalition that says equity every third sentence but somehow all the real power still ends up sitting in the same kind of hands.

Or that slow realization that some systems are not broken. They are doing exactly what they were built to do. And we are the fools, prophets, optimists, and community workers standing there asking a machine to grow a conscience.

And sometimes the failure is not even about paperwork or politics. Sometimes it is about a phone screen and a man’s last breath.

I keep thinking about my frame of mind as I was watching Philando die in real time. Diamond Reynolds, his partner, steady behind that camera, livestreaming his last moments not out of cruelty but out of necessity, because this country had already taught us that Black pain without documentation will get dismissed. I remember the particular sickness of watching something that real and that wrong through a phone screen and not knowing what to do with my hands afterward.

some tremblin’, some tinglin’ and now I know I could not say it was a form of arthirtis or just the shakes.

That is what I mean by institutions failing. Not just the church. Not just the nonprofit. The whole setup. The whole crooked architecture that keeps claiming it is here to protect people and somehow keeps finding reasons not to.

That realization does not hit all at once either. It settles on you slowly. Like humidity. Like a bee coming by to see if you are new plant variety. Like debt. Like family secrets. One day you realize you have been carrying disappointment so long it has begun to introduce itself as wisdom. Its been normalized in and through you.

I have been a pastor long enough to love the church and grieve the church at the same time.

I have sat in denominational meetings where the most honest conversation happened in the parking lot, because folks get real once the microphones are off and the minutes are no longer being recorded for saints and liars.

I have watched institutions say the name of Jesus and then make decisions Jesus would have flipped tables over.

I have seen more energy go into protecting legacy than protecting people. More concern for presentation than pain. More passion for order than justice for those no longer being heard, served, supported or cared for.

I have left meetings and sat in my car for a few minutes before driving home, not because I was broken, but because I needed the space between that room and my home to remember who I actually was, so I didn’t go into my house, an entirely different person.

And I stayed.

Not because I was blind. Not because I was naive. Not because I did not know what I was seeing. I stayed because leaving felt too much like handing the keys over to the same people who had already decided the building mattered more than the bodies inside it.

That is not a pretty reason to stay. It is not neat. It will not fit well on a conference flyer. Wont get me paid, and definitely wont get me invited to be on boards, or to be a conference preacher. But it is the truth.

And lately, truth has been worth more to me than polish.

Because here is what nobody tells you. Staying faithful to people inside institutions that keep failing them is not just emotionally exhausting. It is spiritually disorienting. It will make you ask questions you cannot fix with one sermon and a strong A-100 Hammond with a solid 122 Leslie.

At what point does loyalty become complicity?

At what point does staying become enabling?

At what point are you holding the structure together so well that people can no longer tell the structure is what is hurting them?

Those are not cute questions. Those are the kind you sit with alone at two in the morning and do not post about.

And I do not have a clean answer for them. I just have scars, prayers, and a habit of showing up.

And I am not just talking about the church.

I mean democracy too. I mean local government. I mean the nonprofit world, which I love enough to be disappointed in on a regular basis. I mean funding structures that make poor communities audition their trauma in front of panels. I mean systems that ask Black leaders to translate suffering into grant language, strip all the blood and breath out of it, make it measurable, make it marketable, make it strategic, then wait twelve to eighteen business months while somebody decides whether your people’s emergency sounds compelling enough for a partial award.

I mean all of it.

And here is the harder confession.

Sometimes I get tired of being faithful to things that are not faithful back. Not faithful to me. Not faithful to my people. Not faithful to the very mission they put on the website in tasteful fonts.

That is not cynicism. I know what cynicism looks like. I have watched it move into people who used to believe. It quits caring and starts calling that clarity. It gets sharp and efficient and hollow. Rolls its eyes so much it forgets how to cry.

That is not where I am.

What I am talking about is grief.

The grief of still believing enough to show up. The grief of still caring when caring has become expensive. The grief of being committed and disappointed at the same time.

The grief of faithfulness is real. And we do not honor it much because exhausted people make institutions nervous. Tired truth-tellers are bad for branding.

There is a man in Scripture I keep coming back to, and it is not one of the glamorous saints. Not the sea-splitters. Not the giant-killers. I keep coming back to Jeremiah.

Now Jeremiah was outside his whole life. That man had the worst ministry assignment in the Bible besides maybe Jesus. He preached to folks who did not want to listen. He loved a city committed to its own destruction. He kept telling the truth while the institution around him kept choosing collapse with confidence.

And in Jeremiah 20, he basically tells God, this was a setup.

That is my paraphrase, but not by much.

He says the word is like fire shut up in his bones, and he is tired, but he cannot keep it in. He cannot stop, even when it costs him everything. Even when the city, the temple, the whole religious and political order, is coming apart right in front of his face.

Jeremiah did not stay because the institution deserved him. He stayed because the call was deeper than the institution. Because the people inside the broken thing still needed a word. Because somewhere underneath the grief, the frustration, the exhaustion, and the very real desire to quit, there was still something alive in him that would not let him shut up and sit down.

I know that feeling. Too well.

So why do I stay?

Not because the church always gets it right. Not because democracy is functioning beautifully. Not because the nonprofit sector suddenly got its act together. Not because I trust systems that have repeatedly shown me where their loyalties lie.

I stay because the people are real.

The grandmother in the third pew who has survived hell with a hat on and still comes in giving God praise. The young brother trying to find his footing in a world designed to misread him before he opens his mouth. The family navigating systems that keep changing the rules midgame and then blaming them for not winning. The staff member still trying to do good work inside a structure that keeps confusing paperwork with purpose.

These are not concepts to me. These are not data points. These are not target populations. These are people. With names and stories and little laughs and private fears and bills due and medicine to pick up and children to raise and tears they do not always show in public.

As long as they are in the room, I have a reason to keep walking back into it too.

That is not heroic. It will not make the highlight reel. But it is true. And true has to be enough for me these days.

So let me say this for the folks who are also staying somewhere that is draining them.

For the ones still showing up to a church that disappointed them. For the ones still building something honest inside systems that keep making the same raggedy mistakes. For the ones still out here trying, with too little support and more resistance than they deserve.

Your faithfulness is not foolishness.

But let us not lie on it either. It is not free. And anybody who acts like it is cheap has probably never had to pay for it with their body, their peace, their family time, their sleep, their hope, or their blood pressure.

You are allowed to be tired of what you still believe in.

You are allowed to grieve the distance between what an institution promised and what it actually produced.

You are allowed to tell the truth about disappointment without surrendering your calling.

And hear me clearly.

Staying is not the same thing as settling. Sometimes staying is resistance. Sometimes staying is refusal. Sometimes staying is the last holy act left when everybody else has either sold out, burned out, or learned how to confuse comfort with peace.

I do not know what these institutions will look like in ten years. I do not know if the structures will hold or if the systems will shift or if what we are building is going to survive what is coming at it.

Honestly, some days I do not even know if I am doing this right.

But I do know this.

Tomorrow morning I am going to get up, make my coffee, take a breath that probably will not be deep enough, and go back into the work. Same as today. Same as yesterday.

Not because it is easy. Not because the institutions deserve that kind of showing up. Because the people do.

And because whatever is in me, whatever holy unrest keeps a person showing up when common sense said leave three exits ago, I still have not figured out how to turn it off. And I am not sure I want to.

Maybe that is faithfulness.

Not certainty. Not optimism dressed up in Scripture. Not pretending you are fine when you are not.

Just this.

Not being able to stop caring about the people in the room.

Maybe that is the number that actually matters. Not what the cuff reads. Not what the committee decides. Not what the institution produces on paper. Just whether you are still in it. Still present. Still caring.

And being willing to keep walking back in.

That is enough reason to stay.

Robert A. Morton Sr. is a pastor, writer, and community leader based in Oroville, California. He writes about faith, justice, culture, and community through the lens of the Black Prophetic Tradition.

This is the second piece in an ongoing series. If you missed the first one, The Weight of It All, start there.

If this piece landed for you, share it with someone who needs it. And if you are not subscribed yet, now is a good time.

As a formerly morbidly obese dude and still a big dude, I know a little something about weight. Holding it, using it and it molding you both physically and mentally.
It takes time, but weight by virtue of its makeup, weighs you down.

I’ve learned that not all of negative effects are felt immediately, some seasons do not break you all at once. They sit on you.

They press down slowly, quietly, almost politely at first.

A headline here.

A hard conversation there.

Another bill.

Another death.

Another incident.

Another demand.

Another reminder that the world can ask more of you than it ever plans to give back. Then one day you realize you are not just tired.

You are carrying something. Maybe many things. likely too many. Maybe more than enough that if stress came with a W-2, you could claim it as a dependent.

Legit

That is what this moment feels like to me.

The Weight of It All is the title I am sticking with because it gets closer to the feeling than anything else I have. I am writing this from about as vulnerable a place as I know how to reach without turning vulnerability into a performance. These days, everybody has a platform, a posture, and an angle. Everybody is branding their breakdown. I am trying to do something less impressive and more honest.

My writing lately has been doing less persuading and more unloading. Less trying to prove a point, more trying to tell the truth before it settles too deep in me. Sometimes writing is the only way I know to let pressure out before it starts rearranging something inside.

And if I am honest, I do not know how people are staying sane right now.

I am not just talking about war abroad or disaster across the ocean. I am talking about here. At home. In our cities. In our communities. In our churches. In our minds. There is something contagious about the spirit of this age. The agitation of it. The cruelty of it. The constant churn. It can take an ordinary Tuesday morning and ruin it before you finish your first cup of coffee.

From where I stand, as a Black man, rooted in faith, shaped by culture, trying to stay awake without drowning in everything I see, it all feels heavy right now.

The closest image I have is falling into a pool fully clothed.

Everything that felt light a moment ago suddenly becomes work. The shirt sticks. The pants drag. Fabric pulls at your body in places you were not even thinking about. What looked good on the outside becomes hard to move in. That is what this season feels like. Like life got soaked, and now everything weighs more than it should.

Suffocating in a particular kind of way. Like walking into cigarette smoke somebody else made, and now somehow it is in your lungs. You did not light anything. You did not ask for any of this. But here you are, breathing it in, looking for an exit that does not seem to be there.

And the hardest part is that this pressure is not new.

I have been Black in America my whole life. So was my father. So was his mother. So were the generations before them, people who carried things I will never fully be able to measure. What I inherited from them was not only beauty. Not only the music, the faith, the food, and that sacred ability to make something out of very little. I also inherited the posture. The skill of looking composed while absorbing what should have broken you.

I think about my grandmother. The way she could walk into any room, any situation, any grief, and just handle it. Quietly. Completely. We called it strength. We should have also called it a cost.

Black people have long been forced to master the art of carrying extraordinary pressure with ordinary facial expressions. We learned how to smile in rooms that did not deserve our joy. We learned how to read the air, shift the code, swallow the anger, pray through the pain, and still show up the next day looking intact. We got so good at survival that people started confusing it with strength, when sometimes it was just adaptation under pressure and a refusal to let the world see us fold.

Nobody tells you the whole truth about inherited strength.

They praise it. They honor it. They build slogans around it. But they do not always tell you that you can be proud of your people and still be tired of what it took for them to survive. They do not always tell you that strength passed down without room to grieve can become another kind of wound.

I feel that personally.

I am a pastor. A husband. A father. A writer. A son. A friend.

I carry people for a living.

That is not drama. That is biography. Ministry, at least the kind I know, is not simply preaching sermons. It is holding space. It is bearing witness. It is listening to heartbreak without flinching, trying to tell the truth without crushing people under it, and building hope in rooms that have every reason to give up on it. Then you go home, gather yourself if you can, and wake up to do it again.

And I believe in calling.

But calling and capacity are not the same thing.

A call can be genuine and still outrun what a person has left to give. God does not revoke the assignment because you are tired. But tired is still tired, and pretending otherwise is not faith. It is performance.

There is a version of ministry that does not make it into the highlights. A version of leadership that looks different from the inside than it does from a Sunday morning seat. A version of Black fatherhood praised for its endurance while almost nobody asks what that endurance is costing.

I mean the version where the pastor is tired too. Where the one preaching about rest is privately trying to remember what it feels like.

Everybody wants to know what you said on Sunday. Very few people ask what is happening to you on Saturday night.

A lot of us, especially Millennials, know that kind of exhaustion.

We were raised on the promise that if we worked hard enough, healed enough, stayed informed and organized, prayed enough, we could bend the world toward something better. We were told that showing up mattered. That naming injustice mattered.

So many of us showed up.

And still, we watched.

I remember watching Philando die in real time. Diamond Reynolds, his partner, steady behind that camera, livestreaming his last moments not because she wanted to but because she had to, because this country had already taught us that Black pain without documentation gets dismissed. I remember the particular sickness of watching something that real and that wrong through a phone screen and not knowing what to do with my hands afterward.

We watched Ferguson. We watched Charleston. Many of us were already weary by 2016. Then came 2020 with a pandemic, a racial reckoning, economic collapse, and collective grief piled on at once. We were trying to parent, lead, grieve, organize, survive, and remain spiritually coherent through all of it.

And now, after all of that, we are still being asked to perform optimism.

I believe in hope. Deeply. I have staked my life on it. But a lot of what passes for hope in American Christianity right now is not hope at all. It is pressure wearing a praise break. It is the expectation that you turn your suffering into a testimony before you have had time to actually feel it.

That is not theology. That is cope with church clothes on.

That is why I keep returning to Matthew 11, where Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”

I have preached that text more times than I can count and I still have not fully figured out how to receive it. Not because I doubt it. But because we use it wrong. We hand it to people the way you hand someone a pamphlet at the door. Here. Take this. Feel better. And we move on without sitting with them long enough to understand what kind of rest they actually need.

We quote that verse too cheaply.
It conditions rest on a few things:

Use the last of your energy to come to Jesus - who is willing to do that? and how?
and if you want rest, you got to Stop!

and How am I supposed to do that?

Because rest requires stopping.

And stopping is not simple when the bills keep coming, when children need care and stuff,
when your work is tied to other people’s survival,
when your nervous system has forgotten how to trust stillness.

Rest is not just the absence of motion. It is the presence of safety.

That feel’s like a privilege reserved for those who got time to rest…

And a lot of us are carrying more than we should because we do not feel safe enough to put anything down.

We are told to rest in a society that punishes vulnerability, exploits fatigue, and mistakes exhaustion for commitment. We are told to slow down by systems that would replace us before lunch.

So what do we do with all this weight?

I do not have a neat answer. What I have is honesty.

Pretending something is not heavy does not make it lighter. Denial is not discipleship. Naming what hurts is not weakness. Sometimes naming a thing is the only way to keep it from owning you.

I know what it is to feel the noise of the world pressing against my chest at two in the morning while everybody else in the house is asleep. I know what it is to walk past my son’s bedroom door, hear him breathing, and feel two things at once. Gratitude so deep it almost hurts. And the grief of knowing what kind of world he is going to inherit. Both of those things live in me at the same time. I have not figured out how to separate them, and I am not sure I am supposed to.

That is the honest texture of this life.

The people who carried history were not superhuman. Not untouched. Not made of steel. They were people who found enough grace to keep moving, enough community to keep breathing, enough language to tell the truth about what was happening to them. That last part mattered more than people realize. Naming it kept it from swallowing them.

Not because everything was fine. But because they refused to let the weight have the last word.

I do not want it to have the last word either. Not over me. Not over you. Not over our children. Not over the people who have been strong for so long they have started to forget what it feels like to be held.

Your exhaustion is not a character flaw. Your overwhelm is not proof that you are weak. Your grief is not a failure of faith. Sometimes it is just evidence that you are still paying attention. That your heart has not gone numb. That you are still in it.

That matters more than you know.

A few days ago, I got up before the house stirred. Made my coffee. Sat in the quiet for a minute that was not nearly long enough. Then I came and wrote this. No resolution in hand. No clean lesson to give to anyone. Just this.

An honest naming.

A refusal to perform anymore.

A witness.

The weight is real.

But so are we.

And by the grace of God, we are still here.

Robert A. Morton Sr. is a pastor, writer, and community leader based in Oroville, California. He writes about faith, justice, culture, and community through the lens of the Black Prophetic Tradition.

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How do you call it Christianity when Christ is barely (if that) at the center?

A few years ago, I sat in a church service where the room was full, the music was a whole vibe, and the language was all there. Jesus this. Blessing that. Victory, favor, purpose, destiny. Everybody knew when to clap. Everybody knew when to say amen. The organist hit the A-100 Leslie switch on Chorale, and I heard the whole room shift with it, the way only a Black church room can shift.

And I remember sitting there with a strange heaviness I could not explain at first.

Because for all the talk, Jesus felt oddly absent. There were invocations of his name, emotional acts of spirituality, and immaculate religious vocabulary. But something was missing from the center of it, and I kept waiting for it to show up. It did not.

Not the mercy.

Not the honesty.

Not the tenderness toward the wounded.

Not the sharpness he reserved for hypocrisy.

Not the proximity to the poor.

Not the refusal to worship power.

It was like being surrounded by Christian language and still straining to find Christ in the room.

That feeling stayed with me.

I kept turning it over in my mind, then in prayer, then in the Gospels. The more closely I looked at Jesus, the more unsettling the contrast became. Once you spend real time with him, once you pay attention to what he actually emphasized, what he praised, what he rebuked, what he loved, what he commanded, you start noticing how much of what we call Christianity can function quite comfortably without putting him at the center at all.

That is the question that has been sitting in my spirit ever since:

How can Christianity exist without centering Christ?

That is a serious question. Not rhetorical. Not a setup. It is born out of actually reading Jesus closely and then looking up from the page at what passes for Christianity in public life right now.

And the more I read the Gospels, honestly, the more I keep running into the same hard truth: a whole lot of what wears the label “Christian” feels suspiciously Christ-less.

Not prayerless, maybe. Not Bible-quoteless, maybe. Not churchless, not sermon less, not platform less, not politics-less.

But Christ-less in ethic.

Christ-less in emphasis.

Christ-less in imagination.

Christ-less in public behavior.

Christ-less in what it rewards.

Christ-less in what it excuses.

Christ-less in what it calls maturity.

Christ-less in what it calls victory.

· · ·

We Have Seen This Trick Before

Let me say something before I open the Gospels, because it matters for everything that follows.

I am not talking about the whole church in every place and every age. There have always been believers, pastors, mothers, elders, organizers, teachers, servants, and ordinary saints who really did try to live in the spirit and teaching of Jesus. They carried the gospel at great personal cost. They loved people nobody else was willing to love. They held the line when holding it was dangerous.

Thank God for them.

I come out of a tradition that survived because of them, and the critique that follows is not aimed at them.

But Black people did not arrive at suspicion of Christian culture by accident, either.

We come from a people who had to find Jesus under the rubble of white Christian hypocrisy. We had to distinguish between the Christ who liberates and the Christianity that learned how to coexist with chains. We had to hear good news while standing in the shadow of people who used the Bible to justify evil.

We know the Christianity that could quote Scripture and sell bodies.

The Christianity that could preach heaven and build hell on earth.

The Christianity that could sing about love on Sunday and defend segregation by Monday.

The Christianity that could bless empire, sanctify theft, and call oppression “God’s order.”

So when some of us raise hard questions about modern Christian culture, we are not inventing suspicion out of nowhere. We are recognizing a pattern. We have seen this trick before.

We know what it looks like when Christ is used as a cover for something that does not look like Christ.

This is one reason I trust the Black prophetic tradition on this point. If our people had accepted every version of Christianity as equally reflective of Christ, we would have lost the gospel itself. Instead, we learned to read Jesus carefully. We learned to trust the one who stood with the poor, lifted the lowly, rebuked hypocrites, challenged power, and drew near to the despised.

That Jesus is still the standard. The question now is whether the movement bearing his name is still willing to be measured by him.

Fraud Is a Strong Word. Use It Anyway.

If you are going to be part of a franchise, you have to abide by the standards of the main entity.

You cannot open a McDonald’s and decide you do not do burgers. You cannot carry the logo, wear the colors, use the name, and then tell customers the core product is optional. You cannot say, “We are our own interpretation of the brand.”

At some point, that stops being creativity and starts being fraud.

So how do you carry the name of Christ and treat Christ as secondary? How do you build a whole culture in his name and then sideline his actual words? How do you call it Christianity when Jesus’s commands are treated like nice suggestions, his priorities are treated like niche interests, and his life ethic is treated like an unrealistic burden for serious adults living in the real world?

That sounds less like discipleship and more like trademark infringement on a grand scale.

Jesus Did Not Call People to Admire Him. He Called Them to Obey.

One of the most inconvenient things about Jesus is how direct he is.

“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I tell you?”
Luke 6:46

That is not complicated. That is not buried in Greek grammar. It is plain.

Why are you calling me Lord if you do not plan to do what I said?

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.”
Matthew 7:21

Again, plain.

Jesus does not seem especially moved by branding, and a lot of modern Christianity runs on almost nothing else. Not impressed by slogans. Not impressed by the repetition of his title. Not impressed by a movement that knows how to say his name but not embody his will.

And that right there is where a lot of Christian culture gets exposed.

Because a lot of what gets called strong Christianity is really just loud Christianity. A lot of what gets called bold faith is really just public certainty. A lot of what gets called conviction is just tribal conformity with a Bible verse stapled to it.

Jesus does not ask whether people can market him well. Jesus asks whether they obey.

The Kingdom First. Not the Institution.

Jesus centered the Kingdom of God.

Not nationalism.

Not culture war dominance.

Not religious celebrity.

Not wealth accumulation.

Not institutional self-protection.

“The kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe in the good news.”
Mark 1:15 — The first public note of his ministry

“Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness.”
Matthew 6:33

That means the organizing center of Christian life is supposed to be God’s reign and God’s justice.

But much of Christian culture has drifted toward protecting the institution instead.

Protect the reputation.

Protect the power.

Protect the donor base.

Protect the image.

Meanwhile, in Matthew 23:23, Jesus rebukes religious leaders for being exact in religious detail while neglecting the weightier matters of justice, mercy, and faith.

Jesus already had a category for people who were meticulous in religion and bankrupt in what mattered most. He was not subtle about it.

Jesus Went to the Margins. Christian Culture Chases the Center.

Jesus opens his ministry in Luke 4:18–19 by saying the Spirit has anointed him to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed.

That is not an accidental line. That is Jesus telling you what kind of mission he is on.

Then in Matthew 25, he identifies himself with the hungry, thirsty, stranger, sick, and imprisoned.

So let me ask it straight.

How did we get a Christianity that can speak endlessly about influence, blessing, favor, and success, but gets real quiet when the conversation turns to the poor, the incarcerated, the immigrant, the uninsured, the unhoused, the addicted, the forgotten? How did we get a faith bearing Christ’s name that is more comfortable in proximity to power than in solidarity with the wounded?

In Mark 10, Jesus told a rich man to sell what he had and give to the poor. Mark does not say the man argued with Jesus. He says the man grieved. He walked away sorrowful, not defiant, which means somewhere inside he knew Jesus was right. He just could not bring himself to follow through. Modern Christian culture has largely decided that response is acceptable, that abundance is evidence of God’s approval rather than a test of faithfulness. That is not a small interpretive difference. That is a whole different moral atmosphere, and honestly, a lot of us can feel the difference in the room the moment somebody brings up money and justice in the same sentence.

Jesus Commanded Enemy-Love. Christian Culture Is Fueled by Outrage.

Jesus says in Matthew 22 that love of God and love of neighbor hold up the whole law and the prophets. Then, because he never lets us shrink neighbor down to people we already like, he says in Matthew 5:44:

“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
Matthew 5:44

That is Jesus.

Not “destroy your enemies.”

Not “humiliate your enemies.”

Not “build your identity on your enemies.”

Love them. Pray for them. Be merciful. Be peacemakers.

Right now, we are watching an era of Christian public life defined by contempt, mockery, and the political weaponization of fear. People who call themselves followers of Christ have built entire platforms on rage. Entire movements on the performance of having an enemy. Entire identities around the thrill of winning against someone.

That is not a difference in tone. That is a direct collision with the stated ethic of Jesus. You cannot organize your life around destroying people and simultaneously claim to be following the one who said to love them.

Jesus Demonstrated Servant Power. Christian Culture Keeps Choosing Domination.

“It shall not be so among you.”
Mark 10:42–45 — Jesus, after describing how the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over people

That should have settled it.

Whatever worldly power does, the church is not supposed to mirror it. Then Jesus washes feet in John 13. The Teacher bends low. The Lord takes the servant’s place. The one with all authority chooses humility.

And yet Christian culture keeps falling in love with domination. Strongman religion. Celebrity pastors. Abusive leadership. Platforms without accountability.

Jesus did not tell us to build empires in his name. He told us to serve. He demonstrated it on his knees with a towel. And I will be honest, that image still stops me. Not because it is unfamiliar, but because I know how much resistance that posture meets in real leadership spaces, in church spaces, in community spaces, in any room where power is on the table. For everyone who has ever tried to lead that way and watched people mistake your gentleness for weakness, you know exactly what this costs. The cross is not a symbol of dominance. It is the permanent record of what happens when love refuses to trade mercy for power, even when power is available.

What Christ-less Christian Culture Actually Is

It is Christianity that wants Jesus as a mascot, but not as master.

It wants his name, but not his nerve.

His symbol, but not his submission.

His church, but not his cross.

His blessings, but not his beatitudes.

His promise of eternity, but not his demands on Monday morning.

His resurrection power, but not his crucified posture.

It wants to claim him without being constrained by him.

And some of what we are watching right now is not a faithful disagreement over secondary matters. Some of it is a refusal to let Jesus set the terms for the movement that bears his name.

At minimum, somebody has to prove Jesus did not mean what he said.

And if they cannot prove that, they have to admit they simply do not want what Jesus emphasized to be central.

That is not a conflict with me. That is a conflict with Christ.

If That Sounds Severe, Take It Up with the Gospels

A movement cannot truthfully bear Christ’s name while refusing Christ’s priorities.

If Jesus says love your enemies, then enemy-making cannot be our animating energy.

If Jesus says care for the least of these, then indifference to the vulnerable cannot be called maturity.

If Jesus says do what I tell you, then disobedience cannot hide behind branding.

If Jesus says greatness is service, then domination cannot wear his name without contradiction.

If Jesus says seek first the Kingdom and righteousness of God, then institutional preservation and political power cannot become our functional gospel.

Not all Christianity is Christ-centered.

Not all Christian culture is faithful.

Not every movement using the name of Jesus is actually following Jesus.

The burden of proof is not on the critic. It is on the church to explain how it expects to carry his name while ignoring his commands.

And for anyone reading this who recognizes themselves somewhere in the critique, know that recognition is not condemnation. It is the beginning of something. I have sat in enough churches, enough community meetings, enough hard conversations to know that most people are not operating from malice. They are operating from what they were handed. But what we were handed is not always what Jesus said, and at some point that distinction matters. The same Jesus who rebuked religious leaders also sat down to eat with them. He did not name what was wrong because he had given up on people. He named it because he believed people could choose differently.

That invitation is still open.

But it requires choosing Christ over the culture that has borrowed his name.

Jesus is not confused about what he said. He was direct, consistent, and relentless about it across four Gospel accounts and three years of public ministry. The question is not whether he was clear.

The question is whether the church will have the courage to take him at his word.

· · ·

Before I say a single word about missiles and marble, I need you to sit with me in somebody’s kitchen for a minute. Not a Washington kitchen. Not a Mar-a-Lago kitchen. I am talking about the kitchen where the light over the stove flickers because the electric bill is three weeks late and somebody already made a payment arrangement they are already behind on. I am talking about the kitchen where a family of four in Missouri is staring down $679 a month in utilities alone, the second-highest utility burden in the nation, before they have bought a single bag of groceries. I am talking about the kitchen in Alabama where the rent looks affordable on paper but 15.6 percent of the people in that state live at or below the poverty line, and the utility bill still eats nearly eleven cents out of every dollar they make. I am talking about the kitchen in California where the living wage for a family of four is $110,255 a year and the median family income is $105,232, which means the state’s own math says ordinary people are already losing by $5,000 before the month even starts.

This is not a hypothetical poverty. This is not a think-tank projection. This is the Tuesday morning reality for millions of Americans who are not poor because they are lazy, not struggling because they are irresponsible, not falling behind because of some personal moral failure. They are drowning because the cost of existing in this country has outrun the wages this country is willing to pay, and the government that is supposed to close that gap decided instead to build a ballroom.

In 2025, the average American family’s grocery bill rose 2.7 percent. Utility costs rose by an average of $102 per month compared to the year before. That is not a rounding error for a family already living in the margins. That is the difference between keeping the gas on and telling your kids it’s a camping night. That is the difference between buying your child’s asthma medication and rationing it by half and praying the week moves fast.

The mainstream American family is not some abstract poor person easy to dismiss with a work requirement talking point. The mainstream American family is a nurse in Missouri doing twelve-hour shifts who cannot afford to fix her car and is one breakdown away from losing the job that pays for the apartment that keeps her kids off the street. It is a warehouse worker in Alabama whose employer just cut his hours so they do not have to pay benefits, who now has to choose between the electric bill and the water bill because the budget has no room for both. It is a schoolteacher in California who has a master’s degree, three jobs, and still cannot afford to live in the district where she teaches.

These are not edge cases. These are the center. And the center is collapsing while the people in charge are shopping for onyx and marble.

But they told us there was no money.
Say it with me. We’ll need it again.

Part One: The Receipts

Here Is What They Said They Could Not Afford

Let us be honest and specific, because vague outrage does not move policy. The same government that told us there was no money made very specific choices about what to fund and what to cut. These are not opinions. These are receipts.

DOGE cut roughly 20,000 positions at the Department of Health and Human Services. Twenty-four percent of the CDC’s workforce was laid off through 2025, leaving the nation’s early warning system for disease so hollowed out that a virologist at a Canadian university said America no longer has a functioning national public health agency. Nine pandemic response centers were closed due to NIH funding cuts. Four billion dollars in medical research grants were eliminated, research targeting cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

DOGE also eliminated at least three billion dollars in grants specifically designed to support women’s health and economic security. Among the casualties? Spelman College’s program called “The Next Generation of Black Women Scientists,” designed to prepare Black women for doctoral-level biomedical research careers. They did not cut inefficiency. They cut the future. And they called it efficiency.

Across California, county health departments closed public health clinics, eliminated family planning programs, stopped dental services, reduced immunization availability, and laid off health workers, all as a direct result of DOGE terminating eleven billion dollars in community public health funding in a single season. California alone lost nearly one billion dollars.

And then came the One Big Beautiful Bill, signed on July 4th, because nothing says freedom like stripping 72 million people of healthcare on Independence Day. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that bill would cut federal Medicaid spending by $1.02 trillion over the next decade and eliminate coverage for at least 10.5 million people by 2034. The bill also delivered $4.5 trillion in tax cuts. To the people who needed it least.

Let me put that in a language everybody can read:

• $1 trillion+ cut from Medicaid over 10 years

• 10.5 million people losing health coverage by 2034

• $11 billion in community public health terminated in one season

• $4 billion in NIH medical research eliminated

• $3 billion in women’s health and economic security grants cut

• 24% of CDC staff gone

But they told us there was no money.

Part Two: The Ridiculous

Here Is What They Found the Money For

Now. Now we can talk about the ballroom.

President Trump announced plans to demolish the historic East Wing of the White House and replace it with a 90,000 square foot ballroom. That is nearly double the size of the main White House itself. The stated reason? The White House does not have a large enough room for state dinners. The man who cut healthcare for 72 million Americans needed a bigger party room. Let the record reflect.

The initial cost was stated as $200 million. Then it became $300 million. Then $400 million. The price kept growing the way this administration’s conscience kept shrinking. Simultaneously. In proportion. And when a reporter asked the President about his motivation for the project, he said, directly and on the record: “It’s a monument. I’m building a monument to myself, because no one else will.”

A monument. To himself. While the CDC does not have enough staff to track a flu outbreak. While Spelman women lost their research funding. While families in Missouri are choosing between heat and food. A monument.

Dick Gregory used to say America will spend a billion dollars studying why poor people are poor before it spends a dollar to actually help them. I think we’ve graduated. Now we build ourselves a ballroom and call it patriotism.

Demolition of the East Wing began in October 2025 during a government shutdown. The White House issued a memo stating construction would continue because it was privately funded and would not be impacted by federal budget negotiations. Among the donors who attended a White House fundraising dinner for the ballroom: representatives from Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, Palantir, and Comcast. Every major tech and defense corporation in America bought a seat at the table. Literally. Ethics watchdogs warned that this arrangement means corporations are purchasing access to the Oval Office through marble and onyx. Constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein stated it “flagrantly violates the Anti-Deficiency Act.”

Two magnolia trees planted in honor of Presidents Harding and Roosevelt were removed without public notice. The Presidential Emergency Operations Center was dismantled as site preparation. History, literally, got bulldozed for the party.

But we were not done.

The Golden Dome. The President announced a national missile defense shield promising it would cost $175 billion and be fully operational before the end of his term. The system would deploy thousands of satellites into low-Earth orbit. In tests conducted since 1999, similar interceptor systems have hit their targets approximately 55 percent of the time, under scripted conditions designed for success. So we are building what could become a trillion-dollar system that misses nearly half the time and calling it a shield.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that space-based interceptors alone could cost between $542 billion and $831 billion over 20 years. The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, put the full robust architecture at $3.6 trillion over 20 years. The program’s own director has already revised the price up to $185 billion before a single satellite has been launched. Congress approved $24.4 billion as a down payment in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, with another $13 billion for FY2026.

That $24.4 billion down payment alone could fund the entire State Opioid Response grant program for over fifteen years.

Then the planes. The Air Force is spending over $5 billion on two new Air Force One jets from Boeing, a contract ballooned with overruns and delays. Then $400 million was added to purchase two more 747s from Lufthansa for training and spare parts. Then the United States accepted a luxury 747 from the Qatari government as a gift, which experts estimated could cost anywhere from $400 million to $1.5 billion to retrofit. Democrats called it an illegal bribe. Constitutional scholars cited the Foreign Emoluments Clause. The White House said the President would be “stupid” to turn it down.

Here is the full receipt:

• White House Ballroom: $400 million and growing. A monument to one man.

• Golden Dome down payment: $37.4 billion. Full cost estimates: up to $3.6 trillion over 20 years.

• Air Force One program (all planes, all contracts, all retrofits): $6 billion and rising.

• Tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill: $4.5 trillion. While cutting $1 trillion from Medicaid.

But they told us there was no money.
And they said it with a straight face. On television. In front of God.

Part Three: The Red Lines

What We Will Not Accept as Normal

Dick Gregory understood that political satire becomes obsolete when the absurdity exceeds the capacity of satire to capture it. I think we are there. But silence is not an option. Some things must be named as red lines, not because naming them fixes them, but because silence is complicity dressed up as exhaustion.

Red line one. We will not normalize a government that cuts maternal health funding while the United States already has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the developed world, with Black women dying in childbirth at nearly three times the rate of white women. That is not a policy trade-off. That is a policy choice, and the choice has a face and a budget line.

Red line two. We will not call it efficiency when you fire the people whose job it is to catch the next pandemic early and then spend $37 billion on a missile shield your own advisors say cannot be credibly intercepted. Viruses have killed more Americans than missiles ever have. That is not an opinion. That is a body count.

Red line three. We will not pretend there is no money. There is money. There has always been money. The question is whose emergency counts as an emergency. A president who cannot host a state dinner in a tent has an emergency. A child with no health insurance in Alabama has a personal responsibility problem. That is the logic being legislated into law, and we are naming it for exactly what it is.

“In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”
— Stokely Carmichael

Red line four. We will not allow the word “patriot” to describe donors who funded a monument to one man while 10.5 million of their fellow citizens are losing Medicaid. Patriotism is not writing a check for a ballroom. Patriotism is what communities like Oroville, Butte County, and Shasta County have been doing for decades, building resilience in places the government has chronically underinvested in and calling it community because they had no other choice.

Red line five. We are done performing gratitude for scraps. The community block grants, the opioid response programs, the harm reduction infrastructure, the Pell Grants, the Head Start slots, the nutrition programs that county health departments are now shutting down, those are not gifts from a generous government. They are obligations. They are the return on taxes paid by working people who were told their contribution to the common good would come back to them as services. Cutting those programs is not fiscal responsibility. It is default.

But they told us there was no money.
We have the receipts. That is a lie.

Part Four: The Redemption

Now. What Do We Actually Do?

I am a preacher and a community organizer, which means I do not get to stop at the problem. The prophetic tradition I was trained in does not end at indictment. Howard Thurman did not just describe the disinherited. He told us how to find Jesus in our condition. James Cone did not just name the crucifixion of Black people. He named the resurrection possibility inside it. So here is mine.

One. Organize around the budget, not around the vibes. Every local election, every city council meeting, every county supervisor race is a budget argument. The people making decisions about your water, your clinics, your nutrition programs are elected by the smallest margins to the smallest offices that most people ignore. Show up. Bring the receipts. Make them account for every line item before they get your vote and your silence.

Two. Build the alternative infrastructure now, not after the crisis. Community health workers, harm reduction programs, mutual aid networks, faith-based wraparound services. These are not the backup plan when the government fails. These are the plan. The Black church has always been the government for Black people when the government abdicated. That tradition is not a relic. It is a blueprint. Every church with a parking lot has a community meeting room. Use it.

Three. Name the cost publicly, repeatedly, and specifically. Do not let the abstraction win. When they cut the opioid response grant, the conversation should immediately name the faces behind that number. When the nutrition program closes, put the family in the story. Make it concrete. Make it human. Make the indifference visible. Tell the story in every register. Tell it until people cannot scroll past it.

Four. Make the math viral. $200 billion funds the CDC for 22 years. The Golden Dome’s $24.4 billion down payment funds the State Opioid Response grant program for over 15 years. The White House ballroom at $400 million funds the Spelman Black Women Scientists program for generations. Put that math on a card. Put it in a text to your representative. The numbers are not complicated. They are just inconvenient for people who would rather you not do the arithmetic.

Five. Vote like your healthcare depends on it. Because it does. I know we are tired. I know the options have not always felt like options. I know the disillusionment is real and earned. And I am still standing here in the Black Prophetic Tradition telling you that disengagement is a vote for the status quo. Stokely Carmichael did not build SNCC by waiting for the perfect candidate. He built power in the present tense with the people available in the moment. We have to do the same. In every race. At every level. Tired and determined is still determined.

But they told us there was no money.
We know better now. And knowing is where power starts.

Closing Word: Make It Make Sense

My best friend Matt has a phrase he uses when something is so convoluted, so deliberately obscured, so wrapped in political spin that it requires a translator just to understand what is being done to you. He says: make it make sense.

So let me make it make sense.

A country that can find $4.5 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthiest among us, $400 million for a personal monument, $37 billion as a down payment on a missile system that misses half the time, and multiple hundreds of millions for presidential planes, has made a moral choice about whose lives matter enough to fund. That choice is not hidden in the fine print of reconciliation bills. It is written in the faces of people waiting in emergency rooms about to lose their Medicaid reimbursements. It is written in the closing notice on the community health clinic three miles from somebody’s grandmother. It is written in the body of every person in Butte County who is in recovery and whose treatment program just lost its federal grant and is now wondering what comes next.

The prophets of Israel were not welcome at the king’s table. They were not invited to the state dinner. They did not have access to the palace. But they had something the palace never had. They had the truth about what God requires: justice for the poor, care for the vulnerable, accountability for those who exploit their power at the expense of the powerless. That tradition runs through Amos and Isaiah, through Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells, through Howard Thurman and James Cone, through Fannie Lou Hamer and Dick Gregory and Stokely Carmichael, and it runs through this very moment where the church has a choice about whether it will be a chaplain to empire or a witness against it.

I know which one I choose. I have always known. And I suspect you do too.

There is always money.
The question has always been:
who counts as worth spending it on?

That is not a budget question.
That is a theology question.
And the answer reveals everything.

But they told us there was no money.
We have the receipts. We have the red lines. We have the refrain.
Now we get to work.

Rev. Robert A. Morton Sr. is the Senior Pastor of Oro Vista Baptist Church in South Oroville, California. He takes his coffee with oat milk, and he is always watching.

In a season when the government is dismantling diversity programs, when Black history is being legislated out of classrooms, when Black men are still being buried before their time and blamed for their own burial, somebody has to say what the chaos is trying to drown out.

So I am going to say it plainly, and I need you to receive it fully.

Black men, we are loved. We are them and they are us.

They chained our ancestors, packed us into ships, sold us on auction blocks, renamed us, beat us, bred us, and called it economy. Then they told us we were less than human and expected us to believe it.

Still, love survived.

Not soft love, but an unfamiliar to them, defiant love that refused to die even when everything around it said it should.

Black men, we are respected.

They spent centuries studying us, measuring us, classifying us, and reducing us to categories designed to prove we were inferior. They build systems that teach us we know nothing, that we came from nothing, that we are nothing. They are still building them. The curriculum fights are not nostalgia. The DEI rollbacks are not coincidence. The defunding of programs that serve us is not budget neutral. It is ideological.

That is not truth. That is training.

And we are unlearning it every day we stand up in our full selves.

Black men, we are wanted.

Not as property. Not as production. Not as a stereotype to be consumed. We are wanted as whole men.

But let’s tell the truth.

They do not just target our minds in some boardroom somewhere. They work through absence. Through our fathers being taken or broken before they can teach us who we are. Through poverty engineered to produce our desperation. Through images that tell us our bodies are dangerous but our lives are disposable.

They work at the relational level, in our barbershops and on our block corners and around our family dinner tables, until the most intimate spaces of our manhood become sites of suspicion and self-doubt.

That is not accident. That is architecture.

And it has not finished us.

Black men, we are courageous.

Because it takes courage to live in a world that is actively teaching us to question our own humanity. It takes courage to fight thoughts that were planted in us generations ago and are still being watered today. It takes courage to love Black in a society that is currently profiting off our pain.

And still we show up. Still we build. Still we break cycles.

That is not accidental. That is intentional resistance.

Black men, there is something divine in us.

They are still trying to turn us into beasts in their story so they can justify treating us like one. They write it into law. They program it into algorithms. They produce it in media. But we are not what they name us. We are what God breathed into us.

Before the chains, before the lies, before the rewriting of our identity, there was something sacred in us.

And it is still here. They have not touched it. They cannot.

Black men, we will survive whatever is thrown at us.

Not just because we are tough, but because we are clear.

Every time one of us chooses to go to therapy when the culture is still telling us that is weakness, we are disrupting the script in real time. Every time one of us stays present for our children when systems are actively working to pull us away, we are rewriting history with our presence. Every time one of us builds something in a community that is still being designed to extract from us, we are doing what our people have always done: turning the little we are given into something that outlasts us.

That is not survival. That is defiance with a legacy attached to it.

And don’t miss this.

Black men, we were designed for such a time as this.

I mean that theologically, not just inspirationally.

Esther did not end up in the palace by accident. She was positioned precisely at the intersection of her identity and her people’s crisis, and the question put to her was whether she would use her place or lose it.

That same question is being put to us right now.

Not in a palace, but in school board meetings and city councils, in our living rooms and our churches, on our street corners and in our courtrooms. The attacks on our history are happening right now. The dismantling of the programs that support us is happening right now. The erasure is active, organized, and funded. And so is our resistance. We are positioned. The moment is real. The need is urgent. And the question is the same: will we show up as who we actually are, or will we keep performing who they told us to be?

So let us stand in it. Reject the lie. Reclaim our minds.

Because we were never what they said.

We are what God made.

And that has always been enough.

A note from me to us: I wrote this because I needed to say it, and because I needed to hear it too. If you are carrying weight today, weight from a history we did not choose and a present that is actively working against us, I want you to know that you are not alone in it. There is a community that sees us, a God who knows us, and a story that is still being written. Our chapter is not finished. Keep going.

There is a kind of rejection that bruises your ego, and then there is a kind of rejection that builds your backbone. Black folks know the difference.

We just know it.

We have lived too long in a country that can profit from our genius while doubting our legitimacy. So when Jay-Z says he was rejected, not dejected, that line lands deeper than music industry folklore.

It sounds like survival.

It sounds like Black ambition learning how to breathe in a nation that keeps handing us locked doors and calling it fairness.

It sounds like every Black man who had to build with what was left after systems, schools, employers, denominations, and politicians looked him in the face and said, “Not you.”

The truth is, some rejection is not the end of the road. It is God keeping you from being trapped in rooms too small for your assignment.

I know this personally. Not theoretically. In the words of the Mattie Johnson, I know for myself..

I remember sitting in an office, waiting on news after an interview I was convinced I had nailed.

I had answered every question the panel threw at me.

Every one!

Even the ones designed to trip me up.

I answered honestly, truthfully, from lived experience, the kind of answers you cannot rehearse because they come from actually having done the work. And I was an internal candidate.

I knew that organization. I mean I knew it. Loosely interpreted, I knew where the bodies were buried and had still chosen to stay with them anyway.

I had earned this.

Blessed Assurance was on repeat in my mind. All of that motivational, self-help, positive mind stuff was employed on that day.

You got this!

They are discussing the package!

They are calling the other candidates to thank them for their participation.

At least that is what I kept telling myself as the clock crawled toward 4:45 in the afternoon.

……………
and I waited…
refreshing my screen, no emails

even my junk mail went silent…

……………

But I had also been on the other side of these conversations before. So before my boss even pulled me into the office and closed the door behind me, something in my gut had already started doing the math. I was not the one they were calling to celebrate. They were waiting on someone else to say yes.

I had already sent a few texts before my boss began to speak.

“You are remarkable. Attentive to detail. Versed in how to communicate effectively. But the committee felt...”

I stopped listening for a second. Not because I was rude. Because I was processing. Wait. So I am remarkable and all of those other things you are reading from a job description that I wrote, but somehow not quite enough to lead here? That particular flavor of “no” has a specific sting to it. The kind that comes with compliments attached. The kind that dresses rejection up in affirmation and hands it to you like it is supposed to feel like a gift.

Rejected.

The textbook definition: dismissed as inadequate, inappropriate, or not to one’s taste.

Not going to lie. That ride home was hell.

We need to slow down and sit with that for a moment because too many of us skip past the honest part too fast. The part where it just hurts. The part where you are driving and the music is on but you are not really hearing it. The part where you are rehearsing what you should have said, second guessing what you did say, and wondering what exactly they saw when they looked at you.

That is not weakness. That is being human.

The Psalms are full of that kind of honest. David did not perform his pain. He brought it. “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” That is not a man who had it all figured out. That is a man who had been passed over and was honest enough to say so before God.

But here is where the story turns. And I need you to stay with me because this turn is not a trick. It is not an “everything happens for a reason” shortcut. It is just the truth of what actually happened.

Had they offered me that job, I would have accepted. Had I accepted, I would have committed. And had I committed, I would still be there. Right there. In that same spot. And I would have never moved to the place where I met the woman who became my wife. I would have never had the son who carries my name. I would have never become the version of myself that I am still growing into.

Rachel. RJ. The life I actually have.

All of it was on the other side of a door somebody else closed.

Their rejection became my redirection. I could not see that on the ride home. But God’s architecture does not always reveal itself in the moment of construction. Sometimes you only understand the blueprint when you are standing in the house.

This is what the Scriptures are trying to tell us when they say the stone the builders rejected became the cornerstone. That is not just poetry. That is a pattern. It is Joseph in the pit. It is David forgotten in the field when the prophet came calling. It is the Samaritan woman at the well who had been dismissed so many times she had stopped expecting to be seen.

And yet. The story kept moving. The assignment found them anyway.

Now I want to name the ugly cousins. Because rejection does not usually show up alone.

Dejected comes with it. Rejection and dejection are cousins, the kind who sit on the perimeter at the family gathering and talk about everybody dancing. They focus on flaws. They get energy from your fall. They whisper that the verdict is permanent, that the “not you” was a character assessment and not just a committee decision.

You cannot always control whether rejection finds you. This country has too many systems designed to close doors on Black genius, Black ambition, Black leadership, Black presence. You are going to feel the sting of dejection after the blow of rejection. That is natural. Those are ugly cousins, but they are cousins you will meet.

The decision is how long you let them stay.

There is a version of rejection you carry for a season, process, and move through. And then there is a version you move into permanently, where you stop applying, stop believing, stop asking, stop trying, and start building your whole identity around what was denied you. That second version is the one that concerns me. Not as a motivational speaker. As a pastor. As a man who has watched brilliant Black people shrink themselves down to fit the size of someone else’s no.

Internalized rejection is a different animal than experienced rejection. Experienced rejection happens to you. Internalized rejection convinces you that the verdict is final, that the closed door is a referendum on your worth rather than a reflection of someone else’s limitation. And that internalization is where mental health begins to take the real hit. That is where the hustle stops being a calling and starts being a coping mechanism. That is where you stop asking for what you need because you already expect the answer to be no.

I think about this especially as a father. Because one of the things I am most serious about is making sure I do not accidentally teach my son to be numb when what he actually needs is to be resilient. Those are not the same thing. A child who cannot feel rejection cannot feel much else either. And I need RJ to feel it, name it, grieve it, and then get back up with his spirit intact, not just his performance. That is the harder parenting. That is the work that does not make the highlight reel but makes the man.

Some of you are sitting with a fresh rejection right now. Professional. Relational. Spiritual, the faith community that could not hold you, the theology that kept shrinking until you could not fit inside it anymore. Maybe it is the institution, the county, the system that keeps finding elegant ways to tell you that your presence is inconvenient.

I am not here to minimize that. I am not going to dress your pain up in a motivational slogan.

What I want to say is much simpler.

You are not what rejected you. You are what you are still becoming. And sometimes the most faithful thing God can do is close the door on who you were about to settle for being. Not to punish you. Not because you were not worthy. But because you were too worthy to spend your life in a room that was never built to hold you.

Rejection and dejection are ugly cousins. Visit them if you have to. Process what they showed you. And then leave them right there on the perimeter wall where they belong.

The cornerstone does not apologize for what the builders missed.

The Gospel According to J...Z is a 7-part series exploring faith, Black identity, mental health, and becoming through the lens of a culture that refused to quit. New posts drop weekly. If this one found you at the right time, share it with somebody who needed it too

Yesterday evening, the United States Senate confirmed Markwayne Mullin as the Secretary of Homeland Security.

Let that sit for a minute.

Not because I want to be dramatic. Not because I think the sky is falling, though I do think some storm clouds are forming that deserve our full attention. But because I think this moment calls for some honest reflection about what we mean when we say somebody is qualified for a job, and who we extend that grace to when we decide the credentials do not quite add up.

Pull up a chair. This is going to take a minute.

A Little Personal History First

I graduated from Withrow High School in Cincinnati, Ohio in 2002. That year has weight for me that goes beyond cap and gown ceremonies and senior pictures. That was the year our nation was still breathing in the ash and grief of September 11. That was the year Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, pulling together 22 agencies under one roof in the largest reorganization of the federal government since the National Security Act of 1947.

I remember the energy around it. The urgency. The gravity. The sense that this was not a bureaucratic exercise. This was a response to the worst attack on American soil in a generation, and people understood instinctively that whoever led this new department had better know what they were doing.

The first person to hold that office was Tom Ridge, former Governor of Pennsylvania. I had my thoughts about the politics. Some of us did. But I never once sat back and thought, how in the world did that man get that job? He had executive governing experience. He had served in Vietnam. He had a law degree from Penn State. You could disagree with his politics while still recognizing that he was, by any reasonable standard, qualified for what he was being asked to do.

That matters to me because I want to be clear about what I am and am not arguing here.

What I Am Not Saying

Before you start composing your response about elitism and credentialism, let me get ahead of you.

I do not believe that formal education is the only path to competence. I have known brilliant, deeply capable people who never set foot inside a four-year university, and I have known credentialed fools who collected degrees like trophies and could not lead their way out of a paper bag. A diploma does not make you wise, and the absence of one does not make you unqualified.

I am not arguing that Markwayne Mullin should have been disqualified because he finished with an associate’s degree rather than a bachelor’s. That is not my point.

My point is something altogether different, and it is worth saying precisely.

What I Am Saying

The Department of Homeland Security is one of only two Cabinet-level offices created during my lifetime. The other is the Department of Veterans Affairs, established in 1989, the year I was born. These are not legacy departments with centuries of institutional momentum behind them. They are living institutions that our generation watched come into being, and in DHS’s case, watched come into being out of unspeakable tragedy and national urgency.

When you look at what that department actually does, 240,000 employees, FEMA, ICE, TSA, the Coast Guard, cybersecurity infrastructure, disaster response, border management, counterterrorism, the honest question is not whether you agree with the nominee’s politics. The honest question is whether this person has ever, at any point in their career, operated anything remotely close to this in scope and complexity.

For Markwayne Mullin, the answer is no.

He ran a successful plumbing business. Genuinely. He built something from what his father started and made it grow. That is real work, and it deserves fair acknowledgment. He served ten years in the House and completed a Senate term. That is public service, and I do not dismiss it lightly.

But running a regional plumbing company and serving in a legislative body where you vote on things is not the same as leading the most complex domestic security apparatus in the world. His Senate colleagues confirmed this man to oversee FEMA, the agency that shows up, or fails to show up, when communities like ours in Butte County face disasters. They said this man is ready to manage cybersecurity threats from nation-state actors. They looked at a record containing zero national security experience, zero emergency management experience, zero legal training, and unresolved ethics questions about mixing his business interests with his congressional service, and said, yes. This man.

And I will be honest with you. You could have given him a job over at the Labor Department. His background in small business and the trades makes at least some thematic sense in that house. Put him at a table talking about workforce development, apprenticeships, trade labor policy. That is at least a conversation worth having. But the Secretary of Homeland Security? The newest kid on the Cabinet block, born out of the worst day our generation ever witnessed as Americans? That is a different conversation entirely, and yesterday’s vote suggests too many senators were not willing to have it seriously.

Now. About That DEI Debate.

I want to spend just a moment here, because the irony is too thick to let pass.

We have spent the better part of several years now listening to a sustained, well-funded, rhetorically aggressive argument that DEI programs are putting unqualified people into jobs they do not deserve, passing over more qualified candidates because of race or identity. You know the argument. You have heard it at family dinners, on talk radio, in congressional hearings, on your timeline at 11 o’clock at night when you should be asleep. The basic claim is that merit is under siege, that standards are being lowered, and that certain communities are benefiting from preferential treatment at everyone else’s expense.

Now. I want you to look at the man they confirmed yesterday to lead the Department of Homeland Security.

No national security background. No emergency management experience. No legal training. No executive experience leading anything close to the scale of this department. An active ethics record raising legitimate questions about his congressional tenure. Documented temperament concerns confirmed under oath at his own confirmation hearing. And a moment, caught on tape and living rent-free on the internet, where he literally said “I don’t want reality” when confronted with the historical facts of racism in America. A moment where he told Black Americans that the multigenerational economic damage of redlining is basically a personal choice to stay in a rut.

And the Senate said yes.

So I want to ask the question directly. If the operating principle is merit, if the standard is that the most qualified person should get the job and identity should not be a factor, what exactly is the argument for this confirmation? What professional qualification metric was Markwayne Mullin measured against yesterday that produced a passing grade?

I am not seeing it. And the people most likely to invoke merit as a defense of this vote are the same people who have spent years arguing that Black professionals in this country are receiving opportunities they have not earned. I am simply asking for the standard to be applied consistently. That should not be a radical request. It should be the baseline.

A Brief Word on His Predecessor

I am not going to spend much time on Kristi Noem, who was fired before Mullin’s nomination and was, by any honest accounting, equally unprepared for this role. There is only so much oxygen I want to give to a pattern that has become almost routine.

And I will resist the temptation, though it is considerable, to extend this analysis upward to the person doing the nominating. I will simply say that patterns have sources, and this one has been consistent enough that it no longer surprises anyone paying attention.

What This Moment Requires of Us

I want to close with something less about Markwayne Mullin specifically and more about what yesterday’s confirmation asks of the rest of us.

DHS was created in the shadow of our generation’s defining national trauma. It exists because real people died, and the government made a commitment that the apparatus of domestic security needed to be stronger, more coordinated, and more capable. That commitment meant something. It cost something. It was made in the name of people who are no longer here to hold anyone accountable for whether it is being honored.

Yesterday’s vote was a test of whether we still take that commitment seriously. Whether we still believe the people who lead our most critical institutions should be genuinely prepared for the weight of what those institutions carry. Whether the word “qualified” still means something, or whether it is just a word we use when it is convenient and set aside when it is not.

The Senate answered that question on Monday night.

Now we have to decide what we are going to do with the answer.

Robert A. Morton Sr. is Senior Pastor of Oro Vista Baptist Church in Oroville, California

I can still smell that classroom.

Chalk dust floating lazy in the air. Crayons warming in their wrappers. Scented markers doing too much, trying to smell like strawberries and blueberries and something close enough to candy to feel disrespectful when you were hungry. That dry paper smell from fresh worksheets. Elmer’s glue. Mead notebooks that sliced your finger just enough to sting.

Everything in that room had a smell.

Everything except relief.

Because beneath all of it, underneath the noise of children settling into their seats, my stomach had begun its own little liturgy.

First it murmured. A soft reminder. The kind of ache that says, you forgot something, or maybe life forgot you.

Then it grumbled. Louder now. Less polite.

And then, after a while, it fizzled. That is the part people do not talk about enough. Hunger has stages. At first it protests. Then it pleads. Then, if it learns nobody is coming, it quiets itself down and starts adapting to neglect. It normalizes the need not being met. It folds in on itself. It goes from emergency to condition.

That morning, I had eaten the last of the Fruity Pebbles the night before. And now the smell of school breakfast was hanging in the air like a taunt. Waffles. Breakfast patties. Little box milks. And there I was, standing in the line of possibility with not enough money to pay the lady.

I remember that lunch lady. I remember the look in her eyes. She was not cruel. Her empathy always showed through. But even as a child, I knew there had to be a limit to how many times I could say, “Imma bring it tomorrow,” before that grace ran into accounting. Before my hunger became a line item.

So by the time I got to class and the teacher put multiplication on the board, I was already in a fight. Not with math. With my body. Six times seven should have been simple. But multiplication does not land the same when your stomach is doing call-and-response with your anxiety.

I did what children do when need meets shame. I drifted. I joked. I played with the pencil. I found a laugh where I could, because laughter is easier than letting people see you are hungry. The teacher likely saw inattentiveness. Maybe mild disruption. Maybe a boy not applying himself.

That was never the whole story.

I was trying to focus through lack. Trying to force my mind to sit still while my body was sending distress signals. Trying to memorize multiplication tables while my stomach was learning a harder lesson about how to quiet itself when help was not coming soon enough.

I did not struggle with multiplication because I was lazy. I struggled because hunger kept interrupting the lesson.

And this is where the hypocrisy starts for me. Not in the abstract. Right there. In that classroom. In that line. In that tray I could not pay for.

This country calls that personal responsibility. When really, it was policy with a Bible verse taped to it.

Before I name what America does, I need to name what America has done to Jesus.

Because the hypocrisy that keeps grinding people up is not just a behavioral problem. It is not simply that some politicians lie or that some Christians are inconsistent. Inconsistency is human. What we are dealing with is something more structured, more architectural, more theological.

American Christianity has displaced Jesus from the center of its own faith.

Not removed. Displaced.

Jesus is still there. Still on the wall. Still in the mission statement. Still quoted at graduations and funerals and political rallies where people need a little sacred sanction for whatever they were already planning to do.

But Jesus is no longer the interpretive center. Jesus is the logo. Somebody else is running the operation.

That is the diagnosis. Everything else, the selective morality, the pro-birth politics, the weaponized Scripture, all of it, flows from that one structural failure. When Jesus gets moved to the margin of Christianity, something else will take the throne. Power. Whiteness. Capitalism. Nationalism. Patriarchy. Fear. Something always fills the vacancy. And whatever sits on that throne will determine whose lives get protected, whose suffering gets ignored, and which Bible verses get read on Sunday.

This is not a new problem. It is an old hustle wearing fresh clothes.

The Pro-Birth Lie That Keeps Cashing Checks

Let me stop being polite for five minutes.

If your moral framework is obsessed with birth but bored with hunger, homelessness, healthcare, maternal mortality, gun violence, and educational neglect, you are not pro-life.

You are pro-birth. And even that is suspect, because in many cases what you really are is pro-control.

That is why some people can cry over a fetus and laugh at a hungry child. That is why they can post a paragraph about “the unborn” and then oppose free lunch for children who are very much born, very much here, and very much hungry. That is why they can talk about God knitting folks together in the womb, but once that same life is born Black, poor, disabled, undocumented, traumatized, sick, or inconvenient, the compassion mysteriously develops a flat tire.

Do not tell me you love children while charging them for lunch. Do not quote daily bread while turning breakfast into a balance sheet. Do not tell me every life is precious while building a social order where poor children are expected to do algebra and suppress their appetite at the same time.

They love life in the abstract because abstract life does not ask for insulin. Abstract life does not need rent money. Abstract life does not show up at the border with a backpack and a mother praying in another language. Abstract life does not force you to reconsider an economic system that chews people up and calls it discipline.

Abstract life is easy to protect because it cannot talk back.

Real life is expensive. Real life is loud. Real life has needs.

And the same logic that collapses the pro-life argument collapses “family values” right alongside it. Because the people hollering loudest about family are often the ones defending the very structures that make family life harder to sustain. You cannot keep a family strong on slogans. You cannot nurture children on rhetoric. Families need wages. Families need rest. Families need healthcare.

Families need systems that do not punish them for being human.

What American moral conservatism has done is confuse family values with family optics. As long as the family looks right, they do not much care whether the family is surviving right.

That thing is cosmetic righteousness. Looks good in the front row. Collapses as soon as life starts lifing.

Jesus Gets Quoted. Paul Gets Deployed.

Now let me name the theological mechanism underneath all of this.

A whole lot of American Christianity is not actually built on Jesus. It is built on a selectively interpreted, heavily systematized, culturally filtered reading of Paul, then laid over Jesus like a church anniversary suit that does not quite fit.

For many Christians in America, Jesus is the mascot on the brochure. Paul is the one they call when it is time to build doctrine, define morality, organize church order, regulate bodies, and tell everybody who is in and who is out.

Jesus gets quoted for Easter speeches, Christmas pageants, and the occasional inspirational mug. Paul gets deployed when it is time to police.

And that should bother us deeply.

Because you cannot claim to follow Christ while treating Christ’s actual teachings like soft suggestions, and then acting like your whole faith lives and dies on your favorite reading of Romans and two verses from Corinthians you learned weaponized before you learned contextualized.

Was the Sermon on the Mount just divine spoken word? Was “love your enemies” a Hallmark card? Was “blessed are the poor” just aesthetic? Was “whatever you do to the least of these” merely a devotional caption?

American Christianity has acted like Jesus gave us vibes and Paul gave us rules. But that is precisely backwards.

Jesus is not the warm-up act to Christian theology. Jesus is the hermeneutical center. If your theology makes Jesus sound impractical, your theology is the problem.

Now, to be clear, this is not anti-Paul. Paul is in Scripture. Paul gives us language, pastoral insight, missionary imagination, ecclesial guidance, and genuine theological depth. But Paul is not Christ. Paul does not outrank Jesus. Paul must be read through Jesus, not the other way around.

If Paul could see what American Christians have done in his name, some of these folks would not get a handshake. They would get a letter. A long one. No greeting. No thanksgiving. No grace and peace. Just smoke.

Paul spent half his ministry trying to keep churches from turning freedom into foolishness, privilege into hierarchy, theology into arrogance. Yet American Christianity keeps using Paul to justify exactly the kinds of domination, elitism, and exclusion that both Paul and Jesus confronted in their own time.

It takes real nerve to use “there is neither Jew nor Greek” on Sunday and spend Monday through Saturday defending systems that rank people by race, class, zip code, citizenship, and usefulness.

It takes real audacity to preach justification by faith while treating poor people like they need to justify their suffering to deserve compassion.

It takes real sanctified silliness to claim the mind of Christ while behaving like empathy is liberal propaganda.

The Manageable Jesus

Here is the truth at the center of everything.

Jesus is too dangerous for the kind of religion America prefers.

Jesus talks too much about money. Too much about the poor. Too much about forgiveness and peacemaking and enemy-love. Too much about hypocrisy. Too much about inner transformation that spills into public ethics.

American Christology has preferred a Jesus who can rescue me without restructuring us. A personal savior, but not a public threat. A comfort for my anxiety, but not a confrontation to my ideology. A way to heaven, but not a challenge to empire.

That Jesus sells. That Jesus can wave from the passenger seat while nationalism drives.

But the actual Jesus? The one announcing good news to the poor, release to captives, freedom to the oppressed? The one flipping tables because the sacred got turned into a hustle? The one exposing religious leaders who tithed mint while neglecting justice and mercy?

That Jesus is too alive for the average American church growth strategy.

That Jesus will mess up the donor brunch.

Jesus had a special category for religion that majors in appearance and minors in love. Whitewashed tombs. Beautiful outside. Dead inside.

A lot of American Christianity has become very good at exterior excellence and interior emptiness. Big stages, thin compassion. Big statements, little sacrifice. Big certainty, microscopic mercy.

That is not revival. That is religious cosplay.

The Fraud Is Visible Now

The hypocrisy is so obvious it barely needs exposing. It just needs refusing.

You cannot scream “biblical marriage” while cheating on your spouse, mocking single mothers, ignoring domestic abuse, and voting against policies that help children. You cannot say “God first” while bowing to the market every time profit and people get in a fight. You cannot say “Christ is Lord” and then act like your preferred political movement gets a theological exemption from repentance.

Because when people encounter a church that talks like Jesus saves but lives like Caesar reigns, they notice. When they hear love preached and watch harm protected, they notice. When they are told Christ changes lives but the church refuses to change oppressive patterns, they notice.

People are not stupid. They may not have all the theological language, but they know when something smells off.

I know what hypocrisy smells like.

Sometimes it smells like chalk dust and stale air and a breakfast you cannot afford.

Sometimes it sounds like politicians saying life begins at heartbeat while children already here are learning how to make their stomach stop asking.

The Closing Word

The crisis of American Christianity is not just hypocrisy. It is Christological displacement.

Jesus has been pushed to the front of the sanctuary and out of the center of the faith. Displayed, but not obeyed. Quoted, but not followed. Admired, but not taken seriously.

Maybe the church does not need another branding campaign. Maybe it needs to repent for using Paul to muffle Jesus. Maybe it needs to repent for treating the least of these like footnotes while treating doctrinal control like discipleship. Maybe it needs to repent for baptizing hypocrisy and calling it holiness.

Because the real Jesus does not come to decorate your worldview. Jesus comes to judge it, redeem it, and if necessary, tear it down so something more faithful can live.

You can fool your base. You can fool your donors. You can fool your congregation. You can fool people who love performance more than substance.

But you cannot fool the Christ whose teachings you keep sidelining.

And one day, every church, every preacher, every politician, every movement, every nation will have to answer a question far more serious than whether it won elections, protected institutions, or maintained influence.

The question will be this:

Did you actually follow Jesus, or did you just use God-talk to protect what Jesus came to confront?

America Ain’t Ashamed at All

I woke up this morning sittin’ with it again.

The statements.
The spin.
The justifications.
The way people reach for moral high ground like it is still clean enough to stand on.

Everybody has something to say about Iran right now. About the atrocities. About the abuses. About what that nation has done to its own people. And to be clear, some of that critique is real. Some of it is deserved.

But if I am honest, something in me tightens every time I hear America start preaching righteousness to somebody else.

Because while we are naming their violence, I cannot unsee ours.

I cannot unsee Black bodies buried under policy.
I cannot unsee poverty dressed up as personal failure.
I cannot unsee injustice explained away with a straight face, a flag pin, and a Bible verse snatched out of context.

And what has been botherin’ me in this season is not just that America sins.

It is that America testi-lyes about it.

We tell just enough truth to sound decent, but never enough truth to actually repent.

And I hate being negative.
I really do.

I do not wake up every morning lookin’ for ugliness.
I do not enjoy always callin’ out what is broken.
But this season has a way of puttin’ the rot right out on the front porch.
This stuff is botherin’ me because it is not hidden.
It is loud.
It is shameless.
It is dressed up as strength, policy, patriotism, tradition, and common sense.

And if we are going to tell the truth about this country, then we have to go back to one of those moments when America’s soul showed itself without blushin’.

Not in theory.
Not in a slogan.
Not in a textbook footnote.

In blood.

When the Senate Became a Crime Scene

May 22, 1856.

The United States Senate floor, that place folks still act like has always been dignified, as if we did not watch it turn into a mass tourist event on January 6, 2021, with insurrection dressed up like patriotism.

That Senate floor.

Charles Sumner, senator from Massachusetts, had delivered a speech condemning slavery and exposing the men who protected it. He did not whisper around evil. He named it. He spoke with the kind of moral clarity this country has always found offensive when it gets too close to money, power, whiteness, and comfort.

For that, Preston Brooks, a congressman from South Carolina, walked into the Senate chamber and beat that man nearly to death with a cane.

Not a disagreement.
Not a heated exchange.
Not “boys being boys.”
Not some old-fashioned political dust-up folks can laugh off from a distance.

He bludgeoned him.

Over and over.
Until the cane splintered.
Until Sumner collapsed.
Until blood marked the floor of the United States Senate.

That was not just an assault on a man.
That was a public beating of truth.
That was a white supremacist trying to beat history out of an abolitionist’s mouth and memory.

And here is where the story really tells on America.

It was not just the brutality of the attack.

It was the applause afterward.

The Real Story Was Who Cheered

In the North, Sumner became a symbol of resistance.

In the South, Brooks became a hero.

Folks sent him replacement canes.

Think about that.

Not apologies.
Not rebuke.
Not shame.

Replacement canes.

In other words, hit him again.
Finish the job.
Do not let truth get too comfortable in public.

That was the altar call nobody preached but everybody answered.

Because it told the truth about the country before the country was ready to tell the truth about itself.

Slavery was never just labor.
It was never just economics.
It was a moral formation.
It catechized the country into cruelty.
It trained the national conscience to make peace with domination, especially when Black life was on the other end of it.

And brutality was not some unfortunate byproduct of the system.

It was part of the liturgy.

Imagine My Surprise

Imagine my surprise when I listened to Kentucky Senator Rand Paul grill Senator Mullin about the Sumner-Brooks assault.

That brutal beatdown, which some chalk up to a “don’t talk about my family” dispute, was really a white supremacist attempting to beat history out of an abolitionist’s mouth and memory.

And what stayed with me was not just the violence, but the response.

After Brooks beat Sumner, the folks back in his district sent him right back to represent them.

Think about that.

Not only did they agree, his views were not isolated. That cruelty was the pulse of their afternoon, to borrow a phrase from Maya Angelou, who knew something about what it means when a nation’s ugliness shows up unbothered and unashamed.

My old history professor at Central State, Dr. Paul J. Cook, used to say that history is not something that happened to other people in other places. It is lived. Experienced. Carried in bodies, places, and bloodlines. I thought about him in that moment, watching a Republican senator from Kentucky, of all places, force that story back into the light.

My maternal people have roots in Paris, Kentucky. That is not an abstraction for me. That is memory with an address.

And what struck me most was not that Senator Paul made the connection. It was that the connection still needed to be made. That even now, when so much is being scrubbed, paved over, and repackaged to make room for arches, ballrooms, and shiny new performance centers, the truth keeps finding its way to the surface.

History is stubborn like that. It refuses to stay buried.

If we would listen to it, it could still set us free.

Same Spirit, Different Outfit

And that is why all this matters now.

Because recently Senator Markwayne Mullin made comments romanticizing the old days when senators could settle disputes through duels and canings.

That is not a throwaway line.
That is not harmless nostalgia.
That is not just somebody talking tough for applause.

That is a window into a political imagination.

An imagination where violence is not a scandal but a tool.
Where domination still reads as masculinity.
Where humiliation still passes for leadership.
Where public cruelty still has a constituency.

And we should not let that pass too fast. Somewhere between 1856 and now, a man who beat a senator unconscious became a hero with a cabinet full of new canes. And somewhere between then and now, a sitting United States senator looked back at that moment and saw something worth longing for. That is not a gap of generations. That is a straight line.

And we keep acting surprised by that as if America has not always had a soft spot for brutality when it comes wrapped in order, strength, patriotism, or protection.

But this is not new.

This is old.

It is the same spirit.
Just in a different outfit.

So when America points at Iran, I do not look away from what Iran has done. I look at the hand doing the pointing. Because a nation that has never honestly reckoned with its own atrocities does not have clean hands to gesture with. It just has a longer history of practicing the same sins it is busy condemning.

Not Everybody Uses Shame

Here is the truth at the center of all this.

Not everybody uses shame as a deterrent.

Some people do something cruel and feel convicted.
Others do something cruel and feel confirmed.

That was true when Sumner bled on the Senate floor.

And it is true now.

Because if shame had ever really done its work in America, this country would have dealt honestly with slavery a long time ago.

Not sanitized it.
Not softened it.
Not reduced it to a regrettable chapter.
Not turned it into a moral inconvenience on the way to national greatness.

America does not really believe slavery was original sin.

That is the heart issue.

Because if she did, then she would have to look at everything that came after it differently.

She would have to see the theft.
The rape.
The family separation.
The labor extraction.
The legal degradation.
The theft of land, language, dignity, and possibility.
She would have to admit that this nation’s wealth has fingerprints on it.

But instead, there are still people who believe, deep in their bones, that Black people were somehow redeemed by being brought here.
That we were civilized by captivity.
Saved by the ships.
Improved by the chains.

That is a demonic lie with a patriotic wrapper.

And if that lie remains untouched, America will never be able to navigate a future where her people are actually free.

Because you cannot liberate what you still believe was helped by its oppression.

Christocentric in Label, Not in Life

And this is where the church ought to be ashamed, but too often is not.

America loves a Christocentric label.

We love Christian language.
Christian branding.
Christian campaigns.
Christian platitudes.
Christian outrage when it is convenient.

But Christlikeness is deeper than a label.

You cannot keep Jesus on your lips and cruelty in your civic imagination and call that discipleship.
You cannot wave a cross over a country allergic to repentance and call that holiness.
You cannot celebrate domination, excuse degradation, minimize historical evil, and still act like your faith looks anything like the Christ who came to set the oppressed free.

That is not Christianity.

That is branding.

That is civil religion with a choir robe on.

The problem is not that America has never heard the name of Christ.

The problem is that she keeps invoking that name while refusing the character of Christ.
Strip the robe off and here is what you find.

The Heart Problem Beneath the Headlines

America does not have an information problem.

She has a heart problem.

We have books.
Museums.
Archives.
Testimonies.
Scholarship.
Blood in the soil and memory in the bones.

The issue is not that we do not know.

The issue is that we do not want to confess.

And if slavery is never named as original sin, then everything that flowed from it stays negotiable.

Mass incarceration becomes policy.
Educational inequity becomes a culture problem.
Economic disparity becomes a personal problem.
Police violence becomes a few bad actors.
Housing segregation becomes market logic.
Black suffering becomes unfortunate, but never foundational.

That is what happens when a nation refuses to repent at the root.
It keeps trimming branches and calling that transformation.

But if you do not grieve it, you will repeat it.
If you do not confess it, you will conceal it.
If you do not repent of it, you will reproduce it.

My Tension, My Hope

So yes, I am sittin’ with all of this.

The contradictions.

The hypocrisy.

The suffering this country has domesticated right here at home.

And I do not enjoy writing like this.

I do not enjoy always having to point at what is ugly.
I would much rather write about healing, justice, joy, possibility, and what can be built.

But you cannot heal what you will not name.
And you cannot build a future on top of a lie that still thinks it is innocent.

Now hear me clearly.

My hope is not in this country.

History has taught me better than that.

My hope is in the God who sees.
The God who is paying attention.
The God who is not confused by our spin, distracted by our symbols, or seduced by our ceremonies.
The God who does not need America to tell the truth in order for truth to still be true.
The God who is still at work in the earth, still judging, still revealing, still redeeming, still refusing to let lies have the final word.

That is where my hope lives.

Not in our innocence.
Not in our institutions.
Not in our myths.

In God.

And maybe part of what God is doing in this season is forcing us to sit with what this country has spent generations avoiding.

Because until the truth is told all the way through,
until the sin is named without edits,
until the heart is actually changed,
we will keep reliving versions of the same story.

Different names.
Different suits.
Different slogans.

Same spirit.

And if we are honest about it, really honest about it,

America ain’t ashamed at all.

GOOD MORNING.

Eye crust aside, and with the honest acknowledgment that all coffee is not good coffee, I get up this morning. Which is why this newsletter is so late getting out.

Well before my work meetings. Before my emails. and, before the manufactured urgency of the day.

I check Threads, scroll Facebook, and then glance at ms.now (formerly known as MSNBC), only to watch yet another mediocre anti-DEI politician explain why they are somehow qualified to run Homeland Security.

Before you let out your collective umph... let’s pray.

Not for him but for our own mental health and faith - Let us not get too caught up in it, that we dont recognize that God is still in control of things.

Now let me tell you what is going on.

Because the noise is loud, the spin is predictable, and too many Christians are still trying to decide whether paying attention is part of discipleship.

It is.

There is a war going on. Not the kind some preacher turns into an end-times sermon, that’s darker than night, and limited on hope. A real war, expanding in real time, between the United States, Israel, and Iran. Allies are saying, not today when America retro-actively enlists their support. Guess those NATO comments and Greenland expansion plans do have consequences. Oil routes are unstable. Gas prices are climbing. Working people will feel it first, and hardest.

Meanwhile, eight protesters in Texas were convicted on terrorism charges for demonstrating outside an ICE detention facility. A Palestinian woman held in immigration detention for more than a year was finally ordered released. HUD is moving to eliminate fair housing protections that helped shield women of color and domestic violence survivors from discrimination. And the stock market is down because, apparently, the so-called roaring economy gets a little shaky when the bombs are not theoretical.

None of this happened in a vacuum. None of it stands alone.

That is what this newsletter is for.

WHAT IS HAPPENING

Let’s get clear on the facts before we get theological.

The war. The U.S. and Israel are now three weeks into military operations against Iran. Israel has killed senior Iranian officials, including its intelligence minister and security chief. Iran is retaliating across the Gulf, hitting ports, infrastructure, and diplomatic sites. Trump is asking NATO allies to help patrol the Strait of Hormuz. Several have refused. Even former Republican Congressman Joe Kent resigned this week, saying he could not support a war he believes was driven more by pressure and politics than actual national interest.

The economy. Gas prices are up sharply. The Dow has dropped. GDP growth has slowed to a crawl. The federal deficit has crossed $1 trillion for the year. The Federal Reserve is expected to hold rates steady because this war complicates everything, and higher oil prices could push inflation back up before the year is out.

The justice front. Eight anti-ICE protesters in Texas were convicted on terrorism charges, the first successful federal use of terrorism statutes against activists. A federal judge blocked deportations for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and thousands of Syrians with Temporary Protected Status. HUD says it plans to end the disparate impact fair housing rule. CAIR’s latest civil rights report documents a record 8,683 Islamophobia complaints, the highest in its history.

California and the North State. Gas prices are spiking here too, while Sacramento debates energy policy and leaves existing consumer protections sitting on the shelf. Mental health projects promised under Prop. 1 still have not opened. Senator McGuire is in Chico campaigning for Congress. Chico City Council is weighing a $1.3 million military equipment request for the police department while residents push back. And an unseasonable heat wave is already reminding the North State that fire season does not wait for us to feel ready.

Entertainment. Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor for Sinners. One Battle After Another took Best Picture and Best Director. Jill Scott announced a world tour. The Scrubs revival is pulling strong numbers. We need moments of joy and culture too. We are human beings, not just emergency responders for the age.

Now let’s talk about what all this reveals.

WHAT IT REVEALS

Here is the pattern, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

Empire always needs an enemy, a commodity, and a distraction.

The enemy right now is Iran. The commodity is oil. The distraction is watching protesters get labeled terrorists while the federal government escalates a war without a congressional declaration and far too many people barely blink.

When the government can call a protester a terrorist but cannot plainly call a war a war, language is no longer being used to clarify. It is being used to control.

And once language gets weaponized, truth is usually the first thing bleeding on the floor.

Look at who feels this first.

It is not the people in the Situation Room. It is the folks at the gas station. It is the family in Oroville trying to stretch one paycheck across too many bills. It is the elder in Chico watching grocery costs climb. It is the single mother already priced out of stable housing. It is the people in communities like ours, where one more spike, one more delay, one more policy rollback does not feel abstract. It feels personal.

The market dropping becomes national drama. Housing protections disappearing barely makes a ripple.

Eight protesters get terrorism charges, and the country shrugs. A woman held in detention for over a year is finally released, and it gets treated like a side note.

That is not random. That is how empire manages attention.

Keep the headlines fixed on the foreign threat. Keep ordinary people economically anxious. Keep justice movements criminalized. Keep vulnerable communities too exhausted to organize a real response.

And here is the part that should bother every Christian with a functioning conscience.

A whole lot of this keeps getting wrapped in God talk.

THE CHRIST-CENTERED READING

Let’s go to the source.

In Luke 4, Jesus stands in the synagogue and reads from Isaiah:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor... to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free.”

Then he sits down and says, in effect, this is what I came to do.

That is not vague spirituality. That is mission. That is priority. That is Jesus telling you exactly where to look if you want to know what kind of world God is trying to build.

Now look at what is in front of us.

A war expanding without constitutional authorization, while poor and working people absorb the cost at the pump.

Protesters treated like terrorists, while the people authorizing destruction operate under the respectable language of national interest.

Housing protections stripped away from women of color and domestic violence survivors.

Immigrants detained for months and years, as if dignity can be paused indefinitely.

So what would Jesus do with this?

Better yet, what did Jesus already say?

In Matthew 25, he makes it plain that how we treat the least of these is how we treat him. The detained. The displaced. The denied. The vulnerable. The ones the system can inconvenience without consequence.

In Matthew 5, he says, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” Not blessed are the profiteers. Not blessed are the warmongers with patriotic branding. Peacemakers.

In Luke 20, when asked to sort out what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God, Jesus does not hand empire a blank check. Caesar gets the coin. God gets the people. Human dignity belongs to God. Justice belongs to God. Truth belongs to God. The vulnerable belong to God.

Jesus is not neutral about power.

He is not a mascot for empire. He is not a chaplain for militarism. He was executed by the collaboration of religious performance and state violence, and even then he would not bow to either one.

That is the Jesus we follow.

Not the Americanized one. Not the one draped in a flag. Not the one folks summon when they need Bible words to bless brutal policy.

The actual Jesus.

CALL IT PLAIN

So let me say it simply.

A government that calls protesters terrorists while escalating an unauthorized war is not defending democracy. It is defending power.

A faith community that cheers military escalation while ignoring housing injustice, immigrant suffering, and economic strain is not following Jesus. It is following empire in church clothes.

Stripping the disparate impact rule is not neutral policy. It is structural injustice with paperwork.

And a $1.3 million military equipment request for Chico Police, debated while residents are already strained by rising costs, is not just a budget decision. It is a values decision. It tells you what kind of safety gets funded, and whose fear gets prioritized.

Name things for what they are.

Clearly. Calmly. Without apology.

Because truth does not need theatrics to hit hard.

MORNING CHARGE

Here is what a disciple can do today.

1. Call your representatives about the Iran war.
Congress has not authorized this conflict. That matters morally and constitutionally. Ask where the debate is. Ask where the accountability is.

2. Pray with your eyes open.
Not vague prayers. Specific ones. Pray for the families of those killed. Pray for the people of Iran. Pray for detainees. Pray for the convicted activists. Paying attention is part of love.

3. Refuse lazy panic.
Do not let fear become your theology. Gas prices are rising because war has consequences. Learn the facts. Stay grounded. Do not let somebody else’s propaganda become your worldview.

4. Support people doing the work.
If civil rights groups are documenting record discrimination, and housing advocates are sounding alarms, then believers should not be standing at a distance acting surprised. Justice is not somebody else’s assignment.

5. Stay rooted locally.
Watch what Chico City Council does. Track the Prop. 1 delays. Pay attention to local decisions. The policies that shape daily life are often made in rooms most affected people never enter.

CLOSING

Anchor Scripture

“Learn to do good. Seek justice. Rebuke the oppressor. Defend the fatherless. Plead for the widow.”
Isaiah 1:17

Quotable Line

Empire always needs an enemy, a commodity, and a distraction. A disciple’s job is to notice which one they are being handed.

Holy Side-Eye Moment

They convicted eight protesters of terrorism for demonstrating outside a detention facility, the same week the President asked allies to help clean up the consequences of a war Congress never voted on. Just trying to make sure we all have the same understanding of what counts as a threat.

Concrete Application

Text one spiritually engaged but politically checked-out person today and share this newsletter. Not to argue. Just to remind them that the gospel has something to say about the world we are actually living in.

Reminder

The Kingdom of God does not need empire’s permission to move. It never did.

The Christian Daily is written for disciples who believe the gospel is good news for the whole person, the whole community, and the whole world. Share it, subscribe, and stay awake.

Rev. Robert A. Morton Sr.
Senior Pastor, Oro Vista Baptist Church