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Last Thursday, President Donald Trump gave a speech about preventing fraud and interference in the 2026 Midterm elections.

Memory of the words themselves may fade, but what they set up could shape the country for years to come.

That speech laid the groundwork to undermine the 2026 midterm elections.

A “Stolen” Election and Claims of Fraud

In his address, Trump warned of "shocking vulnerabilities" in election infrastructure and released documents he claimed exposed hidden fraud and foreign interference, though experts said little was new.

He alleged China had acquired 220 million voter files, called voting machines and mail ballots "inherently corrupt," and claimed a DHS review found roughly 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote, offering no evidence any votes were altered.

He also revived debunked 2020 claims and accused the Biden Justice Department of a coverup, even as his own adviser conceded there is zero evidence a foreign power ever flipped a vote, all building toward a call for new voting restrictions before the midterms.

He said all this despite the fact that he had more than 60 court losses in cases alleging fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

He lost.

Neither four years of saying it was stolen nor an attempted insurrection will change that truth.

What’s At Stake in the 2026 Midterms

But the truth does not matter in a slow-moving coup.

What matters is not whether the claims in this speech were accurate—they were not—but simply that he made them.

Now he can take extraordinary and unconstitutional action in the midterms and point back to this speech.

He’s setting the stage to say, “See! I told you back in July that the elections weren’t safe. Now I am forced to intervene.”

Possible interventions, based on his own words and those of his allies, include:

• Issuing executive orders seizing federal control over election rules

• Declaring a national emergency.

• Deploying federal agents to the polls.

• Purging voter rolls

• Ordering mid-decade redistricting.

• Requiring proof of citizenship, not just legal ID, to vote

Some of these efforts, like requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register, are already being proposed at the state level.

This is not business as usual—no matter what anyone tries to tell you.

This is not an ordinary election that decides whether Democrats or Republicans will have the power to make laws.

This election will determine the fate of all other elections in the foreseeable future.

If that sounds hyperbolic, then you are underestimating the desperation of this regime and their willingness to take any measures to maintain power.

Challenge Them, Every Time

What can we do?

Most of us do not have a direct line to Senators or Representatives. We can’t rewrite a presidential speech. We can’t claim a national platform to sound the alarm.

But we are not powerless.

The bare minimum we can do to protect the midterm elections is refuse to let anyone minimize their importance in our presence.

We have a responsibility to speak up between now and November whenever we hear anyone suggest these elections do not matter. If you hear someone shrug off these elections, don’t let it slide—challenge them, every time.

We must interrupt that ignorance.

The first step in protecting democracy is stopping normalization of apathy.

We must give them the list of possible catastrophic outcomes if the president has his way.

We must let them know that even if we cannot pinpoint every move the administration will make, one prediction is certain: they will reject any election outcome that does not go their way.

The hallmark of democracy in this country has been that elections determine the transfer of power. That fact, more than any other, has ensured that new people can enter federal office without resorting to violence.

That tradition was severely tested on January 6, 2021, when a mob invaded the U.S. Capitol Building to prevent the certification of a lawful election.

People died that day and in the aftermath.

Political violence, in general, has become more commonplace.

Apathy Is Not an Option

Let the people around you who would throw up their hands in exasperation about the midterms know that we could become a nation where the next governor, senator, congressperson, or president is decided by violence, not votes.

Let them know that this administration is already doing all it can to undermine confidence in the electoral process.

It does not matter if all the facts and public opinion are against the people claiming voter fraud.

They merely need to declare the threat of impropriety and then seize ballots, pressure Secretaries of State, dispatch ICE to polling locations, or claim national control over elections entirely.

Don’t Let Them Trivialize the Midterms

But too many people choose not to vote because they don’t pay attention.

They believe all the pundits sounding off are merely handwringing and catastrophizing.

They believe that life before and after the 2026 midterms will be substantially the same. And that the United States as a nation is destined to remain an imperfect democracy.

They may believe that, but the people who believe the United States is being taken over by liberal, Left, woke, un-American forces do not.

They are willing, and even eager, to become an autocracy in which power rests not with the people but with the most ruthless faction.

So what can we do?

We can sound the alarm at the local level.

We can make sure that no one around us—at the dinner table, the workplace, our school, or our faith community—gets away with saying these elections do not matter.

We will not let them say, “Both parties are the same.” We will not let them off the hook when they claim, “My vote does not matter.”

And we will tell them to vote. To inform themselves. And to prepare to defend democracy like never before.

No one can do everything, but everyone can do something.

The smallest act of defense is refusing to let anyone trivialize what’s at stake in these elections.

Why do you think so many people are tempted to minimize the stakes of elections, and what can be done to break through that mindset?

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Every movement for progress has one job before all the others.

It is not getting out the vote. It is not fundraising. It is not filing paperwork for a nonprofit.

What every social movement must do is find the injustice that evokes the most moral outrage and press on it until progress comes.

I’ve studied this.

My PhD is in US history since 1877, and I study race, religion, and social movements.

When you look across the eras, you detect a pattern.

The injustice that mobilizes people is almost always the one that is violent, visible, and visceral.

The Witness of History

In the antebellum era, abolitionists pressed first on the slave trade, then on slavery itself. The kidnapping, the chains, the packed ships were violent, visible, and visceral.

In the Jim Crow era, the injustice was lynching.

Ida B. Wells, an investigative journalist, went to the sites, gathered the testimony, and published it so the country could not pretend not to know.

In the civil rights era, it was segregation and the demonstrations themselves.

Nonviolent confrontation was designed to bring tension to the surface and force people to confront their own prejudice.

In the Black Power era, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense named police brutality.

It is the same criteria in every era: violent, visible, visceral.

The injustice of this moment

Today, the violent, visceral, visible injustice is ICE.

ICE keeps killing people.

In a single week, agents killed Lorenzo Salgado Araújo in Houston, a home builder driving his crew to a job site, and Johan Sebastián Durán in Maine, a twenty-five-year-old from Colombia.

They are among at least eleven people ICE has killed since January 2025. The agency runs on a quota of 2,000 arrests per day, masked agents, unmarked vehicles, and almost no accountability.

That is what recklessness looks like when no one has to answer for it.

This is why I made a film about immigration.

People ask why the founder of a studio focused on US race relations would produce Jesus Was a Migrant. Because under this regime, immigration is the tip of the spear. It is their most public, most violent, most visceral campaign.

Movements do not happen by accident.

You find the injustice people can feel, you turn up the volume, and you convert outrage into action.

So book a screening of Jesus Was a Migrant. Demand that ICE take off the masks. Insist on accountability. And if you follow Jesus, remember that our own tradition already tells us how to treat the stranger.

Stay informed. Stay faithful. Stay in the fight.

NOTE: I had some issues with video, so it’s just audio this week. Appreciate your patience.

The criteria I name in this article are: “violent, visible, visceral.” Which injustices in your own community fit that profile? Which serious ones fail it, and how does that shape the attention they get?

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Topics Addressed in This Episode

• The core thesis: every movement presses on the injustice that evokes the most moral outrage

• The “violent, visible, visceral” criteria for what actually mobilizes people

• Abolition: the slave trade, slavery, and the abolitionist ship diagram

• Ida B. Wells and investigative journalism against lynching in the Jim Crow era

• Segregation, nonviolent demonstration, and the Black Panther Party’s naming of police brutality

• Recent ICE killings, the 2,000-arrest daily quota, and the accountability gap

• Why immigration is “the tip of the spear” and the making of Jesus Was a Migrant

• Concrete next steps: booking a screening, unmasking agents, demanding accountability

Check out our impromptu live watch party of The Convocation Unscripted. We did a real-time chat as he gave a speech laying the foundation for rigging the midterm elections.

The Convocation Unscripted

Trump Plots Midterm Chaos

With just two hours notice, Robby threw out a wacky idea…

Listen now

7 days ago · 148 likes · 4 comments · Jemar Tisby, PhD, Kristin Du Mez, and Robert P. Jones

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In the preamble to the Constitution of the Confederate States of America, one phrase stands apart.

Even though the words of the Confederate Constitution are almost copied and pasted from the United States Constitution, it uses a word that never appears in the latter.

God.

“We, the people of the Confederate States, each State acting in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form a permanent federal government, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Confederate States of America.”

He served as chaplain to the constitutional convention, and he took public credit for including the phrase “Almighty God” in the preamble.

He became known as the “Chaplain of the Confederacy.”

His name was Basil Manly, Sr.

Basil Manly Sr. was everywhere the Confederacy was born.

He served as chaplain of the Alabama secession convention. He served as chaplain of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States. And on February 18, 1861, he opened the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederacy with prayer.

Wherever the new Confederate nation swore itself into being, Manly was there to bless it.

Before that, he was a leader in the schism that led to the creation of the pro-slavery Southern Baptist Convention. He also served as a key founder of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary as a site of fundamentalist theological education.

Manly was born in North Carolina in 1798. He was ordained as a Baptist pastor in 1822. He pastored various prominent churches in South Carolina. In 1837, he became president of the University of Alabama and served in that post for nearly 20 years.

Manly also enslaved about 40 people.

At every turn, Basil Manly, Sr. promoted the most restrictive, authoritarian, and white supremacist version of religion.

His legacy stands as a blight on Baptists and the entire Christian church in the United States.

It’s time more people know about his notorious exploits and legacy.

Basil Manly and the Founding of the Southern Baptist Convention

Most people know the Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1845 in a split from Baptists in the North over slavery.

What many do not realize is the exact cause of the split.

In 1844, the Georgia Baptist Convention put forth James E. Reeve as a candidate for missions.

He was a deliberate choice because Reeve enslaved people.

The Georgia Convention, with the support of other Baptists in the South, wanted to use Reeve’s petition as a test case.

Would Northern Baptists approve him for missions as an enslaver, or would they reject him on those grounds? It was time to draw a theological and ecclesiastical line on slavery in the denomination.

The Home Mission Board ultimately rejected the petition, stating,

“If however anyone should offer himself as a Missionary, having slaves, and should insist on retaining them as his property, we could not appoint him. One thing is certain: we can never be a party to any arrangement which would imply approbation of slavery.”1

In response, Manly drafted the Alabama Resolutions.

In them, he argued for the express right of church officers to enslave human beings. He promoted…

“the distinct, explicit, avowal that slaveholders are eligible, and entitled, equally with non-slaveholders, to all the privileges and immunities of their several unions; and especially to receive any agency, mission, or other appointment, which may run within the scope of their operation or duties.”2

Manly went on to write “Address to the Public,” where he explained to an initial gathering of Southern Baptist leaders that their counterparts were wrong on slavery.

“These [Northern Baptist] brethren, thus acted upon a sentiment they have failed to prove—That slavery is, in all circumstances, sinful.”

Manly’s Proud Defense of Slavery

Unlike some, Manly contended that enslaved people were human beings, but they should honor their “masters” and stay in their place.

In his series of “Sermons on Duty,” he argued that “the wants of society” necessitate “different occupations—some to labor, some to plan and to direct the labor of others.”3

In Manly’s estimation, people of African descent were relegated by God’s divine order to serve, and white people were divinely ordained “to plan and to direct” their labor.

Manly waived away the fact that Africans were kidnapped and forced across an ocean against their will.

“Whatever may have been the motives of men engaged in their transportation, God has overruled it for good.”4

No matter how it came to be, slavery in the end was beneficial for Africans.

He thought he could mitigate the brutality of slavery by encouraging enslavers to practice Christian principles toward their human chattel.

Masters were to administer discipline with “a due mixture of firmness and gentleness.” They were also to provide enslaved people with “the opportunity to receive religious instruction, and to worship God.”5

At the core, Manly was a chief architect in the exact dispute that led to the founding of the pro-slavery Southern Baptist Convention and an ardent defender of race-based chattel slavery.

While history should recognize him as a founder of what is now the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, that mere fact does not merit uncritical acclaim.

Equal weight or more should be given to the fact that Manly’s professed piety did not prompt him to protest the pernicious principle that people could be treated as property.

Basil Manly and the Founding of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Basil Manly, Sr. did not stop at helping to split a denomination. He also helped start a school.

Manly wanted an institution to train the next generation of Southern preachers in the same theology that had led to the denominational schism.

In the 1850s, he served as chairman of the education commission that pushed Southern Baptists to found their own seminary.

He worked with others such as James P. Boyce—a pastor and professor who would become the first president of the seminary—to draft plans, raise money, and recruit faculty.

In 1859, Southern Seminary opened its doors in Greenville, South Carolina (later relocated to Louisville, Kentucky), and Basil Manly, Sr. served as the first chair of its Board of Trustees.

The four founding faculty members of the Southern Seminary—James P. Boyce, John A. Broadus, William Williams, and Basil Manly, Jr., the elder Manly’s son—enslaved people and defended the institution.

In 2018, leaders at Southern Seminary published the “Report on Slavery and Racism,” which acknowledged that the school’s founders all four enslaved people and “They invested capital in slaves who could earn for their owners an annual cash return on their investment.”6

The proslavery theology Manly Sr. had written into the Alabama Resolutions did not remain a set of arguments passed at a convention. It became part of the curriculum.

Manly’s proslavery views now had an institutional home at the flagship seminary of the Southern Baptist Convention.

The Legacy of Basil Manly, Sr.

Basil Manly, Sr. died in 1868, three years after the Confederates lost. But his legacy still lives.

Manly’s influence still stands in the form of the stately buildings of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

His proslavery views are forever part of the foundation of the Southern Baptist Convention.

His invocation of God to defend the institution of slavery is etched in the Constitution of the Confederate States of America.

Basil Manly Sr.’s Confederacy lost the war. He won the theology.

The progeny of his ideology is white Christian nationalism.

It echoes in a denomination, a seminary, a constitution, and any present-day perversion of Christianity that still asserts a divinely instituted hierarchy of humanity.

Had you heard of Basil Manly Sr. before reading this? If you grew up in a Baptist church, or any church shaped by Southern Baptist theology, what did you know—or not know—about the denomination's founding?

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Pastors can be wrong.

That’s a surprise to no one. It’s such a given that the New Testament even assumes it.

Scripture repeatedly builds correction into the life of the church.

Paul instructs young Timothy on how to confront church leaders about their errors.

“Do not entertain an accusation against an elder unless it is brought by two or three witnesses. But those elders who are sinning you are to reprove before everyone, so that the others may take warning.” ~ 1 Timothy 5:19-20

Care should be taken not to take seriously every bit of gossip; there should be witnesses who can corroborate. But when wrongdoing is committed, it should be handled publicly as a sign of accountability.

Even Peter, the “rock” of the early church, was not immune to ecclesiastical correction.

Paul “opposed him to his face” when he withdrew from fellowship with the Gentiles (Galatians 2:11).

No leader is meant to be the final word on their own doctrine.

Douglas Wilson is the type of pastor for whom this rule was written.

The Detail That Gives Him Away

Most people missed this, but in his recent NPR interview, Wilson described one of his church’s distinctives almost as a charming quirk.

They commune their children.

In the interview, he described the practice.

“And one of the distinctives that we have is we we are Presbyterian, paedo-Baptist, baptized infants. But a distinctive feature that we have that a lot of Reformed churches don’t have is that we commune children. We practice weekly communion at the culmination of every service and we commune our children, right? As you can see from the spots on the floor. [laughter] So, it’s a war zone. [snorts] So, you you’re giving a little cup of wine to uh to the kids included…So, that that was one doctrinal distinctive.”

His description almost sounds cute and folksy.

It is not.

The practice has a name, paedocommunion, and it means admitting young children to the Lord’s Supper before they are old enough to profess faith for themselves.1

No general journalist should be expected to know the ins and outs of Reformed Christian practices around communion. Much less should they be expected to know the obscure deliberations of extremely conservative Presbyterian denominations from nearly 40 years ago.

But I do.

Paedocommunion is a practice rejected by the most conservative Reformed and Presbyterian denominations in the country.

In 1988, the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA), of which I was once a part, studied the question and instructed its churches to maintain its traditional stance on communion.

"It is the thesis of this report that, in spite of the excellent insights in the minority report and in other papers favoring paedocommunion that we have reviewed, the main argument is not sustained. The PCA is well advised to continue the classical Reformed practice of delaying the admission of children to the Lord's Table until they reach a level of maturity at which they can profess their faith and partake of the elements with discernment."2

The PCA report noted that classical Reformed theology has been “virtually unanimous” in opposing bringing children to the Table before the age of discretion.

The Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) studied it the same year and kept its own standards closed to it.

Its Directory for Worship admits to the Table only those who “have been baptized and have made public profession of faith in Jesus Christ.” The OPC puts it plainly: it “does not favor paedocommunion.”

Modern Presbyterians are drawing from one of the original framers of Reformed theology.

John Calvin rejected paedocommunion in the Institutes, insisting that self-examination must come first.

“The Supper is intended for those of riper years, who, having passed the tender period of infancy, are fit to bear solid food. This distinction is very clearly pointed out in Scripture. For there, as far as regards baptism, the Lord makes no selection of age, whereas he does not admit all to partake of the Supper, but confines it to those who are fit to discern the body and blood of the Lord, to examine their own conscience, to show forth the Lord’s death, and understand its power.”3

Calvin went even further in his denunciation.

He wondered whether those who could not see the difference between baptism and the Lord’s Supper had “the least particle of soundness in their brain.”

Why Douglas Can Get Away With It

This is not just a debate about the sacraments. It is a larger point about power.

Douglas Wilson can hold paedocommunion, dominionism, household voting, and his long apologetic for the Confederacy, because he answers to almost no one.

This unchecked doctrinal power also has real-world consequences such as the propensity for abuse and cover ups in congregations.

Wilson helped found the denomination he belongs to—the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.

There is no body of elders outside his own movement positioned to examine him, correct him, or remove him.

The very situation Presbyterian polity was designed to prevent—a strongman pastor accountable only to himself—is the position he engineered his way into.

At the very least, we should be skeptical about how hard a denomination will ever come down on one of its own founders. The most famous one, no less.

This is niche theology and ecclesiology, and I do not fault the journalists for missing it. But that is precisely why newsrooms should fund dedicated religion reporters who can explain these nuances.

That is not happening anytime soon.

So the work falls to independent journalism and to people who live inside these questions.

That is a large part of what I do here.

And that is one more reason we cannot hear this man’s views in isolation.

Alone, Doug Wilson sounds like a confident, soft-spoken, grandfatherly pastor.

But in conversation with the tradition he claims—Reformed Christianity—he sounds like a man whose views were rejected by the people best positioned to judge them, yet he still teaches from a platform where no one can tell him no.

Have you seen a leader, in a church or anywhere else, insulated from accountability by a structure they built or controlled? What did it produce?

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NPR just gave Douglas Wilson another splashy, in-depth interview. My problem is not that they covered him. It’s how.

Wilson is a Christian nationalist and dominionist pastor out of Moscow, Idaho.

He thinks the Nineteenth Amendment was a mistake.

He believes people who can’t affirm a fundamentalist worldview shouldn’t hold political office.

He is an apologist for the Confederacy who minimizes the horror of slavery.

And his ideology now runs straight into the Pentagon through his disciple, Pete Hegseth.

That is newsworthy. He should be covered.

But here’s the crux of the issue. Wilson said:

“We’re getting a respectful hearing. Maybe not a friendly hearing, but we’re getting a respectful one. And that is progress compared to the compared to the way it was before.”

Amplification. That’s what Wilson is after.

He does not care whether you think he’s extreme. He knows any coverage broadcasts his ideology to the handful of people who will resonate with it.

And he knows a serious, earnest, forty-minute interview makes his beliefs look like just another viewpoint, on par with democracy itself.

Who Gets to Speak for Christianity

The deeper problem is that these stories center Wilson as the lone voice: on his turf, in his church, with no counterpoint.

So here is my suggestion: Never cover Douglas Wilson in isolation.

If you fly a crew to Moscow, talk to the people in town who left his church because of abuse.

If you run a forty-two-minute interview, spend half of it with scholars and pastors who represent a different Christianity (I list them in the episode).

This goes far beyond one man or one interview.

It’s about who gets to speak for Christians, and which version of God and country will prevail. That question is too important to answer with his voice alone.

In This Episode You’ll Hear About...

• Why NPR’s interview, and the wave of coverage before it, put Wilson back in the spotlight

• What Wilson actually believes: fundamentalist reformed Christianity, postmillennialism, patriarchy, and dominionism

• His views on the 19th Amendment and “household voting”

• Classical Christian education and its “Western civilization” subtext

• Why “any coverage is good coverage” for Wilson and his camp

• How respectful press makes his ideology look legitimate

• The missing counter-narrative and the lack of racial analysis in his coverage

• A better model for covering him, and who to pass the mic to instead

Where do you draw the line between covering a dangerous idea and amplifying it?

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On the Fourth of July, the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, hate once again marched in the nation’s capital.

A white nationalist group called Patriot Front took to the streets wearing white masks and sunglasses.

They held U.S. flags aloft alongside Confederate flags and chanted, “Reclaim America.”

This is not the first time a white nationalist organization flooded D.C. for a demonstration.

A similar event happened on September 13, 1926, when thousands of Ku Klux Klan members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue.

The parallels are too evident to overlook.

A century apart. Same energy.

They may be dressed differently, but the same idea keeps coming back in new clothes—that the United States belongs to white people of European descent, and everyone else is a guest at best.

White Nationalism Marches on Washington

In the 1920s, the reign of white supremacy was undeniable.

In 1924, the legislators passed the Johnson-Reed Act. Signed by President Calvin Coolidge,

“[The policy] limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota. The quota provided immigration visas to two percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the 1890 national census. It completely excluded immigrants from Asia.”

The act was a xenophobic policy influenced by the racist eugenics movement and designed to preserve an Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority—a goal the Klan shared.

In 1925, the Ku Klux Klan held a massive march in Washington, D.C. It was the largest demonstration the city had ever seen. Estimates say around 50,000 hooded members descended on the capital in a graphic display of the Klan at the height of its power.

But the Klan’s momentum didn’t last.

They came back to D.C. in 1926, but the demonstration in 1926 drew less than half the number of the previous year—around 15,000—and newspapers at the time marked the decline.

Even in decline, however, the Klan knew how to stage a spectacle.

At the head of the column walked Imperial Wizard Hiram W. Evans, robed in royal purple, a gold star on his hood to mark him above the men in silver.

Behind him rolled a couple of floats. On one, sent by the Klan of Paterson, New Jersey, a young woman stood beside the American flag with an open Bible in her hands. The sign on the truck named her for the crowd: a “100 percent American girl.”

The most telling scene sat right on the curb.

A Black boy worked the crowd, selling copies of the Klan’s own paper, the Fellowship Forum, while onlookers laughed and bought copies. The Washington Post recorded it without a hint of shame:

“A small colored boy selling the Fellowship Forum, the official Klan publication, caused much merriment. He seemed oblivious to the fact that he was furnishing the crowd with fun and kept himself busily engaged in raking in the nickels.”

A child of the very people the Klan existed to terrorize turned into the day’s ironic amusement.

The Real Work of the Klan

The most important story didn’t happen on the streets, though.

The real work happened that night in the Washington Auditorium.

There, the leaders aimed their fury at the Catholic Church and at Governor Al Smith of New York, the Catholic they feared might win the White House. The Washington Post recorded the pledge:

“A challenge was issued to Premier Mussolini of Italy, not to try to dictate to this country, and pledges were given that no Catholic shall ever again hold high position in this country’s government.”1

The hatred did not stop with Catholics.

Speakers named “racial integrity” as the goal of the order, which was coded language that meant a country ruled by and for white people.

When the talk turned to the World Court—an international body attached to the League of Nations—and a Black delegate from Haiti, one speaker stated plainly what the Klan believed about who counted as fully American:

“We will never let a [N]egro sit in judgment of America in international questions.”2

The Klan also came for the immigrant.

Speakers demanded the total exclusion of newcomers and promised new legislation within two years.

The Klan had cheered the 1924 Immigration Act and now wanted the government to finish the job.

The Klan had plenty of political and public support for its aims.

Thousands lined Pennsylvania Avenue in 1926. The New York Times described the scene:

“Washington never had a better-behaved crowd. There was no disorder of any kind among the marchers or the onlookers. There was much hand-clapping and some cheering, but no hissing or other demonstration of disapproval, although many thousands of spectators were persons proscribed by the Klan because of religion, birth, or color.”3

Underneath it all ran a claim about God and country.

The Klan of 1926 fused its Christianity and nationalism, calling the mixture American.

Speakers wanted the nation’s schoolchildren taught loyalty to the cross and the flag as one inheritance. The Washington Post captured the demand:

“The Klan will bring about legislation within the next two years that would have ‘the Bible and the American flag placed in all of the public schools,’ the speaker declared.”4

A hundred years later, the label has changed. We used to call them the Ku Klux Klan. Now we call their ideological descendants white Christian nationalists.

How the Patriot Front Copies the KKK

Some will say the comparison is too extreme.

A few hundred masked men in khakis have nothing to do with the hooded thousands of 1926.

This is where we need primary sources.

Patriot Front published a manifesto. In it, they define who gets to be an American. It’s not by laws or policy or support for democracy. Americanness is defined by blood.

“Membership within the American nation is inherited through blood, not ink. Even those born in America may yet be foreign.”

That is the Klan’s “racial integrity” in the 21st century. It’s the attack on birthright citizenship. It’s the attempt to narrow national identity.

The manifesto then tells the naturalized citizen, the neighbor who has lived here for decades, that they can obey every law and still never belong.

“Those of foreign birth may occupy civil status within the lands occupied by the state, and they may even be dutiful citizens, yet they may not be American.”

Patriot Front considers naturalized citizens guests who can be kicked out if they overstay their welcome. That is the same idea the Klan promoted in 1926.

And like the Klan, they cast the immigrant as an invasion to be repelled, not a neighbor to be loved. The 1926 speakers demanded total exclusion. Patriot Front warns of annihilation.

“The same population that has been imported to supersede the nation will then be enslaved upon our ashes.”

Whether in white robes and hoods or white masks and khakis, the same fear masquerades as patriotism.

There is one apparent difference.

The Klan of 1926 marched to “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and wanted the Bible in every classroom.

Patriot Front does not explicitly mention religion.

Their creed seems to run on blood, not the Bible.

But do not mistake that for distance. The Klan draped white supremacy in Christianity. Patriot Front pulls off the robe and the religion and parrots the same principle: America is a white nation, and everyone else is here on borrowed time.

This is why “ideological descendants” is not a figure of speech. The Ku Klux Klan and the Patriot Front are in the same family tree.

White supremacy is the root. The Klan is an older branch. Patriot Front is a newer offshoot.

The Real Danger

But Patriot Front itself is not the real danger.

The primary peril is that their claims—that democracy has failed and immigrants are invading the country—have become increasingly mainstream and operationalized.

While the march itself was small, just a few hundred people, nearly an entire political party and the group occupying White House are willing to create policies to enact the Patriot Front ideology.

The march is the symptom of a much deeper disease.

Racist, xenophobic policies are the infection, and it is coursing through the bloodstream of the American government.

Name the similarities between today’s white nationalists, like Patriot Front, and the Ku Klux Klan.

Unmask their hatred and let public shame send them scurrying back to the edges of government and society.

How did you first learn that the Klan was once celebrated and mainstream, not hidden in the shadows? How did that change the way you read today’s headlines?

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Anniversaries are never just celebrations. They are arguments about the past and identity.

They tell us who we were, who we are, and who we must become.

As the United States marks its 250th year, white Christian nationalists are ready with their argument about the past: that America was founded as a Christian nation.

This week’s episode of The Justice Briefing, part two of my America 250 series, makes the case for a truer story, and for the tool the church needs to tell it: a theology of history.

Every Christian already has a theology of history. The only question is whether it is faithful or corrupt.

The white Christian nationalist version is corrupt. It does not simply say Christianity influenced the nation, which is true.

It insists:

• the framers wanted a Christian government;

• that America holds a covenant with God like ancient Israel;

• that Christianity deserves privileged legal standing, and

• that “real” Americans are Christian.

White Christian nationalism is a restoration narrative built on fear and grievance.

It claims that our best days are behind us, so we must turn around and go backward to make America great again.

I call that regression.

I am interested in progression, in the conviction that our best days can still be ahead of us.

Why America 250 Requires a Theology of History

So why does the church need a theology of history at all?

Because the Bible is a history book. Because God repeatedly commands his people to remember, from Deuteronomy 8 to Psalm 77 to the Lord’s Supper itself.

Because the command to remember is protective. When the people of God forget the past, that is when idolatry and injustice creep in.

And because history is about identity. Whoever holds the power to tell the story holds the power to shape who we become.

The church has largely abdicated this work. We teach personal piety and skip U.S. history.

But nature abhors a vacuum. If we get all our history from ninety-second videos and Instagram carousels, we are living on potato chips: quick hits of salt and crunch with nothing substantive underneath.

Doing history well is not abstract. It is a practice. So I get practical in this episode.

I apply the ARC—Awareness-Relationships-Committment—of Racial Justice from How to Fight Racism to the theology of history.

In the end, the Fourth of July is what we the people make it.

It can be a time of mythologizing and propagandizing about the past, or an opportunity to move forward toward a more perfect union.

That is a story worth telling truthfully.

Stay informed. Stay faithful. Stay in the fight.

In This Episode

• Anniversaries as arguments about the past and how they shape national identity

• What white Christian nationalists actually mean by “Christian nation”

• The restoration narrative of regression versus a vision of progression

• The biblical case for a theology of history: Deuteronomy 8, Psalm 77:11, and Luke 22:19

• The dangers of forgetting, and why memory functions as a guardrail

• History and identity: how the power to tell the story is the power to shape who we become

• The church’s abdication of history and the “potato chips” problem of getting your history from social media

• Applying the ARC of Racial Justice (Awareness, Relationships, Commitment) to doing history well

Where do you currently get most of your U.S. history? What would it look like to add U.S. history as part of discipleship in the church?

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In 1976, President Gerald R. Ford was the first president to officially recognize Black History Month in a written statement. He did this to commemorate the nation’s 200th anniversary.

Fifty years later, President Donald J. Trump is whitewashing Black history in an attempt to Make America Great Again.

Two Republican presidents, two anniversaries, and two very different approaches to Black history with ramifications for the entire nation.

A Tale of Two Presidential Statements

Fifty years apart, both Ford and Trump issued statements in February, Black History Month.

Comparing these documents side-by-side reveals how different approaches to history shape or misshape our national identity.

The United States celebrated its bicentennial in 1976. Throughout the year, people looked back on 200 years and raised questions about whose stories were told and whose were left out.

Minding the Gap Between Promise and Practice

In his statement about Black History Month, Ford named Carter G. Woodson and his organization the Association for the Study of African American Life and History by name and credited them with highlighting Black history.

For also admitted the gap between the nation’s promise and practice.

“Freedom and the recognition of individual rights are what our Revolution was all about. They were ideals that inspired our fight for independence: ideals that we have been striving to live up to ever since. Yet it took many years before these ideals became a reality for [B]lack citizens.”

In response, explained Ford, the bicentennial anniversary offered an opportunity “to honor the too often neglected accomplishments of [B]lack Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

Therefore, he encouraged everyone in the country to “pay tribute to Black History Month and to the message of courage and perseverance it brings to all of us.”

Whatever his other policy decisions. Gerald Ford used the nation’s 200th anniversary to make the first presidential statement urging Americans to observe Black history for an entire month.

He understood this seminal anniversary as a call to revisit the nation’s past not to suppress the truth but to expand the story.

Rewriting a Mythical Past

Donald Trump is using the nation’s 250th anniversary as a weapon against remembering.

Instead of including more stories of the people and groups responsible for the country’s progress, he and his administration are rewriting the past to serve a nationalistic ideology.

For the Trump Administration, the United States’ anniversary does not prompt questions of “whose voices have been left out” but “how do we go backward to recover America greatness?”

While Ford’s message does not target any group for attack, Trump’s does.

Trump’s proclamation specifically names "the progressive movement and far-left politicians" who "needlessly divide."

His Black History Month statement positions the very people who fought for Black history as enemies of it.

Then Trump’s proclamation makes audacious and incomplete claim.

He lifts up American principles of liberty, equality, and justice as the forces that

“wrested the Western Hemisphere from monarchies and empires, ended slavery, saved Europe, put a man on the moon, and built the freest, most just, and most prosperous society ever known to mankind.”

While Ford admitted these principles took a century to reach Black citizens, Trump claims the ideals did the liberating, and erases the people who risked their lives and safety to force the nation to keep its word.

The statement goes on to list a who’s-who of Black American history-makers—Lemuel Haynes, Phylis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Muhammad Ali, Coretta Scott King, and more.

These historical figures are dissenters, protesters, and radicals.

But he also throws in Thomas Sowell, the conservative economist and favorite Black scholar of the Right.

This administration wants to claim Black freedom fighters as icons while leaving out their indictment of the American endeavor.

The Actions Beyond the Rhetoric

The differences between Ford’s statement and Trump’s statement about Black history on two of the nation’s most significant anniversaries are not merely rhetorical.

Ford’s words were part a posture that, however imperfect, moved toward inclusion. Trump’s words coexist with a concerted campaign to dismantle the very Black history he claims to celebrate.

In the Executive Order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” Trump directed personnel to “remove improper ideology” from Smithsonian museums and “prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values [and] divide Americans based on race.”

A judge later ordered that exhibits removed under the Executive Order had to be replaced.

The judge explained, “this Administration seeks to share a limited history by ordering the removal of all signs, displays, and interpretive exhibits at National Parks that do not align with its preferred narrative, thereby telling half-truths.” And that their actions set “a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization.”

The Trump administration has targeted the National Museum of African American History and Culture. A news report found that at least 32 artifacts had been removed from display, among them Harriet Tubman’s hymn book and a copy of the “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.”

Trump cited Tubman and Douglass in his Black History Month statement. Now he’s whitewashing the history they made.

The nation’s 250th anniversary has also seen officials at the highest levels replacing scholarship with propaganda. For example, the White House has partnered with PragerU, a right-wing content mill no actual historian would credit, to create displays telling the history of supposed American greatness.

Refuse the Myth

Each of these Black History Month statements reveals what a nation is willing to remember, and therefore what it is willing to become.

On the 200th anniversary, Ford said, remember well by including more voices. On the 250th anniversary, Trump is saying, remember the myth of a nation we invent.

This is the white Christian nationalist war on history, and the 250th is the theater of battle.

Whoever controls the story controls the identity, and whoever controls the identity controls the future.

Refuse the myth. Remember rightly. Tell the truth.

The article ends with a charge: remember rightly, tell the truth. What is one concrete way you can do that this year, in your family, your congregation, or your classroom?

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The following is an adaptation from a teach-in I do on “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

Frederick Douglass’s 1852 address is remembered for its fire.

Rochester’s Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society had invited him to speak, and he did not spare them from the truth.

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity.”

He went on to call the nation’s religious parade “mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy.”

He said America, measured against every despotism and every abuse he could find on earth, “reigns without a rival” in barbarity.

These lines get quoted every summer, and they should be.

But when you study the primary source, notice a move earlier in the speech that makes sets up his audience for his indictment.

Today this section is rarely discussed because many are more interested in soundbites than complete thoughts.

The trick inside Douglass's Fourth of July speech was praise. He honored the framers first so his audience would not see the accusation that followed.

Before Douglass condemns the nation, he praises its framers.

“Fellow citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too, great enough to give fame to a great age.”

He goes further still.

“They were statesmen, patriots, and heroes, and for the good they did and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.”

Read on its own, and this sounds like generosity. And it sounds discordant.

How could a man born into slavery, find grace to honor its architects?

Douglass was too precise a thinker and too skilled an orator to hand his audience unearned praise for nothing in return.

He was building a trap, and he tells you he built it if you keep reading.

“They believed in order, but not the order of tyranny. With them, justice, liberty, and humanity were final, not slavery and oppression.”

Notice the setup.

Douglass is taking the men his audience already reveres and attaching their reverence to a claim: that these framers, in the end, stood for liberty and not bondage.

He gets his listeners nodding along, and then he springs a rhetorical trap on them.

“You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation. Their solid manhood stands out the more, as we contrast it with these degenerate times.”

And now it begins to dawn on his audience.

It’s as if they’re thinking now, “Wait a minute. Is he talking about us?”

That is the turn.

He has spent several sentences building up the framers so he can use their stature as a standard, and by that standard, the nation holding this celebration falls short.

He knows his audience admires these men. So he demands they take that admiration seriously enough to notice how far their country has fallen from the ideals the framers espoused.

Before Douglass gets to his righteous anger, he brings his audience along in a show of flattery for the framers.

Douglass knew that denunciation alone rarely moves an audience already inclined to defend itself. So he built agreement first, then let that agreement do the accusing.

I unpack this moment, along with the fuller arc of the speech, the Constitution debate baked into Douglass’s argument, and what he does next once the trap has closed, in this teach-in from a couple years back.

If you want to understand not just what Douglass said but how he built the case, listen today.

Listen to the Teach-In

Think of someone in your life who resists conversations about racial justice. What do they already admire or believe that you could use as a starting point, the way Douglass used the founders?

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Join me, Diana Butler Bass, Kristin du Mez, and Robby Jones for a special live Fourth of July episode of The Convocation Unscripted.

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The Convocation Unscripted

A collaborative Substack magazine and podcast featuring writing on faith, culture, and politics from award-winning authors Diana Butler Bass, Kristin Du Mez, Robert P. Jones, and Jemar Tisby.

By Robert P. Jones

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As we approach the annual Fourth of July celebration and the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we should reflect on James Baldwin’s words about patriotism.

“I love America more than any other country in the world, and, for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

Baldwin shows that true love tells the truth. Love for one’s country—patriotism—is proven by the willingness to be honest about it.

Baldwin’s Autobiographical Note

For years, I had only heard this single quote, though I knew it was part of a larger written work.

But I had to look up even what book it came from—Notes of a Native Son.

I thought it was part of an essay, but it comes from the author’s introduction of himself in a section called “Autobiographical Notes.”

The sentence is not even the subject of a full paragraph, let alone a full section.

It comes amid a laundry list of items Baldwin loves—to eat, to drink, to laugh, and to “argue with people who don’t disagree with me too profoundly.” And it’s part of a list of things he hates—bohemians, people who are too earnest, and people who make pleasure their life’s mission.

Baldwin also doesn’t like “people who like me because I’m a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt.”

Then Baldwin inserts his famous words about criticizing the country out of love for it.

For such a profound statement, it feels tossed like a sock without its mate into a laundry basket of unfolded clothes. It is merely one more autobiographical detail among an assortment of likes and dislikes.

But, taken with the rest of the introduction, his famous words are tied to an analysis of history and identity that sharpens the sentence’s impact.

Neither European Nor African

As a writer, James Baldwin felt compelled to write about “social affairs”—namely, what to do about the “Negro problem.”

He said he had to write about being Black in America because “it was the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else.”

In examining his social location, Baldwin realized he was neither European nor African, and that he could not fully claim either land or culture.

Being embedded in the United States, with its white-centered norms and claims to racial superiority, Baldwin had been taught to hate and fear white people while also learning to despise Black people for not being white.

“In effect, I hated and feared the world.”

He had to work through these feelings in order to write authentically about his experience.

Looking Back to Go Forward

Part of what led to Baldwin’s literary liberation was his emphasis on learning history.

In the context of the Negro problem, neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.

For Baldwin, historical knowledge meant freedom and progress.

Only by taking a critical lens to the past can a person be freed from its guilt, shame, and confusion. Only when unshackled from what lies behind can one look at the present with clarity and the future with a constructive vision.

Baldwin’s emphasis on studying history helps explain why he is adamant about criticizing America.

Baldwin does not point out the racism, hypocrisy, and unfulfilled promises of the United States out of hate or bitterness. He highlights the nation’s failings because only by facing them without illusion can we learn from and transcend them.

Bearing Responsibility for America

James Baldwin insists on his right to perpetually criticize the United States, a nation he loves, because he feels some responsibility for it.

He believes that love comes with the duty to care, and care often means understanding harmful patterns and ensuring they don’t continue.

This is true both on a personal level and a national scale.

I don’t think the Negro problem in America can even be discussed coherently without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country; in short, the general social fabric. Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects, and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it.

Baldwin explained that we cannot accurately diagnose the ills that afflict America without understanding the circumstances that brought them about.

We have to study the nation’s social fabric—woven with threads of history, culture, values, and beliefs—if we are ever to change for the better.

Criticize the Nation Perpetually

In the context of Baldwin’s words about identity and history, his insistence on criticizing America becomes undeniably sincere.

For a writer of Baldwin’s incisiveness, unconditional candor was required.

He turned a magnifying glass on his own soul, and he turned it toward the country of his birth.

He scrutinized the past to understand it and free himself from the fear of it.

In the process, he learned to speak truly about himself and his homeland.

James Baldwin shows us that critique of nation is not hatred of nation; it is a form of love for nation.

In the final line of his autobiographical notes, Baldwin states his deepest desire.

“I want to be an honest man and a good writer.”

As we look to the Fourth of July and America 250, we should aspire to something similar: to be honest about our nation’s history and to be good neighbors in light of it.

Reflect on Baldwin’s words. What does loving your nation look like for you?

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Join me, Diana Butler Bass, Kristin du Mez, and Robby Jones for a special live Fourth of July episode of The Convocation Unscripted.

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The Convocation Unscripted

A collaborative Substack magazine and podcast featuring writing on faith, culture, and politics from award-winning authors Diana Butler Bass, Kristin Du Mez, Robert P. Jones, and Jemar Tisby.

By Robert P. Jones

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It is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and one message keeps showing up everywhere this anniversary year: the United States was founded as a Christian nation.

But was it, though?

The honest answer is not a flat yes or no.

It depends on what you mean.

If you mean that Christians and their ethics shaped this country, then yes. For most of American history, most people have identified as Christian, and a majority always leaves its mark on a nation.

Saying so is not an endorsement of the faith. It is simply a statement of fact.

But that is almost never what people mean when they wave that banner.

If you mean that the framers set up an official, government-backed church, then no, and they rejected that on purpose.

I walk through the primary source documents in this episode because history keeps the receipts: Article VI of the Constitution. The First Amendment .The 1797 Treaty of Tripoli.

The colonists knew from experience the harm a state church could do.

In 1534, King Henry VIII made himself the supreme head of the Church of England, and the repression that followed over the centuries jailed people for preaching without a license and pushed whole religious communities to colonies on a different continent.

The framers did not want to build the very structure so many colonists were running from.

But…

Saying America was not founded as a Christian nation does not mean faith has no place in politics.

Separating church and state is one matter. Separating faith from politics is another—one that I don’t believe is either possible or even necessarily desirable.

Everyone votes from an ethical framework, including the atheist and the secular humanist.

And if you’re thinking that any mix of faith and politics is always bad for democracy, then I encourage you to study the Black Christian tradition.

This week reminds us to learn the history so we can respond to the assertion that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.

But this is just part one.

In part two, we talk about what a faithful response looks like, Dr. King’s vision of the church as the conscience of the state, and concrete steps you can take.

Telling the truth about a nation is not an attack on it. It is one of the deepest ways to love it.

Watch or listen to the full episode, then send it to one person who needs to hear it.

In This Episode

• Why “define your terms” is the first move in answering the Christian nation question

• The sense in which the claim is true and the sense in which it is false

• History has the receipts: Article VI, the First Amendment, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and the Treaty of Tripoli

• Henry VIII, the Act of Supremacy, and why colonists fled state religion

• The difference between the separation of church and state and the separation of faith and politics

• The Enlightenment roots of the Declaration

• What white Christian nationalists actually mean, and why the slogan works as a permission structure for power

When you hear “America was founded as a Christian nation,” what do you think the speaker usually means? How would you ask them to define the term before you answer?

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This year, the country turns 250. We’ll hear about the founding documents—the Declaration, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights.

We’ll hear almost nothing about the other one.

On March 11, 1861, in Montgomery, Alabama, seven slaveholding states signed into being the Constitution of the Confederate States of America.

They copied most of it word-for-word from the U.S. Constitution.

Then they changed a few parts, and the changes tell you what kind of nation a certain group of white Christians wanted.

I read the whole document. Three changes stand out.

They put God in the Constitution. They explicitly named slavery to protect it forever. And they built a strong central government while claiming to fight for states’ rights.

Writing God into the Constitution

The Constitution of the United States never mentions God. That was a deliberate decision by the framers of the document.

They did not want an official religion enshrined by the State.

The Confederates noticed the absence, so they added God to the very first sentence of their constitution.

“We, the people of the Confederate States, each State acting in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form a permanent federal government, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Confederate States of America.”

The first sentence is almost word-for-word from the U.S. Constitution, but at the end it adds: “invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God.”

The men who built a nation to protect slavery wanted God’s blessing as they did so. And they wanted it on record.

The same government that reduced human beings to property prayed for the Almighty’s blessing in its opening line.

The cruelty is not the only point. It’s cruelty in the name of piety.

Yet they did keep a ban on an official state church. In Article I, the CSA constitution states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

They wanted God’s name above the nation without tying themselves to any particular church or creed.

White Christian nationalists are repeating the pattern today.

They claim God as a national symbol, wrap the cross in the U.S. flag, invoke God’s blessing on their power plays, all while ignoring the actual teachings of Jesus.

Naming, Protecting, and Expanding Slavery

The U.S. Constitution never uses the words “slave” or “slavery.” Knowing how contentious the practice was, it used a euphemism: “persons held to service.”

It still protected slavery through several provisions but avoided using the word itself.

The Confederates did away with the coded language and made it plain.

They said it, over and over again. Ten different times.

“Slaves.” “Negro slaves.” “The institution of negro slavery.”

First, they ensured that slavery would be the law of the land and that no other law would overrule it.

“No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.”

No future Congress could touch it. The right to own a human being was fixed in the Constitution itself.

A Confederate legislature could not have abolished slavery even if it had wanted to.

Next, they made sure slavery could spread. Every new territory the Confederacy might acquire was required to keep it:

“In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them...”

Wherever the Confederate flag flew, slavery would exist in its shadow.

Lastly, they made sure that escape from slavery was impossible.

A slaveholder could carry human “property” into any Confederate state and retain his claim to property in people.

“No slave or other person held to service or labor in any State or Territory of the Confederate States, under the laws thereof, escaping or lawfully carried into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor; but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such slave belongs, or to whom such service or labor may be due.”

The U.S. Constitution had its own “fugitive slave clause”, but it concerned only enslaved people who escaped and crossed into free states.

In the United States, enslaved people always had the possibility, however remote and dangerous, of self-emancipation.

If they escaped from their bondage and crossed into a non-slave state, they could gain their freedom.

Not so in the Confederacy.

The Confederate Constitution added the words “or lawfully carried into another.”

It means a slaveholder who traveled into another Confederate state with enslaved people kept his legal claim.

The U.S. clause was about runaways. The Confederate clause was about that and preventing any state from being a place where slavery could be loosened by mere presence.

Building a Centralized Government

Every time a Confederate apologist opens their mouth, they say the Civil War wasn’t about slavery; it was about “states’ rights.”

In their minds, it’s the idea of protecting local control against federal government overreach. So, in this telling, the Confederacy stood for liberty against centralized power.

Their own constitution contradicts that story.

The preamble starts like a states’ rights argument. It refers to each state “acting in its sovereign and independent character.”

They stripped the central government of many of the powers the old Union had claimed.

Congress could no longer raise tariffs to prop up favored industries: “nor shall any duties or taxes on importations from foreign nations be laid to promote or foster any branch of industry.”

But then the Confederate Constitution takes a turn toward centralized power.

Once slavery is the topic, states’ rights disappear.

When it came to slavery, the central government was forbidden to weaken it, and every new territory was required to protect it.

In an even more telling move, the Confederates kept the supremacy clause—copied almost word for word from the Constitution they had just abandoned:

“This Constitution, and the laws of the Confederate States made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the Confederate States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.”

The supposed champions of state sovereignty wrote federal government supremacy straight into their founding document.

When a state law clashed with the Confederate government, the Confederate government won.

So what was the states’ rights argument really for? To protect slavery.

The people who ranted and raved about states’ rights all but abandoned them when slavery was protected.

The War Still Rages

The Confederates lost the Civil War. Now their constitution sits as a historical artifact of a nation that never was.

But the ideology that animated the Confederate Constitution never went away.

There are still people today who call the nation Christian even as it commits horrific acts of cruelty.

Under this White House and following plans outlined in Project 2025, states’ rights are being steamrolled in the name of authoritarianism and centralization of power.

There is a concerted effort to hide the historical record of the nation’s racism and slavery.

It’s as if today’s white Christian nationalists are working from a replica of the Confederate Constitution.

This is what the 250th anniversary is really about.

The choice the nation has always had between two founding documents and two visions of itself.

The one in Philadelphia in 1787 that left room for a “more perfect union,” and the one in Montgomery in 1861 that tried to freeze a moment in time when liberty was determined by skin color.

The Confederate Constitution was an argument about who counts, who is free, who gets to decide, and how God’s name gets used in those efforts.

That argument never ended—whether on the ballot, in the pulpit, or in the laws being written right now.

In the nation’s 250th year, we have the opportunity to move toward a truer democracy or toward a Confederate vision that buries freedom beneath the bloodied soil of injustice.

Where have you heard the Confederate Constitution's argument being made today—in a sermon, a speech, or a conversation? What did it sound like?

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P.S. I’ll be on a panel hosted by Sojourners talking about America 250. It’s free. All you have to do is register. Read my feature article HERE.

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Two anniversaries fall just weeks apart this summer, and they ask two very different questions.

America 250 asks: how great have we been? Juneteenth asks: how free are we, really?

That second question doesn’t have a comfortable answer.

A Question We Must Answer

How free are we, really, when majority-Black voting districts are being redrawn right now to dilute Black political power?

How free are we, really, when the wealth gap between white and Black families hasn’t closed?

How free are we, really, when Black people remain disproportionately incarcerated, and unarmed Black people are still killed with little accountability?

Juneteenth is a cause for celebration. But it doesn’t stop there. It demands an reckoning.

Two Different Risks

This year, each holiday faces a distinct danger.

America 250 risks becoming a sanitized pageant of “Christian nation” mythology designed to paper over the very history Juneteenth insists we remember.

Juneteenth risks the opposite. Getting hollowed out into just a cookout stripped of its connection to slavery, resistance, and the Black freedom struggle that earned it.

Both failures end with the hard and necessary history erased.

You can’t responsibly celebrate America’s anniversary while erasing the 250 years we spent in bondage before emancipation.

So this year, let Juneteenth set the terms for America 250.

Name the cost, celebrate the real progress, and refuse any version of the story that makes Black freedom a footnote rather than the foundation of U.S. history.

Catch the full replay, where I walk through the complete ten-point comparison.

In This Episode:

• The origins of Juneteenth and General Order No. 3

• Why the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t actually free enslaved people

• How U.S. slavery was uniquely race-based, matrilineal, and perpetual

• The White House’s “Freedom 250” initiative and PragerU’s Freedom Trucks

• A 10-point comparison of Juneteenth and America 250

• How white and Black Americans might commemorate Juneteenth differently

How are you celebrating Juneteenth? How does that differ from what you plan to do on the Fourth of July?

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P.S. I’ll be on a panel hosted by Sojourners talking about America 250. It’s free. All you have to do is register. Read my feature article HERE.

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Juneteenth and the Fourth of July.

These events have always stood in relation and in tension.

Juneteenth represents emancipation from race-based chattel slavery.

The Fourth of July is supposed to represent liberty, but it occurred in the context of genocide, land theft, and slavery.

This year, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the contrast between Juneteenth and the Fourth of July couldn’t be starker.

Juneteenth represents liberation and America 250 under this regime represents bondage to a whitewashed past.

Under the Trump White House, America 250 (rebranded as Freedom 250) is as gaudy and tasteless as the golden gilding he slaps on every surface.

It’s in the “Freedom Trucks” rolling across the nation with a truncated history. It’s in the “Founders Museum” in the Eisenhower Building presenting AI-Generated talking heads of historic figures. It’s in UFC 250—a bloody spectacle of violence on the South Lawn.

The White House’s message on America 250 is as simple as it is wrong:

The United States was once great. We lost it because of “un-American” influences such as immigrants and liberals. It’s time to go back to that era of greatness.

Then there is Juneteenth.

On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, and read General Order No. 3 to enslaved Black people who had not yet heard what the rest of the country already knew—that the Civil War was over and their enslavement had ended.

Black people took all the energy they had spent surviving bondage and turned it toward celebrating the freedom that had finally, albeit partially, come.

The Juneteenth Difference

Juneteenth tells a different story. Not an anti-American story. Instead, it’s the most honest story we can share.

Frederick Douglass understood this in 1852 when he asked, “What, to the slave, is your Fourth of July?”

He was not rejecting America. He was demanding that the country tell the truth about itself.

For generations of Black people in the United States, freedom has been declared…and then denied.

But the story doesn’t end in defeat.

Black people and their allies constantly struggled for their freedom.

Forward progress. White backlash. Regrouping. Re-organizing. Then more resistance.

Black people are always striving to bridge the gap between the promise and the reality of freedom.

That’s what Juneteenth represents—the constant struggle to make the aspirational actual. To move toward a “more perfect union.”

So this Juneteenth, I want to put the two stories next to each other.

What follows is a side-by-side comparison of what America 250 and Juneteenth each say about freedom, history, and what this anniversary truly represents.

America 250 vs. Juneteenth

When you think about Juneteenth and the Fourth of July, do you celebrate one, both, or neither? What shapes that decision for you?

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Here are some facts about me and the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) I bet you didn’t know:

1. I was baptized in an SBC church at the age of 8-years old.

2. Al Mohler took me and a group of seminary administrators on a tour of his house in Louisville.

3. I briefly enrolled in a PhD program at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (where Mohler is president).

All true. And all relevant to this episode of The Justice Briefing.

The Southern Baptist Convention just voted—by 77 percent—to amend its constitution to ban women from preaching to assembled congregations.

Al Mohler, who introduced the amendment, called it a “definitional issue.”

But they already had this rule on the books. So what’s really going on here?

What this amendment actually signals is a further rightward turn of the the SBC and its deeper entrenchment in a social hierarchy that includes not only gender but race.

And they call it all “biblical.

Rooted in Hierarchy

This amendment, and the SBC as a whole was never only about gender. It was never only about women in pulpits.

It was about something older, deeper, and far more revealing: a theology that has always needed a hierarchy, and has always placed someone at the bottom of it.

Racism and patriarchy share the same root. This is not speculation. This is history.

The evidence goes back to 1844 and a man named James Reeve. The Georgia Baptist Convention put Reeve forward as a missionary candidate knowing full well he was an enslaver.

The nomination was a setup—a deliberate provocation designed to force the national body to take declare its official stance on slavery.

When the home mission board refused to approve an enslaver for missionary service, Southern Baptists split off and the Southern Baptist Convention was born.

The SBC did not form to protect slavery in the abstract, but to protect the "right” of a missionary to preach a gospel that sets you free while enslaving other human beings.

Racism and patriarchy share the same root because leaders of the SBC have consistently insisted that the Bible sanctions hierarchy and that God ordains who is above and who is below.

The same household codes used to argue that enslaved people must submit to masters were used to argue that wives must submit to husbands.

The same biblical architecture that sanctified racial subordination now sanctifies gender subordination.

They go to the same exact Bible passages, and in every hierarchy they construct, white men somehow end up at the top.

There is also the matter of the sexual abuse scandal, where credibly accused men were shielded by the institution while survivors were called adulteresses and agents of Satan.

And there is the election of Willy Rice as SBC president, a man who has dismissed the denomination’s sexual abuse crisis as more hot air than reality and who ran explicitly on the fear that the SBC had gone too woke.

Both the amendment and the election are not anomalies. They are the denomination operating exactly as designed.

In This Episode...

• The Truth and Unity Amendment, what it says, and why Al Mohler pushed for it even though the restriction on women pastors was already denominational policy

• The case of James Reeve—the 1844 missionary nomination that was a deliberate pro-slavery provocation and led directly to the founding of the SBC

• How the biblical defense of racial hierarchy and the biblical defense of gender hierarchy draw from the same New Testament household codes

• The “purity of white womanhood” trope—how white women were simultaneously subordinated to white men and weaponized against Black people

• Saddleback Church, Beth Moore, and the enforcement mechanisms the SBC already had in place before this amendment

• The parallel between the SBC’s centralizing of authority and unitary executive theory in the Trump administration

• The election of Willie Rice as SBC president and what it signals about the denomination’s further rightward turn

• Why you cannot address patriarchy in the SBC without also addressing its racism and why the denomination is case in point

What does it tell us about a theological tradition when its interpretive framework consistently places the same group of people—white men—at the top of every hierarchy it constructs?

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I’m teaching during a 3-hour workshop with the Iliff School of Theology Values and Public Voice learning lab.

Part 1 — Understand it deeply. New York Times bestselling author and historian Dr. Jemar Tisby leads an expert session unpacking the roots and rise of White Christian Nationalism — and the counterstrategies that work.

Part 2 — Speak up effectively. Practice persuasive communication in breakout sessions, so you can confidently advance an inclusive, democratic vision in your own community.

Grab Your Spot!

Visitors to the exhibit—part of the White House’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding—scan QR codes to watch AI-generated videos of these figures come to life.

But the history this gallery presents is carefully curated and conveniently cleansed.

Take Thomas Jefferson.

His talking portrait makes no mention of the hundreds of people he enslaved, including Sally Hemmings, whom he forced to bear multiple of his children.

Instead, the animated Jefferson praises the “empire of liberty” created by the Louisiana Purchase—ignoring the First Nations already living there and the forced removals that followed.

John Adams repeats the anachronistic quip much beloved by today’s Far Right: “Facts do not care about our feelings.” Benjamin Franklin fails to mention that he had once been an enslaver but by the 1780s had become a vocal abolitionist.

None of the signers mention that they cut a section where Jefferson lambasted King George for “captivating and carrying [Africans] into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”

History weeps.

The exhibit is part of a White House partnership with Prager University. Despite the word “university” in its name, PragerU is “proudly not an accredited university.”

Instead, it’s a nonprofit media group whose mission is “Pro-American, Pro-Capitalism, and Pro-Family Values.”

Its extensive content typically promotes a conservative, often Christian nationalist worldview, including videos such as “Healthcare Is Not a Right,” “Free Enterprise Will Set You Free,” and “Why You Can’t Trust Mainstream Media.”

This is neither history according to the standards of academic discipline nor accurate truth-telling.

Trained historians test claims against evidence, debate in good faith, contextualize primary sources they find in archives, and subject all their work to peer review. Professional historians are comfortable with complexity and resist the temptation to turn the past into a tidy moral fable.

By contrast, nationalistic storytelling often elevates confident nonspecialists—figures such as Dennis Prager, a radio personality—whose authority rests on persuasion and savvy use of multimedia rather than structured method.

When expertise is sidelined in favor of agenda, the result is ideology wrapped in red, white, and blue. And it’s now being given the imprimatur of the presidency.

Jesus taught his followers that the truth will set us free.

However sobering or painful, truth liberates, enabling us to see reality as it is and to make faithful choices in the pursuit of loving God and neighbor.

By contrast, lies, myths, and selective histories lead to a kind of bondage, trapping us in ignorance or comforting illusions.

For Christians, this is not a minor concern: We believe the good news of the gospel is strong enough to confront even the hardest truths.

Truth frees us to move forward and make repair; false history is rooted in fear—the fear of reality, of accountability, and of reckoning with what it takes to heal.

Throughout U.S. history, Christians have too often opted to sanctify the nation’s myths instead of telling the truth.

But as we approach the 250th anniversary of this nation’s founding documents, we have another option.

Neither master nor servant

WHEN I THINK about the role of the church in relation to the state, I go back to Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermon “A Knock at Midnight,” in which he said,

“The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool.” King continued, “If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club with no moral or spiritual authority.”

I was very pleased to write this article as the cover story for a special edition of Sojourners Magazine dedicated to America 250.

Continue reading the article HERE.

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The Supreme Court ruling gutted the Voting Rights Act.

That was last month, and I told you what would happen.

I told you that it would lead to the rapid reduction in Black political power.

And now that’s exactly what is happening.

The same Supreme Court that gutted the Voting Rights Act is now enforcing unfairness.

They just issued a ruling that allows Alabama to wipe out one of its only two majority Black congressional districts.

Do you care about Black voting rights?

Do you care about the midterms?

If not, I’ll tell you this, they start by stripping rights away from Black people, then they come for everyone else.

And this is all a bid to rig the midterm elections in their favor.

What Happened in Alabama

Three years ago, a three-judge federal panel ruled that Alabama’s congressional maps were intentionally designed to dilute Black voting power and ordered the state to draw new ones.

Alabama is 27% Black, and the court said the state needed at least two districts where Black voters could elect the candidate of their choice.

New maps were drawn. And in the 2024 elections, those fairer maps sent two Black Democrats to Congress.

But after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, Republicans in Alabama sprang into action to roll it all back.

They tried to toss out the 2024 maps and return to the ones a federal court had already ruled were intentionally racially discriminatory.

That same three-judge panel blocked them, writing that they could not require Alabamians to vote under “a districting plan tainted by intentional race-based discrimination.”

Alabama Republicans immediately appealed, and the Supreme Court sided with them, ruling that keeping maps already in place for two years and already used in a major election would be too disruptive too close to an election.

Six hundred thousand voters. Two years of precedent. And the Court called the fairer maps the problem.

Justice Sotomayor said what needed to be said: “Just as Alabama doubled down on racial discrimination, the Court today doubles down on chaos.”

The stakes extend well beyond Alabama, with Republican-led states now rushing to redraw maps that could hand the GOP as many as 15 additional House seats before the midterms.

This is how you rig the midterm elections.

Republicans can’t win on policy alone, so they tilt the system in their favor. And the majority on the Supreme Court is helping them.

Where Will You Stand in the Civil Rights Movement of Our Day?

From the courtroom to the boardroom, the message of this episode is the same: Silence is a choice, and every institution—whether it wears a robe or a suit—will be remembered for what it did in this moment.

Alabama defied a Supreme Court order, drew a discriminatory map, and got rewarded for it.

Corporations signed their names to voting rights commitments in 2021 and are now being asked to prove they meant it.

And Black voters—who have paid for the right to vote with poll taxes, literacy tests, and blood—are watching all of it.

The arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend toward justice by itself.

Voting rights and civil rights don’t happen by themselves.

They must be fought for and protected.

Will you be part of the civil rights movement of our day or be one of the moderates who prefers a “negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice?”

Do you think churches are doing enough to advocate for voting rights in this moment? How can congregations and denominations take action?

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The summer cohort of The Justice Journey: A Biblical Guide to Making Wrong Things Right is underway. You have just one more chance this year to join. Sign up for the waitlist for the fall cohort.

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Join me and the Methodists!

Dive into a real talk session breaking down and challenging the rise of White Christian Nationalism together.

This two-part Learning Lab (Zoom only) moves from deep analysis to direct action, empowering participants to address misinformation and articulate the values of a just and equitable society.

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“Life is a gimmick, if you think about it, right? But it’s a good gimmick.”

This is Trump talking about the UFC fight he ordered held on the South Lawn of the White House grounds.

But it’s actually more revealing, isn’t it?

That one sentence gives away his entire outlook on life, business, and politics.

To him...it’s all a gimmick.

A Cage Goes Up at the White House

On a Tuesday in late May, construction crews arrived on the South Lawn of the White House and got to work.

By Flag Day—June 14th, which also happens to be Donald Trump’s 80th birthday, which also happens to fall inside America’s 250th anniversary celebration—a temporary octagon will stand where presidents have held Easter egg rolls and state arrival ceremonies.

The structure is for a UFC cage fight. The White House calls it historic. The president calls it a gimmick, and he means it with pride.

How he describes UFC Freedom 250 and the physical presence of an octagon for the occasion speaks volumes about who this administration thinks it is and who they think we are.

The Frat Boy Fantasy of Masculinity

The issue is not hosting a sporting event, it’s the one they chose and what it says.

If the White House wanted to host a sporting event commemorating the nation’s 250th anniversary, they could have chosen “America’s Pastime”—baseball.

And they could have held it at a stadium dedicated to the purpose, not spent tens of millions constructing a temporary arena that may leave scars on the landscape for a long time to come.

Instead they chose cage fighting, the most visceral expression of violence for sport.

What does it mean to normalize blood sport at that address?

Whatever your personal opinion of MMA as a sport, this is a deliberate choice about what power looks like, what celebration looks like, and what America is supposed to mean.

Yet it’s not a departure from this regime’s ethos; it’s right in line with their performance of masculinity.

Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth proudly goes shirtless and has videos of himself doing PT with the troops. Not as encouragement for everyone to take their physical health seriously but as a demonstration of what a “real man” looks like and does.

Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has videos of himself doing pull ups and wrangling snakes with his bare hands.

Hegseth has also argued against women serving in combat roles in the military and said he would make physical fitness standards adhere to the “highest male standard only.”

“If women can make it, excellent. If not, it is what it is,” he said. “It will also mean that weak men won’t qualify — because we’re not playing games. This is combat. This is life or death.”

The cage fight along with the overall stance of administration officials conveys the most adolescent form of manhood. It’s an image taken from the testosterone fueled fever dreams of college frat boys posturing as Grade A prime beefcake men.

The Soldier as Prop Not Service Member

The immature vision of masculinity has implications beyond the UFC Freedom 250 event.

The Defense Department issued a memo to troops that explicitly communicated the aesthetic it wanted to project.

They wanted junior enlisted and junior officers—not generals, not just distinguished visitors—but the everyday troops. And they had to come in dress uniform, short sleeves only.

Your physical body literally had to fit the bill.

The memo stated, "MUST MEET CURRENT WAIST-HEIGHT RATIO and current physical fitness standard."

In addition, these troops—from the lowest-paid ranks—have to pay for their own travel and accommodations.

Nevermind the fact that the UFC organization is spending $30 million on the event and neither it nor the Pentagon sees fit to cover a plane ticket.

This is what it looks like when the military is not being honored. This is what it looks like when it’s being used as a prop in a spectacle.

What They Don’t Want You to Watch

While fighters are battling it out in the ring before a crowd of well-muscled soldiers, the administration hopes the American people will keep their eyes off of the political and cultural backdrop.

The UFC fight takes place a self-initiated war with Iran is wreaking havoc across the region and driving economic instability globally.

While blood splatters the canvas at the fight, state-level redistricting battles are intensifying following the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act. In the nation’s 250th year of its democratic project, voting rights are being punched in the jaw.

Spectacle has always served as a distraction from urgent issues. This UFC event at the White House is no different.

Even Joe Rogan—Trump’s most prominent celebrity endorser and a man whose entire brand is built on UFC enthusiasm—called it “kind of a gimmick,” a “security nightmare,” said it was “odd” to hold a world championship fight outside.

“You wouldn’t ask them to play a world championship basketball game outside in the sun.”

Trump’s response to Rogan’s critique was to agree, and then reframe gimmick as virtue.

A ‘Good’ Gimmick

The President of the United States said, “Life is a gimmick.”

He said it without a hint of shame or cynicism.

That’s because for Trump, “life is a gimmick” is a philosophy, the governing principle of his public posture from The Apprentice to the presidency.

The White House isn’t the People’s House, it’s a set for the Trump Show.

The military isn’t a service organization to protect the nation and democracy. It’s a department for props, casting, and costumes.

Patriotism isn’t a principle for accountability and the common good. It’s a production.

The danger of governing by gimmick while real people fight real wars, lose real voting rights, and pay real costs is that the facade eventually falls away.

The crowd disperses. The lights turn off. The playbill is discarded and trampled underfoot.

Then you have to create even bigger spectacles to keep people gazing at the gimmick and not at your failures.

Brighter, shinier, gaudier to cover your weaknesses. More garish, more elaborate, more absurd to hide your sense of insignificance.

That’s what this cage fight is—an unfit president’s pitiful attempt at relevance and legacy.

Welcome to Freedom 250, where governing is not serious business with serious consequences. It’s all just a gimmick.

What’s your reaction to a UFC cage fight on the South Lawn? It is communicating deeper truths or not that big a deal?

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I was flabbergasted.

I’ll admit, I hadn’t been following that closely. Apparently, it wasn’t a surprise to those who had been paying attention the last few weeks.

The officials called it long before the night was over.

Ken Paxton won the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in Texas.

As corruption goes, Paxton is a legendary.

Indicted on three felony charges of investment fraud. Reported by his own staff for bribery. Impeached by his own Republican Party for corruption.

Those are just a few of his transgressions.

He hasn’t just displayed low character, but no character.

Now he goes head to head against his ideological opposite, James Talarico.

Talarico is 37 years old, a state legislator, and a seminarian whose is already an accomplished communicator.

You may call me naive.

“Jemar, how could you be surprised? This is the same Republican Party that elected a man indicted on 34 felony counts and whose name appears in the Epstein files more than almost any other.”

Trust me, I know that however low the bar is, it can still get lower.

I’ve studied U.S. history. Written about the worst forms of racism and oppression this country has to offer.

Humans behaving badly is nothing new. Corrupt politicians are regrettably common.

I was not flabbergasted in a historical sense or a political sense.

I was shocked in a moral sense.

Confounded that even with all voters know of Paxton’s malfeasance, they still elected him.

And it wasn’t even close. His opponent, John Cornyn had spent over 20 years in the Senate, but lost in a landslide.

Cornyn had run afoul of Trump for criticizing the insurrection and saying that perhaps Trump didn’t have the votes to win in 2024.

Trump never forgot. And as punishment for disloyalty, he endorsed Ken Paxton.

Now he’s the nominee.

What does that say about the modern GOP? What does it say about the state of our politics?

The election results make it clear.

Republican voters in Texas didn’t overlook Paxton’s character. They endorsed it.

In This Episode of The Justice Briefing

• Why Ken Paxton’s primary victory shocked even seasoned observers of American politics

• The corruption allegations, impeachment, and legal controversies surrounding Paxton

• How loyalty to Donald Trump became more important than character or experience

• Why Paxton’s victory signals a deeper shift within the modern Republican Party

• The contrast between Paxton’s and James Talarico’s competing visions of Christianity

• How white Christian nationalism shapes contemporary political debates

• Why Black Christian political traditions are often overlooked as authentic expressions of faith

• What the Texas Senate race reveals about power, religion, and democracy in America

What's more important in a political leader: integrity, competence, or shared values?

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Host a screening of our first official Tisby Studios production, Jesus Was a Migrant.

Learn more here: jesuswasamigrant.com

My hesitation comes from three main sources:

1. Too many options lead to decision paralysis.

2. Time blindness means I always think there’s more time than there is.

3. I’m constantly searching for absolute certainty and 100 percent sureness.

But real life doesn’t work like that.

Most major decisions have some ambiguity. They have windows of opportunity that close and never reopen in precisely the same way. And there are always a plethora of options from which you must choose based on the information and convictions available to you at the time.

Join the Journey

I’m saying all this because today is your last chance to register for the summer cohort of The Justice Journey.

I don’t want you to miss out and end up regretting it.

We meet weekly on Tuesday evenings from 7:30-9:30pm ET starting June 2.

The heart of the course is the small groups.

Each week you join 4-6 other people to discuss the material we’ve been learning. It’s the same group each week. They quickly become “your people.”

The cost is $300.

We have a limited number of scholarships available.

They are open to all, but people from historically underrepresented groups are especially encouraged to APPLY.

Make the Decision

I can assure you that you will learn, connect, and be encouraged. But you have to take the next step.

Today is the day. Make the decision.

This door is closing…but you still have time if you act right now.

I am decisive!

In this 8-week course we’ll explore these themes:

Session 1: Justice in the Story of God

Session 2: What is Justice?

Session 3: Naming Injustice

Session 4: Small Group Collaboration

Session 5: Truth and Liberation

Session 6: A Legacy of Justice

Session 7: How to Do Justice

Session 8: Gratitude & Sending Ceremony

P.S. If you can’t join this cohort, then consider support the work of Tisby Media which includes the Tisby Justice Academy. The Justice Journey is my signature course. Become a paid subscriber today.

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