The God They Preach at the Pentagon 13JAN26

I am tempted to judge the Christianity of many who claim the faith but don't ( in my opinion ) live it. Then I remind myself there are some ( maybe many ) who have the same thoughts about my claim of being a Christian and realize judgement of one's personal faith is best left to God. However, I will not hesitate to judge the claim of being Christian when it based on the rejection and perversion of the tenets of Christianity as apostasy. "christian" nationalism is apostasy, a perversion of Christianity and those who proclaim it as Christianity are the false prophets, the wolves in sheep's clothing we are warned about in Scripture. This from Sojourners.....

The God They Preach at the Pentagon

By Michael Woolf

Jan 13, 2026

On Dec. 17, 2025, evangelical minister and Republican political activist Franklin Graham led a Christmas worship service at the Pentagon, where he preached about God being a “God of war.” I find it to be one of the most bizarre Christmas sermons ever given, but it was telling. In fact, it telegraphed the foreign policy of the U.S. 

A few weeks later, President Donald Trump would order the kidnapping and extradition of Nicolás Maduro to the U.S. to face drug trafficking charges. Now is the time for Christians to reclaim the message of peace that is at the heart of the gospel, and to resist imperialism.

While there are undoubtedly many root causes of this violation of international law, one of them is Christian nationalism and its insistence that the U.S. is a country chosen by God. Once a country’s chosenness has been established, all things become possible, from invading foreign countries so that the U.S. can “run” them and control their oil reserves to acquiring Greenland by force.

While this idea has no bearing in scripture, it does represent the apotheosis of one of the U.S.’s most sacred beliefs: American exceptionalism. That hubris has often led to disastrous results for both the U.S. and the world. From the Cold War to the War on Terror, the U.S.’s self-conception as a global police force has led to death and misery, with at least 80 people being killed in the attack on Caracas, Venezuela as the latest example.

That exceptionalism, perhaps best embodied by this administration’s “America First” doctrine, manifests as unlimited power that ignores both international law and the U.S. Constitution. When asked what constrained his actions, Trump replied that his morality was “the only thing that can stop me.” In this understanding of the U.S.’s might and power, the guiding question is not whether something should be done, but whether something can be done. As far as Trump is concerned, anything that constrains America’s power or the will of its leader must be tossed aside.

What is striking about such claims is that they emerge from the idea that the U.S. is a Christian nation. On Dec. 21, 2025, Vice President JD Vance gave a speech at a Turning Point USA event where he argued that “Christianity is America’s creed” and that “by the grace of God, we will always be a Christian nation.” As a casual review of the U.S.’s founding documents reveals, it is a myth that this country was ever meant to be a “Christian” nation.

When dangerous theology becomes policy, Christians have a unique opportunity to propose better ideas about the nature of God, and we can start in scripture. Peace is so central to Jesus’ ministry that it takes a willful misconstrual of his message to imagine a Christianity that is compatible with violence of any kind, let alone imperialism and war. From Jesus’ “blessed are the peacemakers” (Matthew 5:9), to his straightforward command to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44), it is clear that God is a God of peace, not war—no matter what Franklin Graham or anyone else says.

READ MORE: After Maduro, Venezuelan Christians Pray for End to U.S. Imperialism

It is time to call such characterizations of God what they are: not just bad theology, but the creation of an entirely different deity, one who has more in common with the Roman god of war Mars than the God of scripture. In that same Christmas sermon, Graham said that God “hates” and spent much time dwelling on an obscure story from 1 Samuel 15 that has been used to support ethnic cleansing and genocide. Sermons like Graham’s reveal little about God and much more about the sorts of power that Christian nationalists worship.

In imagining a god with unlimited power and desire to punish, they are ignoring some of the very best ideas about who God is. The Jewish idea of tzimtzum describes how creation came not from the exertion of God’s divine power but instead from God’s withdrawal. In order to create something that was not divine, God had to recede to create a space for that thing to exist. This idea is echoed from a Christian perspective in Marilynne Robinson’s fantastic book, Reading Genesis, where she argues that restraint is one of God’s key attributes. In making human beings, Robinson argues that “God must practice almost limitless restraint,” leading to her conclusion that “to refrain, to put aside power, is godlike.”

Especially in a time when the line between church and state is being blurred, ideas about God and the use of power are tangled up with one another. If God is all-powerful and all-vengeful, then the state can pursue its goals without any hindrance or accountability. But if God is fundamentally restrained, discretionary, and extremely thoughtful about the use of direct intervention, that models what good use of power looks like for the state as well.

It’s laughable to imagine that God would be in favor of the U.S. kidnapping the leader of Venezuela and seizing control of the nation and its lucrative oil reserves, and yet that is exactly the sort of idea that Christians are forced to confront head-on. It wouldn’t be the first time that Christian theology has been used to justify U.S. aggression. During the Vietnam War, the popular evangelist and Franklin Graham’s father, Billy Graham, as well as Archbishop Francis Spellman, and former Christianity Today editor-in-chief Carl F. H. Henry all lent theological and ethical support to U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Spellman even blessed B-52 bombers with holy water.

Theology is never neutral; it can be used to bless bombers or fight imperialism. As in previous times, Christians are confronted with a choice. As German liberation theologian Dorothee Sölle warned in her 1990 book The Window of Vulnerability, “We have learned to use our tradition. If we do not, it will use us.” We cannot allow Christian nationalism to remake God in its own violent image and use theology to advance its own ends. Instead, we must forcefully advance a theology that makes peace—not power—holy.

Michael Woolf

Michael Woolf is the senior minister of Lake Street Church of Evanston in Illinois.

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Peace is so central to Jesus’ ministry that it takes a willful misconstrual of his message to imagine a Christianity that is compatible with violence of any kind, let alone imperialism and war.

I Rejected Charlie Kirk’s Politics. That’s Why I Grieve His Death 11SEP25

The Charlie Kirk murder is that little dot on the map of gun deaths in 2025.

A message of living faith, compassion, and hope from someone who has lived and practiced right wing religion and politics and now lives and practices and teaches Christianity as he and many of us believe Christ taught us to and that we have a responsibility as Christians to do to the best of our ability. While I am horrified by charlie kirk's murder and have prayed for his family and friends as well as the murderer and his family , but having his body flown on Air Force 2, flags at half-mast, having him lie in state, putting a statute of him in the Capitol, and giving him a Presidential Medal of Freedom are all entirely inappropriate. From Sojourners.....

I Rejected Charlie Kirk’s Politics. That’s Why I Grieve His Death

Killing is neither progressive nor conservative; it is simply anti-human.

Sep 11, 2025

The brazen and reprehensible murder of right-wing religious movement leader Charlie Kirk, a co-founder of Turning Point USA and a key supporter of President Donald Trump, is as tragic as it is telling about the sad state of American politics.

The 31-year-old husband and father of two died after being shot while he conducted a popular debate-style event at Utah Valley University, south of Salt Lake City. Kirk had started answering a question about gun violence in America when a single bullet struck him in the neck. Republican and Democratic spokespersons, including Trump, asked for prayers as medical professionals tried to save Kirk's life, but he succumbed to his wounds shortly after the attack.

I never had contact with Charlie Kirk, but I'm only one degree removed from him because many of my former colleagues knew him personally and supported his efforts. For over 30 years, I helped lead an aggressive protest-oriented anti-abortion movement. My fellow organizers and I intended our movement to be wholly nonviolent. Still, over time, individuals started showing up at our demonstrations eager to pick fights with reproductive rights counterdemonstrators. Before long, they were throwing punches at their ideological opponents. Then, the shootings began. During my time in leadership, four physicians were shot and killed by people from our ranks. It was only after those deadly episodes that some of my colleagues and I woke up to the fact that our increasingly harsh rhetoric contributed to dehumanizing reproductive rights advocates, leading others to believe they could inflict injury and death on them. From then on, I did what I could to reduce incendiary language, but the violence continued.

Before I abandoned the conservatism Kirk so effectively promoted, I shared many of the same platforms he exploited, from the massive student assemblies at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., to the Christian Broadcasting Network's popular television programming. Like Kirk, I was a young star in the Christian conservative universe, but a generation before him. More than a few people have told me, “Charlie Kirk makes me think of you when you were younger.” Maybe that’s one reason I took his death so hard; I literally bent over in grief. But there are other reasons, too.

Listening to news reports in real time, my pastoral impulses immediately went to the young family Kirk leaves behind. No one with a conscience or a drop of compassion could celebrate the life-altering anguish a young widow will experience as she tries to help her toddler daughter understand why the little one will never see her daddy again. Years from now, she will explain to her son, who was born just last year, why he never knew his father. I prayed for them and I prayed for Charlie’s parents, who, I learned, have lost their only child.

Then came my memories: assassinations, bombings, kidnappings, and airplane hijackings that played out on television as I grew up in the 1960s and ’70s. One of my earliest memories is of my family surrounding the black and white television as news broke that a gunman had killed President John F. Kennedy. Then there's the indelible image of my father weeping after Martin Luther King Jr. was slain in Memphis. These events, not to mention the massive politically motivated violence that was the Vietnam War, hang like a pall over my childhood recollections.

Wherever political violence occurs—including recent examples in Utah, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and anywhere else—it is ugly, and it reverberates through whole societies, shocking consciences, instilling fear, giving rise to pervasive pessimism and hopelessness. It is also counterproductive to the ideals that perpetrators ostensibly feel that their ill-advised, misguided actions defend—or even advance. Instead, studies show that assassinations often undermine democracy and social institutions, decrease political participation, correlate with social conflict, contribute to economic decline, and cause harmful psychological impacts across social strata.

Political commentators as different from each other as Rachel Maddow of MSNBC and Katie Pavlich of Fox News have decried the killing of ideological opponents as "anti-American." The robust public exchange of ideas and the First Amendment guarantee of free speech, including using offensive words, contribute to our country's unique freedoms of thought and expression. They strengthen our public life.

Kirk's opinions about others were regularly cruel, dismissive, and exclusionary. Still, he had a constitutional right to express his views and lead his movement—and those who oppose his contemptuous attitudes have an equal right to call out those harmful attitudes and work to defeat the policies and behaviors they produce. But silencing ideological competitors by frightening, brutalizing, or murdering them is contrary to the very foundation of our constitutional republic.

Of course, for Christians, political violence in all its forms is not only unconstitutional, anti-social, and anti-American, but it is also supremely immoral and sinful. Jesus commanded those who seek to follow him to love their enemies, bless those who curse them, and pray for those who abuse them (Luke 6:27-28). Christ did not permit his followers to harm others for any cause. Bullying, menacing, assaulting, and intentional homicide are violations of at least one of the Ten Commandments—against killing—and contradict Jesus' Two Great Commandments to love God, in whose image every person is made, and our neighbors, who, the parable of the Good Samaritan indicates, include people that are the furthest from us socially, culturally, and religiously.

READ MORE: A Field Guide to Christian Nonviolence

It doesn't matter what side of the ideological divide commits a politically motivated murder like that of Charlie Kirk's; it is antithetical to everything Christian. It is demoralizing for anyone who champions human rights, democratic freedoms, political diversity, and general decency. It most certainly flies in the face of virtues Jesus enumerated in his Sermon on the Mount: meekness, the desire to do righteously, mercy, purity of heart, and peacemaking.

Today, I see abortion from a very different angle, and I support a woman's right to make her own conscientious decision about her reproductive health. Notwithstanding my significant and consequential differences with my one-time allies, they have a God-given right to speak, organize, and even legislate as their convictions guide them and the Constitution and the courts allow. My task is to meet that challenge by peacefully persuading a majority of constituents that my position is in the best interests of the whole.

Every religious, cultural, social, and political influencer must unequivocally reject, denounce, and condemn the murder of Charlie Kirk and all political violence, whether expressed in word or deed, whether it comes from our own camp or that of the other. At the same time, we must not let the wicked transgressions of a few discourage us from pursuing good for all. As I write this, Charlie Kirk's assailant is unknown, so we don't know their name, or even their gender, and we most certainly don't know the detailed motivation behind their abominable act, but we do know this person’s actions do not reflect a principled political worldview. Such a killing is neither progressive nor conservative; it is simply anti-human.

As people of good intention, we must not give up working together to advance the irenic, congenial, and mutually respectful, yet firm and determined contest of ideas, policy, and practices with a view toward outcomes that benefit the greatest number of people in the most significant number of ways. We must also admonish anyone tempted to exact revenge that we are not to "be overcome with evil, but to overcome evil with good." (Romans 12:21)

Now is the time to rededicate ourselves to the passionate pursuit of nonviolent social justice fueled by a powerful ethic of love and energized by a generous spirituality that celebrates rather than diminishes humanity. Let's build a safe and accepting future for everyone—and let's do it in honor of all the victims of violence, known and unknown, those who make the headlines and those who don't.

Rob Schenck

Rev. Rob Schenck is a former activist on the Religious Right who now identifies as a progressive evangelical. He holds a Doctor of Ministry from Faith Evangelical Seminary in Tacoma, Wash., and serves on the faculty of the Miller Center for Interreligious Learning and Leadership, Newton, Mass. He is the author of a memoir, Costly Grace: An Evangelical Minister’s Rediscovery of Faith, Hope and Love (HarperCollins, 2018).

Reflecting on political violence 12SEP25

Sorry – the killing of Charlie Kirk was wrong, but having his body flown on Air Force 2, flags at half-mast, having him lie in state, putting a statute of him in the Capitol, and giving him a Presidential Medal of Freedom are all entirely inappropriate. Here is some sane commentary from Monika Bauerlein of Mother Jones.....

Political violence has been in the air as far back as I can remember. I was born after the JFK assassination but before the murders of Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King and the students at Kent State. I was a kid in Europe when left-wing radicals were kidnapping and murdering politicians and CEOs. I remember walking to school past walls spraypainted with the names of terrorist organizations, and adults whispering about who might be next. In this country, I covered the Oklahoma City bombing, Waco, and Ruby Ridge as a young reporter. I worked with the journalists, like the Village Voice’s James Ridgeway, who had valiantly tried to expose the rise of a violent extreme-right movement. Police violence against ordinary people, mostly people of color, was also a constant, and those crimes were often seen as political—by those who perpetrated them, and by those who fought to stop them. Fast-forward through the 2010s, the rise of the Oath Keepers in response to a Black president, the nonstop drumbeat of violent rhetoric (and actual violence) from Donald Trump and his allies, and the emergence of anti-Trump violence (including the two would-be assassins). And now Charlie Kirk, assassinated on a college campus in Utah. I don’t know how to process it all, and I suspect you don’t either. And that’s okay. The hot takes on TV, the online comments, the over-the-top emails and videos that try to tell you that this makes sense somehow, that we know whom to blame, that it proves whatever—they are mostly wrong, and they’ve been wrong as long as this kind of thing has been happening. One thing I know is that violence against people because of their politics leads to more violence against people because of their politics. Assassins, terrorists, and those who want to scare us with violent rhetoric—they all want us to stop speaking up, stop fighting for the ideas we believe in, stop showing up in public. They always have. But we don’t have to do what they want. I’m a journalist, so for me the best way to confront those who want to stop us from speaking is to speak—to report, tell the truth, try to figure out what’s really going on. When the news of the Kirk shooting ricocheted across the internet, I watched my colleagues sprint into action. They sifted through the chaos, the vile online comments, the gut-wrenching videos. They reached out to real people for real thoughts. They focused more on getting it right than getting it first, and they looked for the stories everyone else wasn’t covering—such as the rise, almost immediately, of voices trying to weaponize Kirk’s murder to call for civil war. That’s a story we will continue covering, because it’s vital for the future of the country. We don’t pretend that we have all the answers, but come what may, we pledge to keep bringing you the facts and standing up for the truth. If you have thoughts or questions, I’d love to hear from you. And thank you so much for everything you do to make Mother Jones what it is. Respectfully,

Monika Bauerlein, CEO Mother Jones

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WHO???

 

💀 A SHORT CATECHISM OF THE PERFECT CONTEMPORARY FAR-RIGHT ACTIVIST EXPRESSING HIMSELF ON SOCIAL 💀 NETWORKS 29AUG25

 

I found this post from Prof Leal-Calderon reposted on Blue Sky, he originally posted it on LinkedIn. It shows we in the opposition to the neo-nazi, fascist agenda of the drumpf / trump-vance administration, the gop / greed over people-republican party and the heritage foundation's project 2025 are not alone, good people around the world are fighting the good fight against fascism, hate, ignorance, prejudice, misogyny, fear, violence, xenophobia, racism, and the extreme evil of the far right.

Fernando Leal-CalderonFernando Leal-Calderon • 3rd+3rd+Professeur des Universités, mes opinions n'engagent que moi et en aucune façon mon employeur ou les organismes aidés bénévolement.Professeur des Universités, mes opinions n'engagent que moi et en aucune façon mon employeur ou les organismes aidés bénévolement.6d • Edited • As a university professor, my opinions are solely my own and in no way my employer or the organizations I support voluntarily. 6d • Edited • 6 days ago • Edited • Visible to anyone on or off LinkedIn
6 days ago • Edited • Visible to anyone on or off LinkedIn

💀 A SHORT CATECHISM OF THE PERFECT CONTEMPORARY FAR-RIGHT ACTIVIST EXPRESSING HIMSELF ON SOCIAL 💀 NETWORKS

Preliminary note to the moderators of this network (AI or natural persons of foreign nationality): if French makes your head spin, you should know that all this is to be taken at face value. Breathe, smile, you are safe... well, almost.

Welcome to the theatre of permanent indignation, where every excesses is dressed in the clothes of absolute truth.

First commandment: You shall hate the President of the Republic. No matter who he is, no matter what he does, he is bound to be the gravedigger of the nation if he is not in the camp of the "patriots". Insulting him instantly gives you 10 virility points on social networks.

Second commandment: You shall respect Putin, Netanyahu and Trump. The first two bomb civilians, the second fomented the invasion of the Capitol and was found guilty of sexual abuse and defamation! They are "strong men", real leaders, leaders who make people tremble. Human rights? A trifle of leftists. The important thing is the fist on the table, even if it crashes on lives. The powerful do not criticize themselves, they must not be offended because they have the "atomic bomb".

Third commandment: You will hate "wokism". Forbidden definition: too dangerous to know what we are talking about. Wokism is like the Loch Ness monster: no one has ever seen it, but you have to swear that it threatens civilization.

Fourth commandment: You shall revile righteousness. Thinking properly is suspect. To respect others or to tolerate differences? Of moral tyranny. Intelligence is an insult to common sense, in short: it is better to bellow than to think.

Fifth commandment: You shall cultivate Islamophobia and xenophobia. Foreigners are necessarily responsible for everything: unemployment, rising bread prices, insecurity, public debt, and even Aunt Gertrude's varicose veins. No need for statistics, fear is enough.

Sixth Commandment: You shall challenge the rule of law. Judges are enemies of the people... unless they condemn someone you hate. In this case, they are still too lenient. If they dare to touch your ultra-right leaders, they are solid leftists, of course.

Seventh Commandment: You shall glorify your racial and religious heritage, the civilizational bulwarks against chaos. The crimes hidden behind cassocks you will ignore because "he who loves well, punishes well".

Eighth commandment: you will deny climate change and you will hate ecology. Global warming is an invention and defending the planet is a waste of time in the face of the real mission: to preserve your privileges and your way of life.

This is the breviary: a doctrine made up of cries, contradictions and empty slogans. To sum up, the ultimate dream of this far right is to always be right... without ever having to think.