The "hold your nose and vote for Trump for president, not pastor" to "oh my gosh, the child he trafficked wasn't even that young, stop being such a prude" pipeline turned out to be exactly eight years long. Same with the "God works through imperfect people!" to "if we don't cover up for this Christian rapist, the other Christian rapists will start to get worried" pipeline.
Would you guys really recognize yourselves now? If you told yourself in 2016 what you now believe?

You know, the thing that bums me out the most about the Oklahoma SSI saying there have to be Bibles in classrooms:
The Bible is a religious classic. Having them available for kids to read is a great idea.
But most kids can’t read a KJV. But that’s the one they have to have with the stipulations because it’s the kind Trump can sell because of the public domain.
The instruction is geared around helping one guy cash in on the Bible. Kids actually reading the Bible is an afterthought.

Okay, so here's the thing.
In the historical tradition, and in the global scene, evangelicalism is a diverse movement, and I'm not speaking about the whole field (which continues to shape my theology).
But in American evangelicalism right now, in the way you will primarily see it practiced, there is no such thing as a moral or immoral action.
There are immoral and moral *people* and *groups.* Not behaviors.
The question is never "did this person commit rape" or "did this person cheat." It's "where is that person situated," and that determines whether

I don't know what to do about the appeal of the "easy fake solution" versus the "complicated actual reality" issue in messaging.
Because when I think about the misinformation I've encountered in the last few months ("tariffs mean other countries have to give us money! Getting rid of the DOE means that schools will be better! Deporting immigrants means crime will stop and I'll have lots of money!") the primary thing they all have in common is that it's very pleasant to imagine that paradise is just one small choice away and someone just

You know, I don't think women are more emotional than men.
I think we have more of a problem with a range of women's emotions and we also have a protected class of men who are entitled to tantrums.
We never expected Trump to concede the 2020 election because that was way too hard for such a special boy. We all had to be patient with Biden finally accepting he wasn't in shape to run again.
But it's 1 in the morning and Kamala isn't out there conceding with a smile on her face and everyone's like "wow this is super unacceptable."

Halloween memory:
When I was a little girl, my first year of grade school I had a TON of behavioral issues. Now know it was ADHD but also, I was a little shit.
Second grade rolled around. My teacher was Sherry Hyslop. And Mrs. Hyslop, I thought, hung the moon. She loved the weird homemade outfits my grandma had me in. She thought I was smart. She tested my reading level, she said I was a great reader, sent me home with books (and affirmed everything my mom and dad probably wanted to hear, lol). I went from being the most difficult

I really want to encourage people who think “if enough people don’t vote for Harris because of Gaza and Trump wins, then the DNC will favor Gaza more in their platform” to realize they have not thought about this nearly enough. “Then the next Dem candidate will be pro Gaza!”
Well, that’s nice, I suppose. You might be able to influence the government to pressure Netanyahu harder, in four years, if the cause and effect works the way you want it to (it won’t) and if voting is still a thing.

I'm going to give some free advice for the mid-thirties.
I spent a lot of years feeling like I had to find some deeper reason when people were being really awful or find some way that maybe I wasn't understanding them. "Well, maybe that's how they do things here." "They have valid feelings." "They've been through a lot." "They've got a lot on my plate."
Yeah, that's all true, and your instincts can absolutely be wrongly biased against some people. It happens.
But there are 2 kinds of people I have been right about every single time

One thing I think we don't quite reckon with enough in Christian spaces is the phenomenon of fads.
There are a thousand things I can remember having happened throughout my life that came, became a huge deal, suddenly it was weird and your faith was suspect if you didn't participate, and then suddenly we bury it and we sort of pretend it never happened. Or we all sneer at it later.
Examples:
Wild at Heart
The Passion of the Christ
WWJD bracelets
The Purpose Driven Life (I should note that sometimes the fad manifests as anti-fad-

Sorry, I guess I still have some thoughts on this.
I guess the feeling I just keep having thinking about all those big suburban churches and the moral majority and being not conformed to the pattern of this world is “I got played.”
I defended pro life people *for years* even after I stopped being persuaded by all the talking points. When people said “why do they want to control women so much?” I said “well, imagine if you really thought that hundreds of kids were killed every day in your metro! That’s their lived reality!”
But I got played there too.

So, some thoughts after finishing A Well Trained Wife.
1) I am sure the primary rebuttal to this book is going to be "this isn't what we want, look at all the good hierarchical trad marriages out there!"
And I think that the book contains its own rebuttal to those on two fronts: A. What people say in public is not what they say in private. As Levings notes, in her Covenant Reformed Church men would privately joke about hitting their wives and mutually acknowledge they did that. "Join our church, you can beat your wife into submission here"

We really need to stop playing social services off against private charity in Christian spaces. They aren't the same thing.
"I don't think the government should be feeding people, the church should do that."
Okay, well, the church isn't, and it's not even necessarily any individual church's fault that they aren't. Most churches aren't huge and moneyed and if the majority of churches in your area are already operating at a loss and struggling to make payroll, they're not going to take over housing and education in your area any time soon.

I have a weird pet theory that the proliferation of true crime media means that people think disappearances are way more common than they are and as a result totally underestimate what happens when there's a suspected kidnapping.
I was thinking about this in relation to the Carlee Russell case, which I remember at the time being surprised by and thinking, "Woah, this sounds exactly like the urban legend where someone uses a kid to trick a woman into going to a rural area and then they kidnap her - wild it happened in real life!"

I just can't remember the last time I was this disgusted with Christian content producers.
Ever.
The eagerness to signal you're on the Right Side of an issue, the total lack of regard for facts, the absolute disinterest in the truth, the complete disregard for the reputation of a woman (let alone her safety), the absolute comfort with signaling that you're open to more and more women getting ripped apart publicly for failing to look the way you think they're supposed to-
No concern for truth. No concern for others. No concern for people.

All the moderate, nice, not-one-of-the-crazies Christian men made a real point of dutifully lining up yesterday to say, don’t get it twisted, I’ll still slander Imane Khelif with zero evidence of what I’m saying. Don’t worry, everyone- I’m not too far gone as a man, I still have an appropriate sense that it is my job to police and attack women for not living up to cultural expectations of women.
They’re just smart enough to lamely couch it in respect for women.

Look, I’m just gonna say it.
Every time I’ve met someone who was really contemptuous or judgmental of people who didn’t have kids- eventually it would turn out that person just HATED their own kids.
Never failed. The meaner they were or more snarky about the awful selfish people who don’t have kids, the nastier they’d be about their own kids or to their own kids when the mask slipped.
And it makes sense, right? You don’t like your kids, you regret having them, but you followed the rules and had them and the audacity of people to not dutifully

Okay, so I'm sick of talking about this but:
Boys, gather in. Take a knee.
You ever laugh at your girlfriend for being really into some idealized celebrity like Joanna Gaines or (in my day) Oprah?
You, sir, are not nearly as sophisticated as you think you are with truth in advertising.
Here's a conversation I've watched happen a thousand times today about the Ballerina Farm lady:
Boy: "How DARE you criticize this humble, working class family-"
Someone: "They're billionaires."
Boy: "Oh. Who just wants to live a simple, private life-"

I'm inviting a journalist to put 2 discourses I keep seeing on here in conversation with each other
1) "My mom has never met her grandkids because she's QAnon."
2) "Women need to talk to the Trump-voting women in their lives about voting Kamala."
I think there's a version of a conversation that's worth having about voter outreach among undecided voters or political unengaged people - and among suburban women voters generally, that makes a lot of sense to me as easy pickings for getting out of the vote.
But what I'm continuously baffled by is

I really can't get over the unintentional comedy of staging the Christmas story as shepherds coming to see baby Jesus and immediately recognizing him as a Passover lamb.
Which of course I've heard in about a thousand Christmas programs, and is the big arc of the Christmas special of "The Chosen."
Shepherd keeps bringing blemished lambs for temple. Priest tells him, "don't you come back here until you have an unblemished lamb!"
Angels come, everyone goes and sees Jesus, shepherd leaves after seeing the baby, runs into the priest, priest

I've written about this before but I think a pit we can drive into with women and history is thinking that the opposite of a sexist narrative is one where women don't have agency and are victims.
And - that's not true. Women do things because they want things, and they have motivations, and they act.
So I was thinking about this in response to my Catherine Howard tweet and I've noticed that a lot of people strenuously resist the idea that Catherine Howard would have had an affair with Thomas Culpepper

I think what I find particularly galling about this is just how many times people are quick to suppose that the transformative power of the Gospel/grace means "a man can even rape a woman or child and still get whatever he wants in life!"
That's not "transformation."

https://twitter.com/sewistwrites/status/1811496954909602080

If a man is a pastor, and he does something horrible, and then he wants to be a pastor and still gets to be one because everyone around him agrees to let him live as though he did nothing wrong, the thing that absolutely didn't happen in that situation is "transformation."