In order to cope with the events of last week, my wife and I have been watching Alpha House, a cancelled two season Amazon Prime series about Republican senators. My favorite character is Gil John Biggs, played by John Goodman. Gil John is an old-school, pre-Tea Party Republican, a throwback to the day when bipartisan friendships on Capitol Hill were actually possible. He reminds me a lot of my grandpa Ralph Storm, who was a true conservative and not a... Read more
The stock market was supposed to crash when Donald Trump became president, because of all the instability he was going to bring the world. But it hasn’t crashed; it’s soared. Trump’s son in law Jared Kushner noticed. The investors get it, he said in a recent article. They understand that Trump is really going to be a pragmatist and that all of his outrageous tweets are nothing more than bread and circuses for the riffraff. So if the Dow Jones... Read more
While government officials have always distorted truth, the Trump Administration is the first to openly normalize the use of “alternative facts.” And it’s not because our post-truth president read too much postmodern philosophy. He doesn’t read books. He just thinks that his authority entitles him to proclaim a “truth” that has no correspondence to empirical reality. Trump could not have risen to power without the support of a massive Christian subculture that has been indoctrinated to understand truth as authoritative... Read more
Milo Yiannopoulos is a despicable person. In addition to his racist alt-right views, his entire platform is built upon internet trolling. The means by which he gains followers is to solicit “persecution” from “political correctness” by engaging in malicious ad hominem attacks. In this sense, he is the embodiment of the toxicity that American conservatism has acquired in the Reagan age. He exudes the opposite of the character qualities of authentic conservatism like patience, integrity, discipline, and temperance. Yiannopoulos was permanently kicked... Read more
When the news broke of Russian interference in the presidential election, Franklin Graham responded with a widely panned tweet asking “Do you think it was the Russians interfering with the election or was it God?” I don’t understand the mystery of how God interacts with our world. I refuse to be a closet deist like many of my fellow mainline Protestant ministers who try to argue that because God is the ground of all being, he doesn’t get tangled up... Read more
Before I was ever a writer, I played football. I love the game. It’s one of the few masculine things about me. My grandpa was good friends with Grant Teaff, who coached Baylor’s football team in the eighties, so every year at Baylor’s homecoming game, I got to stand on the sidelines with my grandpa. I’ve seen a lot of football games, but I’ve never seen anybody do anything quite as bold as what Clemson did last night. I would... Read more
First Things senior editor and Emory English professor Mark Bauerlein is intimidated by his college students. He says that on his campus, “Nobody wants to provoke others, so everyone carries an invisible trigger-meter” because “hypersensitivity is out of control.” And he wants Donald Trump’s administration to do something about it: “Recognizing that sensitivity is charted on racial and sexual differences, the new administration should attack school policies that aggravate them.” Wow. While I’ve never been a fan of First Things‘... Read more
A crucial part of my conservative evangelical upbringing was learning about the difference between “absolute truth” and “relativism.” We were taught that conservative evangelicals believed in truth, while liberals believed that each person gets to make up their own “truth.” So I thought that conservatism was defined by loyalty to the truth. To be a conservative meant to believe and tell the truth even when the whole world around you is telling lies. What eroded my conservative evangelicalism more than... Read more
I don’t do my end of year top 10 list according to popularity, because the blog posts that get the most attention are often the trashiest. So the following top 10 list of posts are blogs that I think are worth sharing again. They are listed in chronological order as opposed to any kind of ranking. (more…) Read more
There are two days left in 2016. That means you have two days left to find worthy causes to support with tax-deductible donations that will decrease the amount that you are required by the IRS to give to Donald Trump. It means this is my last opportunity to share my heart with you and hope that you will make it possible for me to continue doing a job that I love. Without an influx of financial support, I will need... Read more
Mercy Not Sacrifice
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