The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast

And the artists will lead us…This week, the legendary U2 dropped a surprise 6-song EP called Songs of Ash, a collection of tracks the band said in a press release, “couldn’t wait.” The music speaks explicitly to the human rights crises in America, Iraq, Ukraine, and Gaza.The song American Obituary is a breathtaking commentary on the ICE occupation of Minneapolis and the murder of Renee Good.U2’s announcement comes less than a week after Bruce Springsteen, who last month released the unflinching “Streets of Minneapolis,’ announced his ‘Land of Hope and Dreams Tour’, as a direct response to the Trump regime, saying in a statement “We are living through dark, disturbing and dangerous times, but do not despair, the cavalry is coming!” Springsteen continued in the video, “We will be rocking your town in celebration and in defense of America, American democracy, American freedom, our American Constitution and our sacred American dream.”Elsewhere, Erstwhile guitar-slinging activist Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, began his recent Minneapolis concert with a scathing rebuke of the Trump Administration, just before launching into Rage’s ‘Killing in the Name’, saying: “If it looks like fascism, sounds like fascism, acts like fascism, dresses like fascism, talks like fascism, kills like fascism and lies like fascism, boys & girls, it’s f—king fascism,”California’s Green Day have regularly used their stage to raise a defiant middle finger to Trump, changing the lyrics to their 2004 hit American Idiot to “I’m not part of a MAGA agenda."Irish punk legends Dropkick Murphys continue their commitment to social justice and political engagement, including an event on the National Mall where I was fortunate to share the platform with them. Singer Ken Casey recently urged more of their brethren to become politically active, saying, there’s “nothing to be scared about. Hey, we’re all in, we’re getting trashed, trolled, losing fans, and guess what, the water’s fine. Come on in. Nothing to be scared about. No one’s stepped to me in public yet. It’s just trolls on the internet.”But it isn’t just long-in-the-tooth rock royalty stepping into the fray. Across all genres, ages, and audience sizes, musicians are leveraging their gifts, platforms, and influence to join in, and in many ways, center the resistance movement:Instagram phenom Jesse Welles has become a prolific and eloquent voice of the times, delivering direct, unadorned traditional folk protest music that is tethered directly to the work of artists like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Woody Guthrie.Self described “troubadour of truth” singer-songwriter Crys Matthews creates soulful, confessional acoustic-based music that often records the inner cost to our outer struggles.Miami-based Earth to Eve serves up a fierce and unapologetic fusion of Amy Winehouse, hip-hop, and alt-pop that skewers the authoritarian powers that be right now.And Rising modern folk-punk artist Carsie Blanton, regularly writes sardonic, fierce, and poignant rebukes of fascists and billionaires.These and so many other musicians remind us that in times like these, it will not be the politicians or the priests that save us, it will be the poets, and the painters, and the six-string prophets armed with three chords and the truth.There’s a reason Trump and his Administration are trying to financially cripple PBS and NPR, why they have infiltrated the Kennedy Center For the Performing Arts, why they’ve declared war on our libraries and museums, why they’re slashing funding for art, music, and theatre programs to young people:Fascists are terrified of artists.Creativity has always been one of the most powerful weapons against authoritarianism, against injustice, against dehumanization. Art is wild and unruly. It defies political proclamation, it does not respect authority, and it refuses subjugation. Once released into the world, it cannot be contained or legislated away.From the sustaining songs of Black people kidnapped and forced to build the scaffolding of this nation hundreds of years ago, to the clarion calls for justice in the ‘60s folk music movement, to the Black Arts Movement, to the Chicano Mural Movement, to the LGBTQ+ Arts movements in the face of the AIDS crisis, to the Hip Hop movements, to Black Lives Matter, to this present Resistance movement, the hands and voices and bodies of artists have confronted injustice, awakened the souls of humanity, and fortified the fighters.Right now, as much as we need to push back against legislation and rally against corruption in the political arena, we need to create. We need the plays and the songs and the murals and prophetic words that help us imagine a place better than this one. We need beauty and melody and drama and dissonance.Famously etched into the guitar of folk songwriter Woody Guthrie were the words THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS, and seeing so many musicians speak truth to corrupt power right now is a reminder how true those words are.The song Land of Hope and Dreams, which Springsteen has named his protest tour after, paints a word picture of the journey to a place where equity, justice, and liberty are reached, where our destinies are tethered together:I said, this train, dreams will not be thwartedThis train, faith will be rewardedThis train, hear the steel wheels singin’This train, bells of freedom ringin’May we stay connected to our muses, to our humanity, and one another.May we in America arrive at that glorious place one day, and let us be singing as we do.In the comments, please share your favorite artistic activists.Learn about art and social change:Art, Protest, and Public SpaceThe Black Arts Movement and Black Liberation StruggleThe Black Arts MovementThe Chicano Mural Movement: A Cultural RenaissanceMusic in the Civil Rights MovementArtists as Agents of Social ChangeLGBTQ Artists & Their ActivismQueer ArtThe Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. 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Well, this is a difficult message to deliver, but it’s necessary, given recent events in America.I’ve done a good deal of painful soul-searching over the past two weeks, facing the truth about my past and coming to terms with my failures as both a human being and as someone who aspires to be a leader.After many hours of honest reflection, prayer, and the support of wise counsel, I feel that in order to stay true to my convictions, I need to be completely transparent, regardless of the cost to me, both personally and professionally. They say the truth will set you free, and I hope it will set others free as well.As a member of the woke, radical Left, I wanted to apologize from the bottom of my heart for preventing Conservative white people from catching their fish, drinking their beer, driving their trucks, cutting their grass, feeding their dogs, wearing their boots, watching their games, and saying their prayers.Until the Turning Point Super Bowl Halftime Show, I never considered the plight of those across the aisle whose journeys have been so filled with adversity and hardship. Yet, seeing country singer Lee Brice bravely bare his soul in one of his people’s dudebro spirituals, inventorying the terrible injustices he’s had to carry through his life, I was shaken to my core. And later, as I watched the ageless, godly, perpetually relevant, jorts-adorned Kid Rock badly lip synching the word “Bawitdaba,” which I assume must be the mother tongue of his people, I found myself brought to tears. There in the purifying glow of red, white, and blue fireworks, I began to understand the ways my calls for equality and representation for every human being have been so hurtful toward white Evangelicals in America all this time; how my efforts to create a diverse and just nation where everyone was seen, heard, and respected must have served as a fresh reminder of their never-ending persecution.In retrospect, I can see how my actions and those of my fellow liberals have made the already Herculean task of being a straight white Christian in America that much more challenging, and I regret that. I am working behind the scenes to educate myself so that I can be more sensitive and self-aware in the future.I am terribly sorry for the harm I have caused, and I humbly ask for forgiveness. I hope this can be the start of a journey of healing and recovery for this oppressed, vulnerable, and obviously extremely fragile people group.And so, with a contrite heart, an awakened mind, and a steadfast commitment to building an America where beer-drinking, truck-driving, gun-toting white Christian people can finally, after 250 agonizing years, live freely and unfettered, I say to you, Bawitdaba, my lightly pigmented friends, Bawtidaba. You shall overcome.May this be my turning point…Sincerely,John Pavlovitz, The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

On the day I die, a lot will happen.Many things will change.The world will be busy.On the day I die, all the important appointments I made will be left unattended.The many plans I had yet to complete will remain forever undone.The calendar that ruled so many of my days will now be of no use to me.All the material things I chased and treasured will be left for others to care for or discard, placed into new hands or into the garbage. On the day I die, the words of my critics, which so hounded and harassed me, will suddenly cease to sting. I will forever be beyond their reach.The arguments I believed I’d won here will not bring me any satisfaction or solace. They will be merely hollow victories in inconsequential battles that only served to distract me.The incessant, noisy legion of notifications and alerts will go unanswered; their screaming urgency silenced, no longer rewarded with a reply.On the day I die, my many nagging regrets will all be resigned permanently to the past, where they should have always been to begin with.Every superficial worry that I ever labored over, about my waistline or my hairline or (ironically), my worry lines, will fade away.My carefully crafted image, the one I worked so hard to shape for others here, will be left to them to complete anyway. My legacy will be curated by everyone but me.On the day I die, all the small and large anxieties that stole sleep from my nights and peace from my days will be rendered powerless.The deep and towering mysteries about life and death that so consumed my mind will finally be clarified in a way that they could never be while I lived.These things will certainly all be true on the day that I die.Yet for as much as will happen on that day, one more thing will happen.On the day I die, the few people who really know me and truly love me will grieve deeply.They will feel a void.They will feel cheated.They will not feel ready.They will feel as though a part of them has died as well.And on that day, more than anything in the world, they will want more time with me. They will plead through tears and sobs for that time, and it will not be given to them.I know this from those I love and grieve over.Given this, while I am still alive, I’ll try to remember that my time with those who are home to my heart is finite and fleeting and so very precious, and do my best not to waste a moment of it.I’ll try not to squander a priceless second burdened by all the other things that will happen on the day I die, because most of those things are not my concern or beyond my control.Friends, those other things have an insidious way of keeping us from living even as we live; vying for our attention, competing for our affections, masquerading as meaningful. Chasing such things robs us of the joy of this unrepeatable, uncontainable, ever-evaporating Now with those who love us and want only to share it with us.On the day you die, there will be people who will be gutted by your absence.Don’t miss the chance to laugh and dream and dance with them while you can.It’s easy to waste so much daylight in the days before you die..Try not to let your life be stolen in a billion poor choices by all that you’ve been led to believe matters, because on the day you die, the fact is, that much of it simply won’t.Yes, you and I will die one day.But before that day comes, let us do our best to live.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Hey, is this thing on? Are you out there?Do You fiscal Conservatives still exist? Are Red-Voting followers of Jesus still a thing? Because right now, I’m having a really hard time accounting for either of you.According to The Washington Post, ICE is spending 38.3 billion dollars to buy warehouses across the country and turn them into detention centers.38 billion.We seemingly can’t afford to provide people with affordable healthcare, or give hungry kids food, but we can expedite the creation of massive concentration camps to address a need that has never been substantively proven to exist.We’re apparently unable to care for our veterans, or fund our public schools, or pay people a living wage, but we can essentially incarcerate tens of thousands of people, the majority of whom have never been given due process or convicted of a crime.The overall budget for ICE is close to 90 billion dollars.Where are you, fiscal Conservatives, on this kind of reckless spending? How is this a prudent use of financial resources, manpower, and infrastructure? Do you support allocating this amount of money to such an endeavor, considering the high costs of groceries, housing, and healthcare for all Americans?What is the economic justification for an initiative that is financially upending local communities, decimating international tourism, and crippling our nation’s farmers?How is any of this compatible with your stated economic ethos? And where are you, supposed Conservative Christians, in the face of this unprovoked violence toward an entire people group? What is your spiritual stance on racial profiling, indiscriminate violence, masked mercenaries, mass incarceration, and ethnic cleansing?How do you make theological sense of the kidnappings of children, the vicious beatings of fathers and grandmothers and big brothers, the shootings of peaceful bystanders, and the random brutality playing out all over our nation? How does any of this specifically embody the teachings of Jesus?What is your specific scriptural justification for not welcoming the stranger, for withholding care from the least of these, and for refusing to love your neighbor as yourself?When you see the unthinkable trauma to individuals, to families, to children, to local communities, to an entire nation, how does any of it align with your personal faith in Christ?Maybe I’m shouting into the void, here. Maybe my words are floating into the ether.Maybe I’m interrogating ghosts. Maybe fiscal Conservatives and actual red-voting followers of Jesus are relegated to our nation’s past.But if you’re out there, I’d really like to know precisely and explicitly how you people on the Right justify what this Administration is doing through ICE, either economically or morally, because from where I’m standing, this all feels both financially reckless and morally reprehensible.What am I missing here? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

JD Vance claims to be a follower of Jesus.In fact, he never shuts up about it.He wears his religion openly, brandishing it at every opportunity in performative piety and finger-wagging condescension, while justifying the harboring of pedophiles, the rolling back of human rights, and the indiscriminate assaults of brown-skinned people by government-funded, masked mercenaries.Vance is doing all this while breathlessly doing the bidding of a man he only a couple of years ago compared to Hitler: a court-adjudicated rapist and 34-count felon indicted several times for high crimes; a man whose racism, misogyny, and immorality are at stratospheric levels.The theological gymnastics he and those like him have to engage in to reconcile their idolatry of a sociopath with the teachings of Jesus are at Olympic-gold-medal levels.I remember Vance giving an interview talking about immigration, and trying to justify prioritizing the American people, saying:“You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world…”This is made-in-the-USA, homegrown, sanctified horse s**t. The idea that there is anything anywhere in the teachings of Jesus to support this means Vance is either willfully ignorant, purposefully misleading, or he’s never actually read the Bible. And when rightly called out on his blasphemous Jesus makeover, Vance took to social media to peddle some asinine, Christian nationalist “ladder of compassion” nuttery, writing:“The idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense. Does anyone really think someone’s moral duties to their own children are the same as their duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone?”Yeah, JD, someone does: Jesus.That’s essentially the heart of the whole friggin’ thing: loving our neighbors, our enemies, and the least of these: caring for the marginalized, the left out, the foreigner, the people we’ve previously seen as not being our own.Vance and his morally inverted, cultic brethren have been bending the knee to their vile, belligerent, spray-tanned savior for so long that the actual teachings of Jesus aren’t really a concern at this point. This is why they spend their days try to connect un-connectable dots between mass violence against immigrants and a poor, dark-skinned, itinerant refugee preacher commanding his people to love everyone.For God so loved the World ain’t America First, no matter how stridently Vance or any MAGA Christians believe or declare it is.I realize that to disciples of the Predator-in-Chief, these words will likely all be white noise, much like the Gospel teachings themselves have clearly become to them.If not, instead of trying to justify abject cruelty in the name of Jesus, JD Vance and people like him (really anyone who simultaneously claims Christianity and MAGA) would be severing ties with Donald Trump and repenting of the prejudices, phobias, and white supremacy that led them to fall prostrate before him to begin with. If they actually gave half a damn about the non-American, non-English-speaking, “blessed are the peacemakers” center of their faith tradition, they’d work the rest of their lives to undo the grievous damage they have done in such a short time to so many beautiful human beings created in the image of God, who do not share their pigmentation, native language, or nation of origin.Jesus taught that love for neighbor was the highest calling and the greatest priority we have here. And when asked by a man in the crowd (likely someone Trump Christians would identify with), who he actually had to consider his neighbor, Jesus tells the Parable of the Good Samaritan.Most people, whether Christian or not, are likely familiar with the story about a man beaten and robbed by the side of the road who is ignored by several religious passersby, finally being cared for by a Samaritan man who stops to tend to his wounds and get him to a place of safety and rest.Jesus making a Samaritan the hero was striking and scandalous, as people from Samaria were thought to be morally impure half-breeds, likely reviled by Jesus’ hearers.By doing this, he is reminding them (and us) that our love and concern for humanity is not organized and prioritized by nation, ethnicity, place of birth, or geography. We are to show equally lavish mercy on the hurting, terrified, assailed humanity in our path—period.The Jesus of the Bible didn’t just love his own. He didn’t choose his family, friends, students, over strangers. He healed people he’d never met. He expanded the table and fed a vast multitude who showed up to hear him speak, not because they were the right people, but because they were hungry.In fact, Jesus said that in showing obedience to his call for expansive, borderless compassion, we may even experience turbulence within our own family.I’m fully aware that most Republican Evangelicals probably don’t care about any of this; they have a Jesus-free Christian that is doing everything that they want it to do, so self-awareness, let alone repentance, isn’t likely.I just want to say that people like me, tens of millions of people of faith in this country, know that what this arrogant, posturing cadre of cosplaying Christians (Vance chief among them) are doing to immigrants and refugees and people of color and gay couples and Mexican families and trans teenagers is a vile, predatory rejection of everything Jesus stood for.And people of earnest faith in Jesus, along with every decent human being who can’t abide hypocrisy, aren’t going to let these charlatans get away with it, at least not in his name.Vance may be able to B.S. his boss’s sycophantic disciples with this fraudulent, heretical, Jesus-less parade of hypocrisy, but the rest of the world (Christians and non-Christians alike) knows they’re full of it… and it ain’t the Spirit.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. 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Friend, I may not know you, but I’m pretty sure I know some things about you:I know you feel something breaking inside lately, an invisible fracture that only you’re fully aware of, one that seems to grow deeper by the hour.I know you walk away from conversations with people you once relied on for wisdom and compassion, doubting your own sanity because you no longer recognize those qualities in them.I know you feel internally estranged from the friends, coworkers, family members, and neighbors you used to find affinity with, the people who once felt like home.I know you stare at the perpetual parade of horrible scrolling past you, from the second you wake up prematurely in the early morning until the stretched-out nighttime moments you try unsuccessfully to fall asleep, and how you question the grip you have on reality.I know the crushing disbelief you feel when you look around and see so many people who don’t seem the slightest bit bothered, who are carrying on as if this is all normal; people who appear fully oblivious to the Category 5 shitstorm that you’ve been screaming about for a decade, now.I hear the nagging question that careens inside your head, the one you ask yourself a few hundred times a day: “Is it me, or has a huge portion of this country lost its mind?”It isn’t you.You’re quite fine, and this is, of course, both good and terrible news because of what it says about you and about the place you find yourself.The fact that you see how wrong this all is means your faculties are intact, your mind is fully right, and your heart is working properly. It’s all confirmation that you still have a soul doing what souls are supposed to do: keep you deeply human in profoundly inhumane times.This is why you need to hold tightly to that humanity because it is rarer and more valuable than it has ever been.It’s why you need to kindle this holy unrest in the center of your belly, because it can push back the numbing flood of apathy threatening to swallow up the beautiful fury of good people.It’s why you can’t allow your right but troubled mind to make peace with such abject madness.If enough time passes, an otherwise healthy person can start to get used to feeling sick. They can slowly begin to convince themselves that almost any horrifying, toxic, painful, twisted reality is acceptable, even ordinary.Little by little, they can gradually allow their hearts to acclimate to the nightmare, to come to see it as normal.Either that, or they come to believe the damage to be beyond repair, and they collapse inward, a hopeless, lightless shell of who they once were.I need you to hear this, friend:You’re okay.You’re not overreacting,you’re not stupid,and you’re not crazy.You’re also in good company.Right now, there is a massive army of similarly walking wounded sharing this place with you; fellow exhausted but still pissed-off warriors who realize that the bad people are counting on them to become so disheartened that they give up—and who refuse to give them the f*ckin’ satisfaction.You and I, we’re seeing clearly, friend, which is always the more painful path; staring down the terrors and refusing to look away from what so many willfully choose not to see.We know that this movement assailing our nation is an assault on decency, a rebellion against goodness, a mutiny against sanity, and that’s why we need to keep resisting it.We need to shout down the legion of professional liars working so fiercely to convince us that it’s we who have gone mad.We need to refuse to be gaslit by people who try to diminish our worries, mock our outrage, or dismiss our despair, even if we have once called them friends.We need to press on undaunted and unafraid, knowing that the jittery chaos-makers realize their time is short, and they are rightly terrified of us because our goodness makes us dangerous. So, breathe, gather yourself, and carry on.Work to find your people, those who are as heartbroken and furious as you are. Find ways to care for human beings in peril, to organize against the legislative and physical assaults, to be focused and effective in your response, and to be strengthened by loving community.You’re not crazy, but these days surely are.You’re not upside down right now, friend; a good portion of this place is.People of faith, morality, and conscience together, from every corner of this nation, will right it.Grieve, and move.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

While so many of us here in America are rightly lamenting the devastating emotional effect this repulsive regime is having on girls and young women, we’ve only been getting half the story.In the unrelenting storm of Conservative’s legislative assaults on body autonomy, their withholding of the unredacted Epstein files, and their coronation of a court-adjudicated rapist to the highest seat of power in the nation, we’ve forgotten something critical: our sons have been watching and listening, too. They are being irreparably altered in real-time by the men they are being raised by, look up to, and taught to revere.My heart breaks open when I think about the kind of young men being created right now, the collateral damage of these days on the boys in the Right’s collective care.I grieve deeply when I consider what so many of MAGA America’s sons are likely to grow into:men with a dangerous sense of entitlement when it comes to the bodies and wishes and wills of the women around them,who believe they will get rewarded for their sexism and moral filth, because they’ve watched it happen for their entire lives.men who are physically incapable of apologizing and morally allergic to accountability.men who believe that money, power, and their penises give them license to do whatever they want.men for whom violent, hateful, objectifying words about women are considered normal, even admirable.men who are violently threatened by any expression of manhood that falls outside of the tiny, rigid sensibilities they feel secure within.men who inherit a religion that tells them that women should defer to them, yield to them, and blindly obey them.men for whom the very idea of consent is irrelevant.men who grow to have no value for gentleness, sensitivity, and empathy.men who think a weak, needy, fragile narcissist like Donald Trump is a man worth emulating.Just before the 2016 election, I remember my then 11-year-old son coming home and asking me what Donald Trump had said about women in the audio that had been unearthed and was being talked about at school. I did the best I could to relay it all without using the actual words, because to use the actual words Trump used would have meant subjecting my son to the kind of vile vulgarity that isn’t normal and shouldn’t be normal for 11-year-old boys—or to men of integrity of any age.The fact that a man with such a vast and sickening resume of depravity soon became the political messiah for so many professed Christians, and remains a decade later, securely seated on the throne of their unwavering devotion, should prompt effusive repentance within faithful followers of Jesus, and be cause for national mourning among every decent American.We should all be collectively sick to our stomachs right now, watching an entire political party dismantling the rights and devaluing the worth of women and realizing how poisonous this all is to the hearts and minds of the boys who will emulate these assaults in the trenches of their private and professional lives.There is a terrible trickle-down inhumanity flowing from the white House, the Supreme Court, the halls of Congress, and the pulpits of megachurches, and into the homes and hallways where young boys are having their brains rewired, their morality renovated, and their roads redirected.I have better dreams for our sons than this.I want them to know that girls and women, that all people, are worthy of respect and decency.I want them to know that dehumanizing a woman is never normal: not in a locker room or a campus party or a board room or a bedroom or a court room.I want them to know that another woman’s body is not their jurisdiction.I want them to know that a woman’s outward no is louder than their internal yes.I want them to know that there is a huge difference between being male and being a man, in being a gentle man.I believe all our sons deserve better than this fragile, fraudulent MAGA masculinity that will surely keep them in the same suspended state of undeveloped humanity their fathers are permanently trapped in.They deserve a higher definition of what it means to be a man than the ratified sexism and legislated subjugation of the Republican platform.They deserve a morality that isn’t as pliable as their Evangelical parents, politicians, and pastors have made theirs in order to accommodate the moral cancer of their profane, perverted, spray-tanned savior.As a young father, I dreamed that my son would become a man who recognizes women as valuable, equal, and worthy of respect. To my great joy, he has. But I want that for every boy and young man who calls this place home.Because of that, I’m going to do everything in my power to shout down all the voices that dehumanize and devalue women, even if those voices come from the men sanctifying sexism in the pulpits of their churches, berating women in beligerant press conference rants, or sitting at the kitchen table talking over the women across from them. At this point, opposing a movement of misogyny and aggression shouldn’t be seen as an act of tribalism, but this is where we are. There shouldn’t be an alternative side to raising men of character and compassion, but sadly, tens of millions of Conservative men have chosen it.Right now, millions of bright and beautiful boys with big hearts and bigger questions are watching and listening. In these moments, they are asking the kind of men they should become.The MAGA movement and its surrogates are failing them.The rest of us must not.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

I often find myself in a now-familiar spot with Trump supporters I know: hopelessly stuck in an unnavigable impasse on our respective paths, unable to find a way forward. And when the friction becomes too great, the exchange too heated, and the tension too uncomfortable, they invariably drop an all-too-familiar final salvo designed to stop the conversation and avoid pressing ahead:"We're just going to have to agree to disagree."I strongly disagree.I refuse these terms.I do not consent to this convenient truce.Such a concession assumes that we both have equally valid opinions, that we're each mutually declaring those opinions not so divergent that they cannot be abided, that our relationship is of greater value than the differences, but that isn't exactly true for me.No, we don't just disagree now. They’re simply wrong.I believe they are deeply, profoundly, and egregiously wrong; the kind of wrong about the kinds of things that I can no longer excuse or make peace with or overlook, because that would be a denial of who I am and what matters to me, the values I have spent a lifetime forming.This is not a disagreement.We are not simply declaring mismatched preferences regarding something inconsequential. We're not talking about who has the best offensive line in the NFL, what craft beer pairs best with a cheesesteak, or the sonic differences between CDs and vinyl. On such matters (though I will provide spirited debate), I can tolerate dissension.We're not even talking about clear misalignments on very important things: how to best address climate change, or what will fix our healthcare system, or how to reduce our national debt, or ways to provide affordable housing. Those subjects, while critically important, still have room for constructive debate and differing solutions. They are mendable fractures.But this runs far deeper and into the marrow of who we each are.At this point, with the last decade (and particularly the past couple of months) as a resume, their alignment with this president means that we are fundamentally disconnected on what is morally and ethically acceptable. I've simply seen too much to explain that away or rationalize their intentions or give them the benefit of the doubt any longer.I know what their reaffirmation of him is telling me about their disregard for the lives of people of color, about their opinion of women, about their attitude toward Science, about the faith they so loudly profess, and about their elemental disrespect for bedrock truth. I now can see how pliable their morality is, the kinds of compromises they’re willing to make, the ever-descending bottom they are following him into, in order to feel victorious in a war they don't even know why they're fighting.That's why I need these people to understand that this isn't just a schism on one issue or a single piece of legislation, as those things would be manageable. This isn't a matter of politics or preference. This is a pervasive, sprawling, saturating separation about the way we see the world, what we value, and how we want to move through this life.Agreeing to disagree with these people in these matters would mean silencing myself and, more importantly, betraying the people who bear the burdens of their political affiliations— and this is not something I'm willing to do. My relationships with many of these people, who are family members, former friends, and neighbors, still matter greatly to me, but if they have to be the collateral damage of standing with the vulnerable and the oppressed, I'll have to see that as acceptable losses.Trump supporters’ devaluing of people of color is not an opinion.Their acceptance of falsehoods is not an opinion.Their demonizing of queer people is not an opinion.Their devaluing of women is not an opinion.Their embracing of racism is not an opinion.Their defiance of facts is not an opinion.Their dehumanization of immigrants is not an opinion.These are fundamental heart issues.And I want them all to know where I stand so that when the chair is empty this Thanksgiving, the calls don't come, they meet with radio silence, or they begin to notice the slow fade of our exchanges, I want them to know why: it's because I have learned how morally incompatible we are. It doesn't mean I don't care for them, but it means proximity to them isn't going to be healthy.I've been disagreeing with people all my life. That isn't the issue here.Were we talking about anything less than the lives of other beautiful, disparate beings, I'd be more than willing to disagree with them, but since we are talking about the lives of other beautiful, disparate beings, I can't.I believe his supporters are wrong in ways that are harming people.They’re wrong to deny the humanity of other human beings.They’re wrong to justify their affiliation with this violence.They’re wrong to embrace a movement built on the worst parts of who we are.I simply can't agree with that.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Dear Ms Bondi,I’m writing to you as an American citizen, a former pastor, and the father of a daughter.I spent today, as much of the nation, watching you speak before the House Judiciary Committee in a state of stunned disbelief, which surprised me, as I thought you’d reached a moral bottom many weeks ago.I witnessed you posturing and protesting, feigning indignation in the face of reasonable questions you repeatedly refused to answer. I looked on as you deflected and pivoted, performing the wildest verbal gymnastics to keep from providing the simple clarity that our elected representatives asked for and deserved—and wondered why anyone would do that.I sat incredulous, watching you appear to lie with great ease, even perverse joy, seeming, to my ears, to contradict both irrefutable evidence and your own words in the past. It was a tour de force in distraction, a true masterclass in gaslighting.And while a thousand thoughts ran through my head, when it was all over, I was left with a single question:How does someone become Pam Bondi?I’m not speaking about your education, your professional experience, or your career path, which are easily retrieved with a few keystrokes. I’m talking about the meandering road to losing one’s soul.I wonder how an apparently intelligent human being finds themselves sitting in that chair in front of the watching world in a moment of such gravity, so completely bereft of empathy, so seemingly unencumbered by other people’s suffering, and so strident in the face of simple accountability.I try to imagine how you, the person entrusted with stewarding the Law in the highest seat of power here, arrives at a place where that Law has seemingly become irrelevant.Are the money and the power so intoxicating that they have rendered your conscience inoperable? Has your journey been filled with a million small moral compromises that burdened you in the beginning, but slowly emotionally anesthetized you to the point that now you feel nothing?Are you so beholden to the redacted man who enabled your ascension to this lofty space that you are willing to shield him from the litany of heinous sins that you must know well he is guilty of?Maybe you don’t even have the answers. Maybe you can’t explain it either, though I’m sure there’s a story you have to tell yourself to keep the self-loathing at bay and let you sleep at night, at least I hope so.I see that you do not have children of your own. Perhaps, if you did, I wonder if you might see this all differently. I don’t know. Tens of millions of people without children are as furious as I am.But you are someone’s daughter, and I do wonder how that girl became the woman sitting there at that table today, so dismissive of other women who have survived trauma. I imagine there may be some answers there somewhere.But as the father of a daughter, I want you to know that I fully detest what you are doing to so many other people’s children right now. I abhor your callous disregard for the daughters who stood courageously before you today, whose eyes you did not have the dignity to look into; women whose black, cavernous hell you know full well, because you’ve pored over it countless times in words, photos, and videos that are still being concealed.It sickens me to my core to know that thousands of survivors, girls and young women not unlike my daughter, have experienced unspeakable horrors and are finding in you, not a fierce and willing advocate, not a steadfast warrior who will deliver them justice, but an unsuspecting, shame-throwing avatar of the men who brutalized them.And if you truly do care for survivors, then I’d like to hear how you justify your treatment of them. They deserve that. We all do.I’m not sure what you believe in, but I am a person of faith, and my religious tradition tells me that we will all face accountability for our misdeeds and transgressions beyond this life, even if we evade them in this one. That possibility does provide a small bit of comfort, but I hope you don’t have to wait that long. I hope that you will face a legal reckoning for any betrayals of our nation that you are guilty of, for the chaos you are willfully creating, and most of all for the sorrow you are exacerbating for the daughters (and the sons) throughout this nation who feel less safe and less protected. I stand with and bear witness to those who are afraid because the Law seems to be refusing to drag the monsters out into the light, because people like you appear so willing to curate the darkness.I hope whatever you got for your soul was worth it to you.It sure as hell isn’t for the rest of us.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

MAGA Americans have a Bunny living rent-free in their heads. (We’ll just call it BDS: Bunny Derangement Syndrome.)Their president has posted late-night, untethered, rambling word salads about him.Their media surrogates have gone on racist tirades against him, seeking to reclaim football for oppressed white people.Their lawmakers have demanded investigations and deportations, clutching their pearls about the terrifying moral dangers of Latino twerking.And they are currently frantically saturation-bombing social media in an effort to convince us (and themselves) that no one liked the most-watched Super Bowl Halftime Show in history.Bad Bunny didn’t just break the Internet and viewership records; he broke MAGA in a way that is deeply personal, and they hate him for it.But they don’t hate him because he doesn’t sing in English, or because he’s been critical of the masked thugs they beat immigrants vicariously through, or because his pigmentation is problematic—at least those aren’t the primary reasons.They hate him because he is a symbol of their greatest fears coming to life: a nation that is outgrowing them, a culture that is evolving past them, a war against progress that they know they’re losing.They despise Bad Bunny because, over the course of a thirteen-minute halftime show that they swore they wouldn’t watch but couldn’t look away from, they were forced to see what’s happening outside of the insular, white nationalist, MAGA echo chamber they spend their lives in, and it terrified them.They watched it all play out on the green hallowed ground of their holiest of national holidays: pulsating, syncopated rhythms that transcended their four-on-the-floor white classic rock safe spaces; a joyous, swirling assembly of brown-skinned people unapologetically celebrating a collective story that these sheltered supremacists know nothing about;messages of unity and hope that defy the hateful, nihilistic, tribal poison that they have been weaned on. It all felt foreign and disorienting and threatening.And even if they can’t make sense of it in their heads right now (or admit it to the rest of us if they can), they can feel it on a visceral level; an internal panic raising their heart rates, turning their white cheeks flush with fury, and filling them with existential dread. Something is terribly wrong, and they know it.And the more they throw tantrums and the louder they carry on, the more obvious it is that they’re losing, and a Puerto Rican pop star was the public prophet of their demise, which is why they hate him.Bad Bunny interrupted the sanctity of the Super Bowl and slammed a loud, radiant Reggaeton wrecking ball into the fictional story that Trump supporters spend every day telling themselves about their prominence and power. Now, they need to figure out a way to make that narrative still be true: he isn’t really that popular, those viewership numbers can’t be accurate, the crowd didn’t really enjoy it. They will do anything to explain it all away as some godless, radical Leftist woke fever dream. But the truth is the truth: The landscape is being renovated, the climate is changing, and America is becoming the diverse, enlightened, culturally-expansive place that they are fighting so hard to prevent it from becoming.Despite their violent opposition and their relentless posturing and their raw-throated protestations, this nation is becoming too big for them to constrain or suppress. Time and progress are going to swallow up the prejudices and phobias they traffic in. The phony patriotism and hollow religion they peddle in tired dudebro country songs about trucks and Bibles is going to be fully exposed as simply white supremacy with a shitty soundtrack.The Super Bowl Halftime show was a bold and glorious microcosm of the America that we are becoming, whether MAGAs like it or not.This is a game they ultimately cannot win, and so they'd better just take the L.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

White friend, you’re not an activist.Or, at least maybe that’s the way you’ve always felt.Perhaps you don’t see yourself in a street with a sign yelling slogans, shouting through a bullhorn on courthouse steps, wielding your social media profile like an independent news outlet, or standing at a school board meeting, elevating your voice to rise above the jeers of your hateful neighbors.These things might all feel miles outside of what you’re comfortable with, and I understand, empathize, and respect that, I really do.But here’s the thing: that’s too damn bad. It’s time to get comfortable with the discomfort.Activism is no longer optional for good humans in America, and here’s why:People of brown and black skin are disappearing. Today. Right now.In the very state you live in, if not the very community, there are people who quite recently were there but no longer are, and not because they chose to leave.They are college students taken from the streets in broad daylight without cause.Fathers rounded up, beaten, and jailed without due process.Legal residents rejected at airports and sent back to places they no longer call home.Foreign spouses of citizens unlawfully detained and harassed.Families taken from their homes and businesses with no warning.These are not hypotheticals to be postulated or fantastical fodder for theoretical political conversations. They aren’t exaggerated examples of worst-case scenarios that will likely never materialize. They are the here, now, real-time subtractions of this brutal regime.These are beautiful, original, unprecedented flesh-and-blood human beings whose presence has been removed simply for the color of their skin, their nation of origin, a rally they may have attended, a paper they once published, a class they taught, or a comment they posted.They are the disappeared and the missing and the unaccounted for, and unless you and I show up now, there will be many more who will join them: more classmates, best friends, mothers, teachers, favorite uncles, little league coaches, and church members. And for every one of these lost people, there are thousands more whose lives have been upended, whose families have been fractured, whose childhoods have been irreparably scarred, whose livelihoods have been destroyed, whose sense of peace has been ripped away, and whose bodies have been broken.And soon, these will not be spread out and distant stories we can dismiss as aberrations; they will be commonplace terrors that we all have front-row seats to. And eventually, someone we know and love dearly will be one of the disappeared, though it should not take that to move us from complacency to urgency.Since these removed, erased, and bloodied human beings are without a voice now, we who still have ours need to speak for them.For our neighbors who are unable to fight for themselves, we owe it to them to fight in their stead.Since they have involuntarily disappeared from this place, if we imagine ourselves to be people of faith, morality, and conscience, our voluntary presence must be mandatory in response.Again, I truly do understand that many of you have an aversion to confrontation; perhaps some severe social anxiety, a sincere desire to keep the peace, a feeling of fear for your safety, or maybe you just don’t like to be seen as an a*****e.All I can tell you is, in every case, it’s time.With all love and compassion, I loudly say to hell with your comfort level, anxiety be damned, and f*ck whatever excuse you’d propose as to why you aren’t the kind of person who is an activist.It’s time to put on our big kid pants and find our outside voices.Right now, at this place and time in the 250-year history of this beautiful but threatened experiment in Democracy with so much quickly going sideways, being an activist simply means being a human who values other humans enough to get your hands dirty, push through your apprehensions, discard your ego, and brave the bruises and scars that will come, because as bad as any of that might feel, at least we’re here to feel it.You may not see yourself as an activist, dear friends, but to be an inactivist right now just isn’t an option.Since you are here and free and well, stand strong and speak loudly for the disappeared and the wounded and the terrified.And do it now.I do understand that personal safety, job security, and social connections are real concerns and true barriers. In the comments, let’s crowd-source ways people can step into activism, regardless of the constraints and pressures. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Sometimes you can forget the point of it all.It’s easy when the horrors have become commonplace to become so beaten down and disheartened by the fight that you can lose sight of why you’re doing it.The repeated brutality and the relentless sorrows and the never-ending crises can squeeze out and suffocate your imagination, gradually rendering you unable to see a future worth walking into anymore. And then suddenly, when you least expect it, there it is.Suddenly, you find those long-dried-up reservoirs of hope bursting open once more.Caught up in the throes of a stirring, pulsating rhythm that you cannot resist, you find your way back.For thirteen minutes on a football field in San Francisco, from thousands of miles away, we could see it again. This America: diverse, creative, joyful, colorful, unified.This America, where fear is banished, where adversity is overcome, where fierce embraces find each of us, where no one is left outside.This America, North, Central, and South.This America, whose story cannot be complete without the Latino community so many wish to erase.This is it.This is what we’re fighting like hell for.This is why giving up isn't an option.And this is why centering something other than Love is the only way we lose.Bad Bunny reminded us that in this war for the nation we’re still renovating, it is not might, or force, or eye-for-an-eye violence that will cause us to prevail; it will be our refusal to become as miserable and hateful as those we oppose. He, a man faced for months with the undeserved scorn of tens of millions of strangers, the target of the worst poison human beings are capable of, chose not to stand upon the largest platform and fly some bitter, middle finger contempt.He simply showed his humanity and reminded us of our own.He refused to allow his enemies to defeat him by becoming them.Love wins.Words can easily feel like hollow platitudes, like empty cliches, until they aren’t. Until they are the truest truth there is in this life.Until we can feel them in the marrow of our bones.Until those words towering above a beleaguered multitude that has been starved of Love.That love is what those grim-faced, joyless exclusionists are afraid of, what they are working so tirelessly to eliminate.That’s why this was more than just entertainment, more than songs and set pieces, more than pop music and sentiment.We cannot lose sight of who we are.Our compassion is what makes us different. We do wield those open, bleeding hearts they ridicule us for. We are a people who believe that the open hand is greater than the clenched fist.Now, I’m not so naive to believe that a 13-minute show is magic: that violent mobs of masked men are going to suddenly disappear from our streets, that the cruel and calloused hearts all around us are going to soften, that the people so addled by racism that they needed an alternative to this celebration of our commonalities are going to be moved to alter their allegiance to a monster.In fact, witnessing such a bold and beautiful declaration of diverse coexistence will likely make those threatened by such things double down in their attacks, but that doesn’t matter.But what I do know is that for thirteen minutes, it all became clear again.For thirteen minutes, we could see the future.We have had our attentions redirected, our spirits lifted, and our strength returned.We have been reminded of the place that we might still be if we refuse to stop doing the hard work; if we continue to make sure that everyone has a place here, that everyone finds welcome, that everyone gets a chance to dance.Over the span of thirteen minutes, Bad Bunny delivered a rich and nuanced love letter to his Puerto Rican roots and to the Latin American culture that shaped both him and our nation.Over the span of thirteen minutes, he gave his detractors lessons in empathy, diversity, unity, and geography. He gave the rest of us the eyes to see what we may have forgotten.He, Love, and America won.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Dear Republican Voters, Trump Supporters, White Evangelicals, and MAGA Faithful,I’d like to ask you some questions, and I’d like to hear your honest responses…If the President is a pedophile, don’t you want to know?If the person in the highest seat of power in our nation is a serial predator, isn’t it important to bring that truth into the light?If our Commander-in-Chief committed sexual abuse of minors for years, doesn’t that matter to you?You see, I know how you might have responded to these questions before January 20th, when we had a Democrat in the White House, because back then, your performative posturing never ceased. You were supposedly all about stopping the child groomers, punishing sexual criminals, and eradicating human traffickers.And with the continually delayed release of the entire Jeffrey Epstein files, I sense your fierce moral stances suddenly becoming more malleable, your hardline religious convictions coming up for debate, your once-passionate sermonizing now softening.Are you against child groomers unless they have an R next to their names?Does sexual violence still sicken you if the perpetrator helps you build a theocracy?Are you for exposing human traffickers, unless they can supply you with Supreme Court seats?Because from where I’m standing, the rubber is meeting the road, and you’re trying to take an exit ramp. It seems like you don’t have the clarity of convictions you’ve always told yourself (and the rest of us) that you have. Look, I don’t need you to agree with me politically or align with me theologically, but I was hoping we could find common ground in a base level of humanity that doesn’t want our leaders to be rapists.I thought that maybe we could cut through America’s fierce tribal divide by agreeing that we should drag monsters who use their wealth to brutalize girls and young women into the light of accountability.If I were as devoted a Christian as you claim to be, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to make the story of these crimes all go away so that I can go back to pretending I’m a follower of Jesus and morally policing the world, all while turning my head at the possibility that I voted for and still support a deviant monster.But what do I know, I’m over here on the supposedly godless, amoral Left demanding the full and unedited release of these files because my morality is a fixed reality, it is not partisan, and it is not up for debate.I don’t give a damn if these documents implicate someone I once respected or even voted for, because I want every vile pervert and predator to be exposed. I want justice for every child and woman who suffered at the hands of the wealthy and powerful. I believe the worth of a human being doesn’t depend on the voting bloc they belong to.And yeah, if the President is a pedophile, if he is a serial predator, if he has abused girls and women, I damn well want to know because I want him to be accountable.And I want you to know, because I want you to be held accountable for trying to turn away from the truth, for attempting to push it all under the rug for fear it might expose your hypocrisy.Most of all, I want to see if your cultic devotion will remain, even if you find out he is the very kind of filth you claim to be sickened by.And maybe that’s why you don’t want these files released, because you know the answer to that question.Prove me wrong. Stand with me. Demand the unredacted Epstein files be released—or tell me again who you think you are. The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Yesterday, a Trump supporter dropped a lengthy, rambling, profanity-laden diatribe into my comments section, lecturing me for implying that MAGA is inherently a white supremacist movement. In between vile personal attacks and egregious spelling errors, he accused me of “playing the Race Card", of making assumptions about people like him, and of stoking division in America (a fracture first caused, he claimed, by President Obama). The man closed by assuring me that I was unfairly maligning tens of millions of white Americans, saying, “We’re f*ckin’ tired of being called racists!”(Is that right, sunshine?)Well, to my pearl-clutching, righteously indignant friend and the rest of the exhausted, exasperated, misunderstood white folk across America:I’m a white American.I am both a person of faith and someone who considers themselves extremely patriotic, and do you know what I’m tired of?I’m tired of white people supporting a political party incessantly working to keep people of color from voting, and feigning outrage at the suggestion that they may be racist.I’m tired of a timeline, comment section, and inbox, littered with the most vile racist epithets, and always knowing their authors’ political affiliation, before even looking.I’m tired of seeing people passionately defending lawless vigilantes who are violently targeting my Latino and immigrant neighbors, making them synonymous with criminals, rapists, and drug dealers.I’m tired of seeing the loudest, most violent opposition to racial equity in this country come from white people professing to love a dark-skinned, foreign Jesus and operating as if God is a white cisgender-heterosexual guy who was born in America, raised Christian, and votes Republican.I’m tired of former church friends, neighbors, and family members hiding behind the flimsy facade of “economic insecurity” and “safety”, to cover the reality that they are terrified of the shifting demographics of this nation and are willing to do anything to stave them off.I’m tired of seeing one political party legislatively assaulting vulnerable communities’ right to vote, their access to healthcare, to affordable housing, and to comparable education.I’m tired of white people doing Olympic-level intellectual gymnastics to try to gaslight the rest of us into believing a meme of an African-American President and his wife depicted as apes is anything other than a dehumanizing and dangerous stereotype. White people in America, if you’re really tired of being called racists, here’s what you might wanna try: stop doing racist s**t.Begin by clearly, unequivocally, and loudly divorcing yourself from the single most racist entity on the planet right now, which is this President and his Administration. That would be a great start.If you’re truly offended at the assertion that you might be a white supremacist, ask yourself whether sharing a voting bloc with The Proud Boys, the KKK, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Kristi Noem is making your accusers’ case stronger.You are known by the company you keep, by the people you vote for, those you contribute to and elevate to public office, and to the highest courts of this nation. And if your self-righteous outrage at being labeled a racist is real, you’re going to need to explain how you can be someone who honestly treasures diversity while standing alongside its greatest and fiercest adversaries.If you really find the idea of racism objectionable and are committed to dismantling it:Work to ensure voting rights for all Americans, and take note of those resisting them.Stop mindlessly attacking Critical Race Theory and DEI and begin actually finding out what those things are and why they matter.Read a book about the realities of systemic racism, white privilege, and the human toll of discrimination written by people of color.Participate in and publicize a march, rally, vigil, or awareness event that you know will cause turbulence with your circle of influence, and ask yourself why that’s a problem for them.Volunteer with a nonprofit, ministry, or community organization in your city, working on the front lines where marginalized communities facing the direct effects of the legislation you support live.Openly confront family members, friends, coworkers, classmates, and social media friends when they perpetuate racist tropes and stereotypes, and see how they respond.Get out of your literal or figurative gated community of whiteness and actually hear the story of someone whose pigmentation differs from your own.In other words: move, learn, speak, work, give, and vote in a way that rattles people of privilege, that takes power from those who traffic in inequity, and threatens those most comfortable in systemic supremacy. Be willing to cross the aisle, leave a church, or lose a friend to demonstrate just how strongly you are opposed to this hateful ignorance.And use your social media platform to explicitly condemn the racism and white supremacy of Donald Trump, JD Vance, the Trump Administration, the Republican Party, White Evangelicalism, and the MAGA movement.If you’re not willing to do any of those things, you’re just going to have to deal with the fallout and the pushback and the implications from the rest of us.You may be tired of being called racist, my white friends. The rest of us are tired of you enabling, supporting, voting for, and actively partnering with racists and expecting us accept it and be silent about it.I don’t accept it, and I won't remain silent about it.If that offends you, that’s a you problem.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.(Note: Even if you’re a white person who believes themselves to be moderate, progressive, liberal, or anti-racist, these are good ways to make sure your outward life is congruent with your internal story.)The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Donald Trump shared an unspeakably racist meme about President Obama and Michelle Obama on social media.With our nation stretched to its breaking point by a litany of Constitutional crises and human rights emergencies, just a hair’s breadth from exploding into inexorable chaos, our sitting president used the unrivaled platform he has been given to perpetuate one of the longest-running and most dehumanizing stereotypes about people of color.It is a historic dereliction of duty, a gross and unprecedented failure of leadership; it is dangerous, damaging, deadly. And before you start thinking anything crazy, I just want to remind you (and myself) that we’ve been here before:This is gonna end him.This will be the tipping point.This is the red line.He’s finally gone too far.How many times over the last ten years have you said this or thought this? How many times have you heard this from well-meaning friends, trusted journalists, beloved podcasters, or even from me?How many new additions to his vast resume of filth convinced us all that this would be the moment when our friends, family members, and neighbors finally had the scales removed from their eyes, when their buried humanity would show itself, when they would be broken from their mindless cultic stupor and reject him?When he mocked a disabled reporter.When he urged rally protestors to be beaten.When he boasted about grabbing women by the genitalia.When he mocked a decorated prisoner of war.When he called veterans suckers and losers.When he talked about a female reporter’s menstrual cycle.When he shrugged off hundreds of thousands of pandemic deaths.When he incited a violent insurrection at our Capitol.When he screamed about immigrants eating family pets.When he slandered citizens executed in the streets of Minneapolis.When he berated a female journalist for asking about the burying of a human trafficking investigation, his name appears in thousands of times.If I had space here, I could easily list a thousand such moments when reasonable human beings were positive that we’d arrived at a nadir of morality, a political Waterloo, one that would precipitate the exodus of the brainwashed sycophants and empty-headed disciples who allowed him to ascend to a place he was never worthy of.And yet, here we are, with this snarling, repugnant cesspool of a man once again slumped upon the highest seat in our nation and almost by the hour, tearing apart everything our forebears and ancestors spent two hundred and fifty years building.And we’re here because tens of millions of people with whom we share this beautiful land have deemed every single bit of moral filth that has erupted from within his dead and blackened heart acceptable.No violent rhetoric toward individuals or people groups has been a moral dealbreaker. No vicious attack on women or people of color or immigrants or queer people or Democrats has proven beyond the pale.No lawless or immoral word or act has been the catalyst for their defection.And so, no, his targeting of the Obamas with the kind of vulgar white supremacist propaganda that has forever poisoned our national bloodstream will change nothing for the people we know and love who have spent ten years fiercely tethered to him. They will cling tightly to his side as he sinks rapidly like a bloated whale carcass toward an ever-deepening moral bottom, because they either harbor that same bigoted ignorance or they lack the courage to oppose it.If they were people possessing the decency and goodness we still give them credit for, they would have abandoned him long ago.They will have no great awakening.They will not publicly condemn him.There will be no epiphanies or moments of clarity.He is them, and they are him, and that’s just how this is.And since they will not part from him, we will need to part from them.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

You hear it, don’t you?The conspicuous silence?The supposed pro-life Christians have gone awfully quiet lately.In fact, come to think of it, they’ve virtually vanished ever since the Epstein files began floating up from the depths of billionaire-birthed hell and into the national discourse (at least, once they realized some of the names within them).As the Trump Administration worked tirelessly over the last year to suppress, withhold, and redact the unspeakable horrors the files contain, the alleged church-going, God-fearing, self-identified life-lovers said nothing; sudden conscientious objectors in the war for the sanctity of all they claim God has fashioned.And right now, as millions of pages filled with the most despicable, depraved atrocities human beings are capable of, cover every square inch of America’s collective consciousness, the pro-life Christians are nowhere to be found. To them, these lives are not sacred; they are worthless.The thousands of girls and young women whose childhoods, innocence, dreams, security, and very bodies were violated in ways that decent human beings cannot comprehend receive no fierce advocacy, merit no anguished outcry, and earn no passionate defense. That’s because their massive moral burden immediately expires outside the womb.You see, Conservative Christians don’t love life; they love embryos.They tell us all the time.They speak effusively about them in conversation, publicly revere them at rallies, shed crocodile tears over them in Op-Eds, accost strangers entering clinics over them, viciously troll people on social media because of them, and sermonize on street corners about them.They even claim to have voted for a reprehensible monster whom they’d never otherwise tolerate to lead, solely on their behalf.Republican people of faith regularly fall all over themselves, carrying on in performative grief over embryos, unleashing all manner of histrionics at those of us who believe in a woman’s right to have autonomy over her own body.And they do all of this (they claim), because they believe that embryos are human beings, and they want those beloved in-utero human beings to be cherished, defended, and protected at all costs.The problem with their breathless, tearful zealotry is that once these embryos are no longer embryos, these supposed life-lovers often don’t treat them like they’re at all human. Before departing the birth canal, they’re sacred. After that, they’re screwed.We don’t see this MAGA Christian hypocrisy in the Epstein files alone, but in their ambivalence toward ICE’s brutality, and their silence regarding the elimination of SNAP funding, expansive Medicare cuts, or Veterans benefit reduction.Over and over, when human beings are pressed up hard against the nightmares and staring down the demons, when people who respect and revere life should be the loudest voices and the most fervent presence, they refuse to speak.We can’t allow these people to claim moral high ground and cosplay as defenders of life when it suits them and then disappear when it threatens their political affiliations and religious institutions, when it requires them to confront their own.We have to hold these sanctified frauds’ feet to the fire of the convictions they claim.We have to confront our family members, friends, neighbors, co-workers, classmates, and social media contacts. We cannot allow them to look away, deny awareness, or hide in the shadows. Most of all, we cannot allow them to label themselves pro-life while showing such contempt for so much of the living.I wish white Christian Conservatives had the same passion for victims of assault, migrant children, school shooting victims, sick toddlers, young black men, Muslim families, and LGBTQ teens that they claim to have for embryos.Then they’d actually be pro-life, and then we’d all be able to go about the work together of caring for humanity and defeating the monsters.Yes, white Conservative Christians love embryos.Disparate sentient human beings who suffer in their midst? Not so much.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Dear ICE Agent,This morning, I woke up abruptly after another night of disrupted sleep and replaying nightmares.My mind and body, though exhausted, could not rest, plagued by a parade of horrifying visions of unthinkable violence that passed in front of me the night before:A disabled veteran, intentionally targeted by an SUV and knocked to the ground, the driver opening his door only to add insult to terrible injury.An unarmed teenage boy, riddled with rubber bullets, the force blowing apart the clothes covering his back.A mother of three, ripped through the smashed window of her car and thrown to the pavement.A young man, his face forcefully driven into the street while being pepper-sprayed from inches away.A hysterical child, watching his grandfather being gang-tackled and beaten by masked thugs.A church minister, bloodied and bruised, his assailants laughing and mocking.A shell-shocked college student, taunted by a man with a gun pointed at her face, asking if she’d “learned anything from that b***h in Minneapolis.”And as this sickening storm of blood and broken glass and whistles and screams swirled around inside my head, a question suddenly stopped me in my tracks: What kind of person does what you do?I reminded myself that none of this chaos and bloodshed is happening without you.You are the face concealed behind the mask.Yours are the hands delivering the blows.Yours are the feet stomping on people’s necks. It’s your voice spitting out the taunts and threats. I began to try to put myself inside your head.I tried to imagine how it feels to wake up every morning, knowing that you will hurt other people, and that you will do so, not begrudgingly but joyfully.I wondered, as you strap on layers of armor, adorn yourself with weapons that you barely know how to use, and reach for the thick mask that will allow you to terrorize your neighbors in anonymity, does it make you feel a strength you never otherwise feel? Does it soothe your fragile ego to be able to inflict suffering on a world you believe has wronged you?Does all of this power and control silence those voices in your head that have always told you that you were useless and stupid?Do you tell yourself a story where the hell you’re going to put people through is for a righteous cause, that you’re working for the greater good, or do you simply get off on it all?I thought about you with your family in the morning, and other questions came:Do you kiss the heads of your kids as you prepare to leave, so willing to brutalize other people’s children?Do you enjoy the tranquility and safety of your home for a few quiet predawn moments, as you ready yourself to invade the homes and the peace of strangers?And as you head out for the day, do you embrace the people you love one more time before violating the lives and bodies of someone else’s loved ones? I also wondered about your faith.Do you believe in a God of love? Do you pray to a Jesus who commands you to care for your neighbor? Do you sit in a church on Sunday, hearing sermons about a compassion that clothes the naked, feeds the hungry, welcomes the stranger, and protects the vulnerable? And if such things are true, how are you seemingly so able to leave all of this at home as you become a willing instrument of such cruelty and malice against people made in the image of God?Actually, maybe that's your secret. Maybe that’s how you do what you do all day long and still sleep at night.Maybe you don’t see the people in front of you as people at all, either because of the color of their skin, the accents they use, or the place they were born.Maybe you’ve dehumanized the human beings in your path to the point that their suffering, their sorrow, their injuries, and even their executions can all be justified:The fathers whose heads you break open, The high school students you shower with tear gas,the young mothers you toss around like rag dolls, the screaming children whose tiny wrists you zip-tie,the battle-scarred former soldiers you throw handcuffed into a van for daring to ask you to respect the Constitution and the nation they fought and suffered to defend.Maybe in the darkened and desolate space inside your head, they’re all simply the enemy to be destroyed, the poison to eradicate, the sickness to drive out.Maybe you really do somehow believe in the middle of the blood and broken glass and whistles and screams that this is all making us safer, but I can’t fathom how.But after a few moments of this, I realize it’s a losing proposition. I’m never going to understand you.No matter how many questions I ask and no matter how hard I work to imagine what it is to be you, I can’t—and I thank God for that. If I were able to, perhaps I would be the lawless, violent coward behind the mask that you are. Maybe I would be causing the trauma that you are.Instead, today, I will step out into my neighborhood, hoping to be the opposite of you, to live in such a way that I undo the damage you are so happily doing. I will be a healer and a helper and a lover of all my neighbors.And at the end of this day, I know I will again find it difficult to sleep, as the monstrous images of this day will once again replay in my head. I will likely wake up tomorrow still weary from a fatigue that refuses to leave.But I will welcome this constant restlessness as the cost of my compassion, I will give thanks for a faith that compels me to love fiercely, and I’ll be grateful that the life I live, the path I take, the work I do, and the person I am never need to be hidden behind a mask.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Sometimes you don’t have to work to figure out where the racists are.Sometimes they out themselves.Back in the Fall, within nanoseconds of the NFL announcing that Latin rapper Bad Bunny would be performing the Super Bowl Halftime Show, the Trump cult tore itself away from Charlie Kirk martyrdom, MAGA church shooter retcons, restaurant logo crusades, and pro-ICE posturing to launch into a full-on frenzy of performative histrionics in protest.Since then, they’ve continued their tortured pearl-clutching unabated, with the white supremacist stalwarts at Turning Point USA recently announcing an “alternative” halftime show (called, of course, The All-American Halftime Show), featuring Olympic-level cultural appropriator-turned MAGA bootlicker Kid Rock and an undercard of similarly pigmented, patriotism-peddling, Bible-brandishing, shameless deep South virtue signalers. You see the “alternative” they’re offering here, right?If you’re over 25 and, like many older white folks, have remained permanently trapped in the amber of Classic Rock radio, you may have never even heard of Bad Bunny, whose birth name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio. (I’d be willing to bet my house that 90 percent of the Conservatives who are currently rending their garments online hadn’t, either.)Born and raised in Puerto Rico (which a terrifying number of MAGAs don’t seem to know is an American territory), his father was a truck driver and his mother a school teacher. He spent his formative years singing in the choir in a Roman Catholic Church his family attended, and began writing his own music at the age of 14. Bunny was signed to a record label at the age of 20 after being discovered online.Today, Bad Bunny is an international superstar, the second most-streamed artist of all time, with 100 billion streamed songs. He is a multiple Grammy winner, has crossed over into professional wrestling and acting, is a coveted brand ambassador, and does millions of dollars in philanthropic work through his Good Bunny Foundation (Fundación el Buen Conejo), which he started in 2018.Ocasio is the literal embodiment of the American Dream that the GOP has spent decades waving in our faces and flying up the flagpole.So, what’s the problem?Let’s just say it’s primarily a melanin issue, with a side order of MAGA cultism, a heaping portion of Christian nationalism, and a healthy dash of homophobia thrown in.As a self-described gender-fluid Latin musician who sings predominantly in Spanish, has previously criticized Donald Trump, and repeatedly lamented the inhumanity of ICE as recently as during his Grammy acceptance speech last week, Ocasio must be condemned, vilified, and eradicated because membership in the mindless death cult of white American intolerance they now call home requires it. This asinine mob mentality vitriol is what Trump’s movement has fostered and fomented, and what it demands.Ocasio opened his recent Grammy speech with these words:“Before I say thanks to God, I’m going to say: ICE out,” he said. “We’re not savages. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans.”This is supposed to be what America stands for: decency, diversity, humanity, and yet it is precisely the message MAGA is burdened to shout down and suffocate. The fact that the Right feels compelled to create an “alternative” to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl appearance speaks eloquently about their desire to secede from a culturally and racially diverse nation, how committed they are to perpetuating the myth of oppressed white Christians, and how determined they are to manipulate every event into a racist holy war in order to keep their rank-and-file foaming at the mouth.Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet said in a statement that the show “is an opportunity for all Americans to enjoy a halftime show with no agenda other than to celebrate faith, family, and freedom.”But whose faith are they celebrating? Not the spiritual beliefs of Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, Unitarians, or non-MAGA Evangelical Christians.Whose families are they talking about? Not Latino families, or black families, or immigrant families, or LGBTQ families, that’s for damn sure.And exactly whose freedom will take center stage on Sunday? Not the people with brown skin being relentlessly terrorized by ICE, not the thousands of sexual assault survivors brutalized by Jeffrey Epstein and his collaborators, not the tens of millions of women who deserve autonomy over their own bodies, and not the migrants and refugees being persecuted by these cosplaying Christians.The Turning Point halftime show, like every venture in the MAGA/Trump ecosystem, is a grim, sinister, mean-spirited fight against progress, evolution, and diversity disguised as sincere virtue. This isn’t about Bad Bunny.This isn’t about a halftime show.It’s about who we collectively want to be, the kind of nation we dream of living in, and the future we want those who follow us to inherit.It’s about the cost of standing up to the bullies, of rejecting racism, of being intolerant of intolerance.This is about what we will demand and what we will not accept when it comes to the rights and voices of people of color.Trump and his supporters don’t want an alternative halftime show; they want an alternative white, gated community nation where only they benefit.In these days, we are in a brutal battle for an America where everyone will find opportunity, safety, and welcome.It’s time we all got in the game.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

I’m not with them.Hundreds of times every day, I feel compelled to break into strangers’ conversations on social media or in the checkout line or in my neighborhood, whenever I see them encountering professed Christians who support this president, his platform, and his actions—and I want to apologize profusely to them.As someone who seeks to follow Jesus and aspire to his teachings of compassion, generosity, and radical hospitality, I’m burdened to publicly distance myself from their unrepentant cruelty, to tell the goodhearted people bearing the brunt of their disfigured MAGA religion that this is not the Jesus I know; to remind them that a vast multitude of faithful people are as horrified by them as they are. I want them to know how much I grieve alongside them and that it makes no sense to me, either.As a thirty-year local church pastor, the most tragic part of the rapid erosion of decency and empathy in America is knowing its source; it’s admitting that the exponential rise in aggression toward immigrants and people of color flows from alleged followers of a dark-skinned, Middle Eastern Jesus whom they would fully abhor.It’s a stomach-turning realization because I know what a confounding, anti-Christian Gospel they’re preaching to the world right now and how they are violently driving decent people from religion and derailing their spiritual journeys—because the cognitive dissonance of Jesus’ words and their responses defies comprehension.I am so sorry for MAGA Christians.I’m sorry for them, because I know they have no idea who Jesus is.Perhaps they once did, but because of some toxic cocktail of fearful theology, partisan media, inherited racism, anti-science rhetoric, and political tribalism, he has been all but entirely squeezed from their hearts and replaced with some terrible, sneering white abomination that bears his name, but little else.The Jesus of the Gospels is nonexistent in them:His overflowing compassion that fed a hillside multitude, not because they agreed with him or earned their free meal, but because they were hungry.His heart for the alone, vulnerable, and invisible, that declared he resided with them in their suffering.His tenderness toward the hurting and the afraid who were drawn to him because they recognized they were seen and safe in his presence.His quiet humility and soft-hearted peacemaking.His perseverant love for his neighbor and for the least and for his enemies.There is none of that in these people or the religion they impose on the world, and that is a flat-out sin.There is only this boasting, angry, greedy “don’t tread on me” bravado.There is only their callous revelry in the suffering of others.There is only an insular, protective, territorial hoarding of blessings and opportunities.There is only this snarling, middle-finger contempt for so much of the hurting, scared, sacred humanity that crosses their paths every day, needing healing and finding greater injury.I am so sorry for angry MAGA Christians, because of how much damage they are joyfully doing to so many in the name of a Jesus who spent his life being radical hatred’s beautifully defiant counterpoint.I’m sorry because I know the dilemma earnest people of faith are facing in these moments: they are drawn to Jesus’ teachings and repelled by hateful Christians. I feel the same way. I am exhausted from trying to perpetually overcome MAGA believers to find any sign of the fierce lover of people that they say they believe in.And since I can’t seem to reach these people, all I can do is to declare as often and as loudly as I am able that I am not with them.We are not of like heart or like faith.We are not doing the same work.I do not share their fear of their neighbor.I do not echo their contempt for the least of these.I do not co-sign their prolific malice.MAGA Christians don’t represent me.They don’t represent millions of followers of Jesus.Most of all, they don’t represent Jesus.They have no use for him.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Whew, this is a tough one to write, but I’ll try to get it out if you’ll bear with me.For the past couple of months, I’ve been doing some serious soul-searching, have spent hours in quiet reflection, and faced some hard truths.I need to come clean now and get this all out in the open.I confess that all those MAGAs in my mentions have been right all along: I am woke.“How woke?”, you ask.I hope you’re sitting down.I'm so woke, I want the complete Epstein files released so every rapist and pedophile, regardless of their political affiliation, faces accountability, and so all survivors of abuse know they matter.I’m so woke, I don’t believe people should be rounded up like animals simply for the color of their skin or the language they speak and thrown into concentration camps, just to placate insecure white bigots.I’m so woke, I believe it’s disgusting to take away healthcare and food from the old, the poor, and the sick, because no one should lack in a land of such abundanceI’m so woke, I think banning books is a sign of intellectually insecure, religion-addled fascists who are afraid of progress and want to control what people learn and experience.I’m so woke, I think actual physicians should be in charge of national health, TV hosts shouldn’t be running our Military, and Russian assets shouldn’t be overseeing our national security. I’m so woke, I think women and their physicians should decide what happens to their bodies, not a group of knuckle-dragging politicians who want to legislate their Jurassic values onto them.I’m so woke, I believe every child deserves an education, even non-wealthy, non-white people, and that they all be free from religious indoctrination in their classrooms.I’m so woke, I don’t believe someone’s gender identity and sexual orientation are anyone else’s damn business, and that people should be able to live in peace in their own skin.I’m so woke, I believe in full LGBTQ rights,that we should protect the planet,that everyone deserves healthcare,that a nation cannot be Christian,that the world is bigger than America,that to be "pro-life" means to treasure all of it.I’m so woke that I believe America isn’t a white birthright,that we are all one interdependent community,that people and places are made better by diversity,that no one’s religion should be compulsory,that non-American human beings have as much value as American ones,that there is no such thing as an “illegal.”I’m so woke, I believe generosity is greater than greed, compassion better than contempt, and kindness superior to derision.I’m so woke, I believe there is enough in this world for everyone: enough food, enough money, enough room, enough care, if we unleash our creativity and unclench our fists and treat people like we want to be treated.I’m so woke, I think it’s a pathetic disgrace that America's president is an incoherent convicted felon and court-adjudicated rapist who has contempt for the Rule of Law and the Constitution.I’m so woke, I’m embarrassed that one of our political parties continually votes against healthcare, against free speech, against body autonomy, against public schools, against due process, against the Bill of Rights, all because they are compromised and beholden to a career criminal.I’m so fully, hopelessly, and unrepentantly woke that I actually give a damn about people other than myself.I confess that the Woke Mind Virus has left me empathetic toward suffering, welcoming of diversity, generous toward those with less, allergic to discrimination, sickened by bigotry, and intolerant of intolerance.In saying all of this, I am the antithesis of MAGA Americans and certainly disappointing, irritating, and confounding them.And that’s how I know I’m doing life right.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe