From The Desk of Holy Heresy

If you listen closely to the wind blowing through Washington this week, you can hear a sound. Pundits reacting. They are reacting to the same thing, a breathtaking display of situational ethics from FBI Director Kash Patel that threatens to snap the spine of American law enforcement. ​The catalyst was the tragic shooting in Minneapolis of Alex Pretti, a nurse and lawful gun owner, by federal agents. In defending the shooting on Fox News this Sunday, Director Patel laid down a new, absolute standard for American civil unrest: "No one who wants to be peaceful shows up at a protest with a firearm that is loaded with two full magazines! That is not a peaceful protest... You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want." ​On its face, this is a coherent, if strict, law enforcement perspective. But placed against the backdrop of the last five years of MAGA orthodoxy, it reveals a hypocrisy so vast it creates its own weather system. ​Fro...

As a theologian and organizer who has studied history, I offer you these lessons not as distant academic theories, but as survival strategies for the spirit and the streets. You are facing a moment where the ground is shifting, where an authoritarian shadow looms, attempting to reshape reality into something rigid and exclusionary. ​We look to the saints of the past for wisdom, as they often have the wisdom to show us the way. They had to figure out how to be faithful, active, and relevant in a society undergoing radical, often polarizing transformation. They refused to disappear. They refused to be irrelevant. ​Here are four real lessons for us, here and now, on how to organize and keep the faith under a regime that demands our submission. ​1. Reclaim the "Theology of the Way" ​The first temptation under an authoritarian regime is to retreat. It is easy to lock the doors of our sanctuaries (or our homes), protect our own circles, and practice what theologians call a "th...

 I have spent much of my life practicing restraint. I have believed, deeply, in live and let live, in ecumenical humility, in interfaith cooperation that treats difference not as a threat but as a gift. I have broken bread across traditions, prayed alongside people whose theology I do not share, and traveled internationally with mission partners who understand that presence can be holy without being coercive. But there comes a point when silence stops being a virtue and becomes complicity. That line was crossed for me recently in conversations with mission workers connected to the Southern Baptist Convention. What I heard was not zeal tempered by love, nor conviction held with humility. What I heard was contempt dressed up as faith. “These people are Muslim.” “These people are heathens.” “They worship statues.” The language was not descriptive. It was dismissive. It was the language of disposal, as if whole cultures and centuries of spiritual meaning were refuse waiting to be clear...