Dear friends—

Here’s the short version: the phrase “colorblind” sounds like the moral conclusion of the civil rights movement. This riff asks whether it might be doing the opposite — preserving the racial settlement it claims to have moved past.

This week the Supreme Court decided a case, and a Facebook conversation underneath it stopped me. Two friends I’ve known since we were young men in uniform used the word “colorblind” the way I once used it — sincerely, confidently, as if it settled the matter. I sat with that for a long time. What follows is not an argument against them. It’s an attempt to trace the grammar underneath the vocabulary — the framework that went into all of us through the same formation, the same church, the same air.

If that resonates, come sit with me in it.

═══

The Sentence That Stopped Me

This isn’t the next series essay; it’s a riff that came out of this week’s Supreme Court decision and a Facebook conversation underneath it.

This week the Supreme Court decided a voting-rights case. The headlines said the Voting Rights Act has been gutted. That may be true; I’ll let the lawyers fight about it. What I want to think about is a sentence that came out of a Facebook thread the day after.

A man I’ll call Pete — a classmate of mine from many years ago, the kind of friendship that survives because you took the same oath at the same age — quoted Chief Justice Roberts approvingly: “The way to stop discrimination based on race is to stop discriminating based on race.” Pete added: Seems reasonable.

A few hours later, another friend from the same era — let’s call him Tim — wrote underneath: Reasonable and Constitutional. The way to become a color blind society is to become color blind. Frankly it’s insulting to all citizens.

I sat with that for a long time. I’m still sitting with it, honestly. Because the sentence is not stupid. It’s not even, on its surface, mean. It sounds like the moral conclusion of the civil rights movement. It sounds like Martin Luther King’s dream — that his children would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. It sounds, to most of the people I grew up with in church, exactly like what we were taught was the right answer.

I’m not describing other people. I’m describing what I have felt, repeatedly, in my own body, when someone has named something I would have preferred not to see. The work of these essays — and of the years of formation behind them — has been the slow work of learning to notice this kind of framework operating in me, and to greet that noticing not as an attack but as an invitation.

So that’s the jump-ball question I want to think about with you. Not whether the sentence is reasonable. Whether it’s what we think it is.

═══

A Story About Two Cases

In 1896 the Supreme Court decided Plessy v. Ferguson. The case asked whether a Louisiana law requiring “separate but equal” railway cars for Black and white passengers violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court said no. The Fourteenth Amendment, they reasoned, requires equal treatment under the law. If the cars are equal, the treatment is equal. If a Black passenger feels stigmatized by being required to sit in a separate car, that is — and I’m paraphrasing the actual language — his own subjective interpretation, not anything the law has done to him. The law treats everyone the same.

One justice dissented. John Marshall Harlan, the only Southerner on the Court and a former enslaver, wrote the dissent. The line everyone remembers is this: Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.

Harlan lost. The Court’s ruling stood for fifty-eight years. Plessy was the legal architecture of Jim Crow.

In 2026, this past Wednesday, the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais. The case asked whether a congressional district drawn to comply with the Voting Rights Act could survive constitutional scrutiny. The Court ruled against the district. The Fourteenth Amendment, the majority reasoned, forbids the state from sorting citizens by race; if the district’s lines depended on race, the district cannot stand. The Constitution, they explained, is color-blind.

That same Harlan line — our Constitution is color-blind — is now invoked by the majority. The dissent has flipped. The vocabulary has flipped. The constitutional warrant has flipped.

What hasn’t flipped is the result. After Plessy, the racial settlement of 1896 stayed in place for two generations. After Callais, the racial distribution of political power that the Voting Rights Act was designed to disturb stays in place — undisturbed.

I keep thinking: what if the words have always been doing different work than I thought they were doing?

═══

The Grammar Underneath

Here is the thing about a grammar. You don’t notice it. That’s how grammar works. You notice the vocabulary. You catch yourself when you use the wrong word. You don’t catch yourself when the sentence structure is doing something the words don’t say.

I’ve been writing about this for the whole series — about how the vocabulary of a tradition can stay constant while the underlying logic shifts to a different framework, and how the people most invested in the vocabulary are often the last to notice that the grammar has changed underneath them. I called it grammar conversion in Essay 9. I’ve been tracing it through Christian theology — how the language of incarnation gets conscripted into the logic of domination, how the language of grace gets put to work in the service of merit, how the words of the Sermon on the Mount get deployed by people whose actual operative grammar is Pharaoh’s.

I didn’t expect to find the same move in a Supreme Court opinion this week. But there it is.

The grammar of Plessy was: the law is satisfied when it does not actively impose racial classification, regardless of what happens to people in the spaces the law declines to reach. The vocabulary was the vocabulary of equality. The grammar was the grammar of leaving the racial settlement undisturbed.

The grammar of Callais is the same. Same grammar. Opposite vocabulary. The vocabulary of Plessy affirmed separation. The vocabulary of Callais affirms integration. In neither case does the vocabulary describe what the law is actually doing. What the law is doing — in both cases — is declining to disturb a racial distribution it inherited.

We’ve covered some ground — two Supreme Court cases, a hundred and thirty years apart, and the claim that the same grammar is running underneath both. Before we go further, I want to name what the next sections do. They get more personal and more psychological. You don’t need to agree with the legal analysis to follow what comes next. The question underneath all of it is simpler than the cases: what is the framework protecting?

═══

What I Wrote in the Bishops’ Report

I want to bring forward something I worked on a couple of years ago, because it goes directly to what’s happening here.

In 2024 I served on the Episcopal House of Bishops Theology Committee, which was tasked with producing a report on Christian Nationalism.¹ I wrote the section on what sociologist Ruth Braunstein has called the Colorblind Judeo-Christian Nation narrative.² I’m going to paraphrase what I wrote, because I’ve watched the diagnosis play out in the wild this week and I want to share it with you.

There is a way of being a religious American — and you may know this person; you may be this person; I have been this person — that combines a sincere commitment to civil-rights-era values with a refusal to address the conditions that civil-rights-era legislation tried to remedy. The framework does this by making a single rhetorical move.

It converts race from a category of origin into a category of culture.

Once you make that move, here is what becomes possible. You can hold yourself accountable to a colorblind ethic. You can sincerely oppose discrimination based on skin color. You can name overt racism as evil and mean it. And you can simultaneously construe the people who are harmed by the racial distribution of resources, opportunity, and political power as people who have failed to embody the dominant culture’s norms — its rugged individualism, its self-sufficiency, its traditional family structure, its work ethic, its respect for authority. They aren’t being discriminated against because of their origin. They’re being judged because they fail to conform to the culture. And they’re being judged not by anyone in particular, but by the culture itself — which the framework treats as if it were neutral.

The framework absolves adherents of charges of racism without committing them to any policy that might address racism’s enduring effects. It enables seeing oneself as practicing colorblind inclusivity while the established practices of exclusion and privilege continue undisturbed.

And — this is the part I want to underline — it makes the person who notices the racial settlement underneath the cultural framework into the offender. The discrimination is no longer the racial pattern. The discrimination is the naming of the pattern. Frankly, it’s insulting to all citizens.

Once you see this move, you cannot unsee it. It’s the move Callais makes at the level of constitutional doctrine. It’s the move Tim made in the comments. It’s the move I made for most of my life without knowing I was making it.

═══

Why This Got Inside Me Before I Could Think

I want to do one more turn here, because the political analysis isn’t enough. The reason this framework has been so durable — the reason I held it for so long, the reason Tim holds it now, the reason most of the people I grew up with in church hold some version of it — is that it does work for us at a level deeper than reasoning.

I’ve been writing in this series about shame and pride. About how shame, properly understood, is not a verdict but a signal — the body’s way of calling us back to the communion we’ve disrupted. About how shame, mishandled, becomes toxic, and toxic shame protects itself by converting into pride. About how a particular kind of pride — the kind that does not need to be earned because it is rooted in who you are rather than in what you’ve done — becomes the most stable defense available, and also the most dangerous.

The colorblind framework is, among other things, a mechanism for managing shame. American history contains an actual moral injury — the injury of enslavement, the injury of Jim Crow, the injury of redlining, the injury of mass incarceration. Those of us who grew up white in church were taught that history.

We were also taught — most of us, by sincere people — that we were not personally responsible for it. The combination is psychologically unstable. The history is real, the harm is real, and the relationship between us and the history is not zero, even if it is not the same relationship our grandparents had to their history.

The colorblind framework offers a way out. It says: the harm is in the past; the present is colorblind; therefore the only remaining moral obligation is to refuse to discriminate, which I am already doing. The shame is metabolized. The pride is preserved. The settlement underneath is undisturbed. Everyone gets to be a good person.

And then someone notices the settlement. And the noticing produces a feeling of being accused. And the feeling of being accused — because the framework has converted the actual harm into a cultural matter — gets experienced not as appropriate moral reckoning but as an insult. Because in the framework’s grammar, that’s what it is.

The framework treats every invitation as an attack. It cannot do otherwise. That’s what it was built for.

═══

A Word About What “Free” Means

Two more voices, briefly, because they sharpen what’s at stake.

Civic republicanism — the political tradition whose leading contemporary voice is the Irish philosopher Philip Pettit — argues that freedom is not, fundamentally, the absence of interference. To be free, on Pettit’s account, is to live in a community where no one has unaccountable arbitrary power over you. The wrong of a racial settlement is not principally that one group does not get its proportional share of outcomes. The wrong is that one group lives under the unaccountable arbitrary power of another. The remedy is the structural securing of contestability — the practical ability to push back, to be heard, to hold power accountable.

Adam Przeworski, the Polish-American political scientist, argues something complementary from a different angle. Democracy cannot be expected to deliver substantive equality. Democracy’s promise is more modest: that elections can produce the alternation of those in power. That losers can lose, accept the loss, and try again. That no group can lock itself permanently into power.

What both voices help me see is what the colorblind framework is actually protecting.

Not skin color. Not even cultural norms. Structural unaccountability — a political and economic arrangement in which a particular distribution of power can be sustained without anyone having to account for sustaining it. The framework’s genius is that it makes the arrangement appear to be the natural product of free choice, when the arrangement is in fact the cumulative effect of centuries of unequal treatment whose effects have not been remedied because remedying them would require seeing them.

The framework prevents the very accountability the republican and democratic traditions require. It does this not by openly rejecting accountability but by reframing the request for accountability as itself a kind of injustice. Frankly, it’s insulting to all citizens.

═══

Where This Leaves Me

I’m not writing this to score points against my friends. I love them. I have known them for a very long time. We were formed by the same institutions, shaped by the same sermons, taught the same answers to the same questions. The framework I’m describing went into them the same way it went into me — through the air we breathed, the church we sat in, the school we attended, the country we served. It is not their fault that they hold it. It was not my fault that I held it.

The fault, if there is fault to be assigned, lies in the formation itself — in the common life that has been doing this work to all of us for a very long time, while the church we trusted to give us a different grammar mostly handed back the same one with different vocabulary.

What I’ve come to believe, slowly and not without grief, is that the only response available to me is to keep naming the grammar when I see it.

Not in contempt — that just generates more shame, which generates more pride, which calcifies the framework rather than dissolving it. But in the kind of patient, undefended attention that the gospel of a dispossessed Christ has always asked of us. The slow practice of noticing what I’ve been formed to want without my noticing.

This is what I have come to understand about the work of these essays. They are not — they cannot be — arguments designed to defeat the framework in someone else’s head. The framework doesn’t lose to arguments.

It loses, slowly, to a different kind of formation. To people doing the small embodied work of paying attention to who is in the room and who is not, who has standing to speak and who does not, what is being protected by the language we are using and what is being made invisible. To people willing to receive the noticing of the settlement as gift rather than as insult — even when the noticing comes from a stranger on Facebook, even when it costs us something we did not know we were holding.

I don’t know how to do this work except slowly. I don’t know how to do it except in community, and the community I have is the one I have, with all its frameworks and all its grief. I keep thinking about the line at the end of Make the Coffee Slowly: we walk together. That’s what I have. It’s not much. But it’s what I have.

If you’ve felt the framework operating in you the way I’ve felt it operating in me, I’m with you in it. The first noticing is the hardest. The thousandth noticing is also hard, in a different way. But the noticing is the beginning of the long undoing.

We walk together.

Endnotes

1. The Crisis of Christian Nationalism: Report from the House of Bishops Theology Committee, ed. Allen K. Shin and Larry R. Benfield (New York: Church Publishing, 2024). I served on the committee that produced this report and contributed to its analytical framework. The report distinguishes among varieties of Christian Nationalism, including what it calls “Colorblind Judeo-Christian Nationalism” — the variety I am tracing in this riff. ↩

2. The phrase and the analytical framework come from Ruth Braunstein. See her articles “A Theory of Political Backlash: Assessing the Religious Right’s Effects on the Religious Field,” Sociology of Religion 82, no. 3 (2021): 293–312; and “The ‘Right’ History: Religion, Race, and Nostalgic Stories of Christian America,” Religions 12, no. 2 (2021): 95. Her book-length treatment of these themes is Prophets and Patriots: Faith in Democracy Across the Political Divide (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), which examines how religious Americans across the political spectrum understand and practice democratic citizenship. The diagnostic I developed for my section of the Bishops’ Report draws on her sociological framework. ↩

Hero image: Midjourney. The bench, the wall, the light — and any ghost you see — are not photographs of any specific place.

In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled.

So begins the second chapter of Luke’s first volume. The decree is the hinge. Caesar counts heads. Caesar moves families across provinces.

Caesar’s image sits on every coin in every pocket, and the coins all read DIVI FILIUS — son of the divine. Augustus had figured out something his predecessors had not: that to rule the body, you must first rule the imagination. So his face went on the money. His statues filled the forums. His name was etched into temples. Pater Patriae, father of the country.

The cult of the emperor was not a side project. It was the project.

Luke writes his two volumes inside that world. And he writes them as a quiet, unrelenting refusal.

Before the decree goes out, before Caesar has spoken a word in the narrative, a peasant girl named Mary sings: He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. Before Augustus opens his mouth, the gospel has already named what is coming. The hungry will be filled. The rich will be sent away empty. Thrones will fall.

This is not metaphor; this is Luke telling us how to read the world we are about to enter.

I have been thinking about this all week.

The Federal Reserve reported in January that the top one percent of American households now hold roughly fifty-five trillion dollars — about as much wealth as the bottom ninety percent of Americans combined. Highest concentration on record since the Fed began tracking in 1989. The Urban Institute reported in March that nearly one in four American adults experienced food insecurity last year, and among working- and middle-income families it climbed to more than one in three.

Hungry. In the wealthiest nation that has ever existed.

And meanwhile: a banner of one man’s face hangs across the Justice Department. Another across the Department of Labor. Another across the Department of Agriculture. His profile on the new commemorative dollar coin, fist raised, fight, fight, fight. His face on the national park pass instead of the parks. This week the State Department announced his image will be printed inside our passports — superimposed directly over the text of the Declaration of Independence, with his signature in gold beneath.

The body of one man, laid over the founding charter of the body politic.

Augustus would have understood the design perfectly. So would the regimes of the last century that learned from him.

I am a Jesus follower. Which means I belong to a story that began as a witness against exactly this. Luke ends his second volume with Paul under house arrest in Rome, in Caesar’s own city, boldly and without hindrance preaching the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ.

Another king. Another Lord. The church’s first creed was three words long: Iēsous Kyrios. Jesus is Lord. Which meant, in that world, that Caesar was not.

The hungry will be filled. The rich will be sent away empty.

Mary sang it before the decree went out. We are still waiting to see whether we believe her.

(Image by Gemini)

Kansas already ran this experiment. The results are in the court record: 31,000 eligible citizens blocked for every 39 noncitizens caught. What I want to trace here is not just why the numbers look like that, but why the architecture that produces them keeps getting rebuilt — and what the neighbor commandment has to say about our willingness to let it.

There’s a move I’ve been watching for two centuries, and it deserves to be named.

In 1820, a Philadelphia political economist named Mathew Carey — sophisticated, humane, genuinely concerned with broad-based prosperity — looked at the Missouri crisis and made a calculation. The freedom of enslaved people, he wrote, was worth striving for, but “if it is to be bought at the expense of the peace and happiness of the country, the price is too great.”1

Every word sounds reasonable. That’s the point. I will keep using that word — reasonable — and I mean to. The grammar’s most effective camouflage is the fact that it genuinely feels reasonable from inside — not because the people speaking it are dishonest, but because the formation that produced them did its work before they arrived at the question.

The vocabulary of freedom, deployed to perform exclusion — dressed in the language of the common good, arriving with footnotes and a concerned expression, entirely unaware of its own grammar. I traced that grammar conversion in detail in a recent essay — from Winthrop’s covenant to the vocabulary that now performs civic concern while the grammar underneath executes gatekeeping.

I’ve been tracing that move for a long time.

It shows up in every era as the latest expression of a grammar whose genealogy runs directly through the literacy test and the redlining map: the standard that applies to everyone equally and that certain populations somehow always fail; the requirement that uses no racial language whatsoever and produces segregated outcomes for generations; the merit threshold that measures precisely the qualities that certain communities were structurally prevented from acquiring. (I traced the genealogy of this grammar — from its colonial origins through four ages of American formation — in recent essays in this series.)

The SAVE America Act is the current expression of that grammar. And I want you to notice what it feels like from the inside — because I’ve been in enough comment threads this week to know: it feels completely reasonable. All it asks is that you prove you’re a citizen to register to vote. What could be more sensible?

Lazarus is at the gate while we are having this conversation. Let me try to make him visible.

⁂

Here is where the political philosopher Philip Pettit becomes both indispensable and uncomfortable.2

Pettit distinguishes between two kinds of freedom. The first is the one we were raised on: non-interference. Nobody is stopping you right now. You’re free. This is the freedom that feels complete to those it protects — precisely because they have never experienced it as incomplete.

The second kind is non-domination. You are free not merely when nobody is blocking you, but when nobody has the structural power to block you arbitrarily — when you do not live under a sword that could fall at any moment, even when it isn’t falling.

To make the distinction felt rather than merely understood, Pettit reaches for Henrik Ibsen. In A Doll’s House, Torvald Helmer is not a cruel husband. He is, by the standards of 1879 Norway — and honestly by the standards of many households today — a decent one. He provides for Nora. He is fond of her. He does not beat her. He calls her his little skylark.

What he retains — and here is Pettit’s knife — is the architectural power to constrain her actions whenever he judges it necessary. Not to harm her. To manage her. To determine, from his position of structural authority, what she may spend, where she may go, who she may be. The harm is not his intention. The domination is not his self-description. He experiences himself as a loving husband exercising reasonable oversight of a household he is responsible for.

Nora experiences something else entirely. She experiences every choice — every word, every relationship, every secret — calibrated around a power she cannot name but cannot forget. And over time, she has learned to perform the contentment that the arrangement requires. She has become, in Ibsen’s devastating image, a doll in a house that was never hers.

This is what Pettit means by domination: not the exercise of power, but its retention. Not cruelty, but the comfortable possession of the capacity to constrain — wielded benevolently, unconsciously, and with complete sincerity.

The power Torvald holds over Nora’s domestic life is the same kind of power — not the same degree, not the same context, but the same structural kind — that a registrar holds over a citizen’s civic life when he alone determines whether her documents are sufficient. The domestic and the civic are different rooms. The architecture is identical.

We have seen this movie before. Literally.

In Ava DuVernay’s Selma, the film opens not with a march or a beating but with a woman standing before a clerk at the Dallas County courthouse. Annie Lee Cooper — portrayed by Oprah Winfrey — is attempting, again, to register to vote. The clerk is not raging. He is not wearing a hood. He is sitting behind a desk administering a neutral standard. He asks her to recite the preamble to the Constitution. She does. He asks her how many county judges there are in Alabama. She answers: sixty-seven. Then he looks up, entirely calm, and asks her to name them all.

DENIED, the stamp reads.

The registrar experiences himself as a reasonable man enforcing a reasonable standard. The standard applies to everyone equally — in theory. In practice, it is a key that fits only certain hands, administered by a functionary with the architectural power to move the lock whenever necessary. Annie Lee Cooper has no recourse. She can answer every question correctly and still be turned away, because the power to determine whether her answers are sufficient belongs entirely to the man behind the desk.

That is domination in Pettit’s sense. That is Torvald behind a government stamp.

Notice what the registrar is not. He is not Mathew Carey — he hasn’t calculated the trade openly or weighed Black freedom against white comfort and found it wanting. He has simply inherited a world in which the trade was already made, and his role is to administer it. The grammar came before him. He learned to speak it the way we all learn to speak: by living in a world where it was the only language available. His sincerity is not in question. His sincerity is precisely the point.

This is not an argument against requiring identification. Pettit’s framework — and simple common sense — recognizes that a political community has every right to verify who its citizens are. A constraint is non-arbitrary when it applies consistent standards the subject can know in advance, contest through a fair process, and expect to be applied equally regardless of who they are.

This is not merely a political philosopher’s standard — it is the biblical tradition’s own understanding of law as gift to a community rather than instrument of the powerful over the weak.

The SAVE America Act fails all three conditions: its standards vary by county and official, its DHS database flags naturalized citizens incorrectly with no clear remedy, and its criminal penalties for good-faith errors incentivize the most restrictive possible interpretation. The existing self-attestation model — in which applicants swear under penalty of perjury that they are citizens — has governed federal elections since 1993.3

The question is not whether to verify citizenship. It is whether verification must vest arbitrary gatekeeping power in local officials to accomplish what sworn attestation already accomplishes, at a documented ratio of 795 citizens harmed per noncitizen caught. Non-arbitrary constraint is not domination. This is not non-arbitrary constraint.

⁂

There is an older American grammar that knows this. The republican tradition — the tradition that produced the Constitution, that was terrified of tyranny not just from kings but from anyone who held unchecked power over another’s life — understood freedom as non-domination before Pettit gave it that name.

The Bill of Rights is not primarily a non-interference document. It is a non-domination document: it removes from the government the arbitrary power to silence you, to search you, to hold you without charge, to make you a doll in its house. The First Amendment doesn’t just say the government won’t interfere with your speech. It says the government doesn’t have the power to threaten your speech — because the mere possession of the sword is the domination, whether or not it falls.

That republican grammar — freedom as the absence of arbitrary power, not merely the absence of active coercion — is what Pettit is recovering. And it is what the neighbor commandment requires. “Love your neighbor as yourself” doesn’t mean “don’t hit your neighbor.” It means “relinquish the power to hit your neighbor and call it your right.”

You cannot love your neighbor as yourself while retaining the structural power to constrain their participation in their own governance — even if you never actually deny them registration, even if you never consciously intend their exclusion, even if your sincerity is never in question.

The SAVE Act places that power in the hands of local officials.

It doesn’t matter whether any individual official exercises it cruelly. The power exists. Damocles’ sword hangs — with no consistent standard governing when it falls, no effective remedy when it falls wrongly, no federal floor beneath the official’s judgment, and no accountability for the hand that holds it.

That is what makes its presence domination in Pettit’s sense: not merely the capacity for future harm, but arbitrary power without recourse — the domination the neighbor commandment forbids, the domination the republican tradition built its most fundamental protections against.

⁂

The sword has a price tag. A U.S. passport — the one document that reliably qualifies under this bill — costs $165. The State Department has never, under any circumstances, offered a fee waiver for a passport application. Not for poverty. Not for age. Not for the fact that you’ve been a citizen since the day you were born in a house in rural Mississippi where the county never bothered to record it. A replacement naturalization certificate: $505 to $555, five to eight months, no expedited option. A Certificate of Citizenship: $1,385.

For the 3.8 million citizens who lack any qualifying documentation,4 the cheapest path runs through that $165 passport — for which no financial hardship exception exists anywhere in federal law.

The 24th Amendment abolished poll taxes in federal elections in 1964. The bill provides no document assistance program. One admires the precision with which the structure avoids the word “tax” while replicating its architecture.5

And the bill doesn’t only build a gate for new arrivals. Thirty million currently registered voters update their registrations each election cycle — every address change, name change, or party switch triggers the full documentary proof requirement. The bill also mandates that every state submit its entire voter roll to the DHS database within thirty days of enactment, flagging anyone it identifies as a potential noncitizen for removal.

The White House offered reassurance: already-registered voters are “entirely unaffected.” This is true in the way that a house with a self-locking door is perfectly safe for everyone who never steps outside. Thirty million people step outside every two years. Nine percent of Americans move within their state annually. Each move triggers re-registration. The reassurance is calibrated to a static electorate that does not exist.6

⁂

Now imagine standing before a similar desk in 2026.

You are a woman who married twenty years ago and changed your name. Your birth certificate says one name. Your driver’s license says another. You have come to register to vote, documents in hand, having done what you were told to do.

The election official looks at them. There is a pause — not hostile, just procedural — while he decides whether what you’ve brought is sufficient.

You have rehearsed your explanation. You do not know whether this particular official, in this particular county, will accept it. The outcome depends on his judgment — arbitrary in the sense that no clear standard governs his decision — not on your citizenship.

This is not hypothetical. New Hampshire implemented proof-of-citizenship requirements for local elections in 2024. Nearly a hundred voters were turned away at polling places.7

One woman had to return three times: first without her birth certificate, then with a birth certificate that didn’t match her married name, then finally with both a marriage license and birth certificate. Some of the voters turned away that day never came back.

The friction doesn’t have to deny. It only has to discourage. And discouragement — quiet, procedural, entirely non-malicious — is how this grammar has always done its most effective work.

Notice what you are doing in that pause. You are calibrating — reading his demeanor, adjusting your explanation, performing your legitimacy for an audience with unchecked authority over your participation in your own governance.

Pettit names this precisely: the employee who self-censors because they might be fired is unfree even if they are never fired. The domination is not in the outcome. It is in the calibration the arbitrary power requires.

That pause — that rehearsed explanation, that reading of a stranger’s face — is what Pettit means. It is what Ibsen meant. It is what DuVernay showed us. It is what the SAVE America Act is rebuilding, with updated paperwork, for the twenty-first century.

⁂

The friction is the point. It always has been.

Consider what the full repertoire sounds like.

Election Day on a Tuesday — not a holiday, a workday — one on which the managerial class adjusts its calendar and the hourly worker asks permission from an employer who may or may not grant it.

Polling places concentrated in the neighborhoods where the people who design election infrastructure tend to live, sparse where they don’t.

Lines of forty-five minutes in the suburbs and four hours in the precincts where the working poor cast their ballots.

Poll locations that change without notice. Hours that shrink. Early voting windows that appear and disappear. Absentee rules that tighten between elections.

Each adjustment individually defensible. Each one landing, with a consistency that should trouble any honest observer, on the same populations.

And now: document requirements that add hours of bureaucratic effort for the Americans who have never had the luxury of assuming their paperwork was in order — the same Americans whose births went unregistered in counties that didn’t particularly welcome them, whose names changed after marriages the system now demands they re-document, whose naturalization certificates are being flagged as insufficient by a database that was wrong about them in Texas last year and will be wrong about them again.

None of these arrangements says “you cannot vote.” Each one says: voting will cost you more than it costs your neighbor. And they are not random in who bears that cost.

I’ve traced the genealogy of this grammar across recent essays in this series — through four ages of American formation — and shown how each generation’s instruments became invisible by becoming infrastructural.

The SAVE America Act belongs to that genealogy. I will not rehearse the full evidence here. But the pattern has a signature: neutral language, disparate impact, consistent directionality. When the same populations bear the cost of every “individually defensible” adjustment across two centuries, the word coincidence stops being adequate.

The instruments change with each age. The grammar underneath them does not. The SAVE America Act is what that grammar looks like when it has updated its paperwork for the twenty-first century.8

⁂

We've covered a fair amount of ground — from Pettit's philosophy to Ibsen's marriage to a county desk in New Hampshire. The question underneath all of it is simpler than the vocabulary: When a law demonstrably prevents far more citizens from voting than noncitizens, what does faithfulness require of the people who benefit from the architecture? You don't need to have tracked every detail to follow what comes next.

For this is precisely what Jesus-followers are called to renounce when we pledge to love our neighbors as ourselves. Not merely to refrain from cruelty. To relinquish the architecture.

When a lawyer asked Jesus to define “neighbor,” Jesus didn’t answer with a principle. He answered with a body — a specific man, beaten, lying in a ditch.

But notice what the parable actually does: it doesn’t expand the definition of neighbor. It exposes the lawyer’s formation. The priest and the Levite did not pass by because they were cruel. They passed by because they had organized their lives — their ritual obligations, their purity practices, their sense of what counted as their business — so that this particular body did not register as a claim on them.

The parable’s judgment falls not on malice but on the practiced, reasonable, entirely sincere capacity not to see.

That is the indictment the rich man in Luke 16 also faces. He did not kick Lazarus. He feasted. Daily. Reasonably. The gate was not a weapon. It was an arrangement — one that required, each morning, a choice not to look.

This is not merely an ethical failure — it is a distortion of the social order as God constituted it in Christ, who took flesh under an empire that also had document requirements for its subjects.

The incarnation does not declare that political participation is the source of human dignity — that dignity is prior, grounded in the image of God, and no bureaucratic apparatus can confer or revoke it. But precisely because that dignity is prior, no political mechanism may arbitrarily obstruct a person’s access to the common life of their community.

The barrier is the offense — not because participation completes the person, but because unnecessary exclusion distorts the community.

⁂

The question is not whether citizenship can be verified. It is whether verification should vest discretionary power in the hands of officials formed by this particular history, in these particular communities.

The SAVE America Act does not accidentally place that power in local officials. It deliberately puts it there — in the counties, in the precincts, in the communities where the history of who gets to participate has never been neutral.

The official who will administer this bill is not an abstraction. He is a formed person, living inside a grammar that arrived before he did, carrying it in his bones the way we all carry our formations — experiencing the arrangement as natural, as appropriate, as simply the way things are. That formation was in him before the power arrived in his hands.

The bill provides the architecture the grammar has always been waiting for.

This is not speculation about bad actors. The DHS database this bill requires states to use has already incorrectly flagged naturalized citizens for removal in Texas — disproportionately in the same communities where discriminatory gatekeeping has always concentrated.9 The domination is not a future risk. It is a present and documented pattern being handed a new set of administrative instruments.

Whether any individual official consciously abuses that power is beside the point. The mere existence of arbitrary gatekeeping power in the hands of officials formed by two centuries of this grammar — in the communities shaped by two centuries of this grammar — is itself the domination.

The church that has watched this pattern repeat across those two centuries has no excuse for calling it anything else.

⁂

Now I need you to notice something about yourself — and I ask it alongside rather than from above, because I have had to notice it about myself first.

I grew up in Baton Rouge formed by a world whose arrangements felt, from inside them, entirely natural. I did not experience the redlining maps as redlining maps. I experienced them as neighborhoods.

I did not experience the document requirements of my formation as requirements at all — I experienced them as simply the way things are, which is what successful formation always feels like from the inside.

It took someone who loved me enough to ask hard questions about my actual practices — not my stated beliefs, my practices — before I began to see the architecture I had inherited as architecture rather than air.

Formation is not fate. But it is powerful enough that most of us cannot see it without help — which is why the Christian tradition calls the moment of seeing not achievement but grace.

If you have never once worried whether your documents were in order to exercise a right — if citizenship has always felt like the water you swim in rather than a credential you must produce on demand — then you experience non-interference as freedom because for you, almost always, it is. The sword isn’t pointed at you. It hasn’t been pointed at you or your children or their children for as long as anyone can remember.

That is not an accident. It is an inheritance.

The communities who today lack ready access to these documents are the same communities whose births went unregistered, whose mortgages were denied, whose literacy was legally suppressed. The architecture changed. The distribution of its burdens did not.

The document gap was not random. The United States did not achieve universal birth registration until the 1940s — and even then unevenly. Black births in the Jim Crow South went systematically unregistered: one study estimated that one-fifth of African Americans born in 1939 and 1940 were never issued birth certificates. The same records offices that declined to register those births are the institutions whose documentation this bill now requires as proof of citizenship. The architecture changed. The gap it built did not close. The documentary requirements simply found it.10

And inheritances carry their own accountabilities — not the accountability of guilt for what was done before you arrived, but the accountability of sight: to see what the inheritance built, and to refuse to call it reasonable when it is not.

⁂

And if you are reading this essay and finding yourself persuaded — if you already opposed this bill before you got here — I want to press one more question. Not about your politics. About your formation.

Have you organized your life so that the people most burdened by this bill are not your neighbors in any concrete sense? Do you live in a neighborhood where document access has never been in question — where citizenship feels like water, not credential? Have you inherited what was built without being required to see what it cost the people it excluded?

I am not asking whether you believe the right things. I am asking what the Contrapuncti asked: what does your body do? When the friction falls on someone else — when it has always fallen on someone else — it is invisible.

And its invisibility is not an accident of perception. It is an achievement of formation. The arrangements made sure of it.

The question is not whether you will oppose the bill. It is whether you will feel Lazarus at the gate as a claim on your actual life — your neighborhood, your church, your school, your professional network — rather than as a political position you already hold.

I don’t have a program for you. Programs are trophy cases waiting to happen. But I can tell you what the question sounds like when it gets concrete: Which of your institutions — your congregation, your neighborhood association, your professional network — would be disrupted if the people most burdened by this bill were actually present in them? That disruption is where repentance begins to have content.

⁂

The SAVE America Act is not asking you to be cruel. It is asking you to be comfortable. It is asking you to look at a bill whose burden falls on people whose documents you have never had to think about — disproportionately the poor, people of color, married women, tribal members, naturalized citizens who crossed oceans and wept when they took the oath — and call it reasonable election integrity.

There is one more irony, and it has the quality of a parable. The states with the weakest vital records infrastructure — the highest rates of unregistered births, the lowest passport ownership, the most rural populations with the longest drives to document offices — are overwhelmingly the states whose representatives voted for this bill.

The communities most likely to lack qualifying documentation live disproportionately in red states. The bill’s sponsors are building a gate their own constituents are least equipped to walk through. The grammar is so thorough in its work that they are constructing the architecture of their own people’s disenfranchisement — and experiencing it as protection.

And the evidence that repudiates the bill’s premise comes not from its opponents but from its own. Kansas already ran this experiment. From 2013 to 2018, under a Republican secretary of state who made documentary proof-of-citizenship his signature cause, the requirement blocked 31,000 eligible citizens — 12% of all applicants — while catching 39 noncitizen registrations over nineteen years.

That is a ratio of roughly 795 citizens blocked per noncitizen caught. The noncitizen registration rate before the law was 0.002% of registered voters.

Georgia audited 8.2 million voters and found 9 noncitizen ballots. Utah reviewed its entire voter roll — over 2 million — and found one confirmed noncitizen registration and zero noncitizen votes. Every court that reviewed the Kansas law reached the same conclusion. The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal. The experiment is over. The results are in the record.11

The architecture is real. The threat it addresses is not.

⁂

Mathew Carey made his judgment in 1820. He was a reasonable man. The registrars of Dallas County made theirs in 1965. They were reasonable men too.

We know what they built.

The standard moved whenever Annie Lee Cooper answered correctly. The SAVE America Act places someone local in every county with the power to move it again.

The question the neighbor commandment puts to us is not whether we will be cruel. It is whether we will relinquish the architecture — quietly, procedurally, reasonably erected — that makes cruelty unnecessary because the domination is already accomplished before anyone has to raise their voice.

That relinquishment has a name. We call it repentance. And it begins, always, with seeing.

(Hero image generated with Google Gemini and composed in Substack's design tools.)

Notes

I want to say something carefully, because I am a theologian and a former naval officer, and both of those identities are demanding something of me right now.

My heart goes out to all those serving on ships in the Persian Gulf at this moment. I know what it is to be a young person in a steel hull far from home, doing what your country asks of you, trusting that the people above you in the chain of command have thought carefully about what they are asking. I pray for them. I grieve for the Iranian civilians — the children — caught in what is being done in our name. I hold both of these things, and I will not pretend they are easy to hold.

But I cannot be silent about what is happening with the name of God in these press briefings. That is not anger talking. It is the responsibility of ordination.

_

Secretary Hegseth has told us, repeatedly and without apparent embarrassment, that he prays for this mission every day. He has blessed our troops with the words “May Almighty God watch over you and His providential arms of protection extend over you.” He has told reporters that every recommendation to the President is made “prayerfully,” and that he prays for “biblical wisdom to seek what is right and the courage to do it.” He has said he serves God first, then the troops, then the country.

In the same press conferences — sometimes within the same breath — he has announced that U.S. forces will operate under “no stupid rules of engagement,” that he wants “maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” and, most recently, that there will be “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.”

I want to dwell on that last phrase, because it is not rhetorical flourish. “No quarter” is a term of art in the law of armed conflict. It means no survivors. It means killing those who try to surrender. It has been prohibited under international law since the Hague Convention of 1899.

It was prosecuted as a war crime at Nuremberg. It violates the Geneva Conventions to which the United States is a party. It defies the Marine Corps’ own rules of engagement. Legal scholars at Just Security note plainly this week that the statement likely constitutes a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2441 — the federal War Crimes Act.

And it was offered to us wrapped in prayer.

_

Theologians have a word for this. The word is blasphemy.

Not the casual cultural usage — not mere irreverence or profanity. I mean blasphemy in its precise, classical sense: the attribution to God of what God explicitly forbids. The invocation of the divine name as cover and sanction for what the divine name actually condemns.

The Hebrew prophets understood this pattern with terrible clarity. Jeremiah watched priests and prophets stand in the temple courts and cry “The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord!” while the community devoured the poor and shed innocent blood. His response was not nuanced: Do not trust in these deceptive words. The issue was not that they prayed. The issue was what they were blessing while they prayed.

Amos did not think it was a compliment when he heard Israel’s liturgical enthusiasm. He rendered the divine verdict with the kind of precision that should make comfortable worshippers deeply uncomfortable: I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. The worship was not being offered to God. It was being offered to the nation’s confidence in itself — and God’s name was being borrowed to seal the transaction.

This is what Dominative Christianism does. It does not merely make religion useful for politics. That would be cynicism, and cynicism is at least honest about what it is doing. Dominative Christianism is more ambitious: it genuinely believes that national power and divine favor are the same thing, that to bless American military supremacy is to bless God, that the prayer is real because the mission is righteous and the mission is righteous because the prayer is real. The circularity is the point. It is a closed system, and it is precisely that closure which makes it theological catastrophe.

_

There is something else here that I cannot pass over. Reports have now emerged — logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation across more than two hundred complaints at fifty military installations — that commanders have been telling soldiers, sailors, and airmen that the Iran war is part of God’s divine plan, that President Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

This formation does not stop at the uniform. The Pentagon’s monthly prayer services, held under Hegseth’s direct sponsorship, have been communicated not only to military personnel but explicitly to defense contractors — the vast civilian workforce whose labor sustains these operations and who are now being formed by the same apocalyptic grammar as those who pull the triggers.

I will be direct: this is not Christianity. It is not a robust or vigorous or even misguided version of Christianity. It is the ancient heresy of holy war dressed in contemporary apocalypticism, and it is being preached to soldiers, sailors, airmen, and the civilians who build and maintain the machinery of war — all of them being told that to serve this mission is to serve God. It tells them that those they are killing are enemies of God. It removes from the entire operation every moral constraint — because once you have convinced yourself that you are God’s instrument of apocalyptic fulfillment, “no quarter” is not a war crime. It is obedience.

This is how blasphemy gets people killed. Not because it is impious. Because it is functionally totalizing. Because it fills the space where moral constraint is supposed to live.

_

I want to return to the soldiers and sailors and airmen and the contractors who support them, because they must not be lost in this argument. They are not the problem I am naming. They are among its victims.

They did not design these rules of engagement. They did not give these briefings. They did not choose to be sent into a war with a Secretary of Defense who publicly disdains the legal frameworks that exist precisely to protect them — because “no quarter” rhetoric does not only endanger Iranian combatants. It places American service members at greater risk of retaliation, of captivity without protections, of being tried for acts they were told were divinely mandated. Senator Mark Kelly, himself a combat veteran, said it plainly: this kind of language “would put American service members at greater risk.”

I pray for them with the specificity that comes from having stood watches in cold water, from knowing what it is to be twenty-three years old and very far from anyone who loves you. I pray for them without condition or qualification.

And I also know — as anyone who has worn a uniform knows — that the moral clarity of command matters. That the language of leaders shapes what happens in the dark, in the confusion, in the moment when a soldier or sailor must decide whether to fire. “No quarter, no mercy” is not a morale statement. It is a formation. It forms the moral imagination of those who hear it — uniformed and civilian alike — and what it forms is not courage but something far more dangerous.

_

One more thing, because it must be said: there are Iranian families tonight who are not our enemies in any theologically coherent sense of that word. There are children who will not wake up because of operations conducted in the name of God’s providential care for America. The strike on a girls’ school that killed more than one hundred seventy people — most of them children — occurred in the context of a campaign framed by prayer and providential nationalism.

The God of the Exodus did not liberate one people by destroying the children of another and calling it providence. The prophets knew that. The tradition knows that. Every serious Christian theology of just war — a tradition with which I have profound disagreements but also profound respect — knows that. The protection of civilians is not a bureaucratic constraint on righteous violence. It is a theological requirement rooted in the conviction that the people we are killing are also made in the image of God.

To pray for American troops while announcing no mercy for those they are sent to kill is not piety. It is a theological inversion so complete that the only honest word for it is blasphemy.

_

I do not say this to be inflammatory. Hauerwas taught me that the church’s first political task is to be the church — to tell the truth about what it sees, even when telling the truth is costly, even when it makes you unwelcome in rooms where the flag and the cross have been arranged to look like the same thing. I say it because I was ordained to say it.

The name of God is not a permission slip. It is not a public relations strategy. It is not something you invoke to consecrate what you have already decided to do for other reasons entirely.

The tradition I serve — the one that runs from Amos through Jeremiah through the apostle Paul through Augustine through the reformers through the best of the American prophetic witnesses — is unanimous on this point: when the name of God is used to bless what God forbids, the proper response of those who know God’s name is not silence. It is witness.

This is mine.

A note on the image: the header was generated with META AI. I think disclosure matters, particularly in a piece about the gap between appearance and reality.

What remains is the question Salin asked. The question about practices.

Not what do you believe about the formation this series has traced. What does your body do?

The road Salin’s question put me on — years of it — eventually produced a set of diagnostics I keep returning to. Not answers. Instruments. Ways of attending to what the formation is doing in your body before your mind has time to construct the trophy case.

I want to offer you these diagnostics. They aren’t arguments. They’re invitations to pay attention — to notice what your body knows before your mind has formed a thought. The formation that operates below consciousness gains its power from remaining unnamed. The moment you attend to it, you’ve opened a gap.

A small gap. But in that gap, you can choose.

⁂

The first is for your community.

Every community tells itself a peoplehood story — who “we” are, where we came from, what we’re called to be. Is your community’s story ordered or disordered?¹

An ordered story is generous: it includes, it welcomes, it receives the stranger as gift. A disordered story is anxious: it sorts, it excludes, it needs an enemy to know who it is.

Listen to the story your community tells about itself — in its sermons, its politics, its coffee-hour gossip about the neighborhood changing. Which grammar do you hear underneath?

⁂

The second is for yourself.

When you hear “City upon a Hill” — which grammar activates? The covenantal grammar, where the city’s visibility means accountability, mutual obligation, judgment beginning at God’s household? Or the triumphalist grammar, where visibility means chosenness, superiority, a nation blessed above all others?²

You’ll know by what you feel, not by what you think.

⁂

The third is for your body.

When you enter a room where you are the racial minority — what does your body do before your mind decides what to think?

I know what mine does. It explodes with data before I’ve formed a single conscious thought. Breathing changes. Posture adjusts. Something begins scanning, sorting, calculating social position before a word is exchanged.

The water fountain lessons running their program, decades after the fountains came down, hundreds of miles from the neighborhoods that installed them.

I’m ashamed to name this. But naming it is the point.

The formation that operates below consciousness gains its power from remaining unnamed. The moment you attend to what your body does — the moment you notice the scan, the sort, the tightening — you’ve opened a gap between the formation and yourself.

⁂

When you encounter someone who has crossed a border — any border, literal or social — does your body contract or open? That’s the homo munitus diagnostic: whether the wall has formed you into a self that experiences otherness as threat.³ Wendy Brown argues that the proliferation of walls in an age of global capital reveals not sovereign strength but sovereign anxiety — the nation-state performing a power it no longer possesses, forming its citizens into walled selves in the process.

⁂

When you meet someone without a degree, do you register it? Do you adjust — your vocabulary, your expectations, your estimate of their worth? That’s the meritocratic purity test operating below your conscious commitments.⁴ Case and Deaton found that the line dividing Americans who are thriving from Americans who are dying is not primarily race or region — it’s the bachelor’s degree. The credential has become a sorting mechanism as absolute in its way as the racial binary was in the Age of Control.

⁂

When you suffer — when something goes wrong at work, when your body breaks down, when the world doesn’t deliver what you expected — do you bear it silently and count the bearing as proof of your worth?

That’s the endurance self.⁵

Hochschild named it in the bayou communities of southwest Louisiana — the deep story of people who have been standing in line patiently, playing by the rules, enduring without complaint, and watching others cut ahead. But its roots run deeper than Louisiana. It’s Christianized Stoicism: the ancient teaching that the sage masters suffering through self-sufficiency, baptized across centuries into a gospel where your worth comes from what you endure without complaint. I’ve traced this mutation across four essays — from the Stoic apatheia the early church tried to resignify, through Lipsius’s neo-Stoic revival that dressed self-mastery in Christian humility, through the Ramist-Federal convergence that transmitted it to the New World, to the theology I inherited from my father: bear the weight, don’t ask for help, and count the bearing as proof that you’re enough.⁶ Augustine diagnosed it as pride. Lipsius relabeled it as humble constancy. My family called it “Be the Gift.” The grammar hasn’t changed. The vocabulary has.

⁂

And when your community gathers — in worship, in political assembly, in the spaces where belonging is performed — who is absent? Whose absence do you not notice?

That’s the deepest diagnostic of all.

Because the profane sacraments’ most successful formation is the formation that makes certain absences invisible. In Contrapunctus I, I described a vacuum — the absence of practices that could have inoculated the faith against dominative identity. That vacuum didn’t close. It went to work. Four centuries of profane sacraments later, the formation is so complete that its own evidence has become invisible. You don’t notice who isn’t in the room because the grammar has taught your eyes where not to look.⁷

⁂

The formation that operates below consciousness gains its power from remaining unnamed. The moment you attend to what your body does — the moment you notice the scan, the sort, the tightening — you’ve opened a gap between the formation and yourself.

A small gap. But in that gap, you can choose. Not perfectly. Not permanently. But actually.

I’m not describing a completed transformation. I’m describing an ongoing conversion — the kind that never finishes, that has to be practiced again tomorrow, that looks less like a trophy and more like a workshop where the sawdust never settles.

Diagnosis isn’t destination.

Closing: The Outer Bracket Closes

But diagnosis matters. Because it reveals something the formation wants hidden: that it was made.

From the auction block to the water fountain to the redlined map to Heritage American — different signs, same formation. From Native dispossession to Chinese Exclusion to Japanese internment to “Build that wall” — different targets, same grammar.

None of this was natural. It was crafted — through specific decisions, specific policies, specific economic arrangements, specific profane sacraments designed to sort bodies and assign worth. People built these systems. Legislatures funded them. Churches blessed them. Neighbors enforced them.

None of this was natural. It was crafted — through specific decisions, specific policies, specific economic arrangements, specific profane sacraments designed to sort bodies and assign worth. People built these systems. Legislatures funded them. Churches blessed them. Neighbors enforced them.

And the circularity completes itself one more time: how you use a person tells you what kind of person they are, and the kind of person they are justifies your use of them. The grammar hasn’t changed. The instruments have.

Which means different practices can replace them. Not a program — I’m suspicious of programs, because programs are trophy cases waiting to happen. But practices. Real sacraments. The kind that form people for communion rather than domination, that write a different grammar into the body over time.

⁂

I keep coming back to the Prayer Breakfast.

Three thousand five hundred Christians standing. A seventy-five-minute speech that violated everything the Sermon on the Mount teaches about power, humility, and the treatment of enemies.

And a room full of people formed — by four centuries of profane sacraments, by a faith that arrived without the practices, by a grammar that learned to whisper so effectively that most of its speakers don’t know they’re speaking it — formed to hear that speech as strength rather than sacrilege.

Peter Wehner, watching from outside, asked the question the room couldn’t ask itself: “What does it mean for the Church to be the conscience of the state?”⁸

I’ve spent this essay tracing the formation that made the standing ovation possible. But Wehner’s question presses further: Can a church formed by the same profane sacraments it should be diagnosing become that conscience?

Can the people who stood — and the people like me who are confident we would never have stood — find practices strong enough to interrupt the grammar we’ve inherited?

I don’t know. I want to offer a confident yes, but confident answers are the trophy case’s specialty. What I can say is that the question itself — can the church be the conscience of the state when it shares the state’s formation? — is the question the profane sacraments were designed to prevent. Asking it means the formation hasn’t finished its work. Not asking it means it has.

What would my body have done in that room? I want to say I would have stayed seated. I want to believe the theological formation would have held me in my chair.

But I’ve learned enough about formation — about my own formation — to know that confident immunity is the last room in the trophy case.

⁂

The girl at the dance was free. She looked me in the eye without fear or deference. Just friendship. Just the ordinary miracle of one person seeing another without the walls intervening.

Salin was free. He looked at my practices without being fooled by my credentials. He asked the question the formation didn’t want asked — and he asked it with the precision of someone who had spent his career reading the profane sacraments that form neighborhoods, housing markets, and the people who live in them.

What the girl at the dance offered — what Salin offered — was not endurance but encounter. Not managing the distance but closing it. Not the trophy case but the workshop.

The profane sacraments were crafted. Different sacraments can be practiced in their place.

But that requires a church that knows what it has inherited — and is willing to begin the long work of unlearning it.

When the formation you’ve inherited is being blessed in the name of the God you serve — will you speak?

I’m still being converted. Maybe you are too.

⁂

This concludes Essay 11, published as five contrapuncti. The next essay in Jazz, Shame, and Being With will return to the regular biweekly format.

All five contrapuncti:

Notes

1. The ordered/disordered peoplehood distinction draws on the Church of England House of Bishops Theology Committee report, which provides a framework for evaluating communal identity narratives. An ordered peoplehood story locates identity in covenantal relationship — mutual obligation, hospitality to the stranger, accountability before God. A disordered story locates identity in contrast — defining “us” primarily through exclusion of “them.”

2. John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630). The sermon’s actual content emphasizes mutual obligation and divine judgment: the city’s visibility means the world is watching to see whether the covenant holds, not that the city is chosen above all others. Ronald Reagan’s famous 1989 use of “shining city on a hill” performed the grammar-conversion: the warning became a boast, the covenant became a credential.

3. Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010). Brown argues that the global proliferation of walls reveals not sovereign power but sovereign anxiety. The walls produce what Brown calls homo munitus, the walled self — a subject who experiences porousness as threat and enclosure as safety.

4. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). Case and Deaton document an unprecedented mortality crisis among white Americans without bachelor’s degrees. The education divide now predicts health, income, marriage, social trust, and political alignment more powerfully than race, region, or religion.

5. Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016), especially chapters 9 and 15. Hochschild’s “deep story” is about waiting in line: you’ve been patient, you’ve played by the rules, you’ve endured without complaint, and now others are being ushered to the front.

6. The endurance self’s theological genealogy spans four essays in this series: Essay 7 (“The Gift of Pride”) traces Augustine’s diagnosis of Stoic self-sufficiency as incurvatus in se; Essay 9 (“Pharaoh in Greek Dress”) traces the early church’s attempt to resignify Stoic apatheia; Essay 10 (“The Perfect Storm”) traces Lipsius’s neo-Stoic revival and the Ramist-Federal convergence that transmitted it to the New World.

7. Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), especially chapters 1–3. The “five displacements” traced in Contrapunctus I draw on Jennings’s account. The absent-bodies diagnostic extends his insight: the formation that makes certain people invisible is the profane sacraments’ most complete achievement.

8. Peter Wehner, “The Evangelicals Who See Trump’s Viciousness as a Virtue,” The Atlantic, February 6, 2026. Wehner’s concluding question — “What does it mean for the Church to be the conscience of the state?” — frames this essay’s opening and closing.

Listen to how your community tells its own story — the narrative it recites about where it came from, who belongs, what made it great. Every community has one. And underneath every story, there’s a grammar.

I’ve spent three contrapuncti tracing unholy profane sacraments — four centuries of instruments that inscribed dominative identity into bodies through repetition, not argument. The theological vacuum that made it possible. The economic phases that gave it new instruments in each age. The way it went underground and became invisible.

But the grammar underneath those instruments is older than any of them. It crossed the Atlantic before the first enslaved person was offloaded at Jamestown. And it’s the grammar I grew up speaking in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, without knowing I was speaking it.

⁂

Movement III: How Formation Persists

The auction block is 165 years gone. The water fountain signs came down before I was born. And yet, at a high school dance hundreds of miles from home, the walls still ruled.

How does formation transmit across centuries?

I’ve been sitting with this question for a long time — longer than I’ve been writing this series. Because the question isn’t really about history. It’s about me.

How did I end up formed by practices I never witnessed, in institutions that had officially repudiated everything I’m describing? None of the schools I attended had water fountain signs. None of the churches I served practiced explicit racial exclusion. And yet every one of them transmitted the formation the signs had performed.

The historian David Hackett Fischer identified three mechanisms by which cultural formations persist long after the conditions that created them have disappeared: institutional transmission, functional interdependence, and elite self-reproduction.¹

I want to show you what each one looks like when the formation being transmitted is an unholy profane sacrament.

⁂

Start with self-reproduction.

A Mississippi merchant named Mabry arrived in the state in the 1820s and built himself into one of the region’s largest enslavers. Then the Panic of 1837 destroyed him — wiped out his holdings, bankrupted his operations, left him ruined in a state full of ruined men.

The fires were literally still burning when people fled their plantations; some abandoned everything except their enslaved human beings.²

You would think that catastrophe on this scale would teach something. You would think that a man who had watched an entire economic system collapse around him would build differently the second time.

By 1850, Mabry owned sixteen enslaved people again. He was rebuilding the same system that had just destroyed him.³

Rothman notes, with an anthropologist's studied calm, that neither Mabry nor most other whites in Mississippi seemed to learn anything from their experience. One is tempted to call this irrational. But that would misunderstand the situation entirely. Mabry wasn't operating by the logic of a market. He was operating by the logic of a liturgy. And liturgies don't fail. They form.⁴

And this is the point I need you to see — because it’s the point that changes everything about how we understand persistence.

Mabry wasn’t a rational economic actor making a calculated decision to re-enter a risky market. He was a formed person. The profane sacraments had taught him what a person of worth does — you acquire human beings, you extract labor, you build a hierarchy with yourself on top — and that formation was deeper than the evidence of its failure.

The system reproduced itself not because it worked but because the formation compelled repetition.

Fischer calls this functional interdependence: the parts of a folkway reinforce each other so powerfully that even catastrophic failure cannot interrupt the pattern.⁵

Mabry’s ruin didn’t teach him anything because the profane sacraments had formed him below the level where teaching operates. His body knew what to do before his mind could question it. If that pattern sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same pattern I described in the trophy case versus the workshop — the same compulsive reproduction of a formation that doesn’t work but can’t stop because the formation is deeper than the evidence against it.

⁂

Now institutional transmission. This is the mechanism that should trouble us most, because it’s the one that operates in plain sight without anyone noticing.

When the great Anglo-American merchant banking houses — the Rothschilds, the Barings, the Browns — developed their sophisticated financial instruments in the early nineteenth century, they developed them in and through the cotton trade. The skills, the networks, the risk-assessment models, the transatlantic credit relationships: all of it was built on the buying and selling of commodities produced by enslaved labor.⁶

When the cotton trade declined and eventually ended, these firms didn’t disappear. They pivoted — to railroads, to gold, to government bonds, to the financial instruments that would become modern investment banking.

The evolution of many of these Anglo-American firms from merchant banking into financial operations more characteristic of modern investment houses, Boodry demonstrates, is directly attributable to their earlier involvement in the enslaved-produced commodity trade.⁷

The firms changed their clients. They didn’t change their grammar.

This is institutional transmission at its most invisible. No one at a modern investment bank traces their risk models back to cotton futures backed by enslaved bodies. No one connects the credit instruments to the commodities they were invented to trade.

The institutions transmitted their operational logic forward — the practices, the relationships, the ways of calculating value — while shedding the content that made the logic legible as a profane sacrament. The grammar persisted. The vocabulary became respectable.

⁂

But the mechanism that haunts me most is the third one — the social embedding — because it demolishes the story I grew up telling myself about where the profane sacraments lived.

My family were the large plantation owners. Our family owned a cotton plantation near Bayou Boeuf in central Louisiana before the Civil War. I knew that. What I was raised to believe was that enslavement was their story — something that happened in the past, on that land, in a world that had ended. The plantation was history. The Baton Rouge I grew up in was something different.

That’s the story I needed. Because if the profane sacraments were confined to the plantation — performed by enslavers on their own land, sustained by their own cruelty — then the world I inherited wasn’t continuous with that world. It was after. It was different. It was clean.

Bonnie Martin’s research on local lending records demolished that story.

Eighty to ninety percent of enslaved-backed capital wasn’t Wall Street. It was neighbor-to-neighbor.⁸

The church elder mortgaging his neighbor’s enslaved family to finance a land purchase. The widow using the human beings she’d inherited as collateral for a loan from a friend. The small farmer who didn’t own enslaved people himself but whose mortgage was secured by someone else’s.⁹

The profane sacraments weren’t maintained by a distant planter class. They were woven into the social fabric at the most intimate level — the level where you couldn’t oppose the system without opposing your own community’s economic infrastructure, your neighbor’s solvency, your church’s financial stability.

This is Fischer’s elite control — but it’s actually something deeper than elite control. It’s social integration so complete that the profane sacraments became indistinguishable from ordinary community life.

They weren’t something a community practiced. They were the medium the community existed in.

And that distinction matters enormously, because it explains how good people — genuinely kind, religiously sincere, morally serious people — could inhabit a world built on profane sacraments without experiencing themselves as complicit.

The formation wasn’t in the cruelty. It was in the normalcy.

⁂

And here’s where I need to show you something about how vocabulary works — because it’s the mechanism that connects everything I’ve been describing to the faith I inherited.

In 1630, John Winthrop stood on the deck of the Arbella and told the Massachusetts Bay colonists that they would be “as a city upon a hill.” The eyes of all people were upon them. If they dealt falsely with their God in this work — if they failed the covenant — they would be made “a story and a by-word through the world.”¹⁰

That was a warning. Winthrop’s pride was contingent and fragile: fail the covenant, and the whole world watches you fall. The city upon a hill was not a boast about American greatness. It was a terrified prayer about American accountability.

The image carried weight precisely because it could be lost.

By the time John F. Kennedy quoted Winthrop in 1961, the warning had become an affirmation. By the time Ronald Reagan added the word “shining” — “a shining city upon a hill” — it had become a boast. By the time Barack Obama invoked it, the grammar had converted entirely.

Same words. Completely different meaning.¹¹ Grammar conversion works two ways: sometimes the vocabulary stays familiar while the meaning inverts — that's Winthrop. Sometimes the vocabulary changes entirely while the underlying logic persists — that's Hayek. Both are grammar conversion. Both require different eyes to see.

The conversion was invisible because the vocabulary stayed familiar. This is what I’ve been calling grammar conversion — and it’s the mechanism that makes all the others so dangerous.

Institutional transmission works because no one recognizes the operational logic underneath the new vocabulary. Functional interdependence works because the compulsion to repeat feels like rational choice. Social embedding works because the profane sacraments feel like normal community life.

And grammar conversion is what makes all three mechanisms theologically lethal — not because it corrupts Christian vocabulary from outside, but because it operates from inside, wearing the vocabulary's clothes, sitting in its chair, answering to its name. The grammar changes. The vocabulary stays pious. Nobody notices. This is, one might observe, a reasonably efficient arrangement.

Winthrop’s pride was the pride I described in Essay 7 — contingent, fragile, dependent on faithful response to a gift that could be squandered. The contemporary “City upon a Hill” offers something entirely different: pride that requires nothing of you except ancestry and belonging.¹²

The first is the pride of a covenant. The second is the pride of an identity. And the distance between them is the distance between a faith that forms you through demanding practices of mutual accountability and a faith that confirms what you already are.

⁂

I stayed with Winthrop’s grammar conversion for a long time because I thought it was a peculiarly religious phenomenon — something that happened to theological language when it was untethered from the practices that had kept it honest.

My first hero as an adult was Milton Friedman. I did my economics thesis my firstie year at Annapolis on Capitalism and Freedom. I already told the story of my immersion in neoliberalism in Essay 9 — “Pharaoh in Greek Dress: I Learned the Creeds and Practiced John Galt.” John Galt was my supreme exemplar before the Spirit claimed me and I became a Jesus follower. I read Hayek before I read the Bible.

Until the last decade I would have said freedom is non-intervention — the absence of constraint, the liberty to pursue return without interference. Now I know freedom is the capacity to love God and all creatures, in Hauerwas and Campbell’s language, or freedom as non-domination in Pettit’s.

That conversion — from negative liberty to participatory freedom — is the grammar conversion happening in reverse. But I need you to understand that when Slobodian traces the Hayek-to-Murray pipeline, he’s tracing the intellectual genealogy of the water I swam in. This isn’t someone else’s intellectual history. It’s mine.

It took Quinn Slobodian to show me the same grammar conversion running in secular register, with no theological vocabulary required at all.

The mechanism is precise. Friedrich Hayek built an evolutionary framework — a story about how human societies had progressed from tribal instinct to extended market order through cultural evolution. It was an elegant account. It was also, as Slobodian documents, deliberately unstable.¹³

Hayek’s distinction between cultural evolution and genetic evolution was blurry enough that a reader could drive through the gap in either direction. A careful reader could interpret Hayek as saying that market norms were cultural achievements, fragile and requiring protection.

A less careful reader — or a more strategic one — could interpret him as saying that market behavior was genetic, hardwired, and therefore that the people who didn’t exhibit it were biologically deficient.

Hayek also functionalized religion. He called religious beliefs “symbolic truths” serving the “multiplication of mankind.”¹⁴

Not false, in Hayek’s account — useful. Religion as a technology for social cohesion rather than a participation in divine life. The grammar was familiar: the vocabulary of faith preserved, the content evacuated, the function reassigned.

One appreciates the honesty, at least. Hayek was doing in philosophical prose what most American Christianity has been doing in practice for two centuries: keeping the vocabulary, reassigning the function, and trusting that nobody would check under the hood. I know because I didn't check mine for decades.

Once religion was reduced to social utility, biology could replace it as the warrant for hierarchy without anyone noticing the substitution. God’s will became nature’s law. The grammar didn’t change. The authority did.

And then the radicals drove through the opening.

Gerard Radnitzky took Hayek’s cultural evolution and biologized it — claiming property rights as genetic rather than cultural. Ludwig von Mises had opened what Slobodian calls a “parenthetical space” for race theory — a passing concession that group differences might be more than cultural.

Murray Rothbard performed what I’d call an ontological escalation: he took Mises’s cultural observation about groups and hardened it into a biological claim about racial nature.¹⁵

Charles Murray operationalized the escalation in The Bell Curve, sorting populations into cognitive castes — what Slobodian names “neurocastes” — where human worth becomes, in his phrase, “objective and calculable.”¹⁶

Richard Lynn supplied the international data that made the sorting global.

I’m giving you the names because the names matter. This wasn’t a cultural shift. It was a research program.

Each step was a grammar conversion: the vocabulary of science — objectivity, data, measurement, falsifiability — carrying the grammar of hierarchy underneath.

Here’s why this matters for the essay’s argument. The grammar conversion doesn’t need the church. It doesn’t need Winthrop or “City upon a Hill” or covenant theology. It can operate entirely through secular-scientific language — IQ scores, genetic markers, evolutionary psychology, human capital theory — while performing exactly the same sorting that the profane sacraments performed through whips and ledgers and redlined maps.

The supersessionist standard I described in the Age of Commerce — a supposedly universal criterion of belonging that certain populations always fail — doesn’t require a theological warrant. It just needs a test. And the test doesn’t need to be administered by a church. It can be administered by an admissions committee, a hiring algorithm, or an IQ researcher with a grant from the right foundation.

⁂

Wendy Brown showed me the deepest level of this persistence.

Neoliberal rationality doesn’t just convert institutions — it converts selves.¹⁷

When every person becomes, in their own self-understanding, a portfolio of human capital requiring perpetual self-investment, the formation no longer needs external instruments. The ledger that Clinch maintained on his enslaved workforce has been internalized.

We keep our own ledgers now — tracking our productivity, our credentials, our market value, our return on investment in ourselves.

If you’ve been following the counter-manna framework from Contrapunctus III, you’ll recognize what’s happened. Counter-manna in the Age of Chaos was capital’s liquidity preference dissolving community bonds from without — the external corrosion of daily-bread economics by a system that rewards perpetual optionality over committed presence. The internalized ledger is counter-manna operating from within. The individual subject is now organized by the same logic that previously required institutional enforcement.

The move from external to internal counter-manna is the profane sacrament’s final achievement: the formation no longer needs instruments because the subject has become self-administering.

The profane sacrament has become an interior practice. And like all the most effective formations, it feels like freedom.

This is how formation persists even when every visible instrument has been dismantled. The water fountain signs came down. The grammar found new warrants — scientific rather than theological, meritocratic rather than racial, internalized rather than administered. And the sorting continued.

⁂

One more thing — because I need you to see how persistence works not just backward but forward, adapting to each age’s instruments.

In the antebellum South, when a state legislature wanted to prevent Black education, they didn’t just pass a law. They burned the school bonds.¹⁸

Physical destruction of the financial instruments that would have funded Black schools. This is a transitional form — still physical violence, but targeting infrastructure rather than bodies directly. Violence against the future rather than against the present.

Lincoln noticed something about this that most people missed. He compared Ohio and Kentucky — states with identical soils, identical climates, identical agricultural potential — and observed that one had built schools and the other had burned the bonds that would have built them.¹⁹

The difference wasn’t geography. It wasn’t economics. It was political choice — which profane sacraments a community chose to practice, and which ones it chose to refuse.

Identical soils, opposite systems. The formation was in the choosing.

And the burning of bonds is the genealogical ancestor of every administrative profane sacrament that followed — the redlined map, the restrictive covenant, the exclusionary zoning, the algorithm that sorts applications by zip code. Each one is violence against infrastructure rather than bodies. Each one targets the future rather than the present. Each one operates through institutions rather than individuals.

And each one is invisible in exactly the way that Mabry’s compulsion was invisible, that the merchant banks’ pivots were invisible, that the neighbor-to-neighbor lending was invisible: the grammar persists while the vocabulary changes, and the change in vocabulary is what makes the grammar unrecognizable.

But there’s something new emerging in our own time — a disordered peoplehood story that makes the grammar explicit, gives it political-theological foundations, and has a direct ancestor in the same era that burned those bonds.

Movement IV: Heritage American

Every nation tells itself stories about who belongs.

I know this because I helped write one. In 2023, the House of Bishops’ Theology Committee — my committee — published a report examining how Americans construct what we called “peoplehood stories.”²⁰

We distinguished between ordered and disordered versions. An ordered peoplehood story is covenantal: it binds a community through shared commitments, mutual accountability, and practices that form members into a common life. It can be critiqued from within because the covenant itself provides the standard of judgment.

A disordered peoplehood story is identitarian: it binds a community through blood, ancestry, and the identification of enemies. It cannot be critiqued from within because belonging is the criterion, and the criterion is fixed at birth.

I helped write that report. I’m proud of the theological work we did. But I’m only now tracing the full genealogy of how the disordered story gets performed into bodies — not by churches but by the common life structures that produce the people who show up at church already formed.

The profane sacraments I’ve been describing didn’t just extract labor and enforce hierarchy. They taught a peoplehood story. And the story they taught has a name.

Michelle Goldberg and Jessica Catoggio have traced what they call the “Heritage American” narrative — a peoplehood story organized not around covenant and accountability but around ancestry and exclusion.²¹

Heritage American doesn’t ask what you’ve committed to. It asks what you were born into. The question isn’t will you be faithful to the covenant? The question is are you one of us? And “us” is defined not by practice but by blood.

I need you to see how old this is.

⁂

In 1820, Mathew Carey — Philadelphia’s most sophisticated political economist, a man who had done more than almost anyone to theorize the American republic’s economic future — confronted the Missouri crisis and made a choice.

He had spent years arguing that the nation needed protective tariffs, a national bank, internal improvements — the full apparatus of what Henry Clay would call the American System. He genuinely believed this program would create a republic of broad-based prosperity for men of moderate fortune.

And he understood, with a clarity that Thomas Jefferson never achieved, that his entire program depended on slavery.²²

The crisis forced his hand. Missouri wanted to enter the union as a slave state. Northern allies were demanding that Carey choose between his economic program and the expansion of slavery.

And Carey chose. He published his answer plainly: the freedom and comfort of the African race were objects worth a strenuous effort to obtain, but if they were to be bought at the expense of the peace and happiness of the country, the price was too great.²³

Read that sentence again. It’s performing a grammar conversion in real time.

Every word in it sounds reasonable. “Freedom and comfort” — he’s acknowledging their humanity. “Strenuous effort” — he’s signaling moral seriousness. “Peace and happiness of the country” — he’s invoking the common good.

The vocabulary is entirely republican. And the grammar underneath is entirely racial: when the republic’s prosperity conflicts with Black freedom, Black freedom loses. Every time.

Not because Carey was a monster — Andrew Shankman’s devastating assessment is that Carey was “at his best when also at his worst,” a vital, thoughtful, tragic, and culpable embodiment of a nation that continued to fuse its best and worst versions of itself.²⁴

Carey is Heritage American’s intellectual ancestor. He established the grammar: use the vocabulary of freedom to perform the practice of exclusion. And make the exclusion sound like wisdom.

⁂

But that’s political economy. The grammar goes deeper when it enters the church.

Craig Steven Wilder traced what happened when a persecuted Christian community — American Catholics, barred from voting, serving on juries, holding office, bearing arms — discovered that slavery offered a path to survival and respectability.²⁵

The Jesuits became among the first slaveholders in Maryland. Their plantations funded Georgetown College, which was tuition-free for its first forty years — an educational gift built entirely on the labor and sale of enslaved human beings.²⁶

The Corporation of Roman Catholic Clergy administered both church affairs and enslaved property in the same meetings, transferring children between plantations and seminaries as institutional needs dictated: “the young negro girl, called Peg, and the small boy, called Jack, both now in the Service of the Seminary.”²⁷

“They embraced human bondage to secure their own liberty.”²⁸

That’s not a political calculation. That’s a grammar conversion at the deepest possible level — a Christian community securing its freedom through the enslavement of others while using the vocabulary of liberty, dignity, education, and mission.

The words stayed Christian. The grammar served extraction. And this is the structure I’ve been diagnosing throughout this essay: a theological vocabulary performing a non-theological function, invisible precisely because the vocabulary sounds right.

⁂

And it wasn’t only the church that had a hidden theology. The profane sacraments had their own all along — it’s just that nobody called it theology.

In 1812, John Quincy Adams sat in St. Petersburg listening to Count St. Julien describe the merchant class with undisguised contempt.

They had no country but their counting-houses, St. Julien said. No God but gain.²⁹

Adams recognized the truth of the accusation but couldn’t argue back, because he was — in his own rueful phrase — “the champion of the merchants.”³⁰

He had sailed to Russia aboard a merchant vessel loaded with Cuban sugar and coffee produced by enslaved labor. His legation secretaries were sons of the merchant families whose fortunes depended on that trade.

The private commercial seal of an enslaver named Vincent Gray had become the de facto public seal of the United States foreign service in Havana.³¹

The state and the market had become indistinguishable.

But I want you to hear St. Julien’s language theologically. “No God but gain.” That’s not metaphor. It’s diagnosis.

The counting-house was a temple. Gain was the deity. This is idolatry in its classical theological sense, not its colloquial one — the attribution of ultimacy to a finite good, complete with sacrifice, priesthood, and an eschatology of endless accumulation.

The profane sacraments had a complete theology — a story about ultimate worth, about who deserves what, about whose comfort matters and whose doesn’t — operating underneath the Christian vocabulary that everybody used on Sundays.

⁂

This is where the political theologian Carl Schmitt becomes indispensable — and troubling.

Schmitt argued that the fundamental category of the political is the friend-enemy distinction.³²

Not the moral distinction between good and evil. Not the economic distinction between profitable and unprofitable. The political distinction: who is the existential enemy whose very existence threatens yours?

Schmitt understood that this distinction doesn’t emerge from rational deliberation. It emerges from a prior decision about who we are — and that decision, for Schmitt, is always theological in structure even when it operates in secular vocabulary.

Sovereignty belongs to whoever decides the exception. And the exception is always: who gets excluded from the “we”?

Heritage American is Schmittian to its core. It answers Schmitt’s question before it’s asked: “we” are the people whose ancestry makes them real Americans, and the enemy is whoever threatens that ancestral identity.

⁂

And this grammar had a political debut.

In 1920, Warren Harding ran on the first “America First” platform, and the realm his administration built was exactly what Schmitt would theorize a decade later: sovereignty as the power to decide who belongs.³³

The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 codified Heritage American’s logic into federal law — a national origins quota system designed to ensure that the people who arrived in the future would look like the people who had arrived in the past.³⁴

Schmitt published The Concept of the Political in 1927. He wasn’t inventing a theory. He was describing what America had already legislated.

The second “America First” movement came in 1940 — the isolationist campaign that Charles Lindbergh addressed in Des Moines, naming who the enemies were.³⁵

That realm collapsed after Pearl Harbor. But the grammar survived.

Now I need you to notice something about the third realm of America First.

When Stephen Miller articulates his “iron laws” of immigration restriction, when the movement consciously reaches back to borrow not just the slogans but the name of a program whose first iteration produced the Johnson-Reed Act, the naming is not nostalgia.³⁶

It is a genealogical claim. It announces which realm is being rebuilt. And the friend-enemy grammar hasn’t changed: the vocabulary shifts — from “better race” to “national origins” to “merit-based immigration” — but the operating logic is always Schmitt’s.

We are defined by ancestry, and sovereignty means controlling who threatens the boundary.

⁂

But here’s what I didn’t see until recently. I’d been treating Heritage American as a political phenomenon — a peoplehood story that emerged from cultural anxieties and found its voice in successive America First movements.

What I hadn’t reckoned with was that Heritage American was manufactured. Not metaphorically. Institutionally.

Quinn Slobodian traced the production line. In 1971, the Institute for Humane Studies was founded to cultivate a generation of intellectuals committed to radical market liberty. Through the 1970s, meetings at Gstaad within the Mont Pelerin Society pushed the boundaries of what market radicalism could encompass.

In 1982, the Ludwig von Mises Institute was established in Auburn, Alabama — and here the fusion began in earnest, because the Mises Institute deliberately cultivated connections between market radicalism and southern traditionalism.

In 1989, Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell convened the John Randolph Club — named, with full awareness, after a slaveholder — bringing together libertarian economists, paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan, and figures like Samuel Francis, who coined the term “Middle American Radicals.”³⁷

I need you to hear what Rockwell’s manifesto actually said. It called for the defense of “Judeo-Christian traditions and Western culture” fused with uncompromising laissez-faire economics and hostility to democratic governance.³⁸

This is the grammar I've been diagnosing throughout this essay — Christian vocabulary deployed within a fundamentally competitive grammar — except that here it wasn't hidden. It was a program. Which is, when you think about it, a kind of progress: after two centuries of performing the fusion unconsciously, someone finally wrote it down.

The vocabulary was familiar. The grammar was hostile. And the fusion was deliberate.

The genealogy runs from there through the Ron Paul newsletters of the 1990s — which Slobodian documents as vectors of radicalization, channeling financial anxiety into racial resentment — through Buchanan’s presidential campaigns, through the Tea Party, to the present.³⁹

Each link in the chain was forged by specific people in specific institutions with specific funding. MAGA Christianism didn’t emerge from a zeitgeist. Its intellectual materials were manufactured in buildings with addresses.

⁂

And this is where the theological diagnosis sharpens.

The conventional story — the one I told myself for years — is that Heritage American represents a backlash against neoliberal globalization. Working people left behind by capital’s mobility, turning to nationalism and racial identity as a consolation prize.

That story is comforting because it positions Heritage American as a reaction — something external to the system, something that happened to neoliberalism rather than from it.

Brown and Slobodian demolished that story for me. Slobodian’s term is precise: not backlash but “frontlash.”⁴⁰

The far right is neoliberalism’s offspring, not its opponent. The reported clash of opposites is a family feud.

Brown provides the mechanism: neoliberalism didn’t just produce economic dislocation. It converted every domain of human life — education, health, civic participation, family — into market logic, and in doing so it destroyed the social as a sphere of shared meaning.⁴¹

When every relationship is a transaction and every person a portfolio of human capital, the only non-market source of identity left is the one the market can’t touch: blood. Ancestry. Heritage.

⁂

Slobodian showed me something even more unsettling.

The connection between market radicalism and ethnic nationalism isn’t accidental — it’s logical. Neoliberal economists themselves recognized that markets require what some of them called a “metamarket” — ethnic, cultural, and linguistic homogeneity as a precondition for market function.⁴²

Milton Friedman conceded that capitalism might not be exportable because it requires cultural foundations that not all societies possess. The nation-state reimagined as a corporation reducing transaction costs.

Heritage American is not a distortion of market logic. It is market logic’s own conclusion: if the market requires cultural homogeneity to function, then defending the market means defending the culture — which means identifying and excluding whoever doesn’t belong.

⁂

Before I go further: a word about what I mean by the supersessionist standard, for readers arriving at this contrapunctus without the earlier essays.

The supersessionist standard is the mechanism I traced in Essay 9: a supposedly universal criterion of belonging — purity of blood, orthodoxy of doctrine, civilizational fitness — that certain populations are structurally guaranteed to fail. It works in three moves: establish the criterion, present it as universal, ensure the targeted group cannot meet it. In medieval Spain it was limpieza de sangre — purity of blood — applied against Jews and Moors who had converted to Christianity but could not change their ancestry. The same grammar ran through colonial papal bulls, American loyalty questionnaires, and Jim Crow literacy tests.

What changes across the centuries is the vocabulary. What doesn’t change is the grammar: covenantal particularity severed from Christ, a vacuum created, and a sorting criterion rushed in to fill it.

What troubles me now is recognizing that criterion operating without any theological vocabulary at all.

I’d been treating the friend-enemy distinction as a rival theology — an alternative account imported into Christianity from Schmitt. But the tension I kept running into was this: if it’s a rival theology, how can it also be a product of economic formation? Barth would say those claims can’t both be true — one makes the friend-enemy distinction ontological, the other makes it epiphenomenal.

Essay 9 resolved this for me. The supersessionist standard — the mechanism I traced from limpieza de sangre through the loyalty questionnaire — is the deeper grammar. It’s theological and philosophical before it is economic: covenantal severance creates the vacuum, the supersessionist standard fills it, and spirit/matter dualism provides the justification.

That genealogy precedes and outlasts every economic formation it inhabits. Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction is the supersessionist standard in political-theological dress — the same dualistic temptation I diagnosed in Essay 9’s analysis of the Gnostic and Manichaean elements that infiltrated Christian grammar.

The purity test (are you friend or enemy?) sounds like a political category. Underneath it’s the same move: sever Christ from his particular covenant, create a vacuum, fill it with whoever controls the “universal” standard. Pneumatics, psychics, hylics — Heritage Americans, allies, enemies — friend, enemy. Same grammar. Same dissolved Christ poured into a new container.

What capital does is generate the conditions under which this grammar becomes compelling. The frontlash thesis doesn’t reduce Schmitt to an economic by-product. It explains why an ancient theological mutation finds such fertile soil in the Age of Chaos — because capital’s liquidity preference has destroyed every other source of meaning, leaving only the friend-enemy distinction as a viable organizing principle for communities that have been stripped of everything except ancestry.

You don’t need to read Schmitt to operate by his grammar. You just need to have been formed by a system that sorts human beings by economic utility and then watch that system dissolve the basis of your own worth. The theology precedes the economics. The economics makes the theology irresistible.

And this is what the church faces when Heritage American arrives in the pew: not an argument to be refuted but a formation already written into bodies.

The person who has been sorted by meritocracy's purity test, who has watched capital dissolve every other source of meaning, who has found in ancestry the one worth the market cannot touch — that person doesn't need a better theology explained to them. They need communities capable of offering what Heritage American offers, without requiring enemies to sustain it. Which is precisely what the church, formed by its own grammar conversions, has largely failed to provide.

⁂

I can name the genealogy. I can trace the institutions. But I almost missed what Heritage American feels like from inside — what makes it compelling to the people who embrace it, not as ideology but as survival.

The education divide that the Age of Chaos produced isn’t merely economic. It’s a caste line — and the caste system has its own form of humiliation.⁴³

The meritocratic order doesn’t just reward those with degrees. It implicitly — and sometimes explicitly — despises those without them. The language of “low-skill workers,” the policy assumption that education is the answer to every structural problem, the cultural contempt that radiates from every institution that sorts people by credentials — all of it communicates a single message to those on the wrong side of the divide: you failed the test. And the test was fair. So the failure is yours.

That’s the supersessionist standard in its contemporary form. A “universal” criterion — merit, education, cognitive ability — that certain populations always fail, and whose failure justifies their exclusion from prosperity, dignity, and political voice.

⁂

Arlie Hochschild spent five years listening to what this humiliation produces.

She found people in Louisiana whose entire lives had been organized around what she calls an “endurance self” — the conviction that suffering without complaint is the measure of moral worth.⁴⁴

They had worked hard. They had endured environmental devastation — cancer alleys, polluted waterways, toxic exposures their own state governments refused to regulate. They had asked for nothing.

And then they watched as other groups — groups they’d been formed to see as less deserving — received recognition, accommodation, public sympathy. The honor squeeze: the endurance that had been their source of pride was suddenly invisible. No one was honoring it. No one was even seeing it.⁴⁵

And then someone saw it.

Hochschild describes what happened at Trump rallies as a form of collective effervescence — Durkheim’s term for the emotional electricity that binds a crowd into a community.⁴⁶

For people who had been formed by the double erosion — eroded from within by the capital process that dissolved their communities, eroded from without by progressive movements that named their grammar — the rally was the first space in years where their grief was acknowledged, their anger validated, their identity confirmed.

It was church. Profane, unholy church — a liturgy organized around the friend-enemy distinction rather than the Eucharist — but church nonetheless. The rally performed community for people whose communities had been liquidated.

I need to sit with that. Because it means Heritage American’s appeal is not primarily ideological. It’s formational. It offers what the profane sacraments of the Age of Chaos destroyed: a sense of belonging, a community that sees you, a story that tells you your suffering was real and your worth is secure.

That the story locates worth in ancestry rather than covenant, and that the community requires enemies to sustain itself — these are the theological mutations I’ve been tracing. But dismissing the appeal as mere racism or ignorance is its own form of Gnosticism — the intellectual’s version of smelling the ink and not the perspiration.

The people at the rally are in pain. The formation is real. And the church that might have offered an alternative arrived without the practices that could have held them.

Heritage American offers what no achievement can: worth that requires no effort and cannot be lost. You don’t have to practice anything. You don’t have to submit to any discipline. You don’t have to be faithful to any covenant. You just have to have been born.

And this is its deepest appeal and its deepest lie — because worth that requires no effort is pride without substance. And pride without substance requires enemies to sustain itself.

If your worth comes from what you are rather than what you’ve committed to, then the only threat to your worth is the existence of people who blur the boundary between us and them. The enemy isn’t someone who has wronged you. The enemy is someone whose existence complicates your story about who belongs.

I’ve been describing this at a distance — the political economist, the Jesuits, the merchants, the immigration legislation, the political theologian. But I recognized everything I’ve described.

Movement V: Water Fountain Walls

Not because I studied it. Because I lived it.

My mother was a planter’s daughter. Our family owned a cotton plantation near Bayou Boeuf in central Louisiana before the Civil War. My grandparents reared nine children on the same land, farming it with the help of Black employees who didn’t join the Great Migration.

Mom grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, when the water fountain signs were still up. White women to the right. Colored women to the left.

She didn’t talk about them much. She didn’t have to. The signs weren’t the formation. The signs were just the visible edge of a world that had already sorted itself before anyone read a word.

Mom’s world operated on what I’d call a graduated hierarchy — a social sorting system so complete it didn’t need explicit instruction. Everyone knew their place, and the knowledge was in the body before it was in the mind.

You knew which neighborhoods you drove through and which ones you stopped in. You knew which families you visited and which you waved to from the car. You knew that Marie, the Black woman who came across the tracks each morning to care for me while Mom finished her degree at LSU, was family in every way that mattered emotionally and not family in every way the social architecture enforced.⁴⁷

The hierarchy wasn’t cruel in any way Mom would have recognized. That’s what made it so effective.

She didn’t teach me to be racist. She would have been horrified by the word. What she transmitted was a formation about who belongs where — a set of somatic reflexes that sorted the world into “our people” and “not our people” long before I had a theology to explain why.

I didn’t have Hochschild’s language then, but I recognize it now. What my mother taught me — the graduated hierarchy, the careful calibration of kindness and distance, the warmth that never quite became equality — was her own version of the endurance self.⁴⁸

She wasn’t cruel. She was formed. She had learned to bear the formation without naming it, to navigate its requirements without confronting its grammar.

And she taught me to do the same — to be kind within the hierarchy, never to be ugly about it, but never to question whether the hierarchy itself was the ugliness.

The endurance wasn’t passive. It took enormous effort. It was a practice — a daily discipline of managing proximity and distance, of knowing exactly how close was close enough and how close was too close.

It was, I’m realizing, its own profane sacrament: an outward and visible practice performing an inward reality of hierarchy, transmitted from mother to son with the same precision the church transmits its liturgy.

⁂

Marie grew up in a different town, but the water fountain liturgy was the same. That profane sacrament shaped her identity too: those who counted as White rule; the best way to thrive is to keep quiet, serve well, and cooperate with White power.

Mom and Marie were pregnant at the same time. Marie came to work for Mom when I was a toddler. They cared for each other from their parenting phase to their golden years.

Yet neither could look the other in the eye as equal neighbors do.

Under duress, Jim Crow took down the water fountain signs before Gary and I learned to read. Signs were no longer necessary. The walls they constructed were hidden in plain sight, like landscape features covered by fig leaves that did not impede their function.

Phil Moser had a concrete driveway with the only basketball goal in the neighborhood. Marie would often bring Gary to work during summer vacation. Sweet memories remain of Gary and me shooting hoops at the Moser’s. We’d play H-O-R-S-E and 21 and one-on-one. Games were long because our best shots could barely reach the ten-foot goal.

It was fun. Like we were friends.

But friendship evaded us.

At that age, we were evenly matched. But we were not equals. Gary was neither shy nor timid. He could do or say whatever he wanted with me. But he wasn’t free. Water fountain lessons ruled him.

He was incapable of looking me in the eye without deference.

I didn’t recognize it then, but water fountain lessons ruled me too. The basketball court was a space where the walls thinned — where for thirty or forty minutes the sorting logic partially suspended itself. But when the game ended, Gary went home with Marie. I stayed.

The court was a breach, not a cure. It showed what life without the graduated hierarchy might feel like. It couldn’t sustain it, because the formation was deeper than the game.

The profane sacraments I’d spent four movements describing — the auction block, the whipping machine, the coffle, the ledger — those were the genealogy of what ruled us at the Moser’s driveway.

Adeline Hodges couldn’t watch grocery clerks weigh food because the weighing ritual had inscribed itself on her nervous system across a lifetime. Gary couldn’t look me in the eye because the deference ritual had inscribed itself on his across generations.

Different sacraments, different centuries, same formational mechanism: repeated practices writing grammar into bodies at a depth no belief can reach.⁴⁹

⁂

Water fountain walls were visible only in the breach. And when breaches occurred, communal discipline reinforced the walls.

As a Boy Scout, I never missed an opportunity to usher at LSU football games. At one game, I escorted a young mixed-race couple to their seats. As the game progressed, so did the drunken anger of those seated behind them.

Who did the couple think they were? They had no right to be in public together where children could see them. Slurs. Threats. A cup of beer thrown at the man.

Eventually, off-duty police officers stepped in to restore peace. They ordered the couple to leave immediately.

Not the drunks. The couple.

The breach had to be sealed. The walls had to be reinforced. The profane sacrament — the sorting of human value into visible hierarchy — had to be performed again, and the crowd was its celebrant.

I watched it happen. I was a boy in a Scout uniform, and I learned something that night that no one had to explain.⁵⁰

⁂

I had a crush on a girl named Anna for most of my adolescence. She was Chinese American. We were close — the kind of closeness that accumulates over years, the mutual recognition that something more was possible.

But neither of our families would have crossed the line. The walls ruled both households, from different directions, toward the same conclusion: we can be friends, but we are different people.

I remember Anna because I remember how clumsy and foolish I felt. I knew the wall was a false story — knew it the way you know something in your mind before your body catches up. But I lacked the courage and the wisdom to transcend it, and so I stood before her unable to respond to what was plainly there between us.

The dance was a different kind of unfreedom — there, I hadn’t recognized the wall at all. With Anna, I recognized it and still couldn’t cross it. That distinction matters. The first is formation operating below consciousness. The second is formation operating against consciousness — the body refusing what the mind has already understood.

⁂

Then came Washington.

We were high school juniors representing our states at the week-long Presidential Classroom for Young Americans. An intense immersion experience. Friendships germinated and blossomed rapidly.

One of those friendships was with a beautiful and brilliant girl whose father was a Black preacher from Atlanta. We’d become good friends over the course of the week. The dance celebrated our completion of the program.

She asked me to dance.

Something happened in my body before my mind could name it. I told myself afterward that I was unaccustomed to girls asking boys to dance. That wasn’t how I was brought up.

But that wasn’t true.

Her outstretched hands invited me to breach water fountain walls I didn’t even recognize as walls. Hundreds of miles from home, they ruled. I wasn’t free.

But she was. She looked me in the eye without fear or deference. Just friendship.

I wanted to be free. Like her.

We danced.

⁂

The Confident Immunity

I’d like to tell you I broke the chain.

That the hesitation at the dance was the last time the walls ruled me. That somewhere between a hotel ballroom in our nation’s capital and worship at the Duke Chapel, I became the kind of person who had shed the formation entirely.

That’s the story I told myself for years. It’s the story the trophy case was designed to prove.

Annapolis. Nuclear submarine officer. A successful high tech company in Baton Rouge. Episcopal ordination. Durham PhD.

Every station a line item in the case for my immunity. Surely a man with that résumé, with that theological formation, couldn’t still carry the grammar of the water fountain. Surely I’d thought my way out. Studied my way out. Prayed my way out.

Who? Moi?

⁂

The woman I love has a brother named Salin.

When she and I first started dating, he did what good brothers do — he protected his sister. Went through my Facebook and Twitter feeds. Read carefully.

Paid attention not to what I said about myself but to what I amplified, what I retweeted, whose voices I elevated. What he found would have been mostly retweets of David Brooks and George Will and Bret Stephens — commentators I regarded as generous, charitable, the reasonable center.

But he also would have observed a clear GOP affinity in a time when passions were aflame with the George Floyd murder and other tragedies.⁵¹

Then he went to his sister with a question. Not an accusation — a question. A careful, intuitive, protective question not just from a brother but from a Deputy Assistant Secretary at HUD whose vocation caused him to study the very formations I’m now tracing in this essay.

Salin could read a social media feed the way a diagnostician reads an X-ray. He saw patterns I couldn’t see in myself because I was inside them.

His question: He seems like a decent guy, but are you sure he’s not a racist? Because based on his Facebook and Twitter feeds, I can’t tell for sure, but it seems that he might be. You need to be careful.

I want you to hear what Salin did — because it matters for everything that follows. He didn’t call me a racist. He didn’t condemn me. He asked a diagnostic question — the same kind of question this entire essay has been building toward.

He looked at the practices (what I amplified, whose voices I elevated, which perspectives I normalized) and asked what formation those practices revealed. He was doing, instinctively, what the profane sacrament framework does analytically: reading formation through practices rather than beliefs.

He was right to ask. That’s the part I couldn’t see for years.

⁂

My response was textbook. Textbook Miss Piggy. Textbook trophy case.

I was devastated. Then defensive. Then offended. Who the hell was this guy who had never met me? I’m a priest and a theologian, one who had thought hard and preached and taught for years about matters of race and reconciliation. I knew in my heart there was nothing racist about me.

I had a trophy case to prove it.

And it was exactly the response the formation predicts. The formation doesn't produce people who say "I am a racist." It produces people with trophy cases. That's the point. That's always been the point.

The trophy case isn't a failure of the formation — it's the formation's finest achievement. Salin wasn't reading my feed and finding a monster. He was reading my feed and finding a perfectly produced specimen of the system I'm now five contrapuncti into describing.

Watch it carefully, because you will recognize it in yourself.

The sequence goes like this: first the visceral recoil — how dare you — which is the shame signal before it becomes conscious. Then the rapid marshaling of evidence for your immunity — the credentials, the relationships, the theological commitments. Then the pivot to offense: the problem isn’t me, the problem is the person who asked.

The question is unfair. The questioner doesn’t know me. The standard is impossible.

I performed, in miniature, what I’ve been tracing across four centuries. The supersessionist standard in reverse: instead of constructing a purity test that others always fail, I constructed an immunity test that I always pass.

Same grammar. Different direction.

⁂

But it wasn’t the kind of challenge I could dismiss. I was head over heels in love with his sister. And that changed everything — not because love made me a better person, but because love made the trophy case insufficient.

I trusted my beloved to see me. With her alone I let my defense mechanisms down. I wanted her to know and love me as me — not the résumé, not the credentials, not the theological sophistication. And in order for her to know and love me as me, I needed to know and love me. Which meant the trophy case had to open. Love didn’t just create stakes that credentials couldn’t override. Love made the question necessary — because the trophy case was blocking the very intimacy I wanted most.

I’ll never forget that painful weekend — trying to persuade her that her concerns were unfounded, feeling like I’d been put on trial. And then, blessedly, the pivot: there must be something here I can’t see in myself.

Salin’s question spawned a journey of self-discovery that made self-knowledge possible — and self-knowledge made love possible. Not the love of performance, where you present your best self and hope it’s enough. The love of presence, where you let yourself be seen in the places you’ve spent a lifetime concealing. The co-regulatory container — the relationship secure enough to hold shame without the shame becoming identity — was what made it bearable to look.

⁂

I deleted my entire Facebook and Twitter accounts. Everything that wasn’t a celebration of family. Gone. I wanted there to be nothing out there — or in me — that could lead anyone to see what Salin saw.

That was years ago. The journey Salin’s question launched has led through territory I couldn’t have mapped in advance — through listening I didn’t know I needed to do, through histories I’d never been taught, through the whole genealogy of profane sacraments that fills this essay.

Salin didn’t hand me these questions. He handed me something more valuable: the recognition that my confident immunity was itself a formation. That the trophy case was the most sophisticated expression of the very grammar it was designed to disprove.

And here’s where the inner bracket has to close — because the formation that produced my confident immunity and the formation that produced the standing ovation at the Prayer Breakfast are not as different as I want them to be.

I am not the opposite of the people who stood. I am a different product of the same assembly line.

Tony Perkins and I weren’t from the same place. But we were both formed by the same Baton Rouge — its profane sacraments working on both of us in the same era, producing a megachurch ally of power in one body and an arrogant theologian in another.

Different outputs. Same formation. And the arrogance that says I would never stand is just another room in the trophy case.

I should tell you that I know what you’re thinking — because I’ve been thinking it too. If the confident immunity was a room in the trophy case, and the theological credentials were a room, and the progressive politics were a room — then isn’t writing this essay another room? Isn’t a twenty-essay series diagnosing Dominative Christianism the most sophisticated expression of the very formation it diagnoses?

I can’t answer that. John Bradshaw’s work on internal family systems and my own acquaintance with polyvagal theory have taught me to recognize that Data — my controlling child, the part of me that manages anxiety through analysis — absolutely would write a treatise on love and feeling to avoid the act of feeling. I’ll leave it to the community to discern whether this effort is Data-led or Spirit-led. I can only tell you that I’ve asked the question. And that the asking doesn’t settle it.

⁂

The formation wasn’t in the cruelty. It was in the normalcy. And the normalcy was in me.

My body knew things my mind had never been taught. Where to sit. Whom to approach. Which spaces were mine and which belonged to someone else. That knowledge didn’t come from theology class. It came from the profane sacraments — centuries of repeated practices that wrote their grammar into the common life I was born into, the common life I reproduced.

The question isn’t whether you were formed by this. The question is whether you can see it.

Salin asked me a question about my practices. Not my beliefs — my practices. He asked it with the precision of someone who had spent his career reading the profane sacraments that form neighborhoods, housing markets, and the people who live in them.

I wasn’t ready to answer. I’m still not sure I am.

But I’ve been learning to ask the question of myself. And in the final contrapunctus, I want to teach you how to ask it too — not as an intellectual exercise but as a bodily one. Not what do you think about race, or formation, or the church’s complicity. What does your body do?

The diagnostics aren’t comfortable. They weren’t meant to be. But they're the only way I know to find the gap — not between the formation and yourself, as if there were a pre-formed self waiting underneath to be liberated. Formation goes all the way down. The gap is between the formation you have received and the formation you are being invited to receive. The choosing is itself a formative act. The first practice of a different pattern.

⁂

Next in this essay: Contrapunctus V: Diagnostics

All five Essay 11 contrapuncti:

• Contrapunctus V: Diagnostics

Notes

1. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Fischer identifies three mechanisms of cultural persistence: institutional transmission, functional interdependence, and elite self-reproduction.

2. Joshua D. Rothman, “The Contours of Cotton Capitalism,” in Beckert and Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism, 136.

3. Rothman, “Contours of Cotton Capitalism,” 142–143.

4. Rothman, “Contours of Cotton Capitalism,” 142–143. “Neither Mabry nor most other whites in Mississippi seemed to learn anything from their experience.”

5. Fischer, Albion’s Seed. Fischer’s concept of functional interdependence explains why personal ruin could not interrupt participation in the slave system.

6. Kathryn Boodry, “August Belmont and the World the Slaves Made,” in Beckert and Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism, 174–178.

7. Boodry, “August Belmont,” 174–178. “The evolution of many of these Anglo-American firms from merchant banking into financial operations more characteristic of modern investment houses is attributable to involvement with this earlier trade in goods produced with slave labor.”

8. Bonnie Martin, “Neighbor-to-Neighbor Capitalism,” in Beckert and Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism, 108–116. 80–90% of slave-backed capital was generated through neighbor-to-neighbor transactions.

9. Martin, “Neighbor-to-Neighbor Capitalism,” 108–116. Widows, church members, and small farmers using enslaved human beings as collateral for personal loans.

10. John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630). See also Abram Van Engen, City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020).

11. On the trajectory from Winthrop’s covenantal warning through Kennedy (1961), Reagan (1989), and Obama, see Van Engen, City on a Hill.

12. See Essay 7, “The Gift of Pride,” regarding contingent vs. non-contingent pride. See also the Ontological Foundations Appendix on participatory versus achieved identity.

13. Quinn Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (Princeton: Zone Books, 2025). Slobodian documents Hayek’s deliberately blurry distinction between cultural evolution and genetic evolution.

14. Quinn Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (Princeton: Zone Books, 2025). Hayek functionalized religion as “symbolic truths” serving the “multiplication of mankind” — not false, but useful. Religion as a technology for social cohesion rather than a participation in divine life.

15. Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards. Ludwig von Mises opened a “parenthetical space” for race theory. Murray Rothbard performed an ontological escalation. Charles Murray operationalized it in The Bell Curve (1994). Richard Lynn supplied the international data.

16. Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards. “Neurocastes” is Slobodian’s term for the far right’s fixation on cognitive sorting — “class war by psychometrics.”

17. Brown, Undoing the Demos, ch. 3, “Revising Foucault: Homo Politicus and Homo Oeconomicus,” 79ff. When every person becomes a portfolio of human capital requiring perpetual self-investment, the formation no longer needs external instruments.

18. John Majewski, “Why Did Northerners Oppose the Expansion of Slavery?” in Beckert and Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism, 289.

19. Majewski, “Why Did Northerners Oppose the Expansion of Slavery?”, 289–290.

20. House of Bishops Theology Committee, “Peoplehood Stories: Ordered and Disordered Nationalism in American Christianity,” in Allen K. Shin and Larry R. Benfield, eds., (New York: Church Publishing, 2024).

21. Michelle Goldberg and Jessica Catoggio have analyzed the “Heritage American” narrative as a contemporary expression of identitarian peoplehood.

22. Andrew Shankman, “Capitalism, Slavery, and the New Epoch,” in Beckert and Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism, 243–244.

23. Shankman, “Capitalism, Slavery, and the New Epoch,” 256.

24. Shankman, “Capitalism, Slavery, and the New Epoch,” 259–260.

25. Craig Steven Wilder, “War and Priests: Catholic Colleges and Slavery in the Age of Revolution,” in Beckert and Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism, 228–230.

26. Wilder, “War and Priests,” 237.

27. Wilder, “War and Priests,” 236.

28. Wilder, “War and Priests,” 239. “They embraced human bondage to secure their own liberty.”

29. Stephen Chambers, “‘No Country But Their Counting-Houses,’” in Beckert and Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism, 195.

30. Chambers, “‘No Country But Their Counting-Houses,’” 207.

31. Chambers, “‘No Country But Their Counting-Houses,’” 203–204.

32. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007 [1927/1932]), 26.

33. Warren G. Harding’s 1920 presidential campaign ran on an explicit “America First” platform.

34. The Johnson-Reed Act (Immigration Act of 1924). See Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

35. The second “America First” movement (1940–1941). See Susan Dunn, 1940: FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh, Hitler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

36. Stephen Miller’s articulation of immigration restriction as governed by “iron laws” represents the third iteration of “America First” as an explicit political program.

37. Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2023).

38. Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism. Lew Rockwell’s manifesto called for the defense of “Judeo-Christian traditions and Western culture” fused with uncompromising laissez-faire economics.

39. Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism. The genealogy runs through the Ron Paul newsletters, Buchanan’s presidential campaigns, the Tea Party, to the present.

40. Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism and Hayek’s Bastards. Slobodian’s term: not backlash but “frontlash.” The far right is neoliberalism’s offspring, not its opponent.

41. Brown, Undoing the Demos, chs. 1–3; and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, ch. 1. Neoliberalism converted every domain of human life into market logic, destroying the social as a sphere of shared meaning.

42. Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism. Neoliberal economists recognized that markets require a “metamarket” — ethnic, cultural, and linguistic homogeneity as a precondition for market function.

43. Case and Deaton, Deaths of Despair, chs. 10–12; see also Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “The Great Divide: Education, Despair, and Death,” Annual Review of Economics 14 (2022): 1–21. The education divide has become the new caste line.

44. Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, chs. 10–12. The “endurance self” is the conviction that suffering without complaint is the measure of moral worth.

45. Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, chs. 10–12. The “honor squeeze”: available sources of honor were being squeezed from every direction.

46. Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, ch. 15, 215ff. Hochschild describes Trump rallies as generating what Durkheim called “collective effervescence.”

47. Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020). Jones provides the analytical framework for understanding how white Christianity transmits racial formation through ordinary community life. The autobiographical material to which this framework is applied is the author’s.

48. Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, chs. 10–12. See note 44 above.

49. Baptist, “Toward a Political Economy of Slave Labor,” 59–60. Adeline Hodges, interviewed in 1930s Alabama in her eighties, could not watch grocery clerks weigh food — because seventy years earlier the nightly weighing ritual of the cotton field had inscribed itself on her nervous system. Baptist draws on the WPA Federal Writers’ Project slave narratives for Hodges’s testimony.

50. The LSU football game incident is drawn from my life story. Jones, White Too Long, 31–35, provides the analytical framework for understanding how such communal enforcement of racial hierarchy operates within white Christian communities.

51. The Salin anecdote is drawn from “Race on the Rocks,” Episode 1 (Common Life Politics podcast, 2020). Salin Geevarghese — Craig’s brother-in-law, former Deputy Assistant Secretary at HUD under President Obama.

The whip. The auction block. The coffle. The noose. The exclusion act.

For two centuries, the profane sacraments were performed on bodies and inscribed in law. The instruments were visible — designed to be witnessed, because the formation required an audience. The bystanders were formed as surely as the people in chains.

But after 1920, something shifted. The instruments didn’t disappear. They became invisible — built into the infrastructure of ordinary life, so that the people being formed by them couldn’t see what was forming them. Including me.

⁂

The Age of Control (1920–1980): When the Sacraments Went Administrative

Then the violence went quiet.

I don’t mean it stopped. I mean it learned to whisper. The lynching tree came down. The auction block was 165 years gone. But the grammar found new instruments — instruments so bureaucratic, so procedural, so administrative that the people who operated them could go home at night believing they’d done nothing wrong. Because they’d only followed the guidelines.

“We’re just enforcing the law, ma’am.”

In the 1930s, the federal government drew maps of every American city. Block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, they assigned grades and colors. Green for the best investment risk. Blue for still desirable. Yellow for declining. Red for hazardous.¹ The red neighborhoods — the ones where the federal government would not insure mortgages — were invariably the ones where Black families lived.

But here’s the detail that should trouble anyone who thinks the unholy profane sacraments operated only along a Black-white line: lots of white neighborhoods got redlined too. Polish neighborhoods. Italian neighborhoods. Greek neighborhoods. If you were the wrong kind of white, the Ledger sorted you out.² But the racial dimension was absolute. If a neighborhood had one Black resident, it was certain to be redlined.³

The genius — and I use the word with full irony — was the framing. The FHA Underwriting Manual warned against “inharmonious racial groups” and instructed appraisers to watch for “infiltration” — language that made racial exclusion sound like pest control.⁴ And when challenged, the FHA described itself as “just a business organization” evaluating “the cold facts and elements of risk.”⁵

This wasn’t racial discrimination. This was risk assessment. The constitutional shield held because the government could claim it was merely measuring financial hazard, not performing racial exclusion.⁶ Same grammar. New vocabulary. And the vocabulary made the grammar invisible.⁷

The apparatus didn’t just reflect existing inequality. It manufactured the evidence for its own operation. FHA exclusion created the very conditions — neighborhood decline, overcrowding, deteriorating infrastructure — that it then cited as proof that Black neighborhoods were bad risks.⁸

A 1952 study in the Appraisal Journal demonstrated that property values actually increased in integrating neighborhoods. The finding was ignored for a decade.⁹

The profane sacrament produced the data that justified the profane sacrament. If the structure sounds familiar, it should — it’s the same logic General DeWitt would deploy to justify Japanese internment: the absence of evidence becomes evidence of threat.

The redlined map is the Ledger’s direct descendant — Gnostic accounting applied to neighborhoods instead of persons. The VA adopted FHA racial policies wholesale; by 1950, the FHA and VA together insured half of all new mortgages in the United States.¹⁰ And like every profane sacrament, the map generated its own aftermarket — exploiting the very inequalities it created, without requiring anyone in the next transaction to be explicitly racist.¹¹

The maps were drawn in the 1930s. They are still sorting neighborhoods today. Kurt Culbertson, a landscape architect who has spent decades studying spatial inequality, showed me what happens when you overlay the original HOLC maps on contemporary socioeconomic data in cities like Raleigh and Charlotte and Cleveland: the correlation persists in great measure.¹²

Ecologists call it patch persistence — once a habitat pattern is established, it reproduces itself indefinitely unless something actively disrupts it. The profane sacrament doesn’t need the mapmaker. It has become the landscape.^13,14

⁂

Families locked out of federally insured mortgages had only one way to buy a home: contract sales. The seller retained the deed. The buyer made a down payment plus monthly installments with interest — not to a bank but directly to the seller.

And here’s the trap: miss one payment, even after fifteen years of faithful payments, and the seller could evict you and keep every dollar you’d paid.¹⁵ Then sell the house to someone else under the same terms. And do it again. In Chicago, eighty-five percent of Black property purchases were made on contract.¹⁶

In the 1920s, Dr. Ossian Sweet bought a house in Detroit through a contract sale. When a white mob surrounded the house, Sweet and his family defended themselves. The legal case became famous. But what most people don’t know is that Sweet didn’t own that house. The landlady did. He wouldn’t have owned it for twenty-five years.¹⁷

The instrument that promised homeownership was designed to prevent it — extracting wealth from Black families who had been deliberately excluded from the legitimate mortgage market, cycling the same house through contract after contract, each buyer’s accumulated payments forfeit at the first stumble.

And the contract sale formed everyone it touched — not just the families trapped in its mechanism. Rothstein traces the causal chain: FHA exclusion locked Black families out of legitimate mortgages; contract sales and blockbusting were the only alternatives; the exploitative terms guaranteed overcrowding and deterioration; white observers saw declining neighborhoods and concluded that Black residents caused the decline.¹⁸

The profane sacrament created the perception that justified the profane sacrament. White flight wasn’t a response to integration. It was a response to conditions the federal government had engineered.¹⁹

Levittown rose from Long Island potato fields in 1947 — mass-produced housing, VA loans requiring zero down payment, the federal government’s explicit guarantee that it would insure mortgages for these vast suburban tracts on the condition of all-white occupancy.²⁰ Restrictive covenants on every deed. The most important investment most Americans would ever make — their home — subsidized by the federal government for white families and denied to everyone else.

This is the profane sacrament of wealth-building: an outward and visible policy performing an inward and structural transfer of resources across racial lines, administered so quietly that white beneficiaries could experience their prosperity as earned rather than subsidized. The result: median white household wealth of $134,000; median Black household wealth of $11,000.

The income ratio between white and Black families is roughly sixty percent. The wealth ratio is less than ten.²¹ That gap is not the residue of slavery. It is the product of administrative profane sacraments operating within living memory — and, after the Supreme Court’s Shelley v. Kraemer decision in 1948 should have ended them, the FHA maintained its racial exclusion for fourteen more years.²²

I grew up inside that subsidy. The Baton Rouge neighborhoods where my family bought homes were green and blue on maps drawn before my parents were born. The neighborhoods where Marie lived, where Gary lived — the neighborhoods I described in the Water Fountain Walls essay — were red. The water fountain signs came down before I could read. The redlines never did.

Phil Moser’s concrete driveway with the basketball goal was in a neighborhood the federal government had decided was worth insuring. The neighborhood Gary went home to was one it had decided was not.

And sometimes the grammar didn’t need a covenant or a lending policy. It needed a tape measure. Robert Moses — who built Lincoln Center, consulted on the interstate highway system, and shaped more of New York’s infrastructure than any other individual — designed the bridges over the parkways leading to Long Island’s public beaches too low for buses to pass under.²³

Black residents, who depended on public transit, were excluded from Jones Beach by twelve feet of concrete clearance. No statute. No covenant. No racial language in any document. Just the built environment speaking the grammar fluently.

⁂

The New Deal — the great expansion of the social safety net — wrote the grammar into the welfare state itself. Agricultural and domestic workers were deliberately excluded from Social Security, the Wagner Act’s labor protections, and the Fair Labor Standards Act’s minimum wage.

This was not an oversight. It was a political bargain with Southern Democrats who understood precisely which workers those categories described.²⁴ These were the two largest categories of Black employment.

Marie — who helped raise me, who came to work for my mother when I was a toddler — was a domestic worker. She was excluded.

The majority of the Black workforce, shut out of the nation’s foundational social insurance programs by a definitional maneuver that never mentioned race. And the mainline Protestant churches that blessed the New Deal as moral progress did not notice who it left out — because the people it left out were invisible to mainline Protestantism.

The social safety net was a white safety net. The administrative instrument that enforced the boundary was the occupational classification form. And the church that should have read the form theologically was too busy celebrating the welfare state to ask who it was forming.²⁵

⁂

Meanwhile, the same administrative grammar had been building its case against Asian Americans for decades — and it was about to find its emergency.

The anti-Chinese logic from the Exclusion era hadn’t disappeared. It had been working its way through the courts. In 1922, the Supreme Court ruled in Ozawa v. United States that Japanese immigrants were ineligible for citizenship — not white enough, regardless of education, acculturation, or character.²⁶

Three months later, in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, the Court ruled that Indian immigrants were also ineligible — even though they were scientifically “Caucasian,” they weren’t white in the “common understanding.”²⁷ Two cases, two different definitions of who counts, both reaching the same result: the supersessionist standard calibrated so that no Asian immigrant could pass. The 1924 Immigration Act completed the architecture, barring Japanese immigration entirely.

Then came December 7, 1941, and the grammar found its emergency.

General John DeWitt, commanding the Western Defense Command, stated the logic with a clarity that should have alarmed anyone paying attention: “The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.”²⁸

Read that sentence again. The absence of evidence is the evidence. Loyalty is proof of concealed disloyalty. The purity test that compliance cannot satisfy — because compliance itself is suspicious. The supersessionist standard’s epistemological perfection: a test designed so that passing it proves you should have failed.

The grammar that Ozawa and Thind had encoded in law, Pearl Harbor activated as policy — rationalizing the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans.²⁹ Executive Order 9066 didn’t use the word “Japanese.” It authorized military commanders to designate “military areas” and exclude “any or all persons.” The vocabulary was race-neutral. The grammar was not.

Austin Anson, a grower-shipper from Salinas, said what the executive order wouldn’t: “We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japanese for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do.”³⁰

I need to show you what happened to one family. The Matsudas were Methodist farmers on Vashon Island, Washington. When the FBI came, they searched the house and found one item of interest: a Japanese-language New Testament. “We are Methodists,” Yoneichi Matsuda told them.³¹

Before the soldiers arrived to take them, the family burned what they couldn’t carry. Mary Matsuda watched her father snap a phonograph record over his knee. “This one is ‘Sakura,’” he said — cherry blossoms, the folk song every Japanese child knows. She watched her mother’s dolls in kimonos fed to the fire. Everything that could mark them as Japanese — as anything other than American — had to be destroyed before the state arrived to classify them as not-American.

They were tagged. The Matsudas became Family 19788.³² Mary’s identification card was stamped “Non-Alien” — not citizen, not immigrant, not a person with a name, but a negation. Defined by what she was not.

I need you to hear that theologically. In baptism, you receive a name and enter a community. In the administrative profane sacrament, the movement runs in reverse.

A Reverend Fuji Usui — a minister — was, in his daughter’s words, “chained and numbered like an animal.”³³ His daughter attended St. Mary’s Church. The Uchida family hung tags from their coat lapels: “Family 13453.”³⁴ The Matsudas became 19788. A minister numbered. Families tagged. Citizens defined by negation.

The administrative profane sacrament is an anti-baptism — it strips the name, dissolves the community, and assigns a category that tells you what you are not.

At the ferry dock, someone spat on them.³² At the camp, searchlights swept the barracks at night. Mary Matsuda wrote: “Shaking in the darkness I realized that at seventeen, I am a prisoner of war in my own country.”³⁵

The searchlight seized her body the way the loyalty questionnaire would seize her identity — an instrument of surveillance so total that the person being watched internalizes the watching. The body learns: you are observed. You are suspect. You are not safe in the dark.

The Reverend Daisuke Kitagawa — an Episcopal priest, a clergyman of my own tradition — named what the camps destroyed: “The loss of the family table and the family kitchen was not simply a loss of opportunity to teach manners to growing children, but a forceful symbol of that human institution which transmits values from one generation to another.”³⁶

Kitagawa saw what I’ve been tracing throughout this essay: formation happens through practices — daily, embodied, repeated. The family table is a real sacrament. The mess hall that replaced it was a profane one. The administrative grammar didn’t just relocate bodies. It destroyed the domestic practices through which identity is formed across generations.

The economic devastation was specific and staggering. Frank Emi sold his $25,000 supermarket for $1,500 — six cents on the dollar.³⁷ In aggregate, Japanese Americans lost approximately $250 million in 1940s dollars — roughly $3 billion in 2013 terms — representing seventy-five percent of total assets.³⁸Scavenger trucks followed the military vehicles, picking over what the families couldn’t carry.³⁹

When the Matsudas returned after the war, they found that a man named Hopkins — a neighbor who had agreed to manage their farm — had been collecting rent from tenants and pocketing the payments. Yoneichi confronted him with the evidence of the theft. Then he handed Hopkins $2,000 from the family’s savings and told him: “It’s only money…. The important thing is we still have our farm.”⁴⁰

Then came the loyalty questionnaire — and here the profane sacrament achieved its administrative perfection. The state imprisoned you, then demanded you prove your loyalty to the state that imprisoned you. A twenty-eight-question form scoring “Americanness” against an implied white norm.⁴¹

Question 21 asked for “names and addresses of three white references” — the supersessionist standard in bureaucratic form, requiring Japanese Americans to produce white Americans willing to vouch for their humanity. Questions 27 and 28 asked them to forswear allegiance to the Emperor of Japan and swear unqualified allegiance to the United States.

For Issei — first-generation immigrants whom American law had prohibited from becoming citizens — answering “yes” meant renouncing their only citizenship and becoming stateless. For Nisei — American-born citizens — the question was an insult: they had no allegiance to forswear. And everyone answering was already behind barbed wire.⁴² The purity test was designed so that compliance meant self-destruction. The grammar hadn’t changed since limpieza de sangre. Only the instrument had.

And then the questionnaire generated its own logic of intensified control — the same circular logic I traced in redlining, where the instrument generates the evidence that makes the instrument seem necessary. Reeves documents Category (d): family members who chose to stay with relatives classified as “disloyal” were themselves reclassified as disloyal.⁴³ Family loyalty became evidence of state disloyalty.

The apparatus built by the incarceration produced the questionnaire that produced the classifications that justified further incarceration. Each step generated the evidence for the next.

The formation worked on everyone it touched. A bus driver named Sumie Barta had greeted Mary Matsuda by name every day — “Hi, Sumi!” — until the day the Executive Order made Sumi a category rather than a person. “Get that damn Jap girl off the bus.”⁴⁴ The grammar replaced a name with a racial slur. It formed the bus driver into someone for whom a person she knew could become a thing she expelled.

And the deepest formation was in those it silenced. Edison Uno, decades later: “We were like the victims of rape. We felt shamed. We could not bear to speak of the assault.”⁴⁵ The profane sacrament’s most devastating achievement: shame so total that it silences its own testimony for a generation.

When the shame has no face — when it arrives as a denied application, a neighborhood boundary, a loyalty questionnaire, a definitional exclusion — it seeps inward. It stops feeling like something done to you and starts feeling like something true about you. The most devastating profane sacraments are the ones you can’t see performing.

The Age of Chaos (1980–Present): When the Constraints Came Off

And then the constraints came off.

I watched it happen in Louisiana. The oil bust of the mid-1980s emptied towns across the Gulf Coast almost overnight — men who had worked the rigs for twenty years came home to locked gates and severance checks that wouldn’t cover the mortgage. The refineries that had made Lake Charles and Port Arthur feel permanent turned out to be as mobile as the capital that built them.⁴⁶ The people left behind had done nothing wrong. They had done everything they were told to do. And the economy they had served simply left.

I need to be precise about what happened, because most accounts get this wrong. Capital — the speculative deployment of wealth in expectation of future return — didn’t suddenly “go mobile” in the 1980s. Capital is mobile by nature.

Its deepest structural impulse is what Jonathan Levy calls “liquidity preference”: the drive toward optionality, exit, the refusal to be bound to any particular place or people or purpose. Capital that can’t exit isn’t fully capital. It’s just property.⁴⁷

What changed wasn’t capital’s nature. What changed was that the sovereign constraints which had channeled that liquidity preference — the regulations, the labor protections, the social contracts, the democratic mechanisms that had forced capital to negotiate with the communities it operated in — were deliberately dismantled.⁴⁸

Wendy Brown diagnosed what happened next with a precision I haven’t found anywhere else. She calls it “double decontainment.”⁴⁹

Capital was freed from sovereign constraint — freed to flow across borders, to relocate production, to arbitrage between jurisdictions, to treat every community as a way station rather than a home.

But simultaneously, the demos — the democratic public — was freed from sovereign protection. The same political decisions that unchained capital also dismantled the institutions that had shielded ordinary people from capital’s liquidity preference: unions, pension systems, stable employment, the social safety net, the democratic mechanisms through which communities had negotiated the terms of capital’s presence.

Both happened at once. That’s the devastation. Capital was liberated. People were exposed. And the language used to describe both operations was the same: freedom.

⁂

Here is where I need you to see something theologically.

Capital-as-process — operating without territory, without deliberation, without a face or a body, yet governing more of human life than any sovereign power — functions as what Brown calls a “deanthropomorphized God.”⁵⁰

Not a metaphor. A diagnosis.

Capital doesn’t deliberate. It doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t appear before a legislature or answer to an electorate. It operates through what Levy would recognize as pure liquidity preference — the restless, perpetual motion of wealth seeking return — and the communities in its path experience its decisions the way ancient peoples experienced weather: as fate.

Irresistible, impersonal, unchallengeable.

When the factory closes, no one decided to close it. The numbers decided. When the town dies, no one killed it. The market moved. The agency has been dissolved into process, and process has no address where you can lodge a complaint.

I’ve been calling this “counter-manna” — and I mean the term precisely. In the Ontological Foundations appendix to this series, I traced how the daily-bread economy of Exodus operates: provision is daily, dependence is the design, hoarding destroys the gift, and trust in tomorrow’s provision is the discipline that forms community.⁵¹

Capital’s liquidity preference is the structural inversion of every one of those principles. Provision becomes accumulation. Dependence becomes weakness. Hoarding becomes fiduciary responsibility. And trust in tomorrow is replaced by the perpetual optionality of exit — the refusal to be bound to any particular place or people or purpose.

Where manna binds people to place and community through shared dependence, capital’s liquidity corrodes every bond that might impede mobility.

The Age of Chaos is what happens when counter-manna wins — when the bonds are corroded, the communities dissolved, the stable employment that had provided not just income but identity stripped away.

And then the people who have lost everything except their ancestry are told that ancestry is enough.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, the wall.

⁂

The border wall’s genealogy tells the story.

A chain-link fence in Calexico in 1911. The creation of the Border Patrol in 1924. Operation Wetback’s mass deportations in 1954. Operation Gatekeeper in 1994 — Clinton’s policy of funneling migrants into the Sonoran Desert, using the environment itself as a weapon.⁵²

Each iteration escalated the infrastructure while the underlying grammar stayed fixed: sovereignty means controlling who belongs, and controlling who belongs means identifying the threat.

David Bentley Hart has diagnosed the paradox at the heart of this escalation. Capital’s relentless drive toward borderless mobility generates the most intense demands for fixed borders, each nation-state sacralized as an area of absolute sovereignty, law, and coercive power.⁵³

The system that claims to liberate individuals actually requires the tribal identities it pretends to transcend.

Brown showed me what that paradox produces. The wall is this age’s characteristic profane sacrament — but not for the reason most people think.

The wall doesn’t work as a security measure. It fails at controlling migration. Its power is formational, not functional.

The wall forms what Brown calls homo munitus — the walled subject, contracting, defending, hunkering behind barriers both literal and psychic.⁵⁴

The wall controls what Americans think about the border, not what happens at it. It stages the fantasy that sovereignty still works, that containment is still possible, that the forces dissolving communities from within can be kept out by concrete and wire.

Where baptism says you belong to a community that transcends every border — a community with its own boundaries, to be sure, but boundaries defined by water and Spirit rather than by blood and soil — the wall says you belong only if the border holds. Where the Eucharist gathers a people whose unity is gift rather than achievement, the wall is a border without a table.

The profane sacrament of the Age of Chaos is not a practice performed on bodies — like the whipping machine — or a bureaucratic instrument applied to neighborhoods — like the redlined map. It is an architecture of imagination: a structure that forms subjects to experience the world as threat, other people as invasion, and containment as the only available salvation.

⁂

And then the double erosion.

This is the insight I almost missed — and it’s the one that explains everything that follows.

The people most deeply formed by dominative identity — the people whose sense of worth depended on their position in the racial and economic hierarchy the profane sacraments had built — were eroded from two directions simultaneously.⁵⁵

From within: the very capital process they had served and defended — the system that had promised them prosperity in exchange for loyalty — dissolved the material conditions that made their identity feel secure.

The factory closed. The union disappeared. The pension evaporated. The town hollowed out. The stable employment that had provided not just income but dignity — the sense that you mattered, that your labor meant something, that your community had a future — was liquidated by the same liquidity preference these communities had been taught to celebrate as freedom.

Capital didn’t betray them. Capital did what capital does. It sought the highest return and moved on.⁵⁶

From without: progressive movements named the grammar. The civil rights movement, feminism, LGBTQ advocacy, immigration reform — each one challenged the hierarchy that had organized American common life for centuries.

Each one said: the sorting is wrong. The walls are unjust. The water fountain signs were evil.

And they were right. But for those whose identity had been built on that hierarchy — whose sense of self depended on their position within it — the naming felt like annihilation. Not moral correction. Ontological threat.

The floor was being pulled out from both directions at once.⁵⁷

If you’ve been following this series from the beginning, you’ll recognize what was happening in the bodies of the people caught in this double erosion. Their window of tolerance — the nervous system’s capacity to stay present, to process complexity, to hold ambiguity without collapsing into fight or flight — was narrowing from both sides simultaneously.

The economic erosion triggered survival-level threat. The cultural naming triggered shame. And shame, as I traced in Essays 3 and 4, narrows the window faster than almost anything else — because it doesn’t just threaten what you have. It threatens what you are.⁵⁸

And here is what makes the Age of Chaos different from every age that preceded it: there was no communal space in which to process the loss.

Capital’s liquidity preference had already destroyed the stable communities — the unions, the civic associations, the churches with enough institutional thickness to hold people through crisis — that might have provided a vocabulary for grief and adaptation. The social had been hollowed out.⁵⁹

The people experiencing the double erosion were experiencing it alone — or in the thin simulations of community that talk radio and social media provided, where rage could be performed but grief could not be borne.

⁂

Arlie Russell Hochschild spent five years in southwestern Louisiana listening to what the double erosion sounds like from inside. She found what she calls a “deep story” — the narrative through which her subjects made sense of their experience.⁶⁰

The deep story goes like this: You are standing in a long line, waiting patiently for the American Dream. You’ve worked hard, played by the rules, done everything right.

And then you see people cutting in line ahead of you — minorities, immigrants, women, people who haven’t earned their place. And the government is helping them cut. And the people who should be defending your place in line — the liberal elites, the media, the institutions — are telling you that your frustration makes you a bigot.

Hochschild is careful: the deep story is not an analysis. It’s an emotional truth — a felt narrative that organizes experience before reasoning begins.

⁂

Angus Deaton and Anne Case showed me what the double erosion does to bodies.

Between 1999 and 2017, roughly 600,000 Americans died what Case and Deaton call “deaths of despair” — suicide, drug overdose, alcoholic liver disease.⁶¹

Not randomly distributed. Concentrated among white Americans without a bachelor’s degree — the population most fully formed by dominative identity and most exposed to its erosion. The geography of deaths of despair maps onto the geography of MAGA support with devastating precision.⁶²

And the American exceptionalism of the pattern — other wealthy nations experienced the same economic shifts without the same mortality spike — proves that this is formation, not economics. The dying is a design feature of a system that first built identity on hierarchy and then dissolved the hierarchy’s material supports.⁶³

Case and Deaton identified something else: the education divide has become the new caste line.

A bachelor’s degree now functions as a purity test — those with degrees live longer, earn more, marry more stably, report greater well-being. Those without degrees are sorted into a world of declining life expectancy, chronic pain, and what Case and Deaton diagnose as the systematic collapse of the structures that had once given life meaning: marriage, employment, community, faith.⁶⁴

The meritocratic system doesn’t just reward education. It humiliates those who lack it — and the humiliation is the formation.

What fills the vacuum when all other sources of worth have been eroded? That’s the question Heritage American answers — and I’ll get to it. But first, the daily instruments.

⁂

But the Age of Chaos doesn’t need a wall to do its daily work. It has zip codes.

Here is what the profane sacraments produce when they have had generations to compound: in Baltimore, a fifteen-to-twenty-year difference in life expectancy within a matter of blocks.⁶⁵

Not across a city. Within neighborhoods that share a boundary.

Raj Chetty’s longitudinal data from the IRS — not surveys, not estimates, but tax records tracking actual lives over decades — confirmed what my brother-in-law Salin Geevarghese had been telling me from his years at HUD: where you grow up determines your life chances.⁶⁶

And the instruments adapt. Redlining denied credit to Black neighborhoods. When that was exposed, the financial industry discovered it could extend predatory credit to the same neighborhoods — subprime loans with exploding interest rates targeted at the communities the original redlining had made desperate for any path to homeownership.⁶⁷

Same geography. Same extraction. Opposite instrument. The 2008 crisis was not a market failure. It was the grammar working — finding a new vocabulary when the old one was taken away.⁶⁸

Salin told me that fair housing testing — sending matched pairs of applicants to the same realtors and landlords — still shows daily evidence that persons of color are steered away from high-opportunity neighborhoods into racially concentrated enclaves.⁶⁹ We are resegregating, he said.

And everywhere we signal it: the pawn shop where a bank should be, the convenience store where a grocery should stand, the park that gets mowed once a month in one neighborhood and every week in the one across the highway.⁷⁰ The “Whites Only” sign came down. The liturgy continues — through signals so embedded in the built environment that most of us drive past them without noticing. Which is exactly how the grammar prefers to operate now. Not through spectacle or statute but through the ordinary landscape of a Tuesday afternoon.⁷¹

⁂

Brown named what I hadn’t been able to see: neoliberalism didn’t fail when it produced MAGA Christianism. It succeeded.⁷²

The Age of Commerce killed with whips. The Age of Capital killed with ropes. The Age of Control killed with exclusion from wealth-building and clean air. The Age of Chaos kills with your address — and with the dissolution of everything that once made an address feel like home.

The grammar hasn’t weakened. It has become so efficient it no longer needs visible instruments. And the faith that blesses it arrived without the practices that might have inoculated against it.

This is the age of epistemic chaos — the same kind of chaos the printing press unleashed in Essay 10’s story of the medieval church. The digital revolution has done to shared reality what the Reformation did to shared liturgy: fragmented it into a million competing narratives, each with its own facts, its own authorities, its own account of who the enemy is.

And in the chaos, the Heritage American story offers what it has always offered: certainty about who belongs.

The profane sacraments no longer need chains or redlined maps or relocation notices. They need algorithms, zip codes, and a peoplehood story that sorts the world into us and them before the data arrives.

MAGA Christianism is not an aberration. It is the predictable response of a formation that has been practicing the friend-enemy grammar for four centuries — now offered a megaphone in an age when every other source of worth has been systematically dismantled.

The grammar is old. The instruments are new. And the faith that blesses it arrived without the practices that might have inoculated against it.

But describing the profane sacraments doesn’t explain how they persist. The Whipping Machine is gone. The Auction Block is gone. The coastwise ships no longer carry human cargo alongside the mail. The opera house in Livermore is just a building. The Santa Fe Bridge doesn’t spray Zyklon B.

So why did my body know what it knew at the dance?

Four ages. Four sets of instruments. And underneath them all, a grammar that precedes and outlasts every one.

I’ve been tracing that grammar at a scholarly distance — naming it in Jennings and Carter and Baptist and Brown, mapping its economic phases, identifying its instruments. That distance felt like analysis. I’m beginning to suspect it was also a kind of protection.

Because underneath the four ages, there’s a grammar older than any of them. And I’ve been speaking it my whole life without knowing.

⁂

Next in this essay: Contrapunctus IV: The Grammar and the Trophy Case

All five Essay 11 contrapuncti:

Notes

1. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017), Kindle Locs. 730–760. Beginning in the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation drew color-coded maps of American neighborhoods — green for “best,” red for “hazardous” — formalizing racial assessment into federal lending policy.

2. Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (New York: Henry Holt, 2004). Polish, Italian, and Greek neighborhoods were also redlined — the grammar sorted “wrong kind of white” as well as Black, though the racial dimension was absolute.

3. Boyle, Arc of Justice. A single Black resident in a neighborhood guaranteed redlining — the racial line was absolute even when the ethnic sorting was more nuanced.

4. Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 800–830. The FHA Underwriting Manual warned against “inharmonious racial groups” and instructed appraisers to watch for “infiltration” — the language of pest control applied to human beings.

5. Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 850–870. The FHA described itself as “just a business organization” evaluating “the cold facts and elements of risk” — the constitutional shield that made racial exclusion look like financial prudence.

6. Boyle, Arc of Justice. The “risk assessment” framing allowed the government to claim it was measuring financial hazard rather than performing racial exclusion — the vocabulary made the grammar invisible.

7. Salin Geevarghese, in conversation with Craig Geevarghese-Uffman, Race on the Rocks podcast. On how profane sacraments adapt their vocabulary while preserving their grammar — the move from explicit racial language to technical risk assessment.

8. Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 900–930. FHA exclusion created the very conditions — neighborhood decline, overcrowding, deteriorating infrastructure — that were then cited as proof that Black neighborhoods were bad risks. The profane sacrament manufactured the evidence for its own operation.

9. Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 960–980. A 1952 study in the Appraisal Journal demonstrated that property values actually increased in integrating neighborhoods. The finding was ignored for a decade.

10. Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 1000–1020. The VA adopted FHA racial policies wholesale. By 1950, the FHA and VA together insured half of all new mortgages in the United States.

11. Craig’s concept, informed by Jonathan Tran’s analysis of how racial capitalism generates secondary markets. The “aftermarket” describes how profane sacraments create inequalities that subsequent actors can exploit without being explicitly racist — each transaction building on the previous one’s distortions. See Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

12. Kurt Culbertson, in conversation with Craig Geevarghese-Uffman, Race on the Rocks, Episode 21, c. 2021, ~15:00–20:00. When you overlay original HOLC maps on contemporary socioeconomic data in Raleigh, Charlotte, and Cleveland, the correlation persists in great measure. Ecologists call it patch persistence.

13. Culbertson, Race on the Rocks, Episode 21, ~20:00–25:00. The ecological vocabulary — patch persistence, habitat pattern, succession of instruments — naming how spatial inequality reproduces itself indefinitely unless actively disrupted.

14. Culbertson, Race on the Rocks, Episode 21, ~25:00–30:00. On the succession of instruments — redlining maps to highway routing to zoning codes to school district boundaries — each new instrument inheriting and reproducing the pattern the previous one established.

15. Boyle, Arc of Justice; see also Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 950–970, and Beryl Satter, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009). Contract sales gave buyers none of the protections of a mortgage — miss one payment and lose the house and every dollar paid.

16. Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 950–970. In Chicago, eighty-five percent of Black property purchases were made on contract.

17. Boyle, Arc of Justice. Dr. Ossian Sweet’s famous legal case — what most people don’t know is that Sweet didn’t own the house. The landlady did. He wouldn’t have owned it for twenty-five years. The instrument that promised homeownership was designed to prevent it.

18. Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 1050–1080. The causal chain: FHA exclusion → contract sales and blockbusting → overcrowding and deterioration → white observers concluding Black residents caused the decline. The profane sacrament created the perception that justified itself.

19. Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 1080–1100. White flight wasn’t a response to integration. It was a response to conditions the federal government had engineered.

20. Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 1100–1130. Levittown: VA loans requiring zero down payment, federal mortgage insurance conditional on all-white occupancy, restrictive covenants on every deed.

21. Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 1100–1120. Median white household wealth: approximately $134,000. Median Black household wealth: approximately $11,000. The income ratio between white and Black families is roughly sixty percent. The wealth ratio is less than ten.

22. Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 1150–1180. After the Supreme Court’s Shelley v. Kraemer decision in 1948 should have ended racial covenants, the FHA maintained its racial exclusion for fourteen more years.

23. Culbertson, Race on the Rocks, Episode 21, ~30:00–33:00. Robert Moses designed the bridges over Long Island parkways too low for buses to pass under — excluding Black residents dependent on public transit from Jones Beach by twelve feet of concrete clearance. No statute, no covenant, no racial language. Just infrastructure speaking the grammar. See also Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Knopf, 1974).

24. Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005); Rothstein, Color of Law. The Social Security Act of 1935, the Wagner Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act all excluded agricultural and domestic workers — the two largest categories of Black employment — as the price Southern Democrats extracted for their votes.

25. Craig’s observation. The mainline Protestant churches that celebrated the New Deal as social progress — Reinhold Niebuhr was advising the Roosevelt administration — did not notice or challenge the occupational exclusions that left the majority of the Black workforce outside the safety net. The silence is itself a profane sacrament: the church blessed the structure without reading who it formed.

26. Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178 (1922). The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Takao Ozawa, a Japanese immigrant who had lived in the United States for twenty years, graduated from Berkeley, and educated his children in American schools, was ineligible for citizenship because Japanese persons were not “Caucasian” and therefore not “free white persons” under the Naturalization Act.

27. United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923). Three months after Ozawa, the Court reversed its own reasoning: Thind was scientifically Caucasian, but not white in the “common understanding.” The ruling stripped citizenship from approximately fifty Indian Americans who had already been naturalized. Together with Ozawa, the paired decisions ensured that no Asian immigrant could satisfy the supersessionist standard — one case excluded those who weren’t Caucasian, the other excluded those who were.

28. Richard Reeves, Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II (New York: Henry Holt, 2015), ch. 2, p. 51. General John L. DeWitt: “The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.”

29. Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America: A History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015). The anti-Chinese logic from the Exclusion era resurfaced to rationalize the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans.

30. Reeves, Infamy, ch. 2. Austin Anson, grower-shipper from Salinas: “We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japanese for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do.”

31. Reeves, Infamy, ch. 3, pp. 85–90. The Matsudas were Methodist farmers on Vashon Island. Before the soldiers arrived, the family burned what they couldn’t carry — the phonograph record of “Sakura,” the mother’s dolls in kimonos. Everything that could mark them as Japanese destroyed before the state arrived to classify them as not-American.

32. Reeves, Infamy, ch. 3, pp. 90–95. The Matsudas became Family 19788. Mary’s identification card stamped “Non-Alien.” At the ferry dock, someone spat on them.

33. Reeves, Infamy. Reverend Fuji Usui — a minister — was, in his daughter’s words, “chained and numbered like an animal.” His daughter attended St. Mary’s Church.

34. Reeves, Infamy. The Uchida family hung tags from their coat lapels: “Family 13453.”

35. Reeves, Infamy, ch. 3, pp. 90–91; see also Mary Matsuda Gruenewald, Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese American Internment Camps (Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press, 2005). “Shaking in the darkness I realized that at seventeen, I am a prisoner of war in my own country.”

36. Reeves, Infamy. The Reverend Daisuke Kitagawa, an Episcopal priest: “The loss of the family table and the family kitchen was not simply a loss of opportunity to teach manners to growing children, but a forceful symbol of that human institution which transmits values from one generation to another.”

37. Reeves, Infamy. Frank Emi sold his $25,000 supermarket for $1,500 — six cents on the dollar.

38. Reeves, Infamy. Japanese Americans lost approximately $250 million in 1940s dollars — roughly $3 billion in 2013 terms — representing seventy-five percent of total assets.

39. Reeves, Infamy. Scavenger trucks followed the military vehicles, picking over what the families couldn’t carry.

40. Reeves, Infamy. When the Matsudas returned, they found Hopkins had been collecting rent and pocketing payments. Yoneichi confronted him, then handed him $2,000: “It’s only money…. The important thing is we still have our farm.”

41. Reeves, Infamy. A twenty-eight-question form scoring “Americanness” against an implied white norm. The state imprisoned you, then demanded you prove your loyalty to the state that imprisoned you.

42. Michi Nishiura Weglyn, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps (New York: William Morrow, 1976; updated ed., Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996). War Relocation Authority, Form WRA-126 Rev. (1943), Questions 27 and 28. Question 21 asked for “names and addresses of three white references.” For Issei, answering “yes” meant renouncing their only citizenship and becoming stateless. For Nisei, the question was an insult.

43. Reeves, Infamy. Category (d): family members who chose to stay with relatives classified as “disloyal” were themselves reclassified as disloyal. Family loyalty became evidence of state disloyalty.

44. Reeves, Infamy. Sumie Barta had greeted Mary Matsuda by name every day — “Hi, Sumi!” — until the Executive Order made her a category: “Get that damn Jap girl off the bus.”

45. Reeves, Infamy. Edison Uno, decades later: “We were like the victims of rape. We felt shamed. We could not bear to speak of the assault.”

46. Jonathan Levy, Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States (New York: Random House, 2021), chs. 16–17. The oil bust of the mid-1980s devastated Gulf Coast communities, demonstrating capital’s liquidity preference in real time: the industry that had built towns could abandon them without deliberation, because capital that cannot exit is not fully capital.

47. Jonathan Levy, Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States (New York: Random House, 2021), Introduction and throughout. Levy defines capital not as a physical asset but as a process — “the never-ending conflict between the short-term propensity to hoard and the long-term ability and inducement to invest.” Its deepest structural impulse is the drive toward optionality and exit.

48. Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), chs. 1–2. Beginning in the late 1970s, a series of political decisions unleashed capital’s inherent liquidity preference from the sovereign containers that had held it accountable to democratic publics.

49. Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, chs. 1–2. “Double decontainment”: capital freed from sovereign constraint while simultaneously the demos freed from sovereign protection.

50. Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism; see also Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015). Capital-as-process functions as a “deanthropomorphized God” — operating without territory, deliberation, or accountability.

51. Craig’s term, building on Levy, Ages of American Capitalism. Capital’s liquidity preference as “counter-manna” — the structural opposite of the daily-bread economy where receiving and trust form the basis of community. Developed in the Ontological Foundations appendix to this series.

52. Carrie Gibson, El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2019). The border wall’s genealogy: a chain-link fence in Calexico in 1911, the creation of the Border Patrol in 1924, Operation Wetback in 1954, Operation Gatekeeper in 1994.

53. David Bentley Hart, “Notes Toward a Polyphonic Politics — Part the Second.” Capital’s relentless drive toward borderless mobility generates the most intense demands for fixed borders. Developed in Essay 8 Appendix (“Ontological Foundations”), Section 6.

54. Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010), chs. 4–5. The wall forms homo munitus — the walled subject, contracting, defending, hunkering behind barriers both literal and psychic.

55. Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, ch. 5. The people most deeply formed by dominative identity were eroded from two directions simultaneously — from within by capital’s dissolution of material conditions, and from without by progressive movements that named the grammar.

56. Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, ch. 5. The very capital process they had served dissolved the material conditions that made their identity feel secure. Capital didn’t betray them. Capital did what capital does.

57. Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, ch. 5. For those whose identity had been built on the hierarchy, progressive movements naming the grammar felt like annihilation. Not moral correction. Ontological threat.

58. Craig’s synthesis, drawing on the neurobiological framework developed in Essays 3–4 (Porges, Siegel, Schore). The double erosion — economic threat from within, shame-based naming from without — narrows the window of tolerance from both sides simultaneously. Economic insecurity triggers survival-level physiological responses. Cultural naming triggers shame, which narrows the window faster than almost any other affect because it threatens identity rather than circumstance.

59. Brown, Undoing the Demos, chs. 1–3; and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, ch. 1. Neoliberalism converted every domain of human life into market logic, destroying the social as a sphere of shared meaning — the communities that might have provided vocabulary for grief and adaptation.

60. Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016), ch. 9, “The Deep Story,” 135ff. The “deep story” is not an analysis but an emotional truth — a felt narrative that organizes experience before reasoning begins.

61. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), chs. 1–3. Between 1999 and 2017, roughly 600,000 Americans died what Case and Deaton call “deaths of despair” — suicide, drug overdose, alcoholic liver disease.

62. Case and Deaton, Deaths of Despair, chs. 13–16. The geography of deaths of despair maps onto the geography of MAGA support with devastating precision. Concentrated among white Americans without a bachelor’s degree.

63. Case and Deaton, Deaths of Despair, chs. 1–3. Other wealthy nations experienced the same economic shifts without the same mortality spike — proving this is formation, not economics.

64. Case and Deaton, Deaths of Despair, chs. 10–12; see also Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “The Great Divide: Education, Despair, and Death,” Annual Review of Economics 14 (2022): 1–21. A bachelor’s degree now functions as a purity test — those with degrees live longer, earn more, marry more stably.

65. Salin Geevarghese, in conversation with Craig Geevarghese-Uffman, Race on the Rocks, Episode 20, c. 2021, ~41:30–42:30. A fifteen-to-twenty-year difference in life expectancy within a matter of blocks in Baltimore.

66. Geevarghese, Race on the Rocks, Episode 19, ~28:00–33:00. Geevarghese cites Raj Chetty et al., “Where Is the Land of Opportunity?” Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, no. 4 (2014): 1553–1623.

67. Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 1736–1770. The 2008 financial crisis as redlining’s mutation: from denial of credit to predatory extension of credit.

68. Geevarghese, Race on the Rocks, Episode 20, ~12:30–13:00. The 2008 crisis as the grammar working — finding new vocabulary when the old one was taken away.

69. Geevarghese, Race on the Rocks, Episode 19, ~22:00–23:00. Fair housing testing still shows daily evidence that persons of color are steered away from high-opportunity neighborhoods.

70. Geevarghese, Race on the Rocks, Episode 20, ~27:30–28:00. The pawn shop where a bank should be, the convenience store where a grocery should stand, the park mowed once a month in one neighborhood and every week in the one across the highway.

71. Geevarghese, Race on the Rocks. On how the grammar operates through the ordinary landscape — not through spectacle or statute but through signals so embedded in the built environment that most of us drive past them without noticing.

72. Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism; see also Wendy Brown, “Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein,” Critical Times 1, no. 1 (2018): 60–79. Neoliberalism didn’t fail when it produced MAGA Christianism. It succeeded.

The faith that crossed the Atlantic arrived already missing its immune system.

In the previous contrapunctus, I traced the vacuum — how the theological imagination mutated under colonial encounter, severing identity from covenant and filling the space with performance. Jennings showed us the displacements. Carter showed us the replacement doctrine. Locke and Kant gave it philosophical architecture.

But a vacuum is an absence. What I want to show you now is the presence — the specific instruments that wrote dominative identity into American bodies across two centuries of flesh-and-blood commerce. Not the ideas. The practices.

And I need to tell you what happens to me when I sit with this material. Because the temptation — my temptation, the one I know best — is to turn it into a lecture. To manage the horror by analyzing it. To put Baptist’s accounts and Cone’s theology into careful paragraphs and move on, having understood without being disturbed. That’s Data — my hyper-competent controller — doing what he does: mastering the material so I don’t have to feel it.

I’m going to try not to do that here. Not because my feelings matter more than the historical record, but because this essay argues that formation happens in the body. If I write about bodily formation while dissociating from my own body, I’m performing the very thing I’m critiquing.

⁂

I said a profane sacrament is a practice that performs the formational work a sacrament performs. Let me be more precise.

The church’s sacraments rehearse the true story — that being is gift, that we are made for communion, that there is enough. Profane sacraments are practices outside the liturgy that do the same kind of formational work, and they can rehearse either story. A barn raising, a shared meal, a neighborhood that teaches children they belong — these are profane sacraments that form people toward the true story. But the ones I’m tracking in this essay rehearse what Wells calls the false story: that scarcity is the nature of things, that other people are threats rather than companions, and that what cannot be seized cannot be trusted.

And I need to press the analogy harder than that. Sacraments don’t merely symbolize. They accomplish. The bread and wine don’t just represent communion — they form us into people capable of receiving it. The unholy profane sacraments work the same way in reverse. They don’t merely represent the false story. They write it into the nervous system at a depth no counter-argument can reach. They have their own terrible efficacy.

Tran names the theological structure precisely: the privatio of gift — the desperate extraction of what can only be received.¹

I’ve organized what follows around Jonathan Levy’s economic periodization — four ages of American capitalism, each generating its own characteristic profane sacraments. The instruments change. The grammar persists.²

The Age of Commerce (1620–1860): The Instruments of Flesh

The first profane sacraments were performed on bodies.

The Auction Block

In 1830, in the Attakapas region of Louisiana, a free man of color named Duplantier stood before a notary and signed a mortgage. He was buying the freedom of Helena and her daughter Marieta — his wife and child. The instrument of their liberation was a loan from his neighbor Massi, secured against property. Love, formalized as debt.³

To secure the loan, Duplantier pledged five other human beings as collateral — Clara, Pedro, Francisco, Mary, and Mary’s children. What promised a brighter future for Helena and Marieta increased the risks of displacement for Clara and the other five.

The only instrument available for love was the same instrument that enslaved.

A man named Bob cut his own throat rather than submit to a new owner. A man named Bunch had insured Bob’s life. For three years after Bob’s death, Bunch pursued the claim — $456 plus interest, compounding while Bob’s body decomposed.⁴

Samuel Davis executed his own enslaved person for stealing a gingerbread cake. Under the law governing enslavement, the state compensated enslavers for executed “property” at an assessed value — and in this case, the assessed value exceeded what Davis could have gotten at market. He profited from the killing. Murder, engineered as sound financial planning.⁵

The profane sacrament didn’t merely reflect a pre-existing hierarchy. It produced one. How you use a person tells you what kind of person they are, and the kind of person they are justifies your use of them.⁶ Duplantier’s mortgage didn’t just express the market value of Clara and Pedro and Francisco. The act of pledging them as collateral produced their status as pledgeable — and that status then justified the next mortgage, the next pledge, the next leveraging of a human life. The auction block didn’t price people because they were property. It made them property by pricing them. And on it goes.

Where baptism says you are beloved, the Auction Block said you are worth what someone will pay. Where baptism marks an identity that death cannot destroy, the Auction Block marked a commodity status that death could not end. Bob had been dead for three years. The interest kept compounding.

The Whipping Machine

In the 1930s, in Alabama, an elderly woman named Adeline Hodges could not watch clerks weigh her groceries.

She was in her eighties. She’d been free for seven decades. But when the clerk lifted a bag of flour onto the scale, something happened in her body that no amount of freedom could reach. She turned away, or she left the store, or she sent someone else — because she remembered that each day the enslaved were given a certain number of pounds to pick, and when weighing-up time came and you didn’t have the number set aside, you could be sure you were going to be whipped.⁷

I need to sit with that. I need you to sit with it. Because what happened to Adeline Hodges is the single most important thing I can show you about how profane sacraments actually work. A practice repeated daily for years had inscribed itself so deeply into her nervous system that a grocery scale could trigger the full cascade of terror seventy years later. The weighing ritual didn’t just hurt her body. It became part of her body.

Here’s how the system worked. Every evening, as the sun dropped, the enslaved carried their cotton baskets to the gin shed and waited. One by one, the drivers hung each basket on a steelyard balance. The overseer recorded each number in chalk beside the picker’s name on a slate. If you fell short of your quota, you were beaten — not randomly, but proportionally. So many pounds short meant so many lashes. The violence wasn’t chaos. It was measurement.⁸

And once you met your quota consistently, the overseer erased his chalk and wrote a higher number. The old target disappeared. There was no stable endpoint. The system ratcheted upward, perpetually, extracting the enslaved person’s own adaptive creativity — every trick of the fingers, every efficiency of motion — and weaponizing those discoveries against the discoverer by demanding more.

Baptist calls this the “whipping-machine.” Not because any single device did the whipping — though one Louisiana enslaver apparently possessed a literal contraption — but because the entire system functioned as a technology. Between 1800 and 1860, cotton-picking productivity increased by roughly 400 percent. Not through mechanical innovation. Through calibrated torture.⁹

When I first read Baptist’s account of the whipping machine, the locale he named stopped me cold. Bayou Bœuf, Louisiana. The planters whose records he was analyzing — the ones who kept ledgers tracking the relationship between whipping and picking, who calibrated torture as a technology for productivity gains — were farming in the parish where my family planted. These weren’t abstractions. These were my people. The whipping machine wasn’t a historical artifact I was studying. It was the family business.

But here’s the thing I almost missed, and it’s what matters most for what I’m tracing in this series: the whipping-machine didn’t only form Adeline Hodges. It formed everyone in its liturgical field.

Think about the overseer standing at the steelyard with his chalk and slate. Every evening, the same ritual. Hang the basket. Read the number. Write it down. Compare it to the quota. Determine the punishment. Day after day, season after season, the practice is teaching his body that this is what evening looks like. That the relationship between a person and a number on a slate is the relationship that matters. That administering calibrated violence based on a mathematical shortfall is simply what the evening requires. The whipping-machine is forming him into a person for whom the hierarchy of human value has become as invisible and as given as the steelyard’s operation. He doesn’t experience himself as monstrous. He experiences himself as competent.¹⁰

And the planter who reads the slate over breakfast — who never touches the whip but studies the numbers, notices which hands are falling behind, makes notations in a ledger? The practice is teaching him that these numbers are these people. The profane sacrament is creating in him what I’ve been calling dominative identity: a self that knows its own worth by standing atop a hierarchy that sorts human beings into quantities. He doesn’t need to be cruel. He needs to be numerate. The cruelty is built into the counting.

And the neighbor — the small farmer, the merchant in town, the minister who rides out on Sunday — who hears the system operating, who sees its products at market, who benefits from the cotton economy it sustains? The profane sacrament is training his nervous system to separate what his body registers from what his mind permits him to know. He hears the screams and learns not to hear them. He sees the marks and learns not to see them. This trained dissociation outlasts the institution that produced it. It becomes heritable — not genetically, but formationally, through the institutions and habits and social arrangements that carry the sacrament’s grammar forward long after the specific practice has ended.

The whipping-machine is the supersessionist standard in action — not in the abstract four-step pattern I described in Essay 10, but in its embodied, practiced, daily form. The purity test is productivity. The “universal” standard is the quota. The targeted group always fails because the quota ratchets upward whenever it’s met. And the “failure” justifies the violence that extracts more labor that generates more wealth that confirms the hierarchy that makes the whole system feel like the natural order of things.

Baptist describes how the pressure forced enslaved people to develop what he calls a “sleight of hands” — Patsey working both sides of her row, both hands picking independently, moving in an unconscious rhythm born of dissociation rather than pleasure. Her artistry was extracted under threat of death. Baptist calls this the extraction of “left-handed power,” borrowing from theologian Robert Farrar Capon — the enslaved person’s own creativity weaponized against them.¹¹

And the sacrament’s reach extended beyond the cotton field. On Virginia wheat plantations where the McCormick reaper was being developed alongside enslaved labor, Rood found the same grammar operating at the level of chronic, pervasive threat. The overseer’s journal revealed that the withholding of violence was exceptional enough to note in the record — which means the threat hovered constantly.

Rood’s language is precise: the invisible hand of the implied lash pushed the workers onward, as essential to the harvest as the tallow greasing the wheels of the machine. Adam Smith’s great metaphor for the market’s benevolent self-regulation — repurposed for the ambient terror that made the market’s cotton supply possible. The invisible hand was a whip. And the whip didn’t have to land. Its possibility was the formation.¹²

The Coffle

A coffle was a chain — literally. Enslaved people shackled together at the neck or wrists, marched overland in lines from the Upper South to the cotton frontier. The word comes from the Arabic qāfila, a caravan. Americans borrowed the term and industrialized the practice, moving roughly a million people by force between 1790 and 1860.¹³

But the chains were only the most visible form. By the 1830s, much of the domestic enslavement trade had moved to coastal shipping — and this is where the Coffle did its most insidious work. Not on the enslaved, who already knew what the system was. On everyone else.

Somewhere in the waters between Savannah and New Orleans, a woman gave birth aboard the brig Lapwing. The customs inspector recorded the event: one infant slave. No name for the child. No names for the parents.¹⁴

In the hold of the Unicorn, twenty-four-year-old Thomas, twenty-six-year-old Jane, and Jane’s six-year-old daughter Anne were packed alongside violins, mirrors, wine, tea, hats, and coffee mills. All listed in the same manifest. They had been forced to acknowledge themselves as slaves for life before being loaded alongside the consumer goods.¹⁵

These vessels also carried first-class passengers on their decks and United States mail in their cargo bays.¹⁶ The passenger who dined above while enslaved people were held below. The postal clerk who sorted mail aboard a floating prison. The harbor master who logged the ship’s arrival. None of them needed to wield a whip or sign a mortgage. They just needed to eat dinner, sort the mail, log the manifest — and not let what they knew reach what they felt.

The Coffle’s formation was this: it taught a population to practice, at neurobiological depth, the art of knowing and not-knowing simultaneously. Seeing suffering and filing it under normal. Feeling the pull of empathic connection and overriding it with the categories their world required.

I’d rather suppress that part of our story than deal with it. That impulse — the flinch, the desire to look away — is itself evidence of how deep the formation goes. The grammar that says don’t look at that, it was a long time ago, you had nothing to do with it — that grammar is the coffle’s bystander formation still doing its work in me, four generations later.

The Ledger

In 1859, a planter named Clinch sat down with pen and paper and assigned a monetary value to every enslaved person he held. Katy: negative one hundred dollars. Old Betty: negative fifty dollars. Phillip: negative fifty dollars.¹⁷

Not worthless. Worse than worthless. Persons whose existence registered as net financial loss, calculated according to the best accounting practices of the day. Rosenthal has shown that enslavers were pioneers of what we now call scientific management — developing depreciation schedules, productivity tracking, and human-capital valuation techniques that northern industries would later adopt for equipment and inventory.¹⁸

To shipping merchants, Schermerhorn writes, slavery smelled not of perspiration and humiliation but of ink and paper.¹⁹ The ink displaced the sweat. The paper replaced the skin. The body disappeared behind the document.

An eight-year-old boy named Jacques was mortgaged three times in four years. Not beaten, in this particular record — leveraged. His future pledged before he could understand what a mortgage was. Enslavers, Martin writes, “worked their slaves financially as well as physically.”²⁰

When a planter recorded the birth of a child — listing weight, sex, estimated future value — the ledger was performing a baptism in reverse. In baptism, a community receives a child, names them beloved, and promises to form them in the true story — that being is gift, that they belong before they produce. The ledger performs the counter-liturgy with equal precision: it receives a child, names them property, and begins the formation in the false story — that being is commodity, that they belong only insofar as they produce.

This is the profane sacrament I find most difficult to name in myself. The Whipping Machine is visceral — I recoil, and the recoil feels like moral seriousness. The Auction Block’s entanglement of love and exploitation is tragic in ways I can narrate. But the Ledger — the capacity to convert persons into data points, to manage human suffering through categories and metrics, to smell the ink and not the perspiration — that formation lives in every spreadsheet I’ve ever used to evaluate a program’s “impact,” every institutional calculation that translates persons into numbers. The Ledger is the profane sacrament of the professional-managerial class. I am its creature.

The Age of Capital (1860–1920): The Instruments of Exclusion

The most pernicious feature of the profane sacraments is that they create their own aftermarket. Each Age’s violence produces the inequalities that the next Age exploits — and the exploitation requires no explicit racism, only the opportunity that prior racism manufactured.²¹

The cotton-to-gold pipeline didn’t stop flowing when the auction blocks went dark. The Anglo-American banking houses — the Rothschilds, the Barings, the Browns — had built their financial instruments through the commodity trade that enslavement produced. When that trade ended, they pivoted to railroads, gold, government bonds. The firms changed clients. They didn’t change grammar.²² And the nation that had generated its profane sacraments through commerce would now generate them through spectacle, law, and exclusion — all at once, targeting multiple populations simultaneously.

The Equal Justice Initiative has documented 4,084 racial terror lynchings in twelve Southern states between 1877 and 1950. These were not spontaneous outbursts. They were announced in advance through newspapers and radio. Crowds of up to 20,000 attended.

In Livermore, Kentucky, in 1911, a man named Will Potter was taken to the local opera house. Admission was charged by seating section — orchestra seats entitled the holder to empty their gun into the victim; gallery seats limited you to a single shot.²³ The theatrical staging made the liturgical structure undeniable. This was not punishment. It was worship — a profane Eucharist where the sacrificial body was consumed by a congregation that knew its roles and paid for its seats.

And the liturgy had its own form of anamnesis — “do this in remembrance.” Postcards. Photographs of lynched bodies, printed and mailed through the United States Postal Service, with handwritten domestic notes on the back. “This is the barbecue we had last night.”

The same administrative infrastructure that once moved human property along coastwise shipping routes now distributed the memory of their destruction. Bits of clothing and body parts were kept as relics. The postcard said: remember what we are capable of. Remember what happens to those who breach the walls.²⁴

Consider what happened in Bartow, Florida, in the summer of 1901. A young Black man named Fred Rochelle was accused of a crime. The town’s leading citizens — not a nameless mob, but men with positions and property — chained him to a tree, stacked bone-dry wood around the base, poured gasoline on the pile, and set it ablaze. Eight minutes later he was dead. The newspaper reported that by midnight, “the town was as peaceful as ever.”²⁵

A five-year-old boy named Ossian Sweet may have watched from the bushes near the bridge. Whether he saw the burning itself or only the aftermath, the event seared itself into his nervous system so deeply that decades later he would recount it with terrifying specificity — the smell of kerosene, the screams, the crowd picking through charred remains for souvenirs. The image of the conflagration, the heart-pounding fear of it, wrote itself into his body the way the weighing ritual wrote itself into Adeline Hodges’s. His parents, unable to keep him safe in a town where such things could happen on a Tuesday and be “peaceful” by midnight, eventually sent him north. He was thirteen.²⁶

The profane sacrament performing its formation on two populations simultaneously. On the Black community: families shuttering windows, barring doors, learning that no amount of respectability could protect them — the practice writing terror into their nervous systems as a permanent condition of American life. On the white community: the leading citizens who did the killing, went home, and slept soundly. The bystanders who watched and learned, as the coffle’s witnesses had learned, the art of knowing and not-knowing. But the lynching taught something the coffle hadn’t: not just dissociation but righteousness. The experience of another person’s destruction as defense of sacred order. As something God required.

I have to sit with what this means. A community that gathers to watch a man be tortured and burned, that brings children, that takes photographs, that sends postcards, that reports the town “peaceful” by midnight — that community is being formed at the deepest level of the nervous system. The practice is writing something into their bodies: the experience of another person’s destruction as festive, communal, liturgical. That is formation so deep it reorganizes what the body registers as normal. Meanwhile, a five-year-old boy is hiding in the dark with the smell of kerosene in his nostrils, and his body is learning a different lesson: nowhere is safe.

That’s the evidence. Here’s the theology.

James Cone spent his life insisting that the cross and the lynching tree interpret each other. His thesis is a single devastating sentence: “Every time a white mob lynched a black person, they lynched Jesus. The lynching tree is the cross in America.”²⁷ Cone saw spectacle — “public spectacle,” “ritual,” crowds performing a social drama. I see sacrament. Once you make that move — once you read the opera house and the postcards and the tiered admission through a liturgical lens — the profane Eucharist becomes impossible to unsee. But I need to be honest about the register shift. The liturgical reading is mine, not Cone’s. He gave the evidence and the theology. I’m extending both into sacramental grammar.

Cone grew up in Bearden, Arkansas, in a lynching state, watching for his father’s headlights every night.²⁸ I grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in a cotton state, watching from the other side of the walls. We were formed by the same grammar — from opposite positions within it.

My father’s theological hero, Reinhold Niebuhr, possessed what Cone generously called a “profound theological imagination.” He never connected it to the lynching tree. What Cone diagnosed was a theology that offered reconciliation without demanding liberation, resurrection without confronting the cross — my compression of Cone’s argument, but the substance is his. The white church’s most serious theologian built an entire ethical framework without once reckoning with the ritual murder happening in his own country, in his own lifetime, blessed by congregations that sang the same hymns he sang.²⁹

The lynchers went to church on Sunday. They worshipped the Jew crucified in Jerusalem. Cone saw the irony — and the irony is the formation. The Sunday worship that should have formed participants against Saturday’s violence instead coexisted with it, leaving the conscience undisturbed. That coexistence isn’t failure. It’s the trained dissociation I described in the Coffle, operating now at the level of an entire theological tradition. The perspective it produced was, in Cone’s word, “fraudulent” — not merely mistaken but actively constructed through the suppression of what the tradition’s own symbols demanded.³⁰

The theological tradition that couldn’t see the lynching tree produced the divinity school I attended, the ethics I inherited, and the reflexes I couldn’t name until a man named Salin asked the right question.

That silence is itself a formation — and the church’s hands were not merely passive. In 1937, Moody Bible Institute in Chicago executed a restrictive racial covenant on its property. Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary did the same. So did the Board of Foreign Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church.³¹ The irony circuit ran through the church’s formational institutions themselves: the same tradition that worshipped the crucified Christ was signing legal instruments to exclude his darker-skinned image-bearers from their neighborhoods. The trained dissociation wasn’t just a failure of theology. It was an institutional practice.

How lonely sits the city that was full of people. The words are Jeremiah’s, but they could be written over any American town where the church signed the covenant on Monday and broke the bread on Sunday. Blessed are those who mourn — but first you have to see what there is to mourn, and the whole architecture of trained dissociation was designed to prevent exactly that.

The church wasn’t merely a passive recipient of malformation from the surrounding culture. In the lynching, the church was co-producer — providing the sacred canopy under which the destruction of Black bodies could be experienced as divine order maintained, signing the covenants that wrote exclusion into property law, training generation after generation in the art of worshipping a crucified God without recognizing crucifixion when it happened in their own town squares. That is the profane sacrament at its most devastating: when the institution that should have recognized the counter-liturgy for what it was instead consecrated it.

⁂

But the grammar was never only Black and white.

In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred fifty-five percent of Mexico to the United States. Approximately 100,000 Mexican citizens woke up in a different country. The border had crossed them. A man named Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo — a wealthy California landowner, one of the most prominent Mexican citizens in the territory — watched as his property was systematically stripped through legal mechanisms the treaty had promised would protect him. Article VIII guaranteed citizenship. Article X protected land grants. The Senate struck Article X before ratification. The supersessionist standard in its treaty form: promise incorporation, make it formally universal, then ensure the targeted group fails by removing the protections that would have made the promise real. White on paper. Brown in practice.³²

And the grammar didn’t need an Anglo-Protestant inventor. It was older than English and wider than Protestantism.

The grammar ran deeper than Anglo-Protestant invention. Spain had built its own Ledger centuries earlier. The casta system classified human beings through an elaborate taxonomy of racial mixture — Mestizo, Castizo, Mulatto, Morisco — each category determining social position, legal standing, economic possibility. Casta paintings hung in churches and government buildings, displaying the hierarchy as visual liturgy.

The English-speaking settlers who arrived after 1848 didn’t invent racial classification in the territory they seized. They imposed their own Ledger on top of one that was already operating — different vocabulary, same grammar of sorting human beings into those who matter and those who don’t.³³

By the 1910s and 1920s, the convergence was complete. Peak lynching, KKK expansion into every major American city, and the simultaneous militarization of the southern border — all expressing the same grammar through different targets.

At the Santa Fe Bridge crossing between Juárez and El Paso, Mexican laborers were forced to strip naked, their hair cropped, their bodies sprayed with kerosene, vinegar, and Zyklon B — the same chemical compound that would later fill the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

The purity test was hygienic fitness. The universal framing was public health. The targeted failure was guaranteed: Mexican bodies classified as pathogenic vectors whose very presence contaminated American soil. Madison Grant and Harry Laughlin testified before Congress with eugenic charts proving which races were fit for citizenship. Congressman Claude Hudspeth argued that no barrier was too high. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 codified the whole grammar into federal law.³⁴

And in the same decades, while lynching terrorized Black communities and border militarization targeted Mexican laborers, Congress maintained the Chinese Exclusion Act — a uniquely targeted system of statutory exclusion lasting sixty years, generating entirely new governmental apparatuses to control American borders.

The arguments were explicit: the Chinese were “irredeemably uncultured,” “naturally pagan,” “innately crooked.” The purity test — civilizational fitness for citizenship — was designed to be failed. Not because Chinese immigrants lacked civilization but because the test was ontological rather than civic: the Chinese were classified as constitutionally incapable of meeting the standard, the way limpieza de sangre had once classified Jewish converts as constitutionally incapable of real conversion.³⁵

The Reconstruction-era Congress had actually debated dismantling the racial grammar entirely. Charles Sumner proposed a Civil Rights Proviso that would have removed race from the law. Lincoln’s own party defeated it. The distinction was stated plainly: the Negro was native-born and had a right to be here; the Chinese did not. When the Gong Lum case reached the Supreme Court in 1927, the justices unanimously ruled that the principle of racial separation extended to “the yellow races.”³⁶

American race politics, Tran argues, constructs race through a white/Black binary that governs all it identifies. Because race is presumed to work for those classified as white and Black, it is presumed to work for everyone else too. If you didn’t fit the categories, you were routed through them.³⁷

My brother-in-law Salin grew up in eastern Tennessee in the 1970s — one of the first Indian children in the region. He’s described the playground calculus to me: no one who looked like him, friends who didn’t know what category to put him in, the daily negotiation of which side of the binary to occupy. “You have the skin color of one and the hair texture of another,” people would say.

His father — a priest and professor who had crossed an ocean on a cargo ship — was coached by host families to dress in ways that would prevent him from being “mistaken” for Black. One summer in Michigan, darkened by the sun and needing a haircut, he walked into a barbershop and was told they were busy. No one was inside. The camp director who picked him up explained: they thought you were Black.³⁸

That’s the binary processing in practice — not as political theory but as a child on a playground trying to figure out where he belongs, a scholar-priest refused a haircut because the sun made the wrong category visible.

My wife grew up in the same household, navigating the same calculus. When I imagine her as a girl — bright, brown-skinned, fierce — trying to locate herself in a world that could only see Black and white, my heart breaks in a way that no amount of Tran’s analysis can reach. The profane sacrament’s formation isn’t only what it does to the excluded. It’s what it does to every child who doesn’t fit the categories and has to perform the sorting on their own body, every day, on the playground.

This is what Tran means when he says race was always “so much political economic theater and its real-world consequences.” The categories were labor-management tools dressed in civilizational language. How you use a person tells you what kind of person they are, and the kind of person they are justifies your use of them.³⁹ The feedback loop powered every profane sacrament I’ve described — and it operated across every target simultaneously.

But here I need to name what exclusion did to the excluders. Because the profane sacrament’s recursive logic — the pattern that every instrument forms both sides of the encounter — demands it.

A nation that defines itself by who it keeps out is being formed by that practice as surely as the people it excludes. The body politic that draws the line learns to experience its own identity as dependent on the line’s existence. Belonging becomes a function of exclusion. Identity becomes a practice of refusal. And the community that has learned to know itself by who it rejects will need to keep rejecting — because without the excluded, the excluders don’t know who they are.

Lynching, border militarization, Chinese Exclusion, the Johnson-Reed Act — different populations, different instruments, same grammar. The profane sacraments of legal exclusion taught the American body politic that belonging is racial, that race is visible, and that the nation’s identity depends on controlling who gets in. And in the teaching, the body politic was formed into a community that cannot stop sorting — because the sorting is how it knows itself.

In the first two ages, the instruments were visible. You could see the whip, the auction block, the chains, the noose, the exclusion notice posted at the port of entry. The violence was performed in public because the formation required witnesses.

And through it all, the ledger kept its quiet counter-liturgy going — that baptism in reverse, naming each person not as beloved but as commodity, as category, as problem to be managed. The instrument changed with each age. The grammar persisted: you are what you produce, and what you produce determines whether you belong.

What happens when the instruments become the neighborhood itself — the redlined map, the highway route, the zip code, the credential? When the formation no longer needs an audience because it’s been built into the architecture of ordinary life?

All five contrapuncti:

• Contrapunctus V: Diagnostics

Notes

1. Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), ch. 4. Tran writes: “Domination and exploitation, when theologically cast, denote the privatio of the divine gift.” See also Samuel Wells, Incarnational Ministry: Being with the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017).

2. Jonathan Levy, Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States (New York: Random House, 2021). Levy organizes American economic history into four ages: the Age of Commerce, the Age of Capital, the Age of Control, and the Age of Chaos.

3. Bonnie Martin, “Slavery’s Invisible Engine: Mortgaging Human Property,” Journal of Southern History 76, no. 4 (2010): 817–866. Martin documents the Duplantier mortgage in the Attakapas region of Louisiana, showing how the financial instruments of enslavement entangled love and exploitation in the same legal apparatus.

4. Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017). Berry traces how the enslaved were valued, insured, and commodified from birth to beyond death — including the insurance claim on Bob’s life that continued compounding for three years after his suicide.

5. Berry, Price for Their Pound of Flesh. The Davis case illustrates how the legal apparatus of enslavement created perverse financial incentives: the state’s compensation for executed “property” could exceed market value.

6. Tran, Asian Americans, ch. 2. Tran’s core analytical engine: “how I use a thing tells me what kind of thing it is, and the kind of thing it is justifies my use of it.” The circularity is the point — the practice produces the category that justifies the practice.

7. Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014). Baptist draws on the WPA Federal Writers’ Project slave narratives for Adeline Hodges’s testimony. Hodges, interviewed in 1930s Alabama in her eighties, could not watch grocery clerks weigh food — because seventy years earlier the nightly weighing ritual of the cotton field had inscribed itself on her nervous system.

8. Baptist, “Toward a Political Economy of Slave Labor: Hands, Whipping-Machines, and Modern Power,” in Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 31–61. The weighing ritual — steelyard balance, chalk slate, proportional punishment — was the daily liturgy of the cotton frontier.

9. Baptist, Half, ch. “Backs.” The “whipping-machine” names the systematized apparatus of daily quotas enforced through calibrated torture. Between 1800 and 1860, cotton-picking productivity increased by roughly 400 percent — not through mechanical innovation but through the ratcheting extraction of enslaved people’s adaptive creativity.

10. Baptist, Half. The formation of the overseer, the planter, and the bystander is my extension of Baptist’s evidence into the sacramental framework developed in this series.

11. Baptist, Half, ch. “Backs.” Baptist describes Patsey’s “sleight of hands” and borrows the concept of “left-handed power” from theologian Robert Farrar Capon — the enslaved person’s own creativity weaponized against them through the ratcheting quota system.

12. Daniel Rood, “Plantation Technopolitics: A Steampunk History of Biopolitics and Biotechnology in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana and Virginia,” in Beckert and Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism, 107–129. Rood traces the “implied lash” on Virginia wheat plantations. See also Stephen W. Porges, The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation (New York: Norton, 2011), for the neuroscience of how ambient threat — neuroception — shapes the nervous system without requiring explicit violence.

13. Calvin Schermerhorn, “Slave Trading in a Republic of Credit,” in Beckert and Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism, 208–215. The coffle moved roughly a million people by force between 1790 and 1860.

14. Schermerhorn, “Slave Trading,” 210. The Lapwing birth record.

15. Schermerhorn, “Slave Trading,” 211–212. The Unicorn manifest listing Thomas, Jane, and Anne alongside consumer goods.

16. Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, “Introduction,” in Slavery’s Capitalism, 7–8. The coastwise shipping infrastructure served commerce, mail delivery, and passenger travel simultaneously.

17. Caitlin Rosenthal, “Slavery’s Scientific Management,” in Beckert and Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism, 62–86. Rosenthal documents the Clinch slave list, including the negative valuations assigned to aging enslaved people.

18. Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). Enslavers pioneered depreciation schedules, productivity tracking, and human-capital valuation techniques later adopted by northern industry.

19. Schermerhorn, “Slave Trading,” 208. “To shipping merchants, slavery smelled not of perspiration and humiliation but of ink and paper.”

20. Martin, “Slavery’s Invisible Engine.” Martin documents the case of eight-year-old Jacques, mortgaged three times in four years: enslavers “worked their slaves financially as well as physically.”

21. Tran, Asian Americans, ch. 3. Tran’s concept of the “aftermarket” — each Age’s violence produces the inequalities that the next Age exploits, requiring no explicit racism, only the opportunity that prior racism manufactured.

22. Kathryn Boodry, “August Belmont and the World the Slaves Made,” in Beckert and Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism, 163–178. Boodry traces the genealogical bridge from the cotton-to-gold pipeline to the postbellum financial infrastructure.

23. Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, 3rd ed. (Montgomery, AL: Equal Justice Initiative, 2017). The EJI documents 4,084 racial terror lynchings in twelve Southern states between 1877 and 1950. The Will Potter case in Livermore, Kentucky (1911) — with tiered admission to an opera house execution — is documented in the report.

24. James Allen et al., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 2000). Postcards of lynched bodies were printed and mailed through the United States Postal Service with handwritten domestic notes.

25. Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (New York: Henry Holt, 2004). Boyle documents the 1901 Bartow, Florida lynching of Fred Rochelle and the newspaper’s report that the town was “peaceful” by midnight.

26. Boyle, Arc of Justice. Ossian Sweet would later become the defendant in the landmark 1925 Detroit trial defended by Clarence Darrow. The lynching seared itself into his memory with sensory specificity decades later — the profane sacrament’s formation still operating in his nervous system.

27. James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), xiv and throughout. The liturgical reading of lynching as profane Eucharist is my extension of Cone’s evidence and theology into sacramental grammar.

28. Cone, Cross and the Lynching Tree, ch. 1. Cone grew up in Bearden, Arkansas, watching for his father’s headlights every night.

29. Cone, Cross and the Lynching Tree, ch. 2. Cone’s account of Niebuhr’s “profound theological imagination” and his failure to connect it to the lynching tree. My compression: a theology offering reconciliation without liberation, resurrection without confronting the cross.

30. Cone, Cross and the Lynching Tree, ch. 2. Cone describes the perspective produced by this trained dissociation as “fraudulent” — not merely mistaken but actively constructed through the suppression of what the tradition’s own symbols demanded.

31. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017), ch. 3. Rothstein documents restrictive racial covenants executed by Moody Bible Institute, Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the Board of Foreign Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

32. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and its aftermath. Article VIII guaranteed citizenship to former Mexican nationals; Article X, which protected land grants, was struck by the Senate before ratification. Vallejo’s dispossession is documented in histories of Mexican American land loss in California.

33. The casta system classified human beings through an elaborate taxonomy of racial mixture — Mestizo, Castizo, Mulatto, Morisco — each category determining social position and legal standing. Casta paintings displayed the hierarchy as visual liturgy in churches and government buildings.

34. At the Santa Fe Bridge crossing between Juárez and El Paso, Mexican laborers were forced to strip, their bodies sprayed with kerosene, vinegar, and Zyklon B. See David Dorado Romo, Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juárez, 1893–1923 (El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 2005). Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (1916), and Harry Laughlin’s congressional testimony provided the eugenic framework codified in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924.

35. Tran, Asian Americans, ch. 1. The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) was a uniquely targeted system of statutory exclusion lasting sixty years. Tran traces the racialization of the Chinese as “irredeemably uncultured,” “naturally pagan,” “innately crooked” — an ontological rather than civic classification.

36. Tran, Asian Americans, ch. 1. Charles Sumner’s Civil Rights Proviso, defeated by Lincoln’s own party. Gong Lum v. Rice (1927): the Supreme Court unanimously extended racial separation to “the yellow races.”

37. Tran, Asian Americans, ch. 2. American race politics constructs race through a white/Black binary that governs all it identifies. Those who don’t fit the categories are routed through them.

38. Craig Geevarghese-Uffman and Salin Geevarghese, “01: Finding Hope In The Face of Racism with Salin Geevarghese,” Common Life Politics podcast, originally broadcast 2021, republished September 21, 2024.

39. Tran, Asian Americans, ch. 2. “So much political economic theater and its real-world consequences.” The feedback loop — how you use a person tells you what kind of person they are, and the kind of person they are justifies your use of them — powered every profane sacrament across every target simultaneously.

On February 5, 2026, approximately 3,500 Christians gathered for the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. The President spoke for seventy-five minutes. He catalogued his grievances, named his enemies, celebrated his victories, and made it clear that anyone who stood in his way would be dealt with.

When he finished, the room rose to its feet.

Three thousand five hundred people who claim to follow Jesus — who presumably know the Sermon on the Mount, who have heard the commandment to love their enemies, who worship a God who emptied himself to the point of death on a cross — stood and applauded a speech that violated nearly every principle their faith teaches about power, humility, and the treatment of the vulnerable.¹

I watched the footage and felt my body do something before my mind caught up. My chest tightened. My jaw set. I wanted to judge those 3,500 people. I wanted to stand at a distance and name what they’d become.

I wanted to say: I would never.

And that impulse — that confident immunity — is exactly the formation this essay is about.

⁂

Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, once told a reporter who asked about turning the other cheek: “You know, you only have two cheeks.”²

Robert Jeffress, a Dallas megachurch pastor, declared: “I want the meanest, toughest SOB I can find to protect this nation.”³

Tony Perkins and I aren’t from the same place. But we were both formed by the same Baton Rouge. He told a reporter you only have two cheeks. I went to Duke to learn why that sentence is a theological catastrophe.

But here’s what I’m only now reckoning with: the confidence that I’m different from the people who stood — the certainty that I would never have applauded that speech — is itself a formation. It’s the trophy case I’ve been building for decades.

Annapolis, ordination, doctoral work in theology — surely all of that inoculates against the grammar I’m about to trace.

It doesn’t. And the journey that taught me it doesn’t started with a question I wasn’t ready to hear.

⁂

But first — what is the formation that produced that standing ovation?

Not “what’s wrong with those people?” That’s the question my body wants to ask, and it’s the wrong question. The right question is: what profane sacraments — what practices of common life, repeated across centuries — formed the people who showed up at that Prayer Breakfast already formed? And what happened to the church’s own practices that might have formed them differently?

A profane sacrament is a practice of common life that performs the formational work a sacrament performs — shaping bodies, training desires, forming people into particular kinds of community. Some are means of grace. The ones this essay traces are not.⁴

It’s prophecy, not prosecution. I know the other column of the ledger — the abolitionists, the martyrs, the faithful who resisted. I’m not telling that story here, not because it isn’t real but because it’s never been the story we struggle to hear.

The Hebrew canon holds Chronicles and the Prophets in tension, and the friction between them is where Israel discovers its vocation. I’m writing from the prophetic column. The critique only makes sense if the covenant is real. Prophets aren’t sent to strangers.

I’ve been trying to understand where the body-knowledge comes from — not the ideas, I can trace those, but the formation. The thing my muscles knew before my mind had a word for it.

Movement I: The Vacuum Opens

Essay 9 traced how the Reformation evacuated the practices. Essay 10 traced the crises that breached the dikes. What I haven’t yet reckoned with is what happens when this mutated faith crosses an ocean.⁵

I grew up assuming that whatever went wrong with the church in America went wrong in America. Slavery corrupted it. The frontier coarsened it. Revivalism cheapened it. The problems were local, and the solutions would be local — better theology, more faithful practice, recovered tradition.

I was wrong about the timeline by about three centuries.

The faith that crossed the Atlantic was already missing its immune system. The practices that had held Stoic self-sufficiency and Gnostic body-denial at bay — the thick liturgical life, the catechetical formation, the communal disciplines of prayer and fasting and mutual accountability — had been thinning for generations.

What I want to trace here is how that vulnerability became an identity.

⁂

The theologian Willie James Jennings helped me see something I’d been missing. In The Christian Imagination, he traces what he calls “displacements” — not errors in doctrine but something deeper, a mutation in the theological imagination itself that colonial encounter activated.⁶

It started on August 8, 1444, at the port of Lagos, Portugal, when the first large cargo of enslaved Africans was offloaded for public distribution. The chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara watched the scene — families separated, bodies sorted, people weeping — and recorded that Prince Henry sat on horseback, observing, calculating his royal fifth.

Zurara wept at what he saw. But his tears didn’t stop him from writing a narrative that justified it. In Zurara’s account, the seizure became salvation: these Africans were being delivered from heathen darkness into the light of the gospel. The enslaver became God’s providential agent.⁷

What Jennings wants us to see is not just the moral horror — that’s obvious — but the theological mutation happening in real time. The pope had already issued bulls authorizing Portugal to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever” and to “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”⁸

For this to make sense, several things had to happen simultaneously in the theological imagination.

First, the church had to displace Israel. The Jesus movement had always carried a supersessionist temptation — the idea that the church replaced Israel rather than being grafted into Israel’s story. In the colonial encounter, this became operational. The covenant with Abraham was reinterpreted in ways that emptied it of Jewish content while retaining the form. The Way became a “universal” religion with no particular roots, available to be poured into any container the colonial project required.⁹

Then place itself was displaced. In Israel’s story, land is gift — covenanted, received, held in trust. In the colonial imagination, land became commodity — discovered, claimed, extracted. The manna grammar of gift was replaced by the Pharaoh grammar of possession.¹⁰

Then the body. In incarnational theology, every body bears the divine image. Under colonial formation, some bodies became labor units — valued for what they could produce, not for whose image they bore.¹¹

Then communion. I need to dwell here for a moment, because this is where it gets personal.

I’m an Episcopal priest. I stand behind a table at worship and break bread and say the words: The Body of Christ, the bread of heaven. I say them to every person who comes forward — every body, without sorting, without ranking. That table is supposed to be where the grammar of gift is most fully performed. Where hierarchy dissolves in shared receiving. Where every body is equally constituted by what it receives rather than what it produces.

Colonial encounter turned it into a Pharaoh table — segregated, sorted, the bread itself made to perform scarcity. In churches across the colonial world, enslaved people received communion separately, or last, or not at all. The table that was supposed to form every body equally became an instrument for ranking bodies. Perversely, the segregated table wasn’t experienced as a violation. It was experienced as order. The profane sacrament felt like a real one.¹²

And finally, formation itself. Manna formation — the slow reshaping of persons through practices of receiving, sharing, and trust — had been the church’s immune system. Colonial encounter replaced it with Pharaoh formation: practices designed to extract rather than transform, mining souls for heaven while mining bodies for labor.¹³

I grew up inside that replacement and didn’t know it. My father’s faith — earnest, sincere, built on personal discipline and moral effort — was a formation designed to produce a self that could stand alone. It never occurred to me that standing alone was the disease, not the cure.

⁂

What Jennings made me see — and this is what I’d been missing — is that these weren’t five separate problems. They were a single mutation.

Identity shifted from being received through place, community, and covenant to being achieved through productivity and usefulness.

When you sever identity from covenant, it has to come from somewhere. And what fills the vacuum is performance. You are what you produce. You belong if you’re useful. You matter if you can demonstrate your worth.¹⁴

⁂

J. Kameron Carter showed me where this leads. In Race: A Theological Account, Carter traces how the vacuum Jennings describes got filled — not by accident but by intellectual design.

When the church reinterpreted covenant in ways that emptied it of Jewish content, it needed a replacement doctrine of creation. It needed some other way to sort human beings into those who matter and those who don’t.¹⁵

Dominative identity was that replacement. Not phenotype — Carter is precise about this — but what he calls an “anthropo-genesis,” a way of constructing the human. When Christ was abstracted from Jesus’s Jewish body and turned into a universal principle — a name for an idea rather than a person you follow — the particular flesh that had anchored the church’s identity was lost.

And into that space stepped a new sorting mechanism: the racial imagination.¹⁶

Immanuel Kant gave this its philosophical architecture. Kant explicitly called for the “euthanasia of Judaism” — not physical destruction but something more insidious: the claim that mature religion naturally outgrows its Jewish particularity the way adulthood outgrows childhood.

The developmental framing is the key, because it makes the supersession seem reasonable rather than violent — just growing up, just getting past the primitive stage. Rational autonomy replaces received tradition. The universal supersedes the particular.

And Kant mapped this developmental scheme onto race: humanity progresses from darker to lighter, from particular to universal, from embedded to autonomous.¹⁷

Here’s what troubles me about this — and I mean troubles in my chest, not just in my head. When we treat the Hebrew Scriptures as merely preparatory, when we prize rational autonomy over embodied communal practice, when we assume the church “superseded” Judaism — we are performing Kant’s program without knowing his name.

I certainly was. My father’s faith — Reinhold Niebuhr as hero, God as what Hauerwas calls “ultimate vagueness,” faith as ethical aspiration rather than embodied participation — was Kant’s euthanasia dressed in Methodist vestments.¹⁸

⁂

John Locke provided the economic grammar. His “improvement” doctrine — the idea that land belongs to those who “improve” it, and that “improvement” means what Europeans do — is the supersessionist standard in its property form.

Just as limpieza de sangre created a purity test that Jews always failed, Locke created an improvement test that indigenous peoples always failed. Same exclusion logic. Same expropriation result.

And the same theological root: the claim that some humans can supersede others’ belonging — that the covenant between a people and their land can be voided by those who declare themselves more advanced.¹⁹

Paul Tillich would later make the connection explicit. Reflecting on two and a half centuries of Protestant theology, Tillich acknowledged he was “in agreement with Stoic philosophy” — that the soul of the wise man is “similar to God,” and that the divine Logos conquers fate through rational self-mastery.²⁰

⁂

And while the philosophers were rationalizing the vacuum, the merchants were filling it.

Scholars of the Atlantic slave trade have named something I’m still reckoning with. For a Yoruba man or an Igbo woman to become enslaved required more than violent extraction from their natal community. It required what Marcus Rediker calls “technologies of race-making.”

The enslaver’s ship was not merely a means of conveyance — it was a machine that transformed Wolof Muslims, Biafran farmers, and Akan soldiers into “Negroes.” The account book completed what the ship began, rendering persons into units of exchange through practices of quantification and abstraction.²¹

Before the word “factory” meant a site of industrial production, it referred to the enslavement depots on the West African coast. The account book was already making races before anyone had a theory of race.²²

⁂

When communal identity collapses into interiority, the person must generate their own worth — and bear their own shame — entirely alone.

That is the vacuum this essay is about. Not an absence of belief — the colonizers believed fervently — but an absence of the practices that had once held faith accountable to incarnation. The theological dikes had been breached. The philosophical fuel was mixed. And each age of American capitalism would generate its own profane sacraments to fill the void.

There’s something I won’t be able to show you fully until we reach the Age of Chaos, but I want to plant the seed now. The theological vacuum Jennings and Carter diagnose didn’t open once in the colonial period and stay open. It reopened.

Wendy Brown has shown that neoliberal rationality — the conversion of every domain of human life into market terms — produces its own form of nihilism: not the dramatic nihilism of Nietzsche but the quiet nihilism of a world in which nothing has value except exchange value.²³

When I trace the profane sacraments through four centuries, I’ll be tracing how that vacuum was filled and refilled — and how each refilling produced the conditions for the next emptying.

The faith that arrived in the Americas was already mutated. The formation it encountered was already extractive. And the nihilism our age is experiencing is not new. It’s the original vacuum, reopened by the very forces the profane sacraments set in motion.

My chest is still tight. I notice it now — the same tightness I felt watching the Prayer Breakfast footage, the same set in my jaw. The body doesn’t distinguish between the shame of watching 3,500 people stand and the shame of recognizing the vacuum in my own formation. It’s all one signal: something is missing that was supposed to be here.

Carter tells us what filled the vacuum: dominative identity. Locke and Kant tell us how it was rationalized. But I haven’t yet shown you how it was performed.

That’s what the next contrapunctus is about. Not the theology or the philosophy — the instruments. The specific practices, repeated across generations, that wrote the grammar into bodies. The whipping machine. The auction block. The coffle. The ledger. The lynch mob. The exclusion act.

All Five Essay 11 Contrapuncti:

Notes

1. Peter Wehner, “The Evangelicals Who See Trump’s Viciousness as a Virtue,” The Atlantic, February 6, 2026. Wehner reports on the National Prayer Breakfast of February 5, 2026, at which approximately 3,500 attendees gave President Trump a standing ovation after a seventy-five-minute speech.

2. Tony Perkins, quoted in Peter Wehner, “The Evangelicals Who See Trump’s Viciousness as a Virtue,” The Atlantic, February 6, 2026.

3. Robert Jeffress, quoted in Peter Wehner, “The Evangelicals Who See Trump’s Viciousness as a Virtue,” The Atlantic, February 6, 2026.

4. The distinction between sacred and profane draws on Charles Taylor’s analysis in A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). “Profane sacrament” designates a practice that operates in the domain of common life while performing the identity-forming work that sacraments perform in sacred space.

5. See Essay 9, “Pharaoh in Greek Dress,” and Essay 10, “The Perfect Storm,” in this series.

6. Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). See especially chapters 1–3.

7. Jennings, Christian Imagination, 15–24. Zurara’s chronicle is Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Crónica dos feitos notáveis que se passaram na conquista da Guiné por mandado do Infante D. Henrique (c. 1453).

8. Jennings, Christian Imagination, 18–20. The bulls include Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455), both issued by Pope Nicholas V.

9. Jennings, Christian Imagination, 32–40.

10. Jennings, Christian Imagination, 42–58.

11. Jennings, Christian Imagination, 58–68.

12. Jennings, Christian Imagination, 68–78. The personal reflection on priestly experience at the Eucharist is the author’s. Jennings traces the colonial segregation of communion practices.

13. Jennings, Christian Imagination, 78–92.

14. This synthesis draws on Jennings’ five displacements and their cumulative effect. The shift from received identity (through covenant, place, community) to achieved identity (through productivity, usefulness, performance) is the theological engine of the vacuum.

15. J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). See especially chapter 2, “Kant’s Racial Theology.”

16. Carter, Race, 79–95.

17. Carter, Race, 80–82. Kant’s phrase “euthanasia of Judaism” appears in The Conflict of the Faculties (1798).

18. See Essay 7, “The Gift of Pride,” in this series.

19. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689), chapter V, “Of Property.” See also Jennings, Christian Imagination, 210–220, and James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

20. Carter, Race, 45–48. Tillich’s acknowledgment appears in Systematic Theology, vol. 2.

21. Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), Introduction, 7–8.

22. Beckert and Rockman, Slavery’s Capitalism, Introduction, 7.

23. Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), ch. 5, 161–188.

For the past several months, this series has generally arrived in your inbox every two weeks — one essay, one argument, one sitting. That’s been the covenant. You gave me your attention; I tried not to abuse it.

I’m about to break the pattern, and I want to tell you why.

Essay 11 is the foundational essay in Jazz, Shame, and Being With. Everything I’ve written so far has been building toward it, and everything that follows will lean on it. It traces the profane sacraments — the practices of common life that inscribed dominative identity into American bodies across four centuries — and then turns the diagnostic on me.

It’s long enough that your email will cut it off before the argument lands.

I could publish it as a single post. You’d receive it in your email, read the first third before Gmail cut you off, and maybe — maybe — click through to finish it on the web. That’s not how this argument should be encountered.

I’ve been studying Bach lately. Specifically, I’ve been listening to The Art of Fugue — his last great work, in which a single musical subject is explored through fourteen contrapuncti. A contrapunctus is a self-contained fugue: complete in itself, but participating in a larger exploration. Punctus contra punctum— point against point. Each one sets a new voice against what came before.

That’s what Essay 11 wants to be.

The argument has five voices. A theological voice — Jennings and Carter tracing the mutations that made dominative identity possible. A historical voice — Beckert, Cone, and the profane sacraments of each economic age. An economic voice — Levy, Slobodian, Brown, and the nihilism that reopened the vacuum. A confessional voice — my own formation in Baton Rouge, Annapolis, Duke, and Durham. And a diagnostic voice — the body questions I’m only now learning to ask.

These voices need to enter one at a time. Publishing them all at once would be like hearing all five voices of a fugue simultaneously. That’s not counterpoint. That’s noise.

So here’s what’s coming.

Over the next two weeks, I’ll publish Essay 11 as five contrapuncti — one every three days. Each is a single sitting — varying in length from medium to long essays, not a short book. Each stands on its own. But the argument is cumulative: each voice depends on the ones before it, and the full texture only emerges when all five are sounding.

My hope is to give each voice room to breathe. Here’s the schedule:

Contrapunctus I: The Vacuum — How the faith that crossed the Atlantic arrived already missing its immune system.

Contrapunctus II: The Instruments of Flesh and Exclusion — The profane sacraments of the Age of Commerce and the Age of Capital.

Contrapunctus III: The Instruments of Order and Chaos — How the grammar went underground — and how neoliberalism reopened the vacuum.

Contrapunctus IV: The Grammar and the Trophy Case — Where I find the grammar in my own formation.

Contrapunctus V: Diagnostics — What does your body do?

If you’d rather read the whole thing at once, I understand. I’ll link the complete set when all five are published. But I’d invite you to try it the other way — to sit with each voice before the next one enters. That’s how counterpoint works. The meaning isn’t in any single line. It’s in the space between them.

The argument demanded the form.

Craig

I’ve been developing a concept across this series that I’ve called dominative identity—the self that requires a threatening “them” to know who “we” are. The “we” is constituted by what it excludes.

I recognize this pattern because I’ve felt its pull myself. The security that comes from knowing who’s “in” and who’s “out.” The comfort of clear boundaries. The relief when anxiety about my own belonging gets transformed into certainty about who doesn’t belong.

Then I read a post by biblical scholar Dan Hawk, and I watched the apparatus operate in real time.1

Hawk exposed how certain Christian voices draw a direct line from the biblical Ishmael—Abraham’s son through Hagar—to modern Arabs and Palestinians. They treat this manufactured “genealogy” as if it establishes permanent, divinely-ordained enmity. Historic Adversaries we’re meant to exclude or subdue.

The problem? There’s no credible historical or biblical warrant for the connection. The descendants of Ishmael listed in Genesis no longer exist as identifiable peoples. So where does the Ishmael-to-Arab genealogy come from? The Hadiths—Islamic tradition. The same Christians who reject Islamic authority on everything else have imported this particular claim because it serves their purposes.

The theological function is what interests me. This manufactured genealogy creates a category of person who can never belong, whose origin permanently disqualifies them, whose removal fulfills the restoration of what was “ours.”

The criterion sounds biblical—who wouldn’t want to be on God’s side?—but it’s designed so Palestinians always fail. Their displacement isn’t tragedy; it’s prophecy fulfilled.

The grammar doesn’t require theology to operate.

Watch what happens when the same structure gets secularized. The current regime doesn’t need convictions about Ishmael. It needs objects for resentment—populations whose very existence can be framed as threat.

The vocabulary shifts. “Ishmaelite” becomes “failed state import.” “Historic Adversary” becomes “imported society.” “Outside the covenant” becomes “unable to assimilate.” But the grammar is identical.

Stephen Miller’s language is instructive. When he speaks of immigrants from “failed states,” he’s not making a policy argument. He’s making an ontological claim: these people carry the failure in themselves. The failure is genealogical. It travels in the blood.

I’ve been a student in this curriculum too. The messages didn’t come labeled as ideology. They came as common sense, as prudence, as “just being realistic” about who belongs and who doesn’t. The training is ambient. You breathe it before you can name it.

You don’t have to look to Gaza to see this grammar working. It’s operating in American zip codes right now.

Minneapolis. Operation Metro Surge moves through the Somali neighborhoods of the Twin Cities. Ahmed, who has run a grocery store in Cedar-Riverside for twelve years, is no longer a neighbor. He’s an “imported society” from a “failed state”—as if the political failures of a country attach permanently to the bodies of people who fled it.

Springfield. As I write this, the February 3rd deadline for Temporary Protected Status termination is hours away. Marie, who has worked as a nursing assistant in Ohio for six years, is being severed from her legal standing. This isn’t a policy dispute. It’s ritual enactment: she must be removed so that “Heritage America” can reclaim its inheritance.

Dearborn. During the 2024 campaign, the Arab Muslim community was courted as “moral allies.” That alliance was a bait-and-switch. The neighbors in Dearborn discovered what the conversos of fifteenth-century Spain already knew: you can be brought inside, but can you ever really be trusted? The answer, by design, is always no.

Three theaters. One grammar. The criterion for belonging keeps shifting, but the structure remains.

This is fascist, not merely nativist: the targeted populations are instrumental. They’re not the ultimate enemy; they’re the training material.

The regime doesn’t primarily hate Somalis or Haitians or Palestinians. It hates the political order that says these people have rights. Every “failed state import” is a proxy for the politics that would welcome them. Dehumanizing the immigrant delegitimizes the worldview that would protect them.

The performative brutality—the raids, the buses, the children separated—isn’t inefficiency. It’s pedagogy. The regime is forming its base to see neighbors as threats.

Dominative Christianism provides the theological cover: these are “Ishmaelites,” historic adversaries, obstacles to prophetic fulfillment. Secular nationalism provides the political cover: these are “failed state” entities, unassimilable, threats to “our way of life.” Different vocabularies. Same grammar. Both serve the deeper purpose: training citizens to accept that some people simply don’t count.

Jesus of Nazareth consistently broke through ethnic boundaries. He treated Samaritans, Syrophoenicians, and Roman centurions as neighbors to be loved, not historic adversaries to be expelled. He told a story in which the Samaritan—the religious Other—was the one who showed mercy.

Dominative Christianism doesn’t drift away from this example. It requires actively refusing to follow it.

And here’s the irony: the same theology that uses “biblical” genealogy to exclude Palestinians has quietly severed Jesus from his own Jewish story. A Christ severed from Israel isn’t the Messiah—because “Messiah” means Israel’s anointed king. Sever the covenant, and you’re left with a generic savior who can be filled with whatever content your culture provides. The generic savior is infinitely flexible precisely because he’s infinitely empty. He demands nothing because he is nothing in particular.

They don’t need Jesus of Nazareth. They need a mascot. Mascots don’t talk back. Mascots don’t have opinions about the border. And mascots are never, ever Jewish in any way that matters—or a refugee in Egypt, for that matter.

The apparatus I’ve been tracing across this series—dominative identity and its enforcement mechanisms—isn’t historical curiosity. It’s loading buses in Ohio. It’s checking papers in Minneapolis. It’s retracting the “we” in Michigan the moment the votes are counted.

And it’s forming Christians to accept all of it as faithful obedience.

Ahmed is a neighbor. Marie is a neighbor. The family in Dearborn who thought they’d been welcomed—they’re neighbors. Not archetypes, not “failed state” entities, not obstacles to prophetic fulfillment. Actual human beings with the same status before God as anyone else.

That’s the simplest claim I can make. And apparently it’s radical enough to constitute heresy—because they’re practicing a different religion entirely, one that has borrowed Christian vocabulary while serving a god who requires enemies to exist.

Maybe that’s always been the tell.

ENDNOTES

How odd to hear the president suggest this week that our stock market is endorsing his tactics. When I check my Schwab portfolio, I notice that international markets outperformed ours by nearly double in 2025 when adjusted for the falling dollar. We’re falling behind quickly.

I’ve been thinking about what global markets are actually pricing in. It’s not inflation. It’s not interest rate differentials. It’s trust.

The dollar’s status as global reserve currency has always rested on something simple: other nations believed American institutions would behave with fidelity and integrity. Those words live in my body differently than they might in yours. At Annapolis, they were stamped on the belt buckle we wore with full dress blues. Plebes knew the answer when an upperclassman barked “What’s up?”: Fidelity, sir! Four years of formation drilled it in—not as abstraction but as muscle memory, as identity.

So I feel something particular when I watch that fidelity and integrity collapse. Tariffs announced, reversed, escalated by tweet. Treaty commitments treated as suggestions. Bondholders informed their contracts may be abrogated. The rule of law—domestically and internationally—subordinated to loyalty tests. Allies treated not as partners but as vassals without choice.

And now the abandonment is explicit. Stephen Miller told CNN last month: “We live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

I need to be honest: I know the seductions of force. I served on nuclear submarines. I’ve felt the thrill of wielding systems designed to end civilizations. There’s something intoxicating about power that doesn’t need to justify itself. So when I hear Miller’s words, I recognize them—not as alien ideology but as a temptation I’ve tasted.

And that’s what frightens me. It’s the anti-ideology of the raised fist. What strikes me is what’s missing from his statement. No appeal to democracy. To law. To mutual obligation. To the liberal order that made American hegemony possible. Just force as its own justification. I keep wondering: what happens to a nation when its leaders explicitly reject the idea that anything should constrain power?

The markets don’t care about ideology—or its abandonment. They’re running a cold audit: Can we still trust that American institutions will function with fidelity and integrity? And they’re reaching a verdict.

This is what it costs to replace fidelity and integrity with force. The satisfactions of dominance feel good in the moment—I know this in my bones. The tariff threats, the loyalty purges, the rule-breaking as performance. But the global system that made American power possible was built on something more boring: fidelity and integrity. And once squandered, they don’t come back on command.

Our retirement isn't abstract—it's the 2 a.m. number, the one I check when I can't sleep. Did the decades of discipline matter? Can we help our kids? Will there be enough? And what I see now isn't collapse—it's erosion. The rest of the world pulling ahead while our savings falls behind. Decades of betting on American fidelity, and we are losing ground to everyone who no longer trusts us. The president posts about winning. Winning what, exactly?

I don’t know where the bottom is. But I know what’s being gambled with—and it isn’t his money.

Dear friends,

This is an essay about grief before it is an essay about resistance.

It’s written for those of us who love people we can no longer reach—people who speak in slogans where a person used to be, who defend what we recognize as cruel, who seem held by something that isn’t fully them anymore. If you’ve felt the pull toward contempt or withdrawal, I know that pull too.

What follows is not an attempt to win arguments or explain everything away. It’s an attempt to understand what has happened to the people we love, what is happening to us in response, and how to do justice without becoming what we oppose.

I. GRIEF

My friend James Howell published a Substack reflection today on Micah 6:8, unpacking the Hebrew with the precision it deserves.1 Darash—God doesn’t demand like a teacher requiring homework but yearns like a lover for response. Mishpat—justice isn’t fairness but care for those with no clout. Hesed—not niceness but covenant loyalty, rooted in Israel’s memory of being refugees themselves.

The prophetic word is clear. The Lord has shown us what is good.

But James’s post left me with a question he didn’t answer—couldn’t answer, perhaps, because it’s the question I have to live rather than resolve: How do I do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly when someone I love thinks the masked agents are heroes? When people I’m called to love are actively supporting what I recognize as sin?

I don’t mean strangers on the internet. I mean people whose faces I know in sleep.

I know what it feels like to sit across the table from someone I love—a parent, a sibling, a friend—and hear slogans where a person used to be.

On Saturday morning, Alex Pretti—a 37-year-old ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital—was shot and killed by Border Patrol agents. Multiple verified videos show him holding a phone, not a weapon, as he tried to protect a woman who had been shoved to the ground. An agent removed Pretti’s legally holstered gun from his waist. Less than a second later, another agent opened fire. Ten shots in five seconds. Most were fired after Pretti was already motionless on the ground.

Within hours, administration officials labeled him a “domestic terrorist” who intended to “massacre” federal agents—claims so thoroughly contradicted by video evidence that even DHS officials now admit the messaging has caused “catastrophic” damage to agency credibility.2

His parents pleaded: “Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man.”

I mention this to someone I love, and I hear: “Well, he shouldn’t have been there.” I describe the videos—the phone in his hand, the gun removed before the shooting—and I hear: “You can’t trust what the media shows you.” I name the administration’s lies, and I hear: “They’re just doing their jobs.”

Bonhoeffer described this exact experience: “In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him.”3

That’s it. That’s what I feel. Something else is speaking through people I love.

I need to confess: I am ashamed.

Not that they voted for him initially. I can make room for that. People make mistakes. Information was incomplete. Hopes were misplaced. I understand initial error.

What I cannot comprehend is the persistence. After Alex Pretti was killed while the administration lied about what happened. After Renee Good was shot in her car three weeks earlier—also called a “domestic terrorist” before evidence showed otherwise.4 After masked agents pulled people from churches in El Paso. After the Venezuela extraction that even oil companies didn’t want, justified by reasons that kept shifting—drugs, then oil, then “running the country,” then oil again—because no reason was ever the real reason.5 After court orders defied. After all this evidence of what this regime is and does—they still defend it. Still call masked agents heroes. Still bend over backwards to name cruelty as strength. Still cling with what can only be called religious zeal.

The initial vote I can forgive. The clinging after evidence—that’s what breaks the heart.

And here’s what my shame wants: to discharge. The two available exits are contempt and withdrawal. Both promise relief. I have been tempted by both. Neither has brought me anywhere I want to live.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew something about this. At Christmas 1942, ten years into Nazi rule, he composed a circular letter to his fellow conspirators—his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, General Hans Oster, his friend Eberhard Bethge. These were men who had watched their nation become something unrecognizable. Men who loved Germany while Germany destroyed itself. Men who were plotting to assassinate Hitler—not writing from prison, not yet, but from the center of active resistance.6

Bonhoeffer named a danger I recognize: “The danger of allowing ourselves to be driven to contempt for humanity is very real—such contempt would lead to the most unfruitful relation to human beings, causing us to fall victim precisely to our opponents’ chief errors.”7

Precisely to our opponents’ chief errors.

It took me too long to notice: the Leader holds his followers in contempt. The lies are contempt performed. Every lie says: I don’t respect you enough to tell you the truth. I know you’ll swallow whatever I feed you.

Consider what happened with Alex Pretti. The administration called him a terrorist, a would-be assassin, someone intending to “massacre” agents—while videos clearly showed a man with a phone trying to protect a woman. They didn’t bother making the lie plausible. Why would they? Plausible lies are for people you respect.

The people we love didn’t start out this way. They were shaped into it—or they allowed it to happen, which Bonhoeffer says amounts to the same thing. The power of the Leader needed something from them, and the lies were the liturgy that created the bond.

This reframes the grief entirely. We’re not just mourning that someone we love supports evil. We’re mourning that they’ve been captured by someone who despises them. The Leader looks at our loved ones the way a con man looks at marks: with the affection a rancher has for cattle. And they, enchanted, declare the one who despises them a hero.

If we respond with our own contempt—if we let our shame discharge into attack or withdrawal—we complete the Leader’s work. We join him in despising the people we love.

He despises them. We will not.

II. DIAGNOSIS

Bonhoeffer’s letter “On Stupidity” is one of the most misused texts of our moment—circulating on social media as permission to call your enemies stupid. That’s not what he wrote. He wrote something far more unsettling.

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice,” he begins. Evil can be exposed, protested, resisted. Evil “always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease.” But against stupidity we are defenseless: “Reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed... and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential.”8

Here is Bonhoeffer’s first crucial insight: what he calls stupidity is not an intellectual deficiency but a moral condition. “There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid.” The people we love and cannot reach are not unintelligent. The German Dummheit names not a failure of reasoning but a failure of perception—a moral obtuseness, an inability to see what is plainly visible.9

This is why argument fails. You cannot reason someone out of a condition that isn’t fundamentally about reason.

Bonhoeffer’s second insight cuts deeper: this condition is sociological, not psychological. It is produced, not innate.

“Every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.”

The Leader requires followers who cannot think independently, and the exercise of power produces such followers. The people we grieve did not arrive at their positions through deliberation. They surrendered deliberation. They gave up the work of establishing their own stance and let the power wash over them.

The result, Bonhoeffer says, is someone “under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.”

If you’ve sat across the table from someone you love and felt that you were no longer talking to them—that something else was speaking through them—Bonhoeffer is naming your experience. And he calls it “diabolical.” I think he means it literally.

Sacraments of Stupidity

Let me name what the Leader is doing with theological precision.

The lies are not mistakes or exaggerations. They are sacraments of stupidity—liturgical acts that form the hearers into what the lies assume they already are.

A sacrament, rightly understood, is an outward sign that effects what it signifies. The bread and wine become, for us, the body and blood—not merely representing Christ’s presence but mediating it. The sacrament does something. It forms us.

The Leader’s lies are anti-sacraments: outward signs of inward contempt that effect what they signify. Where the Eucharist says, “This is my body, given for you,” the lie says, “This is my contempt, and you will swallow it.” And in the swallowing, the hearer is formed. Bound to the one who despises them.

This is why the lies are shameless, obvious, and constant. Their brazenness is the point. A plausible lie might be believed for reasons; a shameless lie can only be swallowed through submission. Each lie accepted is an act of capitulation. The lies are not trying to convince. They are trying to form. They are the liturgy of a counter-church, and those who consume them are being catechized.

Rogers Brubaker gives this dynamic its sociological precision.10 Populist discourse operates in a two-dimensional space—simultaneously vertical (us vs. elite) and horizontal (inside vs. outside). The Leader doesn’t just provide enemies; he provides a coordinate system. “The people” invokes three registers at once: the disrespected ordinary folk (recognition), the sovereign citizens whose power was stolen (restoration), and the threatened community (protection).11

When your loved one swallows the obvious lie, they’re not failing an intelligence test. They’re locating themselves in a space where you—with your arguments, your evidence, your appeal to reason—have been positioned as simultaneously “on top” (condescending) and “outside” (not really one of us).

And the shamelessness of the lies? That’s not a bug. Brubaker describes populism’s “low” style—raw, crude, warm, unrestrained—as the deliberate rejection of elite norms of polite discourse.12 The Leader relishes violating the rules that mark you as educated, cultured, one of them. Every shameless lie is a performance of belonging to us. And when the follower swallows it despite knowing better—because it’s outrageous—they perform their own counter-belonging. They demonstrate that they value solidarity over the epistemological niceties that the condescending elite prizes.

But why would anyone submit to this? Why would the people we love surrender their inner independence to someone who holds them in contempt?

Because many of them carry shame—some personal, some the felt humiliation of being looked down upon by coastal elites, educated progressives, the people who seem to run everything and sneer at people like them. This shame is real. Cultural contempt has been directed at certain populations for decades, and they have felt it, absorbed it, been wounded by it.

Donald Nathanson mapped the options decades ago.13 When shame becomes unbearable, we can withdraw, avoid, attack ourselves, or attack others. The Leader’s genius—and it is genius; we gain nothing by pretending otherwise—is to channel the shame of millions into coordinated attack-other. The protectionist rhetoric doesn’t just identify threats—economic, cultural, securitarian.14 It legitimizes the rage that shame-saturated nervous systems already crave to discharge. Your enemies are real. The threat is existential. Your rage isn’t dysfunction—it’s patriotism.

The Leader offers relief. Not healing—relief. The rallies give permission to discharge shame outward rather than bear it inward. The lies are permission structures for rage. The brazenness baptizes the shame discharge.

The people we love are medicating wounds with poison. The dealer despises his customers. This is not incidental to the business model.

Understanding this changes our posture. We are not facing villains. We are facing captives.

But here Charles Mathewes offers a crucial warning: we must not try too hard to understand.15 The problem with our approach to evil, Mathewes argues, is not that we fail to comprehend it but that we presume we should—that we treat evil as a smooth thread in our moral fabric rather than what it actually is: “a tear, a black hole.”

This is why arguing with captured loved ones fails. We keep trying to comprehend their position—to understand it well enough to refute it. But this very attempt to comprehend is the error. Their position is not comprehensible because it participates in evil’s essential unworldliness.

Mathewes proposes instead what he calls “practices of incomprehension”—active refusal to integrate evil seamlessly into our moral understanding. This is not ignorance but discipline.

And this is liberating: You don’t have to understand how your loved one could defend agents who killed Alex Pretti and the leaders who lied about it. In fact, you shouldn’t. The exhausting work of trying to comprehend can be set down. Not because you’re giving up on them, but because comprehension was never the right approach.

I have practiced this, badly and incompletely. Sitting at a table where someone I love repeated the administration’s lies about Minneapolis, I felt the old urge rise—to marshal evidence, to construct the airtight refutation, to make them see. This time I didn’t. I said, “I see that differently,” and then I asked about his grandchildren. Something in me felt like surrender. It wasn’t. It was the recognition that argument had become my way of not being present—a performance of rightness that guaranteed I would never actually be with him. We talked about his grandkids’ schools and soccer seasons for twenty minutes. I don’t know if it mattered to him. It mattered to me.

Mathewes names a double movement that structures our grief:

First, making the alien familiar: My loved one’s capture participates in a story I know—the false story where we’re the protagonists, where communion is optional equipment, where autonomy is achievement rather than exile.16 I am susceptible to that story too. We have not been tested the way they have been tested. If we had walked their paths, worn their skin, carried their shame—would we have resisted? This prevents the contempt that comes from treating them as fundamentally other.

Second, making the familiar alien: The person speaking in slogans is genuinely foreign to authentic human existence. What we encounter when engaging our captured loved one is genuinely not them—it is displacement from reality. The person we knew is absent in some real sense. Grief is appropriate.

Now I can name what has not worked—in my own attempts and perhaps in yours.

Argument has not worked. Bonhoeffer told me this would happen: “Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”17 You cannot reach someone who has surrendered the capacity for independent judgment.

Withdrawal has not worked either—what Bonhoeffer calls “withdrawn contempt.”18 Good people “withdraw in disgust from people and leave them to themselves, who would rather tend to their own gardens than debase themselves in public life.” But withdrawal is contempt wearing the mask of self-care.

And idealization has not worked. We tell ourselves we love them for who they could be. Bonhoeffer saw through this: “a sincerely intended love for humanity that amounts to the same thing as contempt for humanity. It rests on evaluating human beings according to their dormant values.”19 Loving who someone could be while despising who they actually are is still contempt.

All three responses fail the incarnational test. All three are ways of not showing up.

Bonhoeffer offers one more hard truth: “Only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity... genuine inner liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it.”20 Our arguments cannot free our loved ones because the power structure that holds them has not yet been broken. The work right now is not convincing them. The work is resisting the power that captured them—and maintaining relationship until liberation comes.

He despises them. We will not.

III. THE WAY

So what remains? If argument is useless, withdrawal is contempt, idealization is fantasy, and comprehension is the wrong mode entirely—what is left?

Howell’s Micah returns, but now the question has changed. How do we do justice when someone we love is enchanted and nothing we say will break the spell? How do we love kindness when kindness feels like capitulation? How do we walk humbly when we’re certain—certain—that we see what they cannot?

The humility is the hardest part. Bonhoeffer insists: “Nothing of what we despise in another is itself foreign to us.” The capacity for capture is human. Which means it is ours.

Bonhoeffer pairs “On Stupidity” with a companion letter: “Contempt for Humanity?” The question mark matters. He is asking whether contempt is the appropriate response—and answering no.

“The only fruitful relation to human beings—particularly to the weak among them—is love, that is, the will to enter into and to keep community with them. God did not hold human beings in contempt but became human for their sake.”

Here is the christological ground that transforms everything.

The incarnation is not a strategy God employed to fix a problem. It reveals what was always true. God’s face doesn’t turn away—not because we needed God not to turn away (though we did), but because turning away has never been God’s nature. The mutual gaze that constitutes Trinity doesn’t break when met with human refusal.

Christ on the cross—bearing full exposure, experiencing complete disconnection from humanity’s side—shows that God remains with us even in the most separating, alienating, annihilating circumstances. Not conquering death, not defeating sin, not reversing anything—but being-with us through it all. As Sam Wells puts it, the incarnation reveals that God’s primary posture is not working for us or even working with us, but simply being with us—presence that does not require outcomes to be meaningful.21

This means that when we refuse contempt for those we love, we are not simply being nice. We are participating in the divine life. We are being conformed to Christ. To refuse contempt is to align with what is most real.

And we can only do this because it has first been done to us. We can only stay present because we’ve been given presence. We can only refuse contempt because we’ve been shown what love looks like on a cross. This is not achievement; it is gift received and passed on.

But why does contempt fail not just ethically but actually? Here is where the metaphysics matters. Hart reminds us that God is not a being among beings but Being itself—the inexhaustible source in which all creatures participate.22 Persons are not reducible to what they do or fail to do; they are constituted by their participation in this source. The captured loved one who parrots the Leader’s slogans remains a creature whose being flows from the God who is Being itself. To treat them with contempt—to reduce them to their capture—is to commit the same ontological error the Leader commits. He sees them as marks. We must not see them as villains.

The Leader’s contempt is not merely cruel; it is nihilistic—a reduction of persons to their use-value, which is to say, to nothing. Our refusal of contempt participates in the divine affirmation that creatures are—that being is good, that persons are ends, that existence is gift. This is not ethics. This is ontology.

To embrace contempt—to complete the Leader’s work by joining his disdain—would be to align with the nihilism, to join the reduction. We are choosing which reality we will inhabit.

He despises them. We will not.

James Bernauer, reflecting on both Bonhoeffer and Hannah Arendt, names what sustains this posture: amor mundi—love of the world.23

This is not optimism. Bernauer is clear: we love the world “not because there is an ideological vision of its potential perfection, but because it is greater than the storms of evil which pass over it.”

The storms are real. Minneapolis is real. Alex Pretti is dead and the lies continue. The masked agents are real. We do not deny the evil. But the world—including our captured loved ones as part of that world—is greater than the storms passing over it.

This requires courage, not confidence. Loving the world that includes people who defend state violence is not naive. It is brave. It costs something. It might fail. But it is the posture that keeps us human when everything invites us to become mirrors of what we resist.

Bonhoeffer called this “this-worldliness”—Diesseitigkeit.24 We do not withdraw from captured loved ones into otherworldly consolation. We live “unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences.” The messy reality of relationship with them—their current captivity included—is where faith is learned. Not in escape but in presence.

But what does this look like practically? “Being with” sounds lovely in a theology seminar. What does it mean at a dinner table?

I have been learning, slowly and poorly, some postures for the long haul.

Presence without persuasion. Show up. Sit at the table. Do not arrive with arguments prepared. When they speak in slogans, do not engage the slogans. Ask about the garden. Hold the grandchildren. Remain in the room when everything in you wants to leave. And when they cross a line, say quietly: “I see that differently.” Then stop. Do not explain, justify, or defend. Register the witness and let it sit.

Solidarity with suffering. Bonhoeffer says we must learn to regard human beings “less in terms of what they do and neglect to do and more in terms of what they suffer.” The people we grieve are suffering—the shame that made them vulnerable to the lies is real, and it hurts them. We cannot heal that shame. But we can refuse to add to it. When my loved one starts in on the latest outrage, I sometimes see something flicker behind his eyes—something that looks like exhaustion. The rage is work. Even he is tired of it.

Patience measured in years. The spell may not break while we are alive to see it. This is the risk of incarnational presence—it does not guarantee results. God tried it and ended up on a cross. We are not responsible for outcomes. We are responsible for presence.

The Fifth Option

The incarnational alternative is costly. Bearing shame without discharging it—neither attacking those we love nor withdrawing from them—is cruciform work.

Nathanson mapped four options when shame becomes unbearable: attack others, attack ourselves, withdraw, or avoid.25 Every one of these is a way of not staying in the exposed place. Every one is movement away from the shame rather than through it.

The cross reveals a fifth option: exposure. Bearing the shame without discharging it. Standing in the place of vulnerability and refusing to move.

This is what the incarnation looks like when it meets our moment. Christ did not attack those who shamed him. He did not withdraw into divine invulnerability. He did not avoid the confrontation or turn the shame inward into self-destruction. He stayed. He bore the full weight of humanity’s rejection without converting it into counter-rejection.

The resurrection does not undo this exposure; it vindicates it. The one who bore shame without discharge is revealed as the one who was right all along. The exposure was not weakness but the shape of divine love meeting human refusal.

This is what I am asking of myself—and perhaps of you. Not to pretend we’re not ashamed. Not to attack those who make us ashamed. But to bear the shame with them, as Christ bore it with humanity. To stay in the exposed place. To let the grief be grief without converting it into contempt.

The Counter-Liturgy

What sustains this? Not willpower. Willpower runs out before Thanksgiving.

We are sustained by the community that practices the counter-liturgy. The Leader’s lies are sacraments of stupidity—outward signs of contempt that form hearers into consumers of disdain. The Eucharist is the counter-sacrament—an outward sign of self-giving love that forms us into a body capable of refusing contempt.

On Sunday, we receive bread and wine. The true sacrament. The sign that effects what it signifies: communion with God and with each other across every division. But notice what the Eucharist is doing against the Leader’s liturgy:

Where his lies say, “This is my contempt, and you will swallow it,” the Eucharist says, “This is my body, given for you.”

Where his sacraments form people into isolated consumers of rage, the Eucharist forms us into a body—members of one another, including the ones we grieve.

Where his liturgy requires enemies, the Eucharist makes present the One who prayed for his executioners.

The Eucharist doesn’t just form us in a different grammar. It makes present the One who refused contempt unto death. Every time we receive, we are rehearsing the refusal this letter calls for. We are being formed into people capable of bearing shame without discharge, of staying present when everything in us wants to flee, of loving those who have been captured by someone who despises them.

The person we’re grieving may be at the same table. This is not a problem to be solved; it is the shape of the practice. The Eucharist does not wait until we have sorted out who deserves to be there.

We are sustained by prayer—not as technique but as orientation. Pray for them by name. Not that they would agree with us, but that they would be free. That the spell would break. That their inner independence would be restored.

We are sustained by hope that is not optimism. We do not know that they will be liberated. But we know that the One who joined us in our captivity is also the One who breaks every chain. We know that resurrection follows crucifixion, even when the Saturday stretches longer than we can bear.

What does the Lord require? To do justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly with your God.

How do we do that when the people we love are enchanted?

We stay. We witness. We grieve. We practice incomprehension—refusing to make evil comprehensible while remaining present to those it has captured. We exercise amor mundi—loving the world that is greater than the storms passing over it. We refuse the contempt that would make us mirrors of what we resist. We bear the shame without discharging it. We receive the counter-sacrament that forms us in a different grammar. We wait for a liberation we cannot produce and may not see.

The Leader despises them. He lies to them because he holds them in contempt, and the lies make them what he always assumed they were.

We will not look at them that way. We will not complete the liturgy of disdain. We will not join the one who enchanted them in holding them beneath regard.

He despises them. We will not.

This is our resistance. This is our grief. This is our sacrament.

CODA

Alongside the main arc of this series, I’ve been writing a handful of short riffs—ad hoc pastoral reflections responding to particular moments in our common life. They’re not steps in the argument so much as pauses for presence: ways of staying human and regulated when events outrun our capacity to think them through all at once.

If you need them, they’re there:

• Riff: The Data We Create by Looking — on how systems of evidence can remain rigorously blind to the suffering they exclude, and why that blindness matters for everything that follows.

• Riff: Make the Coffee Slowly — a pastoral pause on regulation, kindness, and staying human when fury feels justified but corrosive.

• Riff: The Art of Fugue and the Art of Staying Human — on music, presence, and the practices that help us remain capable of faithful action amid moral overload.

None of these are prerequisites for the main essays. They’re simply companions—offered for moments when the work asks more than you have capacity to carry, or when the times themselves demand a different register.

The Series

This essay belongs to Jazz, Shame, and Being With—a twenty-essay arc tracing shame and pride from neurobiology through theology to political formation. If you’ve been reading along, you know where we’ve been. If you’re new, or if you’d like to see the architecture of where this is heading, the Reader’s Guide maps the full journey. Every essay is a real door. Start anywhere that calls to you.

If this work has helped you notice your own formation, subscribing is one way to stay with the conversation. Biweekly essays on incarnational alternatives to Dominative Christianism, drawing on embodied psychology, theology, and jazz. Presence, not opposition.

ENDNOTES

It shows how the grammar the early Church struggled to hold at bay slowly returned, preparing the ground for the faith many of us inherited.

My brother Keith was a Presbyterian pastor in Texas oil country. A few years ago, he preached on Jeremiah — the lack of a balm in Gilead — and wondered aloud why Christians weren’t in full lament over what was happening at the border. Families separated. Children in cages. Asylum seekers treated as pawns.

He described the behavior as cruel. That word hung in the air. Then he mentioned, almost in passing, that Jesus was not an American. And that Jesus was a Jew.

Growls rose from the pews. Literal growls. Two oilmen — husbands of prominent widows, men who’d made piles of money and carried themselves accordingly — shifted in their seats with visible fury.

After the service, one of them found Keith.

“That,” he said, “is the damnedest thing I have ever heard in a Church.”

Not the cruelty at the border. Not children separated from parents. Not the failure of lament. The damnedest thing was that Jesus was Jewish.

I’ve been sitting with that story for years now, turning it over, trying to understand what it reveals. Not about those oilmen — their willful ignorance is easy enough to comprehend. But about the form of the faith that formed them. The form of the faith that formed Keith. The form of the faith that formed me.

How does a faith centered on a Jewish rabbi from Galilee produce people who experience his Jewishness as blasphemy?

The answer isn’t ignorance. Those men might have known, in some technical sense, that Jesus was born in Judea, circumcised on the eighth day, bar mitzvahed, Torah-observant. They might have passed a Bible quiz on it. But as Hauerwas never tires of pointing out, Christians have become very good at knowing about Jesus without being formed by Jesus.1 We’ve turned a story we’re supposed to inhabit into a set of propositions we merely affirm. The facts get filed away; the life remains untouched.

But knowing a fact and letting it matter are different operations. Something in their formation had taught them to simultaneously suppress Jesus’s Jewishness as historical data and experience it as offensive when spoken aloud in church. The fact was stored in one compartment; their functional Jesus — the one who actually shaped their emotions, their politics, their sense of who belongs — lived in another.

Their reaction wasn’t just theological error. It was imaginative failure. They could not imagine themselves as guests in a Jewish story—as Gentiles grafted into Israel’s olive tree, joining a narrative that preceded them by millennia. They could only imagine that story as theirs: possessed, controlled, available for their purposes. The faith that should have taught them to receive had taught them to own. And owners do not tolerate being told that the house belongs to someone else.

That compartmentalization didn’t happen by accident. It was built, layer by layer, across centuries. And in this essay, I want to trace how the sea came back — how the dikes the Church Fathers had constructed to hold back the sea of Pharaoh’s grammar were breached, one crisis at a time, until the form of faith those oilmen inherited had more Pharaoh in it than manna.

This is the story of a perfect storm: plague and war, institutional collapse and technological revolution, political terror and theological mutation — all converging in ways that would reshape the faith for four centuries.

It’s also my story. Keith and I grew up in the same Louisiana household, shaped by a milieu of German Midlander, Borderlander, and Deep South planter culture, surrounded by the distinctive Catholicism of Louisiana’s New France settlers.2 We swam in the same waters. Our father’s theological hero was Reinhold Niebuhr — which meant we inherited, without knowing it, what Hauerwas calls “Stoicism restated in Christian terms.”3 We learned a form of the faith that could pass Bible quizzes while leaving our functional Jesus — the one who shaped our politics, our bodies, our sense of who belongs — untouched by Israel’s story.

Keith saw the supersessionist standard operating in his congregation and named it. I’m trying to understand how it got there — and how much of it I’m still carrying.

What the Fathers Built — And What Was Always Pressing

If you’ve been following this series, you know the baseline. In Essay 8, I traced two grammars — two logics of worth that have been competing since Egypt. (I use “grammar” as a heuristic—not claiming traditions were sealed containers with incommensurable logics, but pointing to the different consequences that follow when shared concepts get applied. Christians and Stoics both knew what “enemy” meant. The question is what followed from applying the concept.)

Pharaoh’s grammar runs on scarcity: never enough, store against future lack, worth through productivity, hierarchies of who matters. Build store-cities. Hoard. The strong survive.

Manna grammar runs on abundance: enough for today, trust for tomorrow, worth through receiving, everyone fed. Don’t hoard — it rots. Rest on the seventh day. You are beloved before you contribute.

Jesus embodied manna. Fed the multitudes with leftovers to spare. Healed on the Sabbath because people matter more than production. Ate with sinners because belonging precedes achievement. Died vulnerable rather than dominating. The entire arc of his life performed the logic: you are gift before you are useful.

Essay 9 traced something crucial: from the beginning, the Jesus Movement faced competing grammars that used similar vocabulary. Stoic philosophy offered the Sage — the fortress self who achieves worth through rational self-mastery. Gnostic religion offered special knowledge that sorted people into tiers of spiritual belonging. Both were available in the cultural water. Both could be dressed in the Movement’s vocabulary while carrying different freight.

The Church Fathers knew this. And they built dikes.

The creeds weren’t abstract theology. They were anti-Gnostic polemic encoded in liturgy. “Maker of heaven AND earth” — matter isn’t evil; the Creator God of Israel made it. “Born of the Virgin Mary” — Jesus has Jewish lineage; he didn’t parachute in from a spiritual realm. “Suffered under Pontius Pilate” — real flesh, real pain, real political history. “Resurrection of the body” — bodies aren’t escaped; they’re transformed.

The Eucharist was what I called a “liturgical fortress.” Every week, in every congregation, the question was forced: Is this bread Christ’s body? If yes, then matter carries grace — and Gnostic grammar becomes unlivable. You can’t believe bodies don’t matter while eating one.

And the virtue ethics tradition held that transformation actually happens — not through individual technique but through participated life in community. You become a saint by being carried in practices you didn’t design, shaped by rhythms of grace you can’t control.

These practices sustained what I called resignification. The early Movement borrowed Stoic and Gnostic vocabulary — logos, apatheia, gnosis — but attempted to transform it within a different grammar. The transformation was real. But it was never complete. The old meanings persisted, always pressing, always ready to flood back.

I used the image of land reclaimed from the sea. The Dutch built dikes and created farmland where water used to be. The land is real. But the sea never left. It’s always pressing against the walls. The dikes have to be maintained, or the surf comes back.

The practices were the dikes. The creeds, the Eucharist, the slow formation in community — these held the resignification in place. Where the practices were strong, the new meanings held. Where practices weakened, the old meanings reasserted themselves.

The fathers built dikes against Gnosticism while building Christendom—and Christendom would become its own kind of flood. The liturgical fortress that held Gnostic grammar at bay became, over centuries, an institutional fortress that could issue Discovery Bulls. The same practices that formed saints also formed inquisitors. This is the tragedy of Christian formation: you cannot guarantee the harvest.

Three patterns in particular kept pressing against the dikes:

Covenantal severance:4 The Gnostic move to abstract Christ from his Jewish, covenantal particularity. Once you sever Jesus from Israel’s story—from that mother, that village, that Torah-observant life—you create a vacuum. And whatever hierarchy your culture provides will rush to fill it.

The Gnostics filled it with spiritual castes. Later centuries filled it with race. Our century fills it with whoever can claim the most authentic belonging—by ancestry, by identity, by whatever sorting mechanism the culture provides. “Heritage American,” “real British,” progressive hierarchies that invert the winners while preserving the grammar. Different containers, same dissolved Christ.

I’ve watched myself reach for these hierarchies. They feel like solid ground when participation feels like falling. But here’s what the reaching reveals: I’m asking ancestry or identity to do what only baptism can do. I’m asking cultural sorting to provide what only dying and rising with Christ provides—a belonging that doesn’t need to exclude to feel real.

The supersessionist standard: A purity test designed to be failed. Create a criterion that sounds universal — who wouldn’t want purity? who wouldn’t want loyalty? — but that ensures the targeted group always fails. The conversos in Spain could never be pure enough. The Jews in Keith’s oilmen’s imagination could never be American enough. And somehow, impossibly, Jesus himself fails the test his own followers invented.

Dominative identity: The self that requires a threatening "them" to know who "we" are. Old Christians existed as a category only through the continuous exclusion of New Christians. The pattern migrates freely: "Heritage American," "real British," progressive hierarchies that name the oppressor class. Left and right, nativist and identitarian—the content inverts, the exclusion remains. The "we" is always constituted by what it excludes. I've felt the pull from multiple directions. The grammar is easier to recognize when it's not my team using it.5

These three are connected. Covenantal severance creates the vacuum. The supersessionist standard polices who fills it. Dominative identity is the result — a “we” that knows itself only through excluding “them.”

The dikes were practices—not beliefs, not ideas, but embodied rhythms that made resignification livable. Weekly Eucharist. Creedal confession. The hospital that treats the stranger as Christ in disguise. Where practices held, meanings held. Where practices weakened, the old grammar flooded back.

Now go back to Keith’s oilmen.

Those men growled when Keith said Jesus was a Jew. Not because they didn’t know — they could have passed the Bible quiz. But because their functional Jesus had been so thoroughly severed from Israel’s story that reconnecting him felt like contamination. The supersessionist standard was operating: real faith (in their grammar) is pure, American, untainted by Jewish particularity. Jesus’s Jewishness fails that test.

And their identity — their sense of who they are as “real Christians” — required that failure. If Jesus is Jewish, if the faith is a Jewish movement, if the story we’re in is Israel’s story continued, then the whole apparatus of “us” versus “them” collapses. They weren’t protecting doctrine. They were protecting a self that needs an excluded other to exist.

Covenantal severance isn’t just bad history. It’s bad soteriology. A Christ severed from Israel isn’t the Messiah—because “Messiah” means Israel’s anointed king. Sever the covenant, and you’re left with a generic savior figure who can be filled with whatever content your culture provides.

Hauerwas calls this the God of ultimate vagueness—and vague gods are useful gods. A Christ who isn’t Jewish can be American. A Christ unmoored from Torah can bless your market, your army, your immigration policy. The generic savior is infinitely flexible precisely because he’s infinitely empty. He demands nothing because he is nothing in particular. The oilmen didn’t need Jesus of Nazareth. They needed a mascot. Mascots don’t talk back. Mascots don’t have opinions about the border. And mascots are never, ever Jewish.

The patristic dikes had been built precisely against this. The creeds insisted on Jewish particularity. The Eucharist grounded faith in matter. The practices held covenantal severance at bay.

But the dikes were breached. Not all at once. Not in a single dramatic failure. Layer by layer, crisis by crisis, the sea came back.

This essay traces how.

Part 1: When a King Was Also a Vassal

The Impossible Position

Here’s an impossible position. See if you can solve it.

You’re the King of England. You answer to no one. Your word is law. Your sovereignty is absolute within your realm.

You’re also the Duke of Normandy — a French territory you inherited. As Duke, you’re a vassal of the French king. You owe him homage. When he summons you, you kneel.

Can you be both? Can a king kneel? Can absolute sovereignty coexist with feudal obligation?

When William the Conqueror took England in 1066, he was already Duke of Normandy. After the conquest, English kings kept acquiring French territory — through marriage, inheritance, conquest. At various points, the “English” king controlled more French land than the French king did.6 But every acquisition deepened the contradiction. More French territory meant more obligations to the French crown. More sovereignty in England meant less tolerance for kneeling in France.

For over two centuries, they managed the contradiction through careful ambiguity. Overlapping jurisdictions. Negotiated arrangements. The boundaries stayed fuzzy because everyone benefited from fuzziness.

Then the whole thing started to collapse. And when it did, it took the Church down with it.

The First Breach: When France Captured the Pope

In 1309, the impossible position found a new victim.

The papacy had been anchored in Rome for over a millennium, even when popes were periodically forced elsewhere. Rome was where Peter had been martyred, where the apostolic succession began. The pope was the Roman bishop. That was the whole point.

But Philip IV of France had grown powerful enough to bully the papacy. When he maneuvered a French archbishop onto the papal throne, the new pope never made it to Rome. He set up court in Avignon — a city in southern France, in old Roman Provence, conveniently close to French power.7

You’ve seen this move before. An institution is designed to be independent — to serve everyone, not just one ruler’s interests. But a powerful leader decides that independence is inconvenient. He wants the institution to serve him. Philip IV wanted the pope to bless French policy, fund French wars, excommunicate French enemies. Just as some modern leaders want central banks to cut rates when elections are near, regardless of what economic stability requires. Once you capture the institution, it loses the authority that made it useful in the first place. Nobody trusts it anymore.

For sixty-eight years, the pope lived in France, not Rome. The Avignon Papacy was widely perceived as placing the Church’s central institution under French shadow. The institution that claimed to mediate God’s grace to all Christendom was now operating out of one king’s backyard. The Vicar of Christ had become a franchise operation.

The tension was building. English kings had French territories. The French king had the pope. And the whole arrangement was about to explode.

The War That Bled Europe

By 1328, the old fuzziness could no longer contain the strain.

French king Charles IV died without a male heir. Edward III of England claimed the French throne through his mother. The French nobles said no — the crown couldn’t pass through a woman. They chose Philip VI instead.

Edward didn’t accept it. In 1337, he pressed his claim.8

What followed was 116 years of devastation. The Hundred Years’ War wasn’t one war but a series of campaigns, truces, and resumptions that bled France and England for over a century. Crécy. Poitiers. Agincourt. Names that meant piles of bodies, burned villages, ravaged countryside.

For 116 years, Christian kingdoms bled each other. England against France. Bishops blessing armies on both sides.9

What matters for our story: while the creeds were being recited and the Eucharist celebrated, while the dikes were supposedly holding, Christian Europe was demonstrating Pharaoh grammar at civilizational scale.

The Church Splits Along the War’s Fault Lines

In 1377, thirty-seven years into the war, Pope Gregory XI finally returned to Rome. He promptly died.

French cardinals panicked. They’d lose their influence if the pope stayed in Rome. So they elected a rival pope — one who went back to Avignon.

Now there were two popes. And the division was political:10

• Avignon obedience: France, Scotland, Castile, Aragon — France’s allies

• Roman obedience: England, Holy Roman Empire, parts of Italy — France’s enemies

The Church was literally divided by the war. You couldn’t be loyal to the “wrong” pope without being a traitor to your king.

Sound familiar? When independence gets reframed as disloyalty, the institution is already dead. It just doesn’t know it yet.

By 1409, there were three popes, each excommunicating the others — an art we’ve democratized.

This was the Western Schism. The institution that claimed to speak for God couldn’t agree on who spoke for God. The impossibility that started with kings kneeling had infected the entire system. Categories were supposed to be pure — but nothing was pure anymore. Everything was contaminated by political calculation.

What the War Revealed

While Christian kingdoms fought one another over who got to rule France and who got to speak for God, the Ottomans consolidated power in the Balkans — exploiting a Christendom too fractured to respond coherently.11

When the war finally ended in 1453, Europe had demonstrated something for 116 years straight: how Christian vocabulary operates when Pharaoh grammar is running underneath.

The vocabulary was Christian — crusade language, divine right, sacred monarchy, papal authority. The same liturgy that reconciled enemies to God blessed their efforts to kill each other. The creeds were recited. The Eucharist was celebrated.

But watch what the grammar actually produced: scarcity (there’s only one France, only one legitimate pope, and someone has to control it). Division (split the Church along political fault lines). Competition (the strong take what they can). Extraction (116 years of bleeding populations dry to fund royal ambitions).

That’s Pharaoh’s logic, scaled to civilizational scope. And Christendom had just spent over a century perfecting it.

The Lesson They Drew

The lesson that gradually hardened — whether named or not — was this: overlapping sovereignty doesn’t work. You can’t be both king and vassal. Categories must be pure. Boundaries must be clear. France is France. England is England. Pick a pope and stick with him.

They drew the obvious conclusion: boundaries must be clearer, categories purer, loyalty tests stricter. They drew every conclusion except the right one: that maybe bleeding Christendom dry for 116 years over who gets to rule France wasn’t how the people of a God who fed multitudes were supposed to operate.

Instead, they took the purity obsession and the boundary-policing that the war had normalized — the idea that ambiguity is dangerous, that categories must be clear, that you’re either with us or against us — and prepared to export it.

The same grammar. New applications.

Part 2: Manna Grammar Resurfaces — And Gets Burned

Into this chaos, some voices tried to remember manna.

While the war bled Europe and popes multiplied — while the institution demonstrated Pharaoh grammar at civilizational scale — a few asked dangerous questions. What if the Church’s corruption meant institutional membership no longer determined salvation? What if belonging flows from God’s commitment to be with us — a commitment no institution can mediate or revoke?

John Wycliffe, in fourteenth-century England, was asking these questions in the 1370s and 1380s — right in the middle of the chaos we just traced.12 The Avignon papacy was in full operation. The Western Schism was about to begin. And someone had to pay for the war.

Here’s what protected him: war economics.

Remember the Hundred Years’ War? Someone had to fund it. John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster — Edward III’s fourth son and commander of England’s war effort — needed money. War is expensive. The English clergy controlled one-third of England’s landed wealth and were exempt from most taxes.13 Gaunt needed that wealth.

Wycliffe was useful. He argued that:

• The Church had “fallen into sin” and should surrender its property

• Secular rulers could legally confiscate Church wealth

• Papal taxation of England was illegitimate

• The Avignon papacy was a French puppet — therefore England’s enemy

You see how this fits? The Church we watched split along the war’s fault lines in Part 1 — the institution that couldn’t agree on who spoke for God — was now being called corrupt by an English theologian who happened to give English kings the perfect excuse to seize Church property and cut off funds to their French enemies.

Gaunt accompanied Wycliffe to ecclesiastical trials with armed men. When papal bulls demanded Wycliffe’s arrest, the English government refused to comply. The Statutes of Provisors and Praemunire had already forbidden papal interference in English affairs.

Wycliffe survived because he was useful to the war. His ideas traveled to Bohemia, where Jan Hus read them and began to preach.14

Hus’s claim was simple and devastating: “Christ alone is the head of the Church.”15 You can be IN the visible church without being WITH Christ. The institution doesn’t constitute communion; God’s presence does — and no institution can revoke it.

This was intolerable to a Church operating by Pharaoh grammar. If the institution doesn’t determine belonging, the institution loses its power. If membership is received rather than achieved, the whole apparatus of exclusion collapses.

The threads from Part 1 converge in a single man.

When Christendom’s Fractures Collided

In 1396 — fifty-nine years into the war, eighteen years into the Schism, with three rival popes all claiming Peter’s chair — Sigismund of Hungary led the Crusade of Nicopolis.

Remember the Ottomans consolidating power in the Balkans while Christendom tore itself apart? This was the moment. A major European effort to relieve Constantinople from Ottoman siege and push the Turks back. The crusaders were slaughtered. Sigismund barely escaped by boat down the Danube.16

The lesson he learned: a divided Church with three rival popes could not organize effective resistance to Islam. To save Christendom from the Turks, the Schism must end. The external threat required internal unity.

Eighteen years later, in 1414, the same Sigismund convened the Council of Constance. His goal: reunify the Church so Christendom could face what really mattered — the Ottoman armies we watched advance unopposed in Part 1.

Sigismund had promised Jan Hus safe conduct—a promise worth precisely as much as every other promise an institution makes when the institution’s authority is at stake. Hus went voluntarily, expecting a theological debate where he could defend his views from Scripture. Instead, he was arrested within weeks, imprisoned in a Dominican dungeon, and presented with propositions extracted from his writings. He was asked to recant — not to debate.

In 1415, at the Council of Constance, they burned Hus.17

The council succeeded at reunification — but by eliminating internal dissent. The purity obsession we watched take root in Part 1, the boundary-policing that the war normalized, the loyalty test that said you couldn’t support the “wrong” pope without being a traitor — all of it converged on a single man who dared to say the institution doesn’t control access to God.

The institution determines who belongs. Those who question institutional authority are heretics. Heretics burn.

Same year, same Christendom: that war we’ve been tracing continued — English longbows slaughtered French knights at Agincourt. The external threat — Ottoman armies — went unaddressed. The internal dissenters — those who remembered manna — were eliminated.

Pharaoh protects his granaries. The institution’s monopoly on determining who belongs mattered more than Christendom’s survival.

The Pattern Repeats

Sixteen years later, the gatekeeping apparatus found another target.

Joan of Arc claimed God had directly commissioned her to crown the Dauphin Charles. This bypassed the political order (the Treaty of Troyes had given the succession to England) and the ecclesiastical order (the Church claimed sole authority to certify what God had said).

She was tried as a heretic by a French bishop allied with England — the same institutional-political alliance we watched form in Part 1. In 1431, she burned.18

The parallels to Hus are precise. Both claimed divine authorization that bypassed institutional mediation. Both were tried by Church courts under political pressure—the same fusion of religious and political authority we watched contaminate the Schism. Both were burned. Both received the same message from the institution: You cannot claim unmediated access to God. We control the switchboard. The God who showed up unmediated in a Bethlehem stable was apparently unavailable for comment.

When the Institution Loses

The Bohemian response to Hus’s burning was explosive.

Pope Martin V issued a bull authorizing the execution of all supporters of Hus and Wycliffe. Five consecutive papal crusades were launched against Bohemia between 1420 and 1431.

All five failed.19

Most Czech lands remained non-Catholic for over a century. When people believe they’re fighting for their own covenant with God — when they refuse the institution’s claim to mediate that covenant — they’re hard to stop.

The institution that couldn’t agree on who spoke for God, that split along war’s fault lines, that burned anyone who challenged its authority — that institution couldn’t enforce its monopoly when people stopped believing the monopoly was real.

Part 3: When Baptism Wasn’t Enough

The dikes were failing. The mutations were spreading. And the worst was yet to come.

While the institution was losing in Bohemia — while five consecutive crusades collapsed and Czech lands rejected papal authority — something darker was emerging on Europe’s periphery.

Spain, in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, was still finishing its Reconquista. The same decades that brought the Hundred Years’ War, the Western Schism, and the burning of Hus saw Spanish kingdoms completing the centuries-long campaign to push Muslim powers from the Iberian Peninsula. The Catholic Church that split along war’s fault lines, that couldn’t agree on who spoke for God, that burned anyone who challenged its authority — that institution was operating in Spain too. And there, on the margins of Christendom’s chaos, it was about to invent a new technology of exclusion.20

The institution that burned Hus and Joan had demonstrated something: it would eliminate anyone who challenged its authority to determine who belongs. Believe the wrong things, claim the wrong authority, and you burn.

But what if you believed the right things? What if you submitted to the institution completely — converted, were baptized, practiced the faith sincerely? Could you belong then?

In Spain, they were about to answer that question. And the answer would change everything.

The 1391 Massacres

In 1391 — two years after the Council of Pisa created a third pope, thirteen years before the Council of Constance would burn Hus — anti-Jewish violence swept through Castile and Aragon.

Mobs attacked Jewish communities in Seville, Córdoba, Toledo, Barcelona, Valencia, and dozens of other cities. Thousands were killed. Synagogues were burned or converted to churches.

In the wake of the massacres and the proselytizing fervor of the following decades, tens of thousands of Jews converted to Christianity. Some converted under threat of death. Some converted to avoid expulsion. Some converted through social pressure. Some converted voluntarily, seeking advancement in a Christian society. These converts — conversos — and their descendants would number perhaps 200,000-300,000 by the mid-fifteenth century.21

Many conversos rose to prominence — in commerce, in the Church, in royal administration, even in nobility through intermarriage. By the Church’s own theology, they were Christians. Many were sincere. Their baptisms were valid. Their faith was genuine.

And that was the problem.

You couldn’t exclude them on religious grounds anymore.

The Invention of Blood Purity

In 1449 — six years before the Hundred Years’ War would finally end, while the institutional chaos was still raging — the city council of Toledo issued limpieza de sangre: blood purity statutes barring conversos from holding public office.

The purity obsession the war normalized — the boundary-policing that said categories must be clear, ambiguity is dangerous, you’re either with us or against us — was about to take its most devastating form.

The theology justified the apparatus, not the other way around. Limpieza didn’t emerge from conceptual confusion about baptism—it emerged from institutional need for exclusion, which then required theological rationalization.

The logic of limpieza was not about doubting sincerity. It was about ancestry:

• Your baptism is valid

• Your faith may be genuine

• But baptism cannot transform your blood

• Another criterion — genealogical descent — determines real belonging

• The institution decides who really belongs

Think about what this means. A new category of exclusion had been invented — not religious (what you believe), but genealogical (what you are by descent). The sacrament that was supposed to transform identity — baptism, the drowning of the old self and rising of the new — was declared insufficient to transform your essential nature. Apparently the God who raised Jesus from the dead couldn’t manage genealogy.22

This is proto-racial reasoning. Not “we doubt your sincerity” but “your blood is what it is, regardless of your faith.”23

Do you recognize the pattern? This is the supersessionist standard from Essay 9 — now explicitly racial.

Create a purity test (blood ancestry). Frame it as protecting the community (preserving Christian Spain from crypto-Jewish contamination). Ensure the targeted group fails (converso ancestry is indelible — baptism cannot wash it away). Use their “failure” to justify exclusion (they cannot hold office, enter religious orders, claim honor).

The Gnostics used purity tests to create spiritual castes. The Schism used loyalty tests to police allegiance. Limpieza used blood. The tests varied. The logic didn’t.

Limpieza wasn’t just proto-racial. It was anti-grace. The Pauline gospel announced that God gives without regard to worth—that baptism incorporates the unworthy into Christ. Limpieza inverted this: worthiness must be established before incorporation can be real. Blood purity was the new merit system, all the more insidious for wearing baptismal clothes.

The Institution’s Response — And Failure

“You were brought inside, but can you really be trusted?” The answer is always no. (That’s not a bug. That’s the feature.) The standard exists to be failed. As generations passed and the memory of Jewish ancestry faded, efforts were redoubled to unearth traces of “impure” forefathers. The category was designed to be inescapable.

Pope Nicholas V — one of the popes attempting to reunify the Church after the Schism — issued condemnations grounded in sacramental theology. Baptized Christians could not be discriminated against on the basis of Jewish ancestry.24

But the condemnations proved unenforceable.

What we just watched in Bohemia was happening here too. The institution that couldn’t enforce its monopoly when people stopped believing it couldn’t enforce sacramental theology when local authorities decided ancestry mattered more than baptism. The statutes spread anyway — to cathedral chapters, religious orders, universities, military orders, municipal governments. By the sixteenth century, proving “purity of blood” was required for most positions of honor in Spanish society.

The Spanish Inquisition (1478) became an enforcement mechanism — investigating conversos, policing hidden Jewish practices, producing records that supported limpieza exclusions.25

1492: The Double Apparatus

In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella completed two operations that converged in disturbing ways.

They conquered Granada, ending the Reconquista. And they expelled all Jews who refused baptism.

The bitter irony: the expulsion came after limpieza had established that conversion changed nothing essential. Jews who converted in 1492 became conversos — and conversos were already marked by ancestry, already subject to investigation, already barred from positions of honor. Convert, and you’re still tainted by blood. Don’t convert, and you’re expelled. There was no path to genuine belonging.

The system wasn’t broken. It was working exactly as designed—which is the most damning thing you can say about any system.

And the same year — 1492 — Columbus sailed.

That’s not a random coincidence. The same monarchs who perfected religious-genealogical exclusion, who established that baptism couldn’t transform essential nature, who created the Inquisition as enforcement apparatus — those monarchs sponsored the voyages that would carry this grammar to a hemisphere that had never heard of Christ.

The apparatus was ready. The theology was in place. The grammar had been normalized. All that remained was to scale it.

That’s the story of Part 4.

What Limpieza Created

Once you can say “the sacrament is valid but doesn’t transform your essential nature,” you’ve opened a door. The institution now has permission to add criteria—and what starts with blood can extend to whatever serves institutional need. Limpieza didn’t necessitate what followed. It made it thinkable.

Limpieza didn’t just corrupt Christian anthropology. It created a structural position—what I’ve called dominative identity. “Old Christian” was the first form of the unmarked norm: belonging that needs no proof because it’s assumed. The subject who gazes at others as objects of scrutiny while remaining unscrutinized himself. When the oilmen growled at Jesus’s Jewishness, they weren’t defending doctrine. They were defending that position.

The loyalty tests from the war. The political divisions of the Schism. The burnings of Hus and Joan. All operated by this logic. Now it was codified in law. Enforced by the Inquisition. Ready for export.

The content was new. The pattern was ancient.

The dikes the Church Fathers built against covenantal severance, against the supersessionist standard, against dominative identity — those dikes were now thoroughly breached. The sea had come back. And it was about to flood a world that had never seen it before.

Part 4: The Apparatus Was Ready

The institution that burned Hus for challenging its authority over salvation, that burned Joan for claiming unmediated divine access, that declared converso baptism insufficient to overcome ancestry — that institution wasn’t finished.

Its next claim would extend to the entire globe.

The Chronology

Before tracing what the Discovery Bulls claimed, we need to get the timing right. The standard story has it backwards.

The standard story says Constantinople’s fall blocked spice routes, creating economic pressure that drove exploration, with theological justification following. Necessity first, warrant after.

The chronology is damning.

By the 1440s, Portuguese operations on Madeira and other Atlantic islands were experimenting with sugar cultivation — though not yet the plantation slavery that would later devastate Brazil and the Caribbean. The Portuguese slave trade had begun, but for domestic service and urban labor, not sugar. The full sugar-slavery nexus lay 120 years in the future.26

But the legal and theological infrastructure was already under construction.

• 1449: Toledo issues limpieza de sangre — blood purity statutes establishing that baptism cannot transform ancestry.

• 1452: Pope Nicholas V issues Dum Diversas, authorizing Portuguese kings to “invade, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans… and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”

• 1453: Constantinople falls to the Ottomans.

• 1455: Romanus Pontifex expands the grant, giving Portugal exclusive rights to territories along the African coast and authorizing perpetual slavery of captured peoples.

• 1478: Ferdinand and Isabella establish the Spanish Inquisition — the enforcement mechanism for limpieza, investigating converso sincerity and producing records that support blood purity exclusions.

• 1492: Spain expels all Jews who refuse baptism. Columbus sails.

• 1493: Pope Alexander VI issues Inter Caetera, drawing a line through the globe. Everything west goes to Spain. Everything east goes to Portugal.

Dum Diversas was issued eleven months before Constantinople fell. The theological warrant for enslavement was prepared before the economic emergency it supposedly addressed.27

And spice prices in the early 1450s were low — recovering from a spike decades earlier. There was no immediate crisis. The warrant preceded the emergency.

The Jurisdictional Move

The Discovery Bulls claimed something unprecedented.

Before: The Pope’s authority extended over Christendom — the community of baptized Christians. Non-Christians were outside papal jurisdiction.

After: The Pope claimed authority to grant dominion over non-Christian lands and peoples to Christian monarchs. The entire world became subject to papal disposition.28

This happened under rhetorical cover of the Ottoman threat — we must find allies, secure alternative routes, keep our gold from infidels. But the actual effect was something else: we can now claim any land, enslave any people, extract any resources — as long as they’re not already Christian.

The grammar is identical. This is supersessionism expanded to civilizational scope. The Church had already claimed to replace Israel as covenant people. Now Christian Europe was replacing all peoples as legitimate holders of sovereignty.

The people who lived in those “discovered” lands had names, families, histories stretching back millennia. They had their own covenants with the divine, their own ways of belonging to place and to each other. In the papal documents, they became line items. They weren’t parties to the negotiation. They were what was being divided. Objects of grant, not subjects with standing.

The pope had given away a hemisphere. One wonders if he consulted the hemisphere first. (He did not.)

The Doctrine of Discovery didn’t just authorize conquest. It constituted legal title — creating ownership by decree. This is why it still matters in American law. Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823) explicitly cited it as the basis for land title — a framework that persists in federal Indian law despite sustained criticism and no formal repudiation.29

The deeper irony: the pope who claimed jurisdiction over non-Christians couldn’t maintain jurisdiction over Christendom itself. The Schism had just demonstrated that papal authority couldn’t keep Europe in communion. The Discovery Bulls are compensatory hubris—the fantasy of universal sovereignty precisely when actual sovereignty was fracturing. The pope couldn’t hold Avignon, but he could give away Peru.

The Economics

The Discovery Bulls created legal infrastructure for extraction at unprecedented scale. But the economics reveal something striking: extraction logic proved self-defeating.

Portuguese “monopoly” over the spice trade operated as state extraction — tribute, taxation, military interception. The result was structural failure. By the 1560s, Mediterranean trade had recovered to pre-1498 levels. When the Dutch tried coercive pepper cultivation in Bantam, production collapsed from 7 million to 300,000 pounds. Meanwhile, market-based cultivation in Penang achieved six times the yield per acre.30

Extraction persisted not because it worked economically but because it served the institution’s authority claims. The warrant mattered more than the results.

Do you recognize this grammar? When ExxonMobil’s CEO told President Trump this month that Venezuela’s oil was “uninvestable” — that the legal and commercial frameworks made the operation economically irrational — Trump responded by threatening to exclude Exxon from the deal. “They’re playing too cute.” Stephen Miller explained the administration’s worldview to Jake Tapper: “We live in a world... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.”31

The Discovery Bulls didn’t invoke “iron laws.” They invoked papal warrant for royal extraction. But Stephen Miller and Alexander VI would understand each other perfectly. Domination doesn’t require profitability. It requires submission. The quarterly earnings can sort themselves out.

In the fifteenth century, though, the papal-royal partnership went deeper than authorization. Religious institutions didn’t just provide the warrant for extraction — they were the extraction economy’s nervous system. Convents received sugar as dowries and redistributed it through secular networks. Hospital pharmacies created demand by treating sugar as medicine. Liturgical festivals normalized consumption. The Church didn’t merely authorize extraction at one end and consume its products at the other. The Church was the distribution infrastructure that made extraction work.32

What Was Unleashed

The Discovery Bulls didn’t just authorize conquest. They created a new kind of political actor—the Christian monarch with divine warrant to expand. The pope who couldn’t hold Christendom together outsourced his mission to kings who could. This was the birth of the modern nation-state as theological entity: sacred violence in secular clothes. When American courts cite the Doctrine of Discovery, they’re not invoking vestigial theology. They’re standing on their own founding myth.

When the Hundred Years’ War ended in 1453, the resources that had been destroying France and England for 116 years were suddenly available. Knights. Ships. Capital. Military capacity. Portugal was already exploring West Africa. Spain, completing the Reconquista in 1492, immediately pivoted to Atlantic expansion.

The Discovery Bulls gave Pharaoh a hemisphere—and centuries to demonstrate what his grammar produces.

Part 5: The Reformation’s Double Edge

Which brings us to 1517 and a German monk who thought he was defending manna.

The Augustinian Paradox

Consider who Luther was: an Augustinian friar, deeply formed in the anti-Donatist theology that Augustine had articulated a millennium earlier.

The core anti-Donatist claim: Sacraments work ex opere operato — their efficacy depends on Christ, not the minister. You cannot be “unbaptized.” Grace received is real grace. Human failure cannot invalidate divine gift.

Yet by Luther’s time, the whole apparatus operated by Pharaoh grammar while speaking manna vocabulary:

The presupposition underneath: The institutional Church mediates grace and can therefore control, withhold, or withdraw mediation.

Luther understood something important: the late medieval Church had become a Pharaoh operation. Indulgences, merits, calculated piety — salvation had become something you achieved through religious performance. The institution controlled access to grace and charged admission.

Against this, Luther thundered: “You cannot save yourself. Grace does everything. You just receive.”

This is manna grammar. You can’t earn it. You can’t hoard it. It comes fresh each morning as gift.

What Luther Recovered

This is manna grammar recovered: Worth through receiving, not achieving. Identity as participated, not constructed. Grace that cannot be controlled, hoarded, or revoked.33

The Same Apparatus

When Pope Leo X issued Exsurge Domine (1520), threatening Luther with excommunication, he was operating from the same supersessionist ecclesiology that had burned Hus.

The bull explicitly referenced Constance: “Witness to this is the condemnation and punishment in the Council of Constance of the infidelity of the Hussites and Wyclifites as well as Jerome of Prague.”

Leo X was saying: We burned Hus for this. We’ll burn you too unless you recant.

I hadn’t seen this until recently: the structural parallel between limpieza de sangre and Exsurge Domine.

The same supersessionist standard. In both cases, sacramental status is formally acknowledged but functionally overridden by an institutional criterion that the institution itself controls.

Limpieza: Your baptism is valid, but blood purity determines real belonging. Exsurge Domine: Your baptism is valid, but submission to Rome determines real belonging.

Different purity tests. Identical grammar. The method creates the category that dismisses the questioner.

Several of Luther’s condemned propositions directly challenged this apparatus:34

“In the sacrament of penance and the remission of sin the pope or the bishop does no more than the lowest priest; indeed, where there is no priest, any Christian, even if a woman or child, may equally do as much.”

This is anti-institutional: Grace is not mediated through hierarchical gatekeeping.

“Excommunications are only external penalties and they do not deprive man of the common spiritual prayers of the Church.”

This directly challenges papal power to exclude from covenant. If excommunication is merely “external,” then the institution cannot control access to God.

“That heretics be burned is against the will of the Spirit.”

This challenges the entire apparatus of coerced conformity that limpieza and Inquisition represented.

Why Luther Survived

The difference between Luther and Hus was not that Luther’s ideas were better. The difference was technological and political.

When Hus challenged institutional authority in 1415, the printing press didn’t exist. The Council could burn him and expect his ideas to fade.

When Luther challenged institutional authority in 1517, his 95 Theses were translated, printed, and distributed throughout Germany within weeks. By the time Exsurge Domine threatened him with excommunication (1520), Luther’s ideas were everywhere. You couldn’t burn all the books.

Luther also had Frederick the Wise’s protection — political cover from a powerful elector who refused to hand him over.

And Luther had something else: a German population that had watched five papal crusades fail against the Hussites. The apparatus that worked in 1415 could not work in 1520.

Luther initially knew little of Hus. But during his debates with Johann Eck in 1519, Eck forced Luther to acknowledge that some of his positions aligned with Hus’s condemned teachings. Luther later studied Hus’s writings and declared: “We are all Hussites now.”

The connection was not accidental. Both were challenging the same structure: the institutional Church’s claim to determine authentic covenant membership.

The Double Edge

But Luther’s revolution had unintended consequences.35

Luther rightly rejected the late medieval system where salvation felt like achievement — counting indulgences, calculating merit, constructing your own worth through religious performance. Against this, Luther thundered: “You have no capacity to save yourself. Grace does everything. You just receive.”

But here’s the problem: in rejecting self-construction, Luther’s formulation could be heard as rejecting all human agency. If we’re “totally depraved,” can we participate at all? If works are “filthy rags,” does transformation happen? If justification is purely forensic — a legal declaration that leaves us unchanged — where is sanctification?

Luther himself sometimes held these tensions together. But his systematizers often couldn’t. And what they developed was a framework where:

• Human agency disappears entirely

• Practices become irrelevant (since you can’t contribute anything anyway)

• Transformation isn’t expected

• “Just a sinner saved by grace” becomes an endpoint, not a beginning

Do you recognize this? I grew up marinating in it.

Now I wonder whether Luther escaped the grammar—or just transposed it into a different key.

Think about the late medieval system Luther rejected. It ran on contract logic: you owe a debt (sin), you make payments (penance, indulgences, merit), and eventually — if you’ve paid enough — you’re square with God. It’s a transaction. A deal. An exchange.

Luther said no — you can’t pay. The debt is too great. Only Christ can pay it. Grace is free.

But notice what Luther didn’t change: the whole framework is still about debt and payment. The question is still “who pays?” — Luther just changed the answer from “you” to “Christ.” The New Testament scholar Douglas Campbell calls this “justification theory” and argues it retains the contractual logic it claims to reject.36 The alternative — what Campbell finds in Paul and what Wells develops as “being with” — isn’t about payment at all. It’s about participation. Union. Being drawn into a life that transforms you from the inside.

Luther glimpsed this. His language of union with Christ, of being “in Christ,” points toward participation rather than transaction. But the systematizers who followed him often flattened it back into contract: Christ paid your debt, you accept the payment, transaction complete.

Protestants celebrated their escape from Rome’s transaction. They didn’t notice they’d landed in another one. The currency changed; the cash register didn’t.

The grammar shifted while the vocabulary stayed the same.

The alternative Paul offers isn’t a better transaction. It’s the announcement that the transaction framework was always wrong—that God wasn’t setting conditions but breaking chains.

And here’s the deeper issue: “receiving” can become its own achievement—the right posture, the proper openness, faith as the one thing you contribute. Paul’s alternative is more radical. It’s not that we receive rather than achieve. It’s that we’ve been called by name, claimed as beloved, drawn into a life already underway. The self that would achieve or receive has been buried with Christ. What rises is someone who no longer needs to secure their own belonging.

This is why blood-and-soil nationalism is works-righteousness with better genealogy. The “Heritage American” or “real British” thinks he’s escaped the achievement trap—he didn’t earn his belonging; he received it through birth. But he’s turned reception into merit. His ancestors’ crossing is his achievement. The accident of his birth is proof of his worth. He’s billing his grandparents for righteousness he never earned.

Paul would not be impressed. You cannot ground yourself in blood any more than in works. Both are the self securing itself against the grace that would undo it. The self that has been named beloved doesn’t respond to “Papers, please.” The self that had papers died in the water. The new creation has no birth certificate from the old world—which is precisely why those who build kingdoms on documentation find the gospel so threatening. A God who names the undocumented beloved is no use to Pharaoh at all.

Luther’s own formulations were shakier than Protestant hagiography admits. He diagnosed the disease correctly—salvation by works—then smuggled the infection into his cure. His forensic model kept Rome’s transaction; he just changed who paid the bill. His language of union with Christ was genuine—real glimpses of participation that later systematizers would lose entirely—but that language was at war with his own framework. And the framework won. The systematizers weren’t betraying Luther. They were completing him.37

The Reformation recovered something essential. But the recovery was incomplete. The resignification project — Christian vocabulary operating within Christian grammar — was already in trouble.

The Immediate Fragmentation

The printing press that saved Luther from Hus’s fate did something else: it made theological fragmentation instantaneous.

Within months, Luther’s ideas were everywhere. But so were the critiques, the revisions, the alternatives. Some said he hadn’t gone far enough — the Radical Reformers who would become Anabaptists pushed for immediate church purification, rejecting infant baptism and state authority. Others said he’d articulated key doctrines incorrectly — Reformed theologians in Bern, Frankfurt, Geneva (under John Calvin), and Zurich (under Huldrych Zwingli) developed their own formulations, often disagreeing with Luther on crucial points.

This wasn’t a later development. The Reformation fragmented from the beginning. The same technology that spread Luther’s 95 Theses throughout Germany in weeks also spread competing visions of what “reformed” meant. This is what Charles Taylor would later call the “nova effect”: once the medieval synthesis fractured, it didn’t produce two options but an explosion of possibilities, each claiming to recover primitive Christianity.38

Marburg would make this fragmentation undeniable.

The Marburg Fracture

In October 1529, in a castle in Marburg, two men sat across a table and decided the future of the Western church. They didn’t know that’s what they were doing. They thought they were arguing about bread.

Martin Luther slammed his hand on the wood: “Hoc est corpus meum — This IS my body.”

Ulrich Zwingli shook his head: “This SIGNIFIES my body.”

They agreed on almost everything else. Justification by faith. The authority of Scripture. The rejection of papal corruption. But on this one point — whether bread could carry the presence of Christ — they couldn’t budge. The Reformation that began by insisting Scripture was clear enough for anyone to read had just discovered that two of its best readers couldn’t agree on four words.39

What Luther understood, instinctively if not always clearly, was that Zwingli’s position reopened the door to Gnosticism. If the bread is “just a symbol,” then matter and spirit have been separated again. The physical world becomes a collection of teaching aids, not the medium of grace. Bodies point to spiritual truths but don’t participate in them.40

And more than that — though I don’t know if Luther saw this part — Zwingli’s position weakened the practices that had kept Christ’s particularity in focus. When the Eucharist becomes “just a memorial,” it loses its power as a liturgical fortress. The weekly encounter that made Gnostic grammar unlivable becomes a quarterly reminder of something that happened long ago and far away.

Luther wasn’t wrong to worry. But he had vulnerabilities of his own.

The Reformation recovered something essential — manna grammar against institutional Pharaoh. But the recovery was incomplete. And what came next would make it worse.

The Chaos That Required a New Human

You already know this chaos. You’re living in it.

Your social media feed floods you with contradictory claims. Experts disagree. Institutions that once seemed stable — governments, churches, universities, newspapers — are fragmenting or fighting each other. You can find “evidence” for almost any position. Algorithms feed you what you already believe. Your uncle shares conspiracy theories with the same confidence your professor shares peer-reviewed studies. And nobody knows what’s true anymore.

How do you survive it? You have options. Build an inner fortress — curate your feed, protect your peace, master your reactions, don’t let the chaos get to you. Or find a method — the right podcast, the right teacher, the right system that cuts through the noise and tells you what’s really going on.

The sixteenth century invented both solutions. For the same reasons.

By the 1580s, Europe was drowning in print.41 Religious pamphlets multiplied. Multiple Bible translations competed. Lutheran texts fought Geneva Reformed texts fought Zurich Reformed texts fought Frankfurt Reformed texts fought London Reformed texts fought Catholic polemics and Radically Reformed sectarianism. News sheets. Commercial records. Legal documents. Scientific treatises. And nobody knew what was true anymore.

Before print, you trusted your priest, your guild master, your local authorities. Information came through stable institutional channels with clear authority structures.

After print? Information flooded from everywhere. Contradictory claims. Competing authorities. No clear way to adjudicate truth.

But our chaos differs from theirs in one crucial respect. They faced cacophony through proliferation—too many voices claiming authority. We face cacophony through saturation—so many voices that authority itself becomes suspect. The Neo-Stoic solution was designed for their crisis: build an inner fortress against the noise. Whether it can work for ours, when we’ve watched a dozen “right methods” fail, remains to be seen.

In England, the chaos was compounded by political whiplash: Henry’s break with Rome, Edward’s Protestant reforms, Mary’s Catholic restoration that sent Protestant leaders fleeing to Geneva and Frankfurt and Zurich, Elizabeth’s attempted Settlement that satisfied no one completely.4243 The exiles returned with competing visions of what “Reformed” meant — and those competitions would cross the Atlantic.44 45

And in the Borderlands between Scotland and England — and soon in Ireland — the chaos was not merely theological. It was existential.

For centuries, the Anglo-Scottish border had been a region of endemic raiding, feuding, and lawlessness.46 When James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603, he pacified the borders by force — executing some, imprisoning others, and “planting” many in Ulster as a convenient way to remove them.

The Plantation of Ulster (1609) became England’s rehearsal for American colonization: confiscate land from Gaelic Irish lords, displace the native Catholic population, settle Scottish and English Protestants, extract resources.47 The “Undertakers” who received large grants were required to bring Protestant tenants. The sectarian geography this created — Protestant planters, displaced Catholics, endemic violence — persists to this day.48

My Lyles ancestors were part of the plantation. They came from Kilmacolm and Linlithgow in Scotland — associated with the Stuarts — to Ballynure in County Antrim. They were elites, planters. When they later migrated from Charleston to Louisiana, they carried the grammar they had learned: confiscate, displace, plant, extract. Ulster prepared them for Bayou Boeuf.49

The Borderers who would later cross the Atlantic to Appalachia carried a different version of the same formation: centuries of violence, suspicion of all authority, fierce clan loyalty, honor culture that demanded blood for insult.50 They had learned that institutions couldn’t be trusted. Survival meant self-reliance.51

Add religious warfare — the Wars of Religion devastating Europe from 1562 to 1598. The institutions that used to provide stability were fracturing, fighting, killing each other.

The existential question then was the existential question now: How do I know what’s true when every institution I trusted is either fragmenting or trying to kill the others?

Part 6: The Solution That Arrived

Into this chaos stepped the first of two solutions that would shape the faith for the next four centuries. And I’m only now recognizing that the formation I received — “Be the Gift,” master yourself, keep it together — was its direct descendant.

The Philosophy of Survival

Justus Lipsius was, above all else, a survivor. This is not incidental to his philosophy. This is his philosophy.52

Born in 1547 in the Spanish Netherlands, he lived through some of the most brutal religious violence in European history. The Dutch Revolt. The sack of Antwerp. Protestants killing Catholics. Catholics killing Protestants. Entire cities destroyed over theological disputes that seemed, to someone watching the bodies pile up, increasingly absurd.

Lipsius survived by changing his confession. He was raised Catholic, became Lutheran, then Calvinist, then returned to Catholicism. His critics called him a chameleon. He called it staying alive.

What he produced from this experience was a philosophy of survival: Neo-Stoicism. His book De Constantia (On Constancy, 1584) became an instant bestseller — running through eighty editions across Europe — because it answered a question everyone was asking: How do I maintain my sanity when everything around me is collapsing?53

Lipsius’s answer: Build an inner fortress.

The ancient Stoics had taught that the wise person achieves apatheia — not apathy in our sense, but freedom from being controlled by external circumstances. Your city can burn. Your family can die. Fortune can strip away everything you thought you possessed. But if you’ve cultivated the inner citadel of rational self-mastery, nothing can touch what really matters: your capacity to govern yourself through reason.

Lipsius called this constantia: firmness of mind that remains steady regardless of external fortune. The self-controlled agent who doesn’t get rattled by circumstances. Who governs emotions through reason. Who, in modern terms, “keeps it together.”

For people living through religious warfare, this was water in the desert.

Why Reformed Christians Found It Useful

What I didn’t understand until recently: Neo-Stoicism didn’t attack Reformed Christianity. It offered itself as ally.

Think about what Reformed communities already emphasized: discipline, sobriety, self-examination, the mastery of passions. Think about the suspicion of excessive emotion, the emphasis on rational piety, the preference for order over enthusiasm.

Lipsius seemed to provide philosophical foundations for virtues Reformed Christians already valued. You’re not earning salvation — Luther settled that. You’re just living well after receiving grace. And Neo-Stoicism tells you how: cultivate inner discipline. Master your passions through reason. Build the self-controlled character that demonstrates you’ve received what you claim.

This looked compatible with Reformed piety. It provided moral seriousness without works-righteousness. It offered technique for the transformation that Protestant theology still expected but had stopped explaining how to achieve.

As Christopher Brooke documents in his study of Stoicism’s political influence, Reformed theologians found in Lipsius “a philosophical companion who seemed to validate what they believed Scripture demanded.”54 Neo-Stoicism effectively supplied the anthropology the Reformers had never intended to canonize but had already begun to assume.

The Objection That Should Have Stopped It

But there was a problem. And the problem had a name: Augustine.

Eleven hundred years before Lipsius, Augustine had already diagnosed Stoicism with devastating precision. His critique was simple: Stoicism is “a philosophy for the proud.”55

The Stoics, Augustine argued, “drastically overestimated the abilities of fallen men and women to act in accordance with reason and virtue in the absence of divine grace.” The whole project — achieving invulnerability through rational self-mastery — was the self curved in on itself, refusing to receive from God what only God can give.

Augustine forged what Brooke calls “the ideologically powerful link between Stoicism and the notion of original sin.” The serpent’s temptation in Eden — “you shall be like God” — was precisely the Stoic promise: achieve self-sufficiency through your own rational capacity. “From Cicero’s point of view,” Brooke observes, “to declare oneself a Stoic was to make a number of significant philosophical mistakes; from Augustine’s, it was also in a way to declare war on God.”

This should have stopped Neo-Stoicism cold. Augustine was the most authoritative voice in Western Christianity. His critique was devastating. And it was aimed directly at what Lipsius was selling.

The Clever Relabeling

Lipsius knew the objection. His response was clever.

He made a distinction: Constancy is not the same as obstinacy.56

Obstinacy, Lipsius admitted, is “a certain hardness of a stubborn mind, proceeding from pride or vainglory.” That’s the Stoic vice Augustine criticized. But constancy? Constancy is different. The mother of constancy is “patience, and lowliness of mind.” True constancy is humble, rooted in “judgement and sound Reason.” Pride produces obstinacy. Patience produces constancy.

See the move? Augustine diagnosed Stoic self-sufficiency as pride. Lipsius agreed — and then explained why his version was different. The humble version. The Christian version.

It’s a brilliant defense. It’s also the defense every addict makes: I can handle it. I’m not like those other people.

Lipsius acknowledged the Augustinian critique and claimed he wasn’t doing that. His Neo-Stoicism was the good kind — the humble, patient kind that doesn’t overestimate human capacity. The Stoic pride Augustine attacked was the stubborn, arrogant version. Lipsius was offering something gentler.

This distinction created a permission structure. Reformed Christians could adopt Neo-Stoic practices — the inner fortress, the self-mastery, the rational governance of passion — while believing they weren’t falling into the pride trap Augustine warned about. They had the humble version. The Christian version.

The distinction spread. It became the standard defense. And for four centuries, Western Christians have been practicing NeoStoicism while believing they’re doing something else.

Why the Distinction Doesn’t Hold

The distinction is a sleight of hand.

The problem isn’t the motivation for self-mastery (humble vs. arrogant). The problem is the stance of self-mastery itself: the assumption that through proper technique, I can achieve a kind of invulnerability. That’s the declaration of war on God. And calling it “humble” doesn’t change what it is.

Jennifer Herdt traces how Augustine’s critique, intended to protect the gratuity of grace, created an unexpected trajectory. Augustine’s accusation that pagan virtue was “splendid vices” — performed for glory rather than love of God — was meant to establish divine grace as the only source of genuine virtue. But by so thoroughly delegitimizing human moral capacity, it created conditions where virtue could eventually be understood only naturalistically — as sentiment, instinct, or disguised self-interest.57

The irony cuts deep: Augustine’s critique was deployed by Lipsius precisely to defend a program of self-mastery that Augustine would have recognized as the very pride he opposed.

Charles Taylor identifies what actually happened. He calls it “excarnation” — the migration of meaning from embodied practice to abstract mental representation. What had been formed through participation became achieved through technique. What had been received in community became mastered by individuals. The body that had been the site of transformation became the object of control.58

The Stoic stance — disengaged rational self-mastery, relating to the world through control rather than participation, governing the body through will — that stance is the pride Augustine diagnosed. You can’t escape the critique by relabeling. Lipsius didn’t Christianize Stoicism; he gave Stoic pride a Christian vocabulary.

Humble constancy versus proud obstinacy. I know which one I have. Ask me. (Actually, don’t. I’ll explain at length why my version is the humble one.)

That’s the tell, isn’t it? The person who’s sure they have the humble version is the person who’s stopped asking. The distinction doesn’t invite self-examination — it provides permission to stop examining. You’ve already sorted yourself into the good category. Anyone who questions you goes in the other one.

Augustine’s critique didn’t land because it couldn’t land. The distinction was designed to deflect it. “You’re describing the proud kind. We have the humble kind.” Next objection?

I know this move because I use it. When someone challenges my need to keep it together, I don’t hear the challenge. I hear someone who doesn’t understand mature faith. Someone who wants me to be weak. Someone who — if I’m honest — fails my private test for people worth listening to.

The test looks fair. Anyone could have humble constancy. But somehow the people who question the project never qualify. A test designed to be failed isn’t a test. It’s a sorting mechanism wearing a test’s clothes.

This is the supersessionist standard applied to selfhood. Create a purity test that sounds universal. Ensure your critics always fail it. Use their “failure” to dismiss the critique.

Four centuries of Christians practiced Stoic self-sufficiency while believing they’d escaped the trap Augustine identified. The permission structure held. The grammar shifted while the vocabulary stayed the same.

This is how you get “Be the Gift.” This is how you get Christians who can articulate grace theology on Sunday and live by Stoic self-sufficiency on Monday without noticing the contradiction. The Neo-Stoic package was absorbed so thoroughly that it became invisible — just “what mature faith looks like.”

The Sage, wearing Christian clothes. And producing what the Sage always produces: dominative identity. The autonomous Subject who has achieved proper self-mastery. Who needs nothing from outside. Whose worth is constructed through achievement rather than received through communion.

But Neo-Stoicism was only half the package. The inner fortress addressed the emotional chaos of religious warfare. There was still the epistemic chaos — the flood of competing truth claims that print had unleashed. For that, another solution emerged. And it would cross the Atlantic with the Puritans.

Part 7: The Pattern That Would Repeat

Something clicks into place—something I missed for years—why Neo-Stoicism and its epistemic twin emerged together, and why they fit so perfectly.

Richard Hooker helped me see something I'd missed for years: Ramism and Neo-Stoicism weren't separate developments. They were parallel responses to the same crisis—the crisis the Reformers created when they broke the medieval synthesis that had held theological knowledge and moral formation together. They thought they could do better. Ramism and Neo-Stoicism were the repair attempts. And both arrived at the same solution: technique over formation, method over participation, individual mastery over communal transformation.59

Neo-Stoicism did it to virtue. I was trained to believe I didn't need the slow work of liturgical formation—the gradual shaping of desire through practices I didn't choose, the transformation that happens to you in community. I needed the right technique for self-mastery. Method replaces apprenticeship. The individual applying correct procedure replaces the community carrying you in rhythms of grace. You don't need sacramental practices when faith mutates into a private thing. Indeed, you don't need communities at all.

And around the same time — not coincidentally — another mutation was spreading through Protestant universities that did to knowledge what Lipsius did to virtue.

The Decay of Dialogue

Peter Ramus was a French Protestant professor martyred in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572.60 Before his death, he launched what his followers called a revolution in method.

Walter Ong gave this revolution a haunting title: Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue.61

That phrase — “the decay of dialogue” — captures what happened. Before Ramus, knowledge was transmitted through dialogue. You learned by engaging with a teacher, a tradition, a community of formation. Truth emerged through conversation, through the give-and-take of minds in relationship.

Ramism replaced this with something else: visual-spatial diagrams that contained knowledge in neat, binary divisions. Define, then divide. Divide again. Keep dividing until you have a complete map. Once you have the diagram, you have the knowledge. Anyone can master it through correct procedure.

Where medieval education had been formation — years of slow cultivation within a community of practice — Ramism offered technique. Where wisdom had required a master’s guidance, method could be taught from a textbook. Knowledge became something you could extract from a chart rather than receive through relationship.

Donald McKim documents how this method spread through English Puritanism. The Ramist principle was to divide knowledge areas into opposing binaries or dichotomies. “As Perkins approached a passage or text he applied Ramist method: defining, dividing, classifying from general to specific.” The assumption was that by doing so, “the ‘interior logic’ or thought pattern of the author could be plainly shown.62

And since the author of Scripture is the Holy Spirit, Ramist exegetes believed their method “could lay bare the very mind of God Himself.”63

Do you hear the grammar? This is mining, not gardening. Extraction, not cultivation. Pharaoh, not manna.

The Convergence

Hooker saw this in the 1590s, and I read him for years without grasping it: these weren't two separate mutations. They were one mutation with two expressions.64

Ramism and Neo-Stoicism shared a single deep pattern: confidence that human reason can directly access divine requirements without mediation, that truth can be systematized into specifiable conditions, that the individual applying correct method can secure certain outcomes.

Both separated knowledge from formation. Both separated method from virtue. Both separated individual technique from communal practice. Both separated mastery from transformation.

And the Puritans found both mutations enormously attractive.

William Perkins — the most influential English theologian of his generation, whose books outsold Calvin, Beza, and Bullinger combined — was simultaneously the leader of Ramist Puritanism at Cambridge and one of the earliest systematizers of Federal Theology in England.65 As McKim documents, Perkins’s “earliest published works were polemical defense of the Ramist art of memory,” and his theological works were “constructed nearly all along the lines of the Ramist method.”66

In Perkins, the epistemological mutation and the soteriological mutation converged in a single figure.

This wasn’t coincidence. They fit together. Ramist confidence that human reason could directly access divine patterns enabled Federal confidence that natural law could specify salvation’s conditions. Ramist method’s binary divisions found their theological expression in the works/grace dichotomy. Ramist technē — the reduction of wisdom to technique — found its soteriological expression in the reduction of salvation to meeting contractual conditions.67

As Simon Burton has argued, “the attraction of Ramism to Puritans was especially in its nature as a Platonic logic with its assumption of a direct map or isomorphism between the created world, the human mind, and the mind of God.” This epistemological confidence underwrote the Federal conviction that salvation’s conditions could be rationally specified.68

Formation became technique. Wisdom became method. Relationship became procedure.

“The Bible Clearly Says”

“The Bible clearly says.” I’ve heard that phrase shut down more conversations than any other. It sounds humble — I’m not giving you my opinion, I’m just telling you what the text says.

But listen to what’s underneath: I have extracted the meaning. If you disagree with me, you’re disagreeing with God.

That’s not submission to Scripture. That’s using Scripture as a weapon while claiming to be unarmed.

This is Ramism’s long tail. Define, divide, diagram. Break Scripture into pieces small enough to fit on a chart. Organize the pieces into binary categories. And now you have it — the mind of God, laid out in propositions anyone can master.

The supersessionist standard found a new domain: how we read.

Create a purity test: Do you take the Bible “plainly”? Frame it as universal: Anyone can read! The meaning is right there on the surface! Ensure the wrong people fail: Those who bring historical context, who insist on dialogue with tradition, who suggest that formation might matter for interpretation — they’re adding “human wisdom” to God’s word. Use their “failure” to dismiss them: They’re not really Bible believers. Not like us.

I know this one from the inside too. The person with more verses wins. The person who can proof-text fastest has the truth. And the person who says “it’s more complicated than that” has already lost — not because they’re wrong, but because they’ve failed the purity test. They’re the ones who can’t just accept what Scripture clearly says.

Richard Hooker saw this coming four centuries ago. Against the Ramist Puritans of his day, he insisted that Scripture doesn’t work like a diagram. You can’t extract its meaning through method and apply it through logic. Reading requires formation. Interpretation requires community. Wisdom requires apprenticeship to a tradition that shapes what you’re capable of seeing.69

The Puritans dismissed him. He was adding “human tradition” to God’s word.

Four hundred years later, Stanley Hauerwas made the same argument against the same mutation. In Unleashing the Scripture, he called the bluff: there is no “plain reading.” Every reading is a formed reading. The question isn’t whether you bring interpretive assumptions to the text — you do. The question is whether your community’s practices have formed you to read well. The claim to read Scripture “plainly” isn’t humble. It’s a power play that hides its own formation.70

Today’s Ramist biblicists dismissed Hauerwas too. Same reason. Same supersessionist standard.

Hooker in the 1590s. Hauerwas in the 1990s. Four centuries apart, same argument, same dismissal. The method that claims to read Scripture “plainly” can’t see itself reading. The blindness is load-bearing.

Lipsius addressed virtue; Ramus addressed knowledge. The underlying grammar was identical. The method creates the category that dismisses the questioner.

Crossing the Atlantic

And nearly one hundred Cambridge men who grew up in Perkins’s shadow led early migrations to New England.71

They carried with them the complete package: the Neo-Stoic anthropology (master yourself through technique), the Ramist hermeneutics (extract meaning through method), the Federal soteriology (salvation as contractual conditions). They carried the supersessionist standard that had developed for selfhood and for reading. They carried the grammar that separated knowledge from formation, method from virtue, individual technique from communal practice.

They didn’t know they were carrying mutations. They thought they were carrying purified Christianity — Scripture alone, read plainly, applied rationally. They thought they had finally escaped the Catholic corruption that had obscured the gospel.

They carried it to Massachusetts Bay. They carried it to Harvard. They built institutions to transmit it.

And over the next four centuries, it would become the air Americans breathe — including Americans who have never heard of Lipsius or Ramus, who have never opened a Puritan devotional, who might not even call themselves Christian.

That’s the next question: How did ideas held by a few thousand Puritans become the default grammar for millions of Americans who don’t know where it came from?

Part 8: How Ideas Become Air

I can already hear the objection: “Why should I care what some philosophy professor wrote 445 years ago? Lipsius wasn’t the Pope. He wasn’t the King. He just wrote books.”

Fair question. And if I can’t answer it, everything I’ve said is just intellectual history.

So let me tell you how ideas become air.

The Transmission Belt

Philosophers don’t change the world by commanding armies. They change the world by shaping the people who train the people who run the institutions that form everyone else.

Lipsius was a professor at Leiden, one of the most influential universities in Protestant Europe. His students became professors. Those professors trained pastors. Those pastors preached sermons that assumed the goal of Christian life is autonomous moral self-governance — without ever mentioning Lipsius. The assumptions seeped into hymns, catechisms, devotional literature. By the time it reaches you, nobody’s reading philosophy. But the philosophy has become the water you swim in.

The transmission wasn’t through propositions but through practices. Devotional manuals taught self-examination as a daily habit. Preaching styles modeled rational self-governance. The format of private prayer—solitary, methodical, focused on interior states—enacted the disengaged stance before anyone could name it. The architecture of the examined conscience, borrowed from monastic practice but democratized for every believer, trained Christians to relate to themselves as objects of scrutiny and control. By the time the assumptions reached the pew, they weren’t ideas anyone had to accept. They were habits no one thought to question.

Charles Taylor calls this a social imaginary: the largely unstructured, inarticulate understanding of our situation that we inherit, not choose. It’s pre-theoretical. It makes certain things “thinkable” and others “unthinkable” before you consciously reason about them. You don’t decide that “maturity means self-sufficiency.” You just know it. It feels obvious. Natural. Just how things are.72

That’s why social imaginaries are so powerful. They make historical contingency feel like created order.

Taylor calls this proliferation the “nova effect.” Once the medieval synthesis fractured, it didn’t produce two or three alternatives. It produced an explosion — an endless proliferation of options, each one a variation on the themes now loosed from their institutional containers. The Reformation didn’t create one Protestant church; it created thousands, each convinced it had recovered the primitive gospel, each carrying mutations it couldn’t see.73

This is why Dominative Christianism has so many faces. Calvinist and Arminian, high church and low, premillennial and postmillennial, nationalist and globalist — they look like opposites, but they share the same grammar. The nova effect means that once Pharaoh’s logic re-entered the bloodstream, it could express itself in infinite variations while remaining structurally identical. The surface diversity masks the deep unity.

The Freud Parallel

If this still feels like intellectual history with no practical consequence, try an experiment: go a week without using the words “projection,” “defense mechanism,” “repression,” or “trauma.”

You can’t. Because you think in Freudian — not because you read Freud, but because Freud became the water. The Freudian social imaginary spread through medical schools, psychology programs, therapy practices, self-help books, TV shows — until Freudian assumptions became invisible common sense. You don’t need to read Freud to be Freudian. You swim in it from birth.74

Lipsius is the same. His articulation of the Neo-Stoic autonomous Subject transmitted through universities, seminaries, churches, families — then nova’d across four centuries into Protestant individualism, Enlightenment rationalism, American self-reliance, therapy culture, wellness optimization. All sharing the same underlying grammar: self-possession as maturity, autonomy as freedom, self-sufficiency as virtue, dependence as failure.

By the time I got the message “Be the Gift,” nobody in my family had read Lipsius for four hundred years. But I was swimming in water he helped mix.

The Personal Landing

When my therapist asks about Data mode — that part of me that must master everything, control everything, govern everything through reason — I thought I was describing personal adaptation. A quirk of my psychology.

What I’m actually describing: a 445-year-old social imaginary transmitted through channels I can now name.

I told you at the beginning: Keith and I swam in the same waters—Louisiana folkways, German Midlander and Borderlander and Deep South, our father's Niebuhrian Stoicism dressed in Christian vocabulary, God as “ultimate vagueness” rather than the particular God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But I haven't told you about our mother.

My mother’s side tells a different story. She was Methodist. Where Dad theologized, she gardened. Her faith was Franciscan before I knew that word—creation-attentive, practically embodied, never announced.

The Lyles ancestors who came through the Ulster Plantation to Charleston and eventually to Bayou Boeuf carried what David Hackett Fischer calls “hegemonic liberty”: the freedom of gentlemen to rule their own domains without interference.75 These were the plantation owners, the landed elites who migrated with Calhoun and Houston, carrying a formation where autonomy meant everything and dependence meant shame — or worse, meant being the one who was dependent, who was property.

Two streams, one grammar: self-possession as maturity, autonomy as freedom, rational control as virtue. Data mode isn’t personal neurosis. It’s inheritance. I thought I was describing my adaptation. What I was describing was a 445-year-old social imaginary that just happens to fit my nervous system like a glove.

And what I inherited was dominative identity — the self that must be defended because it was constructed rather than received. The supersessionist standard internalized: I sort myself into “disciplined” or “undisciplined,” “mature” or “needy,” “together” or “falling apart.” The purity test runs continuously. The targeted part of me — the part that needs, that depends, that can’t keep it together — always fails.

The pattern doesn’t just sort communities. It sorts selves.

Why Naming Matters

And when Samuel Wells says God’s being-with requires receiving rather than achieving, participating rather than self-possessing, dependence as maturity rather than autonomy—It sounds literally unthinkable.76

Here’s the test: when I use words like “maturity” or “freedom,” what do I actually mean by them? What follows from applying them? For me, maturity has always meant self-governance. Freedom has meant independence and non-interference. And dependence has meant failure. I can find all these words in Scripture. But the logic governing what they mean — the consequences of applying them — matches Lipsius more than Luke.

Not because Wells is unclear. Because 445 years of Neo-Stoic social imaginary made receiving feel like weakness, dependence feel like failure, being-with feel like threat to the autonomous Subject I must protect.

The dikes weren’t maintained; the sea rushed back in.

Naming the mutation as Stoic rather than generic “individualism” matters because it identifies the specific problem: self-mastery as the goal of formation, rather than participatory dependence on grace. Different diagnoses require different cures. If the problem is just “individualism,” the cure might be more community. If the problem is Stoic grammar — the stance of self-sufficient rational mastery — the cure requires something more radical: learning to receive, to participate in being.

Naming doesn’t let you escape the inheritance. But it breaks the possession’s power to operate invisibly.

That’s why this genealogy matters. Not intellectual exercise. Exorcism.

Answering the Opening Question

Now I can answer the question that started this essay.

How do Christians who pass Bible quizzes experience Jesus’s Jewishness as blasphemy?

Because the grammar they inherited isn’t biblical. It’s Stoic, Ramist, supersessionist — a formation that can speak Christian vocabulary while operating by Pharaoh logic. The oilmen in Keith’s Sunday school knew the words. But the grammar governing what those words meant came from Lipsius and Ramus and the Federal theologians, not from the Jewish peasant who ate with tax collectors and touched lepers.

Jesus’s particularity — his Jewishness, his embodiment, his being-with — violated the grammar they had absorbed. It felt like blasphemy because it was blasphemy against their actual god: the autonomous, self-sufficient Subject that Neo-Stoicism built and American culture canonized.

The supersessionist standard that began with limpieza de sangre — creating a purity test that ensures the targeted group fails — reached its logical conclusion: the Jewish Jesus fails the purity test for Christianity.

This is what happens when Pharaoh grammar wears Christian vocabulary. The god it produces can’t recognize the God who showed up.

Standing at the Atlantic

I’ve told this as a sequence—one crisis leading to another. But the historical reality is messier: multiple streams converging, reinforcing each other, producing what meteorologists would recognize as a perfect storm. Neo-Stoicism influenced Catholic spiritual writers too. Ramism had Catholic adherents. The Federal theology developed in complex dialogue with scholastic traditions. Fischer’s folkways are cultural as much as theological—the Borderlanders often had weak theological formation of any kind. What I’m tracing is not a single current but a confluence. The surface diversity masks the deep unity.

Nearly one hundred Cambridge men who grew up in Perkins’s shadow led early migrations to New England. They carried Ramist method and Neo-Stoic self-mastery across the Atlantic, institutionalized it in Harvard’s curriculum, and transmitted it to generations who never knew the names of the professors whose assumptions they breathed.

The Borderers who crossed to Appalachia via Charleston and Philadelphia carried a different version of the same formation: centuries of violence, suspicion of all authority, fierce clan loyalty. The planters who came through Charleston to Louisiana carried yet another: hegemonic liberty, the right to rule without interference, autonomy sustained by the labor of the enslaved.

Different folkways. Same grammar. The surface diversity masks the deep unity.

To understand how the mutations I’ve traced became the form of faith that could pass Bible quizzes while experiencing Jesus’s Jewishness as blasphemy, I need to trace the specific folkways that carried Pharaoh grammar to American shores.

That’s the story of the next essay.

CODA

Before returning to the main arc this week, I paused briefly for a few short riffs. They weren’t detours so much as ways of staying regulated while working through the material that led to this essay.

If you need them, they’re there:

• Riff: The Data We Create by Looking — on how systems of evidence can remain rigorously blind to the suffering they exclude, and why that blindness matters for everything that follows.

• Riff: Make the Coffee Slowly — a pastoral pause on regulation, kindness, and staying human when fury feels justified but corrosive.

• Riff: The Art of Fugue and the Art of Staying Human — on music, presence, and the practices that help us remain capable of faithful action amid moral overload.

None of these are prerequisites for this essay. They’re simply companions, offered for those moments when the work asks more than you have capacity to carry all at once.

The Series

This essay belongs to Jazz, Shame, and Being With—a twenty-essay arc tracing shame and pride from neurobiology through theology to political formation. If you’ve been reading along, you know where we’ve been. If you’re new, or if you’d like to see the architecture of where this is heading, the Reader’s Guide maps the full journey. Every essay is a real door. Start anywhere that calls to you.

ENDNOTES

Every morning I wake up to news of state-sanctioned violence—deportations, cruelty disguised as policy, the deliberate dismantling of what we’ve built together. And I feel this tightness in my chest, this urge to DO something. To make signs. To march. To fix it.

But here’s what I’m finally learning late in life: when I’m hijacked by outrage—when my body is screaming FIGHT and part of me just wants to curl up and give up—I can’t think clearly. I just react. And my reactions usually make things worse, not better.

So my first step isn’t the protest (though that may come). My first step is getting myself settled enough to remember who I am—a Jesus follower—and what that identity actually calls me to do. Sometimes faithful action means acting before I’m perfectly calm. But I at least need to know whether I’m acting from the true story I’ve been given or just from the false story my triggers keep telling me.

I’ve written before about my little coffee ritual. How grinding beans by hand every morning settles something in me. The repetitive motion, the sound, the smell—it all brings me back into my body, back into the present moment, back into something like peace.

But I’ve discovered something else recently that does this for me even more powerfully.

Bach’s Art of Fugue.

I can’t believe I’d never really listened to it before. It’s his final work, left unfinished when he died in 1750—the last fugue literally breaks off mid-phrase where death interrupted him. He didn’t even specify what instruments should play it. It’s pure musical architecture, mathematical precision made into art.

But here’s what happens when I listen to it: I hear these multiple voices, each singing their own song, each speaking truthfully and consistently, and somehow—impossibly—they’re all in harmony with each other. The technical term is counterpoint, but that word feels too small for what Bach achieves here. These voices don’t just coexist; they need each other. Each one makes the others more beautiful, more themselves.

And when I hear it, something shifts in me.

The tightness in my chest eases. My view becomes less cloudy. The darkness that threatened to overwhelm me is penetrated by light—not the light of easy answers or quick fixes, but the light of what humans are capable of when we’re at our best.

This is what we were made for. Life together where different voices sing truthfully, consistently, in harmony. Where we don’t have to choose between being ourselves and being in community. Where the ensemble makes each individual voice more beautiful, not less.

That’s the art of fugue. And it’s also, I think, the art of being human together.

I’m not naive. Bach’s fugue doesn’t stop deportations or restrain autocrats. And honestly? Some mornings I can’t hear it. The darkness is too thick, the news too brutal, and I’m too dysregulated to receive what Bach is offering. Those mornings I just have to sit with the grief and the rage and trust that the capacity to hear will return.

But on the mornings when I can hear it, the fugue reminds me that beauty is real, that human flourishing is possible, that we’ve done this before and we can do it again. It opens space for me to think about what faithfulness actually requires of me right now.

Maybe that’s protest. Maybe it’s something else. But whatever it is, I want to arrive at it from who I’ve been made to be rather than my reactive fury. From hope rather than despair. From the story I’ve been given rather than the one my panic tells.

So this morning, I’m commending The Art of Fugue to you. Right now I’m savoring the Emerson String Quartet version, though sometimes I prefer organ or piano. However you can find it. Let those voices wash over you. Let them show you what we were made for. Be present to what they’re offering—some mornings you’ll hear it clearly, some mornings you won’t.

But I’m also curious—what does this for you? What music, what art, what practices help your community stay grounded enough to act faithfully? Because I don’t think this is just about individual rituals. I think we need to be discovering together what forms us, what steadies us, what keeps us connected to who we are when everything around us is trying to tell us otherwise.

We need every one of us thinking as clearly as we can right now. We need every one of us remembering who we are—and remembering it together.

The darkness is real. But so is the light.

And, for me these days, sometimes the light comes through Bach.

This week’s news makes me angry and sad and slightly unhinged, and I can feel my nervous system wanting to spin into catastrophe.

My wife asked me this morning what we should do with all this fury and grief. And I heard myself say: We must double down on kindness.

We cannot respond to evil with the same friend-enemy dichotomy it wants us to inhabit. We cannot meet force with force and think we’re doing something different. The people who see power and strength as the fundamental reality of the world—they want us to join them in that story. They want us to prove their point by becoming what we oppose.

So it matters more than ever that we embody forbearance. Patience. Charity. Not because these virtues are weak or naïve, but because they’re the only things that actually heal.

And before we can do any of that for others, we have to do it for ourselves.

Today I put on my nervous system playlist—actual lullabies and soothing tones that quite literally caress the agitated parts of my brain. Lots of John Rutter these days. I slowed myself down. I performed the small liturgy of making my café au lait and my wife’s chai.

I felt the coffee grounds between my fingers. I smelled their aroma. I watched the gases emerge when the hot water bubbled through. I heard the music of my spoon as I mixed milk and brew together. These small rituals ground me in something bigger than the evil that demands all my attention.

It’s not just my window of tolerance that needs care right now—it’s my window of perspective. When I’m dysregulated, the current moment becomes the whole of reality. I catastrophize. I confuse these awful things with allthings.

But when I’m grounded—when I’m held by these small physical rituals—I remember a different story. I remember God’s steadfast love. I remember specific moments of provision and beauty in my own life. That memory heals the fog clouding my vision.

The rituals ground me, and hope returns. Still moving, I find myself resting in God’s love.

This is what I know how to do today. Make coffee slowly. Listen to lullabies. Remember that God has been faithful before and will be faithful again.

Choose kindness, especially when everything in me wants to choose fury. It’s not much. But it’s what I have. And maybe it’s enough to walk again.

If you’re struggling too, I’m with you. Make the coffee slowly. Remember the good. Choose the small embodied kindnesses that reconnect you to something larger than the horror.

We walk together.

This piece is about a grammar we rarely name — how what we look at becomes “data,” and how entire forms of suffering disappear when no one is watching.

If that sounds abstract, the story that follows is not.

This week the CDC overhauled the childhood vaccine schedule, cutting routine recommendations for six diseases based on what experts say is a misreading of Danish data. The same week, a senior White House official explained the administration’s posture toward Greenland and Venezuela: “We live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

The iron laws of the world since the beginning of time. That’s one grammar.

My wife is a gynecologic oncologist. Each day she treats women—often poor, often uninsured, often showing up late because they couldn’t access care—dying of cancers a vaccine could have prevented. Some argued with her about vaccination even as COVID took them during treatment—or took the family members who were their lifeline through it. Not because they were stupid, but because wealthy ideologues had spent years teaching them to distrust the very system that might have saved them. The propaganda of the comfortable becomes the death sentence of the vulnerable. And when the vulnerable die outside the system, they don’t appear in the data that would indict the propaganda.

If you’ve been following the series, you’ll recognize the themes—Sage and Saint—ESSAY 9, the shame-pride architecture—ESSAY 6, forbearance—ESSAY 2 , the Pharaoh economics—ESSAY 8 underneath. If you’re new here, welcome to the middle of a conversation. The links should help you find your way back to earlier movements if you want them.

A few years ago, I learned something about crime statistics that changed how I think about evidence.

Criminologists have long understood that “reported crime” and “actual crime” are different things. When you increase police presence in a neighborhood, you detect more offenses. The data then shows “more crime” in that area, which seems to justify the increased policing that generated the data in the first place. The measurement changes what gets measured.

This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a structural feature of how detection works. A broken taillight in one neighborhood leads to a stop, a search, a drug charge, a data point. The same broken taillight in another neighborhood leads to nothing—no stop, no search, no charge, no data. Multiply this by millions of interactions, and you get statistical patterns that appear to reveal something about the neighborhoods themselves rather than about the distribution of attention.

I’ve been thinking about this lately because I keep encountering arguments that follow a similar structure in completely different domains.

When Measurement Creates the Problem It Claims to Find

Consider the question of whether some intervention—a medical treatment, a policy, a practice—causes harm. One way to study this is to compare people who received the intervention to people who didn’t and see which group has more problems.

The immediate difficulty: people who receive interventions and people who don’t are usually different in systematic ways before the intervention. They differ in how often they interact with institutions that detect and record problems. They differ in resources, geography, education, and dozens of other factors that influence outcomes independently.

What I’ve been noticing is the direction this bias runs. The poor and marginalized are simultaneously more vulnerable to disease and harm and less visible in the data that records it. They’re excluded from the healthcare ecosystem by cost, by geography, by immigration status, by the justified distrust that centuries of medical exploitation have earned. They get sick and suffer and die—but not in ways that generate data points, because they never entered the system that would record their suffering.

So when you compare an “intervention group” to a “non-intervention group,” you’re often comparing a population whose problems are fully captured by the healthcare system against a population whose suffering is structurally invisible. The intervention group’s harms appear in the dataset. The non-intervention group’s harms never existed as far as the data is concerned—not because the harms didn’t happen, but because no one was watching when they did.

The populations rendered invisible aren’t random. They’re structured by intersecting systems—race, class, geography, documentation status, disability, historical trauma. The invisible denominator has a demographic profile. And sophisticated statistical analysis, applied to this structurally biased data, produces what looks like rigorous finding but is really rigorous laundering of the original bias.

The machinery is elegant, I’ll grant. We’ve constructed measurement systems exquisitely calibrated to detect the problems of those we were already watching while remaining perfectly blind to the suffering of those we’d prefer not to see—and then we congratulate ourselves on our empiricism.

Long ago, in what now feels like another life, I had a career in economics and business that gave me the chops to deploy those statistical tools. I can still appreciate elegant methodology when I see it. But the most important thing I learned in all those years of quantitative analysis wasn’t a technique. It was a phrase: garbage in, garbage out. Rigor in analysis cannot compensate for bias in data collection. You can calculate precisely with numbers that don’t mean what you think they mean.

The technical vocabulary can actually obscure this. Someone might list impressive-sounding methods—Cox proportional hazards, chi-square tests, multivariate regression—and conclude that because the analysis was rigorous, the findings must be valid. But rigor deployed on biased data produces rigorous bias, not truth. And when the bias systematically undercounts the suffering of the marginalized while fully capturing the problems of the visible, the “finding” will systematically favor conclusions that let us off the hook for solidarity.

When Inquiry Becomes Performance

What interests me isn’t the technical debate in any particular domain. It’s the question of how we know when we’re actually inquiring versus when we’re performing inquiry while seeking confirmation.

Genuine inquiry has a particular structure. It requires asking: What would I expect to see if I were wrong? It means actively searching for evidence that might disconfirm what you’re inclined to believe, not just collecting evidence that supports it.

The philosopher of science Karl Popper called this falsifiability—the idea that a claim is only scientific if you can specify what would prove it false. But falsifiability isn’t just a criterion for theories; it’s a disposition of the inquirer. Am I actually open to being wrong, or am I constructing an elaborate architecture of apparent rigor around a conclusion I reached before I started?

There are tells. The person who announces “I take no position” and then spends the next hour explaining why one side is obviously winning has taken a position—they’ve just learned that certainty sounds more respectable when dressed in the vocabulary of open-mindedness. The framing that treats one view as needing to “help us out” while the other is simply “what the evidence shows” has already done the work that argument was supposed to do. Methodological objections flourish when findings are unwelcome and evaporate when findings confirm. And counter-evidence gets diagnosed as conspiracy with a speed that suggests the diagnosis was prepared before the evidence arrived.

These are the marks of what we might call inquiry theater—the performance of open-minded investigation in the service of foregone conclusions. The theater can be quite elaborate. The production values are often excellent. But theater it remains, and what it reveals is not the truth about the question but the truth about the performer: that something more than evidence is at stake, and that something has already settled the matter.

This is a lot of ground, and it’s okay if the technical details are starting to blur. What matters isn’t the vocabulary, but the question underneath it: why some forms of suffering never register as claims on us at all. If we miss that, everything that follows will sound abstract. If we see it, the rest begins to make sense.

Why This Matters

I notice this pattern across domains that have become identity-marked. Positions on contested questions become badges of tribal belonging, and what looks like debate about evidence is actually negotiation of social identity. The vocabulary of science or scholarship or reason gets deployed, but it’s operating according to a different logic—the logic of group loyalty and self-definition.

Theological language has surprised me with its usefulness here.

The Christian tradition I inhabit has a word for the state of being curved in on oneself, unable to receive correction from outside: incurvatus in se—ESSAY 7. Luther used it to describe sin—the fundamental curvature that bends everything, including our best efforts, back toward self-reference. I’ve been discovering how the phrase applies not just morally but epistemologically too. There’s a kind of intellectual self-enclosure where we become incapable of genuine inquiry because our conclusions are load-bearing for our identity. To be wrong would be to lose ourselves.

I’ve been writing elsewhere about shame and pride—ESSAY 6, and I’ve come to see that what happens in contested public debates has deep roots in how our nervous systems work. Shame, the neuroscience tells us, operates like firmware—it fires in milliseconds through subcortical circuits, below the level of conscious thought. Pride, by contrast, is more like software—something that gets constructed over years through relational experience.

This asymmetry matters. When a position becomes identity-bound, when being wrong about it triggers not just intellectual discomfort but that deeper firmware response of shame, we’re no longer dealing with a disagreement that better evidence can resolve. The nervous system narrows what I’ve been calling the river—ESSAY 6—the range within which we can actually think, stay present, and remain open to correction. Outside that river, threat responses dominate. We defend. We attack. We shut down. But we don’t learn.

Augustine—ESSAY 7 saw this clearly centuries ago. He distinguished between amor sui—the curved-inward love that makes the self its own ultimate reference point—and caritas sui—proper self-care that flows from first being loved by something beyond ourselves. The first generates what we might call hubristic pride: defensive, comparative, needing to outperform others to feel secure. The second generates authentic pride: grounded in reception, capable of genuine contribution precisely because it isn’t scrambling for worth.

Hubristic pride cannot receive. That’s its structure. To receive would be to admit dependence, which threatens the whole defensive architecture. So we take, we acquire, we even accept—but we cannot receive in the way that acknowledges we might be wrong, might need correction, might learn something that destabilizes what we thought we knew.

Two Grammars of Selfhood

But there’s something even deeper than the shame-pride dynamics—a grammar of selfhood that determines whether solidarity even registers as intelligible, or whether it arrives already coded as offense.

Two grammars—ESSAY 9 use the same vocabulary but mean opposite things:

One grammar—call it the Sage—understands the self as self-constructed through discipline. Freedom means freedom from externals: from interference, from claims others might make, from vulnerability itself. The goal is an inner citadel, a fortress of autonomy where no outside force can compel me. Worth comes through achievement, through what I’ve made of myself by my own effort.

The other grammar—call it the Saint—understands the self as received through participation. Freedom means freedom for love and service. Vulnerability isn’t weakness but the very site where grace enters. Worth comes not through performance but through belonging—through being held in relationships I didn’t earn and can’t control.

The irony of the Sage’s inner citadel is that it’s a prison with the lock on the inside. We’ve decorated it so tastefully that we’ve forgotten we can’t leave. Freedom from turns out to mean freedom from connection, freedom from vulnerability, freedom from the relationships that might actually make life worth living. The Stoic achievement of needing nothing from anyone is indistinguishable from the tragedy of having no one who needs you. Call it autonomy if you like. Loneliness is the more honest word.

Under Sage grammar, any external claim on me is categorically offensive. Not because I can’t afford it, but because it constitutes interference with my self-constructed autonomy. The request itself violates who I am.

This is why masking for others feels like tyranny rather than love. Why vaccinating for community health registers as imposition rather than participation. Why funding schools for all children—not just the children of my tribe—feels like theft rather than investment in shared flourishing.

Notice the achievement here. It takes considerable formation to experience a request to protect the vulnerable as an assault on your freedom. The Sage grammar has accomplished something remarkable: it has made care feel like violence and selfishness feel like liberty. We have worked hard to reach the point where “love your neighbor” sounds like oppression.

Under Saint grammar, these same requests aren’t offenses at all. They’re invitations to participate in what I was made for. If my worth comes through belonging rather than achievement, if freedom means freedom for rather than freedom from, then bearing cost for others’ sake isn’t diminishment—it’s fulfillment.

Why Solidarity Stops Making Sense

The theologian John Bowlin—ESSAY 2 makes a distinction I’ve found clarifying. Forbearance, properly understood, isn’t just patience or tolerance. It’s the charitable endurance of offense for the sake of love and reconciliation. It’s bearing injury without excusing wrong, staying in relationship, trusting that repair is possible.

Forbearance is what makes common life sustainable. It’s how we remain in community despite real wrongs. But forbearance is structurally inaccessible under Sage grammar.

If I’ve defined my selfhood as the absence of external claims, then to practice forbearance—to bear offense for love’s sake—would be to surrender the autonomous self I’ve labored to construct. The Sage cannot forbear because forbearing would mean letting an external reality make claims that the fortress was built to refuse.

And this is where the data problem and the forbearance problem converge.

The Sage grammar needs the invisible denominator. It needs not to see the marginalized dying outside the healthcare system, needs not to see the children failed by defunded schools, needs not to see the vulnerable harmed by the solidarity we refused. Because if we saw them—really saw them—their suffering would make a claim. And claims are what the constructed self was built to repel.

This is the dark comedy of the sovereign self: it must construct elaborate systems of not-seeing in order to maintain the fiction that it owes nothing to anyone. The autonomous individual turns out to require enormous social infrastructure to sustain the illusion of independence. We are radically dependent on the invisibility of those whose visibility would reveal our dependence.

This is why inquiry theater isn’t innocent. The performance of rigorous investigation that systematically undercounts certain suffering isn’t just bad methodology. It’s moral architecture. It’s building the epistemic conditions under which we never have to practice forbearance because we’ve arranged not to see the offenses we’re committing.

The structure is ingenious, really. First, define freedom as the absence of claims. Then, construct measurement systems that render invisible the people whose suffering would constitute claims. Then, produce “findings” from these systems that appear to justify the original refusal of solidarity. Finally, accuse anyone who questions the findings of being anti-science. The citadel builds itself, and calls the construction evidence-based.

Why Detachment Isn’t the Cure

The alternative isn’t neutrality or detachment. Everyone has commitments, priors, communities that shape what we notice and how we interpret it. The question is whether those commitments make us defensive or curious, whether they close us off from correction or open us to it.

I think about the difference between holding a position and being held by one. When I hold a position, I can examine it, stress-test it, let go of it if the evidence requires. When a position holds me—when my identity is invested in it—I’ll construct elaborate defenses against any evidence that threatens it.

The data that confirm me I’ll scrutinize charitably. The data that challenge me I’ll scrutinize skeptically. I’ll deploy methodological objections selectively—rigorous when encountering uncongenial findings, credulous when encountering congenial ones. And I’ll do all of this while believing myself to be simply following the evidence.

The theological tradition offers a diagnostic here: check for gratitude. Can I receive? Can I be genuinely thankful when someone shows me I was wrong, or do I experience correction as threat? Aquinas—ESSAY 7 called gratitude “a debt of love from which no man should wish to be free.” The phrase stuck with me—not least because we have made debt a curse word. The entire trajectory of modern freedom has been toward the cancellation of debts, the escape from obligation, the construction of a self that owes nothing to anyone. We have achieved the remarkable feat of making Aquinas’s vision of flourishing sound like servitude.

Aquinas saw what we’ve forgotten: the person who wishes to be free of the debt of gratitude has misunderstood not just ethics but reality. The self organized around refusing obligation cannot welcome debt, cannot bear the vulnerability of having been helped, must maintain the fiction of autonomous competence. And so it mistakes its bondage for freedom, its isolation for independence, its poverty for wealth.

Learning How to Be Wrong Together

We don’t escape these grammars by thinking better or choosing the right side.

We escape them by learning how to see—and how to stay—with what our seeing reveals.

The question underneath this riff isn’t whether we have biases. We all do.

The question is whether we’re willing to notice what our attention makes visible—and what it allows to disappear.

That willingness is not neutrality. It’s humility. And it’s the condition for any truth that might actually change us.

Next week, we return to the main movement—back to the cracks in the dikes, and to what presses through them when control finally fails.

Dear friends—

Here’s the short version: many of us learned Christian vocabulary while being formed by a very different grammar—one that prizes self-sufficiency, mastery, and the quiet confidence that we have figured something out. This essay names that grammar, traces where it came from, and shows why it has proven so resilient inside Christian life.

This essay is not about exposing hypocrisy or scoring a theological point. It’s about a formation problem that operates below the level of belief. I know this grammar intimately because it formed me. I learned to speak of grace, participation, and communion while something else was quietly training my body. The result wasn’t bad faith. It was a mismatch—Christian words carried by logics the tradition once worked very hard to resist.

If that already feels uncomfortably familiar, good. Stay with me. The goal of this essay is not to shame recognition but to slow us down long enough to see what the early church saw coming—and what they built to form something different.

What follows begins with a figure you may recognize.

Watch him walk in.

Shoulders back. Smile ready. He knows who he is—a man who’s built something, who’s disciplined himself, who’s earned his place. He’s a good Christian. Ask him. He’ll tell you. His faith is strong. His family is intact. His opinions are correct. And if you disagree, well, that’s your problem.

The ancient Stoics would recognize him immediately. They’d call him a Sage. The Gnostics would recognize him too—he knows who’s in and who’s out, and he’s certain he’s figured it out. What the early church would have recognized is harder to say. They spent centuries fighting both formations. They didn’t expect them to merge.

I recognized him because I’ve been him. For years I walked into church with that same set to my shoulders, that same quiet certainty that I had figured something out. PhD in theology. Rector of Episcopal parishes. I knew the vocabulary of grace, participation, communion. What I didn’t know was that my practices were forming something else entirely.

This essay is about the grammar underneath—and what the early church understood that took me decades to learn. They saw him coming. They knew the threat. And they built practices and institutions designed to form something different: not Sages but Saints. Not the self-sufficient and the sorted, but the received and the vulnerable.

For over a thousand years, those practices held. Not perfectly—the tensions were there from the beginning, the resignification never complete. But the dikes held. The sea pressed, and the land stayed dry.

I want to show you what they built and why it mattered. Because I received the vocabulary without the practices that made it mean what it was supposed to mean. Somewhere between their achievement and my formation, the conditions changed. The pressures shifted. What had been held in place was released.

That’s a longer story—one that winds through wars and councils, through professors nobody remembers now and the families who absorbed their ideas without ever reading them. It crosses an ocean and arrives, eventually, at a plantation on Bayou Boeuf where my mother’s family owned what they should never have owned—and at Sunday dinners where I was being formed before I knew it. This essay is the first movement: what was at stake, and what was built to protect it.

Maybe by the end, you’ll start to see what I’m seeing—why he keeps walking in, shoulders back, smile ready, and why he’s exactly the kind of Christian our common life knows how to produce.

Maybe in yourself.

The Grammar Before the Mutation

In the last essay, I traced the economy of manna—God’s strange pedagogy in the wilderness where yesterday’s provision couldn’t be hoarded and tomorrow’s worry was forbidden. What I didn’t say explicitly was what that economy was forming.

It was forming Saints.

Not saints in the Hallmark sense—people who are especially nice or unusually pious. Saints in the technical sense: persons whose identity is received rather than constructed, whose security comes from belonging rather than achieving, whose vulnerability is the site where grace operates rather than weakness to be overcome.

The ancient church developed vocabulary for this. They called the goal koinonia—communion, participation, being-with. They contrasted it with autarkeia—self-sufficiency, the inner citadel, the fortress self that needs nothing from outside.

Here’s where I have to confess something embarrassing.

I spent decades in Christian formation—seminary, ordination, parish ministry, doctoral work in Christian ethics—and for most of it, I was being formed in the wrong grammar. I knew the vocabulary of manna. I preached about receiving, about gift, about grace. But my practices were forming something else: achievement, self-construction, proving my worth through what I could master and control.

I was learning the words while operating in a different logic entirely.

Let me make this concrete with a simple table—a diagnostic I’ll return to throughout this essay:

I know this theology in my bones now. Receive, rest, contribute. The manna economy. And I still obstruct it every day. (You probably do too. We should talk.)

But here’s the problem: the early Jesus movement didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It emerged in a world where another vision of human flourishing was already dominant—and that vision looked remarkably similar in some ways, devastatingly different in others.

Within a few centuries, the church would also have to navigate an even older temptation: the grammar of Pharaoh wearing philosophical clothes.

When Jesus-Followers Met Stoics

The Grammar We Were Meant to Inherit

The Only Manna We Keep handed us a grammar worthy of creatures who live by gift. Augustine showed us the heart that can only rest by receiving; the Cappadocians revealed a God whose very life is shared rather than seized; Aquinas let humility and magnanimity grow together like roots and branches; Luther warned us how quickly the self collapses when it tries to become its own foundation. Taken together, these voices describe a single way of being in the world: identity is received, agency is participatory, and pride becomes ordered only when communion is its ground.

I didn’t know any of this at twenty-one. Just after I got engaged, I entered what I now sheepishly call my Ayn Rand phase. I was an economics major at Annapolis at the beginning of the Reagan revolution, indoctrinated into what we now name as neoliberal economics—Milton Friedman, the Chicago School, markets as salvation. My supreme exemplar wasn’t Jesus of Nazareth. It was John Galt: unencumbered, unashamed, answerable to no claim he had not chosen. I recited the Creeds and inhaled the wafer and wine on Sundays with my fiancée, and Monday through Saturday I imitated John Galt as the human ideal. Appeals to altruism? That was the moral language of control—how the weak manipulated the strong.

It was a vision of freedom that felt heroic, even salvific, precisely because it asked nothing of me I had not already decided to give.

Christian imagination was never meant to begin with the self constructing itself. It was meant to begin with the self held—steadied by a love that precedes striving, liberated by a belonging that does not require achievement. From this foundation, the great risks of life, the creative work of contribution, even the courage of leadership, become acts of gratitude rather than bids for justification.

This was the grammar the tradition entrusted to us, the one in which humility and courage, dependence and agency, vulnerability and strength were not opposites but neighbors. It names a life in which the creature does not shrink in false modesty nor inflate in anxiety, but stands upright in the radiance of a gift already given.

And it is precisely this grammar that the modern West forgot.

The Shared Ground

The early Jesus movement emerged in a Stoic-saturated world. When Paul arrived in Athens and encountered philosophers at the Areopagus, when educated Romans considered this strange new Jewish sect, when the early apologists tried to explain what the assemblies believed—Stoicism was the cultural furniture of the empire.

And here’s what makes this complicated: Jesus-followers and Stoics shared massive common ground. Both traditions cared about virtue. Both thought the good life required wisdom. Both believed in a logos—a rational principle ordering the cosmos. Both emphasized moral seriousness, self-examination, preparation for death.

An educated Roman encountering the Jesus movement might have thought: “These people are Stoics who got confused about one particular Jew.”

The Stoics would have understood Pharaoh’s logic perfectly. Not the cruelty—Stoics weren’t cruel; Marcus Aurelius wasn’t Rameses. But the grammar underneath: you construct your worth through what you achieve. The Sage builds an inner citadel. The Sage needs nothing from outside. The Sage is self-sufficient.

This is Pharaoh in Greek dress. Same song. Different instruments.

What “Grammar” Means

When I say “grammar,” I don’t mean rules for constructing sentences. I mean something deeper—the logic that determines how words actually work.1

Think about the word “freedom.” In one logic, freedom means freedom from—escape from constraint, independence, self-sufficiency. The goal is a fortress self, impervious to external threat.

In another logic, freedom means freedom for—capacity for love, availability for relationship, openness to the other. The goal is communion, participation, vulnerability that enables connection.

Same word. Different logics underneath. And the logic determines what the word does when you use it.

Phrase Book vs. Immersion

Imagine taking a phrase book to France. You memorize the phrases. You can order coffee, ask directions, express gratitude. Anyone listening would hear French words coming out of your mouth.

But you’re not thinking in French. You’re thinking in English, then translating. The grammar underneath—the way concepts relate, the logic of how meaning is made—that’s still English. You have French vocabulary operating within English grammar.

This is what can happen when traditions encounter each other. And it’s what I’m increasingly convinced happened to me.

For years I used Christian vocabulary—grace, participation, communion—while operating within a different grammar entirely. The grammar of achievement. Of self-construction. Of proving my worth through what I could master and control.

The question isn’t whether early Jesus-followers borrowed vocabulary from Stoicism. Of course they did. (Everyone borrows; that’s how language works.) The question is whether they successfully resignified that vocabulary—transformed it so thoroughly that it operated within Christian grammar—or whether the old meanings persisted underneath, waiting.

A Necessary Caveat

I need to be careful here. It would be easy to caricature Stoicism as purely about the inner fortress—individual self-mastery divorced from community. But Marcus Aurelius wasn’t meditating in a cave; he was governing an empire. Stoic philosophy had communal, political, and relational dimensions that I shouldn’t flatten.

The question isn’t whether Stoicism was “bad”—it was a serious attempt to live well, and many of its practitioners exhibited genuine virtue. The question is whether Christian resignification actually transformed the grammar, or whether the Stoic grammar persisted underneath the Christian vocabulary. And whether—when the practices that sustained resignification weakened—the old meanings flooded back.

The Resignification Concept

Here’s what I’m learning from scholars who study how language works: when communities borrow words from other traditions, they don’t just transplant vocabulary. They attempt to transform the meaning—to make the word serve new purposes within a new story.

The technical term is resignification: taking an existing term loaded with established meaning and redeploying it in a new context where it acquires new significance.

But—and this is crucial—resignification is never complete. When you borrow a word, the old meaning doesn’t disappear. It persists within the new usage, like a palimpsest where earlier writing shows through.

The Philippians Gambit

Watch Paul try it.

When he writes to the Philippians, “I have learned to be content [autarkēs] whatever the circumstances... I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Phil 4:11-13), he’s not inventing a new word. He’s borrowing a term loaded with Stoic freight—the sage is self-sufficient, virtue alone suffices for happiness, you need nothing from outside—and attempting to resignify it.

Paul’s move is audacious: contentment comes not from Stoic self-mastery but from Christ’s power working through human weakness. The sufficiency is Christ’s, not his own. ‘I can do all things’ becomes the opposite of what it sounds like—not a boast but a confession of dependence.

This is resignification as it’s supposed to work. The vocabulary stays; the logic transforms.

But here’s the question Paul couldn’t answer from Philippi: What happens when readers don’t catch the flip? What happens when the Stoic freight persists underneath the Christian usage, waiting?

What the Next Generations Heard

Paul intended the flip. But intention doesn’t guarantee reception.

Within two centuries, you can watch the borrowed vocabulary straining against its new home. The church’s brightest minds attempted the same resignification Paul had modeled—and the results were uneven.

Clement of Alexandria is a revealing case. He hoped philosophy could serve faith, that Stoic moral seriousness might steady Christian life. But certain Stoic habits resisted baptism. The Stoics prized apatheia—freedom from disturbance—as the mark of the wise. Clement tried to Christianize this ideal, urging believers not to be ruled by passions, yet the grammar he borrowed carried implications he could not fully purge.2

In his Stromata, Clement describes even Christ as ‘entirely impassible, inaccessible to any movement of feeling’—eating not from bodily need but only to prevent onlookers from thinking him phantasmal. (Let that sink in: Christ performing hunger for optics. The incarnation as PR strategy.)

Here the crack opens: if perfection means transcending emotion, then vulnerability becomes deficiency, need becomes weakness, and the God who weeps at Lazarus’s tomb starts to look like a concession rather than a revelation.

Clement did not intend this. But the echo lingered.

The same tension appears in Justin Martyr, the church’s first great apologist. Justin embraced the Stoic concept of logos spermatikos—seeds of reason scattered throughout creation—arguing that philosophers like Socrates and Heraclitus had participated in the Logos before Christ’s coming.3 The move was generous and strategically brilliant: it claimed the best of Greek thought for the church.

But the Stoic logos was cosmic order, an impersonal rational structure governing all things by necessity. Justin’s grammar conversion was real—he insisted that Jesus Christ is the Logos, not merely an instance of it—yet the borrowed vocabulary carried traces of its origin. When providence sounds like rational architecture rather than personal address, when cosmic order substitutes for covenantal love, virtue quietly becomes alignment with structure rather than response to a summons.

The pattern recurred wherever borrowed grammar outpaced converted meaning.

I know because I lived it. At naval nuclear power school, my skipper’s Bible study introduced me to Logos—”In the beginning was the Word” rendered as rational order, cosmic structure, the principle that governed the universe. I didn’t hear John’s gospel. I heard ancient validation of what I was already becoming: homo economicus, the rational optimizer, unencumbered by irrational claims. Jesus became John Galt with a beard.

Maybe Justin’s logos spermatikos was always vulnerable to this. Or maybe I just heard what I was tuned to hear.

Paul flipped autarkeia. Clement couldn’t fully flip apatheia. Justin strained to flip logos. The resignification project was real—but incomplete.

None of this displaced the ancient grammar. Most of the time the tradition corrected itself with remarkable grace—later Fathers like Maximus the Confessor would explicitly address these tensions, distinguishing natural passions (which Christ assumed) from disordered ones (which he healed).4 But the fault lines remained. The patristic inheritance was not a seamless cloth but a tapestry stitched over earlier frameworks that occasionally strained under the weight of Christian claims.

Whenever the impulse toward self-mastery was not fully transfigured—whenever courage drifted toward stoic resolve rather than magnanimity, or serenity toward emotional detachment—the grammar wavered.

At the time, these tensions felt minor. They were the ordinary complexities of a living tradition. Yet history shows that if an anthropology compatible with the Way is not defended with clarity, another anthropology eventually takes its place. Stoicism waited patiently in the wings—admired for its rigor, respected for its discipline, compelling in its confidence. It offered an alternative vision: a world where the self stands upright through achievement rather than gift, mastery rather than mercy.

These early fractures did not yet redefine Christian identity. But they created the conditions in which a more thorough Stoicization could one day take root.

The Reclamation Metaphor

Here’s the image that helps me understand why this keeps happening:

The Dutch reclaimed land from the sea. They built dikes, installed pumps, maintained constant vigilance. The land they created is real—you can farm it, build on it, live on it.

But the sea never left. It’s always there, always pressing. Stop maintaining the dikes, and the sea doesn’t negotiate. It just comes home.

The early Jesus-followers reclaimed vocabulary from the Stoic sea. They resignified apatheia, autarkeia, logos—built new meaning on what had been Stoic territory. The resignification was real.

But the Stoic meanings never left. They persisted as traces within the resignified terms, always pressing.

The dikes were practices. Weekly Eucharist. Creedal confession. Catechesis. Virtue formation in community. These held the resignification in place.

When practices weakened—when the dikes weren’t maintained, when the pumps stopped—the sea reclaimed the land.

The Contemporary Collapse

This is how you get prosperity gospel preachers quoting “I can do all things through Christ” as a self-help mantra for achievement. No one converted to Stoicism. The resignification just... failed to hold.

The vocabulary stayed Christian (the land still has Dutch names). But the operative logic drifted back toward Stoic patterns (the sea is back). No dramatic conversion event. Just gradual re-inundation.

Paul’s intended flip—”I can do all things because of Christ who strengthens me”—became the Stoic original: “I can do all things through my own empowered effort.” Same words. The grammar reverted.

The Diagnostic: Circumstances and Consequences

So how do you detect mutation if the vocabulary stays the same?

Here’s a reframing that cuts through: when you use a word or concept, ask two questions:

Circumstances: When and where do you apply it?

Consequences: What follows from applying it?

Stoics and Jesus-followers both have the concept “enemy.” But post-Sermon on the Mount, the consequences of applying that concept diverge dramatically. For the Stoic: rational management, emotional indifference. For the Jesus-follower: love, prayer, non-retaliation.

The mutation shows up not in whether you have the concept but in what follows when you apply it. Same vocabulary, different consequences.

The Stoics weren’t the only alternative pattern Jesus-followers encountered. There was another, perhaps more seductive, that attacked the very foundation of incarnational faith—not just bodies in general, but one body in particular.

When Bodies Don’t Matter

The Gnostic Challenge

I know Christians who weep at movies about refugees. They feel the injustice. They grieve the suffering. They identify as compassionate people.

Then they vote for policies that cage children at the border.

For years I couldn’t make sense of this. How could someone hold both? Were they hypocrites? Did they not see the contradiction?

It took me a long time to realize: there is no contradiction—if you’re operating within a certain grammar. A grammar where what you believe and what you do occupy different registers entirely. Where your heart can be in the right place even if your practices tell a different story.

The ancient church had a name for this grammar. They called it Gnosticism. And they fought it tooth and nail.

But here’s what I’ve only recently understood: the spirit/matter dualism that the Gnostics taught—the idea that bodies don’t ultimately matter—wasn’t the engine of their heresy. It was the justification for something more fundamental.

The engine was what theologian J. Kameron Carter calls covenantal severance: abstracting Christ from his Jewish, covenantal flesh.5

Universal Solvent vs. Particular Covenant

Think of a universal solvent—a hypothetical substance that can dissolve any container you put it in. The problem, of course, is that you can’t actually store it anywhere. Whatever you put it in, it destroys.

Gnosticism functions like a universal solvent on Christ’s particularity. It dissolves the scandal of incarnation—that God chose this people, spoke this language, was born of this woman, was crucified under this political authority. Gnosticism says: all of that is accidental. The real Christ is spiritual, universal, above all that messy particularity.

But when you dissolve Christ’s particularity, you also dissolve the container that gives the Way its shape. What remains can be poured into any container—any cultural hierarchy, any power arrangement, any system that needs religious legitimation.

The ancient Gnostics poured it into a hierarchy of spiritual natures: pneumatics, psychics, hylics. Some people are saved by what they are, not by covenant relationship with God.

Carter names the theological root: covenantal severance. I want to name what it produces operationally.

First, what I’ll call the supersessionist standard: a supposedly universal criterion of belonging that just happens to ensure a targeted group always fails—justifying their exclusion. The Gnostic version worked like this: Create a purity test (spiritual nature). Frame it as universal (gnosis is available to the worthy). Ensure the targeted group fails (those bound to covenant, to matter, to particularity can never measure up). Use their “failure” to justify exclusion (they’re not spiritually capable).

The test looks fair. That’s the point. Anyone could be a pneumatic—it’s not officially about your ancestry or your body. But the criterion is designed so that certain people always fail. The institution that controls the “universal” standard gets to decide who’s in and who’s out.

Second, what this produces: dominative identity. Carter calls it “whiteness”—and his diagnosis is correct. But I want to name it differently, because the sin isn’t inscribed on bodies; it’s a story embraced. Dominative identity is the embrace of a false story in which a righteous “we,” defined by purity and possession, is threatened by a contaminating “them”—requiring defensive domination rather than vulnerable communion.

The supersessionist standard is how dominative identity gets enforced. Continuous marking of who fails the purity test maintains the “we.” Anyone can adopt this story. That’s what makes it so dangerous.

Centuries later, as Carter shows, the same dissolved Christ got poured into racial categories. Dominative identity became, in his devastating phrase, a “replacement doctrine of creation.”

And in our moment? I’m watching the same dissolved Christ get poured into competing containers of Dominative Christianism. “Real Christians” are defined not by participation in Christ’s covenantal flesh but by cultural markers, political allegiance, the right opinions.

The Gnostic mechanism hasn’t changed. Only the container.

Pharaoh’s Division Logic Applied to Humanity

Think about what Pharaoh did. He divided Israel: some were useful (skilled labor), some were disposable (male infants). He determined who counted. The institution—Pharaoh’s administration—decided who belonged and who didn’t.

The Gnostics did the same thing to humanity. Pneumatics at the top. Psychics in the middle. Hylics at the bottom. Some people saved by nature, others damned by nature. The division wasn’t based on anything you did—it was based on what you were.

And here’s the mechanism that made it possible: covenantal severance. Abstract Christ from his Jewish particularity, and you create a vacuum. Something has to fill it. For the Gnostics, it was spiritual hierarchy. For later centuries, it would be racial hierarchy, national hierarchy, whatever hierarchy the culture provides.

The Gnostic move wasn’t really about spirit versus matter. It was about who gets to determine belonging. Once you sever Christ from his particular covenant, the institution that controls the “universal” Christ gets to decide who’s in and who’s out.

Pharaoh would recognize this immediately.

Contemporary Recognition

I’m watching this happen again in real time. On both sides.

On the political right, there’s a concept circulating called “Heritage American”—the idea that how long your family has been in America determines how American you are. It sounds like patriotism. But listen to the grammar underneath: some people are more American by nature, by accident of birth, by ancestry. Others are formally included but culturally excluded.

On the progressive left—including academic theology—I encounter what I’ve come to call Providential Identitarianism. The framework sounds different: God has providentially established distinct cultural identities, and those identities determine who has authentic voice, who can speak with authority, who gets to adjudicate belonging. Some people have epistemic privilege by nature of their identity position. Others can be allies, can do the work—but can never speak with the same authority.

I recognize the second pattern because I’ve operated by it. In academic spaces, I’ve sorted people by identity category before listening to their arguments. I’ve assumed that position determined insight.

But here’s what I’ve had to face: the grammar is identical.

The Gnostic logic is precise: formal belonging at the bottom, cultural authority reserved for the elect at the top.

The ancient Gnostics called the elect “pneumatics”—those saved by spiritual nature. The contemporary right calls them “Heritage Americans.” The contemporary left calls them “authentically positioned voices”—and sometimes finds Jewish particularity itself an inconvenient complication in its moral calculus.6 7

Different containers, same dissolved Christ.

Mining vs. Gardening

Once you sever Christ from his Jewish particularity, the spirit/matter dualism follows naturally.

Think of two ways to approach a human being.

In one vision, humans are like ore. There’s something valuable inside—call it the soul, the spirit, the divine spark—trapped within worthless matter. The goal is extraction. Separate the valuable from the dross. Escape the prison of the body.

In the other vision, humans are like plants. Body and soul grow together, in relation to earth and sun and rain. You can’t extract the “real” plant from its material existence. The goal isn’t escape but flourishing. Cultivation, not mining.

The Gnostics were miners. But the dualism was symptom, not cause. First they severed Christ from his Jewish body. Then they decided bodies in general didn’t matter. The order is important. Covenantal severance came first; metaphysics followed. And once you’ve severed Christ from his particular flesh, what matters is extracting the spiritual essence—which can then be mapped onto whatever hierarchy you prefer.

Hologram vs. Incarnation

The technical term is Docetism—from the Greek dokein, “to seem.” Christ only seemed to be human. He looked real, interacted with the environment, but there was no there there. His body was a hologram, a projection, a visual demonstration.

But notice: Docetism only makes sense if Christ’s Jewish particularity doesn’t ultimately matter. If the incarnation is just a demonstration of spiritual truths—not the actual site where God and humanity are reconciled—then of course the body is optional. It’s a teaching aid, not the thing itself.

This matters enormously. If Christ’s body was real—if he was hungry, tired, scared, killable, and specifically Jewish—then God has skin in the game. The incarnation cost something. What happens to this body, in this covenant community, matters to God.

But if Christ’s body was appearance, then the incarnation was a performance. Moving, perhaps. Instructive, certainly. But ultimately costless. God demonstrated something without risking anything.

And if God’s body didn’t ultimately matter, why would yours? And if this covenant doesn’t ultimately matter, then particularity itself becomes infinitely transferable—available for whatever myths of sacred pedigree the powers find useful. Which is exactly what happens perennially, as we shall see.

Escape Room vs. Dinner Party

Here’s another way to see it. Is salvation more like an escape room or a dinner party? Or better: Is salvation something that happens to you, or something you’ve always already been invited into?

In an escape room, the world is a puzzle designed to trap you. Success comes from finding hidden knowledge that others don’t have. Only the clever few escape. The physical environment is an obstacle to be decoded and transcended.

At a dinner party, the world is a gift to be received and shared. Success comes from being welcomed into relationship you didn’t earn. The invitation preceded your existence—you were created for this table. Everyone is invited. The physical environment—the food, the table, the embodied presence of others—is the medium of communion.

The Gnostics were escape room Christians. They had special knowledge (gnosis) that separated them from the ignorant masses. They were the clever ones who had figured out the code.

They missed the table because they were looking for the exit.

The question for us isn’t theological. It’s phenomenological: Which does your community feel more like? Are you solving puzzles together, or breaking bread?

The early church recognized the threat. And they built elaborate defenses—not just against spirit/matter dualism, but against the more fundamental move of severing Christ from his covenantal flesh. For a while, it worked.

How the Church Held the Line

The Particularity Fortress

“I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth…”

I must have said those words a thousand times before I understood they were weapons. Every clause about materiality—about earth, about flesh, about bodies—was a polemic against people who’d rather have a hologram than a Lord with dirty feet.

But it took me even longer to understand what they were really defending. Not just bodies in general. Not just matter against spirit. They were defending the scandal of particularity—that God is the Creator, YHWH, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That Christ is not a spiritual abstraction but the Jewish Messiah, born of a Jewish woman, in the line of David, fulfilling the covenant made with Israel.

“Maker of heaven and earth”—not a demiurge who botched material creation, but the Creator who called matter good. And not just any Creator, but the God who took on Israel’s story as his own—speaking through prophets, making covenant, assuming particularity as the medium of his presence.

“Born of the Virgin Mary”—not a hologram projected into the world, but actual flesh taken from an actual woman. A Jewish woman. In a Jewish family. In a Jewish village. The Word became flesh, and the flesh had a family tree.

“Suffered under Pontius Pilate”—not a demonstration of suffering, but real pain in a real body under real political authority. The Roman occupation of Palestine is in the creed. History is in the creed. The particularity is deliberate.

“Resurrection of the body”—not the soul’s escape from its prison, but the body’s redemption and transformation. The risen Christ still bore the wounds. The particularity traveled through death and out the other side.

Irenaeus’s Vision

Irenaeus, writing in the second century, saw what was at stake. Against the Gnostics who wanted to mine the spirit from the dross of matter, he insisted: creation is good. Incarnation is real. Bodies matter. Practices matter. What you do with your flesh is your faith made visible.8

But he saw something deeper too. He understood that the Gnostic move wasn’t just philosophical error about spirit and matter. It was theological treason—an attempt to decouple the Way from Israel’s story, from YHWH’s covenant, from the scandal of a God who chooses particular peoples and particular persons.

His concept of recapitulatio captured this: in Christ, God was gathering all of creation back to himself—but through Israel’s story, not around it. The covenant wasn’t bypassed by the incarnation; it was fulfilled. The Church doesn’t replace Israel; it’s grafted in.

And the glory of God? Irenaeus wrote one of the most important sentences in Christian theology: “The glory of God is the living man.” Not the escaped spirit. Not the extracted soul. The living man—embodied, breathing, material, vulnerable. This is profoundly anti-Gnostic. The whole person, alive and in relationship, is where God’s glory shines.

Email vs. Handwritten Letter

Think about the difference between an email and a handwritten letter.

An email is pure content. The medium is invisible, irrelevant, interchangeable. What matters is the message. You could type it, speak it, think it—the “information” is identical.

A handwritten letter is different. The time it took, the physical trace of the hand, the envelope’s journey, the moment of opening—these aren’t incidental to meaning. When I was at sea as a submarine officer, my wife sent perfumed letters. The scent, the handwriting, the paper that had been in her hands and was now in mine—her presence crossed the ocean through matter. This is what the Gnostics couldn’t see: embodiment carries what abstraction cannot.

Sacramental logic works like handwritten letters. Bread, wine, water, oil—these aren’t mere illustrations of spiritual truths. They’re the medium through which grace operates. Material things carry grace. No spirit/matter split possible.

But more than that: this bread, in this community, with this prayer. The Eucharist isn’t just about matter-in-general. It’s about the particular body of Christ—the body that was born in Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth, crucified in Jerusalem, risen on the third day. The particularity is the point.

The Eucharist as Liturgical Fortress

In my grad school notes, I called the Eucharist a “liturgical fortress.” Here’s what I meant.

Every week, the early Jesus-followers gathered around a table. They took bread and wine. They said specific words about specific events: “On the night he was betrayed, he took bread…”

And in that practice, they forced a question that Gnostic grammar couldn’t answer: Is this bread Christ’s body?

If you said yes—if you believed that material things could carry spiritual grace, that the incarnation didn’t end at the ascension but continued in sacramental presence—then you’d already rejected Gnosticism. You couldn’t maintain the spirit/matter split while kneeling at that rail.

If you said no—if you believed the bread was “just a symbol,” that the real action was purely spiritual, that matter couldn’t carry grace—then you’d exposed something. You’d revealed that your grammar was still Gnostic, no matter what vocabulary you used.

The Eucharist was a weekly test. A practice that made Gnostic grammar unlivable for anyone trying to live it consistently.

Christological Anthropology Made Visible

The early church understood something I had to learn the hard way.

When I left the submarine force and began my business career, my wife and I struggled to adapt to our new life together—chiefly because my Jesus-follower identity had not conquered my John Galt-follower habit of seeing other people as objects. I felt love for my wife. Why didn’t that suffice? It was only when an ex-NFL linebacker taught me that love is not a feeling but an action—a movement toward the other’s flourishing—that I began to understand: you cannot be withsomeone without concrete practices that embody curiosity about their life.

The early Jesus Movement built institutions on this logic. Their response wasn’t just creeds and sacraments. It was institutions—concrete, material, organizational expressions of what Christological anthropology actually produces.

Consider what the early church invented:

The hospital. Before the Jesus Movement, there was no institution dedicated to caring for the sick regardless of their social status. Basil of Caesarea built the Basileia in the fourth century—a complex so vast it was called a “new city.” It included facilities for the sick, housing for the poor, hospices for travelers, and training for medical care. The idea that strangers deserved healing because they bore Christ’s image became brick and mortar.9

The refugee shelter. Xenodocheia—literally “stranger-receivers”—provided care for travelers, refugees, the displaced. Roman society had hospitia for citizens and guests with status. The early assemblies invented care for those with no status at all.

The orphanage. Orphanotropheia cared for children who had lost their family networks. In Roman society, children without paternal protection were legally and socially vulnerable. The early church created institutions that said: these children matter because they bear Christ’s image, not because they have a powerful father.

Plague nursing. When epidemics struck Roman cities, the wealthy fled to their country estates. Jesus Movement members stayed. They nursed the sick—including pagans—and buried the dead. Rodney Stark estimates that this practice alone may have contributed significantly to the Movement’s growth: basic nursing care dramatically improved survival rates, and survivors remembered who stayed.10

The invention of “the poor.” This sounds strange, but bear with me. Roman society had categories for the destitute, but they were understood as losers—people who had fallen out of the patronage networks where the powerful alone decided who deserved protection. The Jesus Movement created “the poor” as a theological category: persons who deserve care because of their need, not despite it. The poor became, in Peter Brown’s phrase, “the treasures of the church.”11

Pharaoh Logic vs. Manna Logic

Here’s the contrast that reveals what was at stake:

This table is a diagnostic. Which logic is operating in your community? In your politics? In your gut reactions to “those people”?

Notice something: the left column is Pharaoh logic. Worth tied to status. Care through hierarchy. Provision rewards the deserving. The institution determines who belongs.

The right column is manna logic. Worth through bearing the image. Care flows to need. Provision responds to hunger.

What the early church built wasn’t just theological—it was economic. Manna economics made institutional.

The Julian Evidence

The experiment has been run.

In the fourth century, Emperor Julian—called “the Apostate” because he tried to restore paganism after Constantine—attempted to replicate Christian charitable institutions using pagan resources.12

He failed.

Julian wrote frustrated letters complaining that “the impious Galileans provide not only for their poor but also for ours, while our own [poor] lack support from us.” He tried to create pagan hospitals and stranger-shelters. They didn’t take.

Why? Because you cannot sustain Christological ethics without Christological anthropology. The practices require the theology. If every human being is Christ’s image—if the stranger is Christ in disguise, if “whatever you did for the least of these you did for me”—then hospitals and xenodocheia and plague-nursing make sense. Without that theological foundation, the practices don’t sustain themselves.

Julian proved something empirically that we keep forgetting theologically: you cannot sustain Christian ethics without Christian ontology. Cut the root; the fruit rots. Every time.

You cannot sustain manna institutions with Pharaoh grammar underneath.

Empirical Confirmation

Not belief. Not self-identification. Practice.

A recent survey found that consistent church attendance is one of the strongest predictors of rejecting antisemitic and racist attitudes. Infrequent attendance is one of the strongest predictors of falling into the segment that holds both.

Not belief. Not self-identification as Christian. Practice—showing up, week after week, to a table where the Body of Christ is shared without hierarchy.

The patristic thesis has empirical support. Practices hold resignification in place. Where the practices weaken, the old meanings flood back. The Eucharist is still working—where it’s actually practiced.

The Framework That Held

The patristic achievement was extraordinary.

Creeds that encoded resistance to covenantal severance—every clause about materiality a polemic against those who wanted a hologram instead of a Lord with dirty feet. Sacraments that required material things to carry grace—bread you could taste, wine you could smell, water that got you wet. Virtue ethics that insisted on embodied practice as the site of transformation—not technique mastered in isolation but character formed in community. And institutions—hospitals, shelters, orphanages—that made Christological anthropology visible in brick and mortar.

For over a thousand years, this framework held.

The Stoic and Gnostic patterns were still there—resignification is never complete—but the practices and institutions kept them contained. The sea pressed against the dikes, but the pumps ran and the land stayed dry. Jesus-followers learned through their bodies that matter mattered, that particularity mattered, that Israel’s God was still their God.

I find myself moved by what they built. Not nostalgic—I know too much about medieval Christendom’s violence and exclusion to romanticize it. But moved by the attempt. Moved by the recognition that formation requires architecture. That you can’t just announce manna grammar; you have to build institutions that make Pharaoh grammar unlivable.

They understood something we’ve forgotten: practices hold resignification in place. Weekly Eucharist. Creedal confession. Catechesis. The hospital that treats the stranger as Christ in disguise. These weren’t decorations on top of belief. They were the dikes that kept the sea from reclaiming the land.

What I Keep Asking Myself

I received the practices. I said the creeds. I took the bread and wine for decades. The architecture was there—battered, compromised, but there. And still the Stoic grammar got in. Still I walked into church with shoulders back, smile ready, quiet certainty that I had figured something out.

How?

Part of the answer, I suspect, is that the practices had been weakened before they ever reached me. Something happened between the patristic achievement and my formation in late twentieth-century American Christianity. The dikes were breached somewhere. The sea got back in. By the time I showed up, I was swimming in water that looked like Christianity but operated by different logic.

The next essay will trace how that happened. It’s a story of wars and schisms, of reformations that recovered something essential and lost something else, of philosophical systems that filled vacuums nobody planned to create. It’s a story of how ideas become air—how a philosophy professor in the sixteenth-century Netherlands shaped the formation I received four centuries later without anyone in my family ever reading his books.

But before I tell that story, I want to sit with this one a moment longer.

The early church built something. Against Stoic self-sufficiency, they insisted on participation. Against Gnostic escape, they insisted on incarnation. Against Pharaoh’s division of who counts, they built hospitals for strangers and orphanages for the abandoned. They took the vocabulary of their culture and tried to make it serve a different grammar—and for a thousand years, it mostly worked.

They knew something I’m still learning: you can’t think your way out of a formation problem. You can’t read your way to transformation. The grammar that shapes you operates below the level of conscious belief. It lives in your body, your reflexes, your gut responses to vulnerability and need.

Which means the way out is the same as the way in. Practices. Communities. Institutions that form you before you’ve decided what you believe.

The Sage Who Walked In

I started this essay with a man walking into church. Shoulders back. Smile ready. Certain he’d figured something out.

I’m still that man more often than I’d like to admit. The formation runs deep. But I’m learning to notice when it’s running—when my chest tightens, when my need to be right crowds out my capacity to receive, when the Sage shoulders his way past the Saint who’s supposed to be showing up.

The patristic Christians would tell me to keep taking communion. Keep saying the creed. Keep showing up to practices I didn’t design, in communities I can’t control, receiving grace I haven’t earned.

They’d tell me the dikes need tending.

They’d tell me the sea is patient.

Next: “The Perfect Storm: How the Fortress Fell”

CODA

Formation doesn’t announce itself.

It keeps time.

You don’t defeat a grammar by outthinking it.

You outgrow it by staying.

Practice by practice.

Week by week.

Together.

The Series

This essay belongs to Jazz, Shame, and Being With—a twenty-essay arc tracing shame and pride from neurobiology through theology to political formation. If you’ve been reading along, you know where we’ve been. If you’re new, or if you’d like to see the architecture of where this is heading, the Reader’s Guide maps the full journey. Every essay is a real door. Start anywhere that calls to you.

ENDNOTES

Dear friends—

Here’s the short version: the only manna that didn’t rot was the manna released to God—everything hoarded bred worms. This essay traces what that ancient distinction might mean for the Christianity I inherited.

I went looking for this because the modern genealogy I’ve been tracing couldn’t explain why the faith that sings Mary’s reversals so readily blesses extraction economy. The deeper grammar lives here—in the wilderness catechism where Israel learned to receive without hoarding, and in the Emmaus table where recognition came not through teaching but through bread broken and shared.

If you’ve ever felt your body tighten around money even when you have enough, or wondered why Christmas feels spiritually thin, this may help name what’s underneath. The vocabulary moves between Luke’s gospel, Hebrew scripture, neuroscience, and political economy. You don’t need to track every term. What matters is whether this names something your body already knows.

The Jar in the Ark

There’s a detail in the Exodus story I’d overlooked for forty years.

You remember the manna—bread from heaven, Israel’s daily provision in the wilderness. You probably remember the rules: gather only what you need for today; don’t store it up; trust that tomorrow’s bread will come tomorrow. And you might remember what happened when people ignored those instructions and hoarded extra against the uncertain future. It rotted. Bred worms. Stank.

Except once.

Moses told Aaron to take an omer of manna and place it before the Lord, “to be kept throughout your generations.”1 This single jar of manna traveled with Israel through forty years of wandering, eventually resting in the Ark of the Covenant alongside the tablets of the Law and Aaron’s rod that budded.2 Three objects. The tablets—the Word, God’s instruction for covenant life. The rod—Aaron’s staff that bloomed with almonds, authority that flowers rather than dominates. And the manna—provision that comes daily, cannot be hoarded, must be received. The same manna that rotted when families stored it in their tents was preserved for centuries when kept in the presence of the Word.

The tradition calls it “bread from heaven.”3 That phrase echoes through Israel’s memory, reappearing whenever the community remembers wilderness provision. By the time we reach John’s Gospel, Jesus will claim to be the true bread from heaven, the manna that doesn’t run out. The connection I’m tracing between manna and Incarnation isn’t my invention. It’s a trajectory already present in Israel’s own re-reading of the story.

I’ve been sitting with this detail through Advent, wondering what it might mean that the only manna permitted to be retained—rather than circulated—was the manna that dwelt with the Word as witness.

I wasn’t looking for this. I’d been tracing a genealogy of Christianized Stoicism—the formation I promised in Essay 7 to investigate, running from ancient philosophy through medieval atonement theology to modern nationalism. Months of work on Lipsius, Locke, Kant, Schmitt. But none of it explained why my inherited Christianity so readily blesses extraction economy, why the faith that sings Mary’s reversals makes peace with store-cities full of rotting manna.

The modern genealogy showed how we arrived here. It didn’t show the deeper grammar—the ancient choice between two economies that every generation faces again.

So I went back. Before Stoicism. Before the mutations I’ve been tracing. Back to the wilderness catechism where a people newly escaped from Pharaoh learned to receive differently.

Mary knew something about manna.

A young woman, probably thirteen or fourteen, unmarried, from a village so insignificant it warranted Nathanael’s famous sneer: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”4 Luke tells us she was “much perplexed” by the angel’s greeting—and why wouldn’t she be? She was being invited into the kind of divine disruption that ruins careful plans.

But then Mary sang. And what she sang wasn’t a lullaby.

“He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”5

Biblical scholars call this the “prophetic perfect tense”—speaking of future reversals as if they’ve already happened.6 Not wishful hoping but confident declaration. The way our civil rights movements sing “We Shall Overcome” while Pharaoh’s economy still rules. The reversal isn’t complete, but its completion is so certain that you can sing about it in past tense.

Mary’s song announces that God is doing something. And what God is doing has economic teeth. The hungry filled, the rich sent empty, the proud scattered, the powerful unseated. This isn’t spiritualized comfort for the oppressed while leaving oppression intact. This is reversal, not reform.

The first time Luke mentions “the rich” is in Mary’s song—and it’s not flattering.7 Whatever is about to happen in the manger will have something to say about wealth, poverty, and who gets to keep what.

We have, of course, found ways to neutralize this. The Magnificat is among the most frequently performed pieces in the Western choral repertoire—gorgeously orchestrated, sung by choirs in evening dress to audiences in evening dress, the revolutionary lyrics wrapped in such aesthetic splendor that we can appreciate the music without hearing the words. Mary announces the unseating of the powerful, and we applaud the soprano’s high notes. She proclaims the hungry filled and the rich sent empty, and we check our programs for the next movement.

This is the church’s particular genius: we can sing what we refuse to practice, perform what we decline to embody, make beautiful what we will not let be true. The Magnificat becomes a concert piece rather than a confession—something to be admired rather than obeyed. And so Mary’s song, which should land in our gut as summons and disruption, floats harmlessly over our heads as lovely sound.

The prophets had a word for worship that doesn’t change anything. They called it noise.

Here’s where Christmas gets strange.

We Western Christians have mostly learned to hear the Incarnation as God’s solution to our sin problem. Humanity fell; we couldn’t fix ourselves; God sent Jesus to pay the debt, absorb the punishment, satisfy the requirement. Christmas becomes the delivery date for our salvation package—God arriving to work for us, to accomplish on our behalf what we couldn’t accomplish ourselves.

But reading Luke again this Advent, I’m noticing something different.

Luke’s Jesus, when he finally begins his ministry, quotes Isaiah in his hometown synagogue: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”8

The “year of the Lord’s favor” is Jubilee—the great redistribution, when debts are cancelled, slaves freed, and land returned to families who’d lost it.9 Jesus announces his ministry as the inauguration of Sabbath economics. Not just individual salvation but systemic restoration. Not just forgiveness of personal sin but release from the structures that bind and impoverish.

What if the Incarnation isn’t primarily about God fixing our problem from outside, but about God being with us inside the problem?10

What if the baby in the manger—laid in a feeding trough because there was no space in the guestroom, born to displaced parents pushed by empire’s census, visited first by shepherds working the night shift—what if this is God demonstrating not how to escape our condition but how to inhabit it differently?

What if Christmas is less about God providing a solution and more about God becoming present—the Word made flesh, dwelling among us, full of grace and truth?11

The manna that rotted when hoarded didn’t rot when kept with the Word.

I think Luke wants us to see the connection.

The Road to Emmaus

Luke does something unusual with his Gospel. He ends where he begins.

The final chapter finds two disciples walking the seven miles from Jerusalem to Emmaus, devastated. Jesus is dead. Whatever they’d hoped would happen hadn’t happened. “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” they tell the stranger who falls into step beside them.12 Past tense. Hope extinguished.

The stranger asks what things have happened. They’re astonished—is he the only visitor to Jerusalem who doesn’t know? They recount it all: Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet mighty in deed and word, handed over by chief priests and leaders, condemned to death, crucified. Three days now. Some women found the tomb empty, saw a vision of angels, said he was alive. But him they did not see.

Then the stranger speaks. “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?”13

And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.

I want to stay here for a moment, because this is the church’s first Bible study.14

Before there were creeds or catechisms, before councils defined orthodoxy, before systematic theologies organized the faith into categories—there was this: the risen Jesus walking with confused disciples, opening the scriptures, showing them how to read Moses and the prophets in light of what had just happened.

What did he teach them?

Luke doesn’t give us the transcript. But Luke has already shown us, through the entire Gospel, what it means to read scripture through Jesus’s eyes. And what it means is Sabbath economics.

Go back to the wilderness.

After the exodus from Egypt, Israel wandered forty years in desert country. No agriculture possible. No economy to speak of. Just daily dependence on God’s provision—manna in the morning, quail in the evening, water from rock.

Ched Myers calls this period Israel’s “first catechism”—the basic instruction that formed a people.15 And the catechism had three lessons:

First: Gather only what you need. “Those who gathered much had nothing over, and those who gathered little had no shortage.”16 In the wilderness economy, there is such a thing as enough. Not everyone scrambling to maximize, not winners and losers, but sufficiency for all.

Second: Do not store it up. The manna that was hoarded rotted. Accumulation bred worms. The instinct to secure tomorrow by stockpiling today—the instinct Pharaoh’s economy had drilled into them through generations of slavery—that instinct had to be unlearned.17

Third: Rest. On the sixth day, gather enough for two days, because the seventh day is Sabbath. No manna will fall. No gathering required. Creation itself pauses. And in that pause, Israel would learn that the world does not depend on their anxious productivity. God provides. They can rest in fellowship.18

Here’s what I’d missed for decades: this Sabbath instruction comes before Sinai.19 Israel learns to receive before Israel learns to obey. The sequence matters. Exodus 16 precedes Exodus 20. Rest and provision aren’t rewards for keeping commandments; they’re the foundation that makes faithful living possible. You can’t practice Torah from a dysregulated nervous system. You have to learn you’re held before you can learn to hold others.

Sabbath isn’t a name for Sunday. It’s the name for an economy we’ve spent two thousand years avoiding.20

I grew up thinking Sabbath meant “the day Christians go to church”—a weekly obligation, a religious duty, the day you wore uncomfortable clothes and sat still. But that’s not what the tradition means.

It begins with creation. God worked six days and rested on the seventh—not because God was tired but because creation was complete. The world didn’t need more. It was good, very good, and the appropriate response to goodness is enjoyment, not improvement.21 Sabbath rest isn’t recovery time so you can be more productive tomorrow. Sabbath rest is our declaration that creation is enough.

From this weekly rhythm, the tradition elaborates. Every seventh year, the land itself rests—no planting, no harvesting, living on what grows wild.22 And every fiftieth year, the great Jubilee: all debts cancelled, all slaves freed, all land returned to ancestral families.23 The economic accumulation of forty-nine years—the inevitable drift toward concentration, where some families lose everything and others acquire everything—that drift gets reset. Jubilee is the economy’s Sabbath, the declaration that the current distribution isn’t final, that God’s vision of enough-for-everyone keeps interrupting the human tendency toward hoarding.

This is what Jesus announced in Nazareth. “The year of the Lord’s favor.” Jubilee. Not spiritual metaphor but economic reality. Good news to the poor. Release to the captives. The oppressed going free.24

Jesus would relive this formation in miniature. Luke tells us that after his baptism, Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness for forty days, tested as Israel was tested.25 Where Israel grumbled for bread, Jesus refused to turn stones into provision. Where Israel doubted God’s presence, Jesus refused to test the Father. Where Israel flirted with other gods, Jesus refused empire’s offer of all the kingdoms. The one who would teach manna economics had first to embody it—learning in his own body what it means to receive daily bread rather than secure tomorrow’s supply.

Israel’s forty years of wilderness catechism finds its fulfillment in Jesus’s forty days. What Israel learned partially and forgot repeatedly, Jesus lives completely. The teacher of Sabbath economics is also its first graduate.

Now watch what happens on the Emmaus road.

The disciples don’t recognize Jesus while he’s teaching. Their hearts burn within them—something is happening—but their eyes are kept from recognizing him.26 The revelation comes later.

They reach Emmaus. The stranger walks ahead as if going farther. They urge him to stay: “It is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.”27 He agrees. They sit down to eat.

“When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.”28

The recognition happens at table.

Not during the Bible study—though their hearts burned during that. Not through theological argument or scriptural proof. At the moment when bread is taken, blessed, broken, and given.

This is manna economics performed.

Bread taken—acknowledging the gift, receiving what has been provided. Bread blessed—giving thanks, recognizing that provision comes from beyond ourselves. Bread broken—not kept whole for private consumption but divided for sharing. Bread given—circulated to others, passed around the table, released rather than retained.

The disciples had walked seven miles with the risen Lord and hadn’t known him. But when he performed the economy of the kingdom—when gifts were received and released rather than hoarded—their eyes opened.29

I wonder if Luke is suggesting that we can study scripture all we want, can have our hearts burn with beautiful theology, can recite all the right doctrines about Jesus—and still not recognize him. Recognition happens when we practice what he practiced. When bread circulates rather than accumulates. When we trust tomorrow’s manna to come tomorrow rather than storing against imagined scarcity. When the Sabbath vision becomes the shape of our common life.

The risen Jesus is made known in the breaking of bread.30 Here’s the way I learned to say it: the church doesn’t have an economic practice; the church is an economic practice—or it isn’t the church.

The risen Jesus is made known in the breaking of bread. But here’s the hard truth beneath that claim: without a community that actually embodies release, the invitation I’m about to offer has nowhere to land.31 The question isn’t whether individual readers will stop hoarding. The question is whether there exists a community so formed by manna economics that people can be drawn into its practice—a community where daily bread is actually shared, where accumulation is actually discouraged, where your flourishing and my flourishing are so intertwined that hoarding becomes unthinkable.

If the church is just Pharaoh’s economy with better feelings—if we practice the same accumulation, defend the same borders, but add a spiritual gloss—then we’re not offering an alternative. We’re offering chaplaincy services for empire.

The Magnificat isn’t asking us to be more generous within an unchanged system. It’s announcing that the system is being replaced. “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones.” That’s not gentle invitation. That’s regime change.

We’ve covered a lot of ground—wilderness economics, first catechisms, bread broken at Emmaus. If you skimmed, or if the biblical references blurred together, that’s fine. Here’s what matters: two economies run through scripture. Pharaoh’s economy hoards against scarcity and breeds the anxiety that makes hoarding feel necessary. The manna economy receives daily bread and trusts tomorrow to bring tomorrow’s provision.

The question underneath all of this is simple: What if the Christianity we inherited has been teaching Pharaoh’s economics while singing Mary’s song? You don’t need to have tracked every thread to feel the weight of that question. I feel it in my chest when I write it. What follows is where this gets personal.

What We Refuse to Release

Here is where the newsletter gets uncomfortable.

I’ve been describing Sabbath economics as if it were ancient history—wilderness wandering, Jubilee legislation, first-century table fellowship. Interesting background for understanding Luke. Nice context for Christmas.

But the whole point of the Emmaus road is that Moses and the prophets aren’t background. They’re diagnosis. They name what’s wrong with the world and announce what God is doing about it. The risen Jesus didn’t offer his disciples a history lesson. He gave them eyes to see their present moment.

So let me try to see ours.

The manna rotted when Israel stored it against an uncertain future.

Think about what that means. The instinct to hoard—to accumulate more than you need today because tomorrow might not provide—that instinct comes from somewhere. It comes from the reasonable experience that the world is unpredictable, that provision isn’t guaranteed, that those who don’t secure their own future may find themselves without.

Pharaoh’s economy ran on this fear.32 Store-cities filled with grain extracted from peasant labor. Surpluses accumulated against famine. The few controlling what the many needed to survive. When you’ve been formed by that economy—when anxiety about scarcity is the water you swim in—then of course you hoard. Of course you store up. What else would you do?

Pharaoh’s genius wasn’t just economic extraction—it was nervous system formation.33 His store-cities didn’t merely hoard grain; they cultivated the chronic anxiety that makes hoarding feel necessary. When you keep people in perpetual precarity, their windows of tolerance narrow. They lose access to the neural circuitry of trust and connection. They become biological hoarders, unable to imagine that tomorrow’s bread might come.

Precarity. I’ve only recently learned this word, and it won’t let me go.34 It names something I’d sensed but couldn’t articulate: not poverty exactly, but the chronic condition of never being secure enough to stop performing, never stable enough to rest. The workforce that won’t demand better conditions because it can’t afford to risk what little it has.

The manna was God’s counter-formation. Daily bread. Enough for today. Tomorrow will have its own provision. The anxiety that Pharaoh cultivated—the fear that drove accumulation—that anxiety is a lie. Creation provides enough for everyone if everyone takes only what they need.

But we don’t believe it.

I don’t believe it.

I know where this comes from. I emerged from high school and Annapolis with a clear picture of what adult male achievement looked like: first serve your country—give your life if necessary—then accumulate honor for yourself and family through wealth and influence within your community. Be the gift. That was the catechism, and I internalized it completely. Even decades later, my limbic system still fires along those ancient grooves—implicit memory encoded in neural pathways before I had language to question it, procedural knowledge my prefrontal cortex can critique but cannot simply override.35

My wife and I have retirement accounts and emergency funds and insurance policies against every imaginable contingency. I tell myself this is prudent—and maybe it is. But I notice that my prudence never arrives at a number where I feel we have enough. The anxiety keeps recalibrating. The goalpost keeps moving. The scarcity Pharaoh taught is so deep in my bones that even manna from heaven might not convince me.36

And we are one of the lucky couples. We have enough that we can afford the luxury of worrying about having more. Plenty of people we know are genuinely precarious—one medical emergency, one job loss, one car repair away from disaster. Their anxiety isn’t neurosis; it’s accurate assessment of an economy that needs them anxious.

That’s the thing about scarcity. For some of us, it’s internalized psychology—Pharaoh’s voice in our heads long after we’ve left Egypt. But for others, it’s engineered reality—a system that produces precarity on purpose.37

Both are lies. But they’re different lies, and they require different responses.

The prophets saw this clearly.

When Israel settled in the land and established a monarchy, the old patterns reasserted themselves. Debt-default mechanisms transferred land from peasant families to wealthy creditors.38 The accumulation that manna economics prohibited became the economy’s engine. Some families lost everything across generations while others acquired everything.

The prophets were not subtle about this.

“The spoil of the poor is in your houses,” Isaiah thundered. “What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor?”39 “Woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no more room”—naming the debt-default mechanism by which the few acquire what the many lose.40 Amos condemned those who “trample on the needy and bring to ruin the poor of the land.”41 Jeremiah blamed the exile itself on Sabbath-breaking—not missing synagogue but refusing to release slaves, refusing to let the land rest, refusing to practice the economics of enough.42

This is what Mary’s song anticipates. God scattering the proud, bringing down the powerful, filling the hungry, sending the rich away empty. Not because God has arbitrary preferences about wealth distribution, but because the current distribution represents the abandonment of everything Israel was formed to embody.

The rich are sent empty because they’ve been hoarding manna. And it’s rotting in their store-cities while others go without.

The pattern didn’t start with the prophets’ generation. It started almost immediately.

When Solomon consolidated power, what did he build? Store-cities.43 The same infrastructure Pharaoh had forced Israel to construct in Egypt, Solomon now built for himself—with conscripted Israelite labor. The monarchy became Pharaoh’s economy under Israelite management. The temple that housed the Ark with its jar of manna stood alongside the store-cities that represented everything manna was meant to undo.

Israel didn’t just fail to practice Sabbath economics. Israel rebuilt Egypt and called it the kingdom of God.

I think about this when I see a former president proclaim himself king, when I hear proposals for triumphal arches to rival Caesar’s monuments. The pattern is old. The instinct to return to Pharaoh—to trade wilderness vulnerability for imperial security, daily bread for store-cities, manna for monuments—that instinct runs deeper than any single nation or era. We keep rebuilding what we were delivered from, and blessing it in God’s name.

Now: America. Now: us.

We are the richest society in human history. Not approximately—precisely. No civilization has ever commanded the resources we command, produced the abundance we produce, accumulated the wealth we’ve accumulated.44

We have accomplished the miracle of scarcity amid abundance—not through plague or famine but through policy.

We have people sleeping under bridges. Families choosing between medication and groceries. Children going hungry in the wealthiest counties of the wealthiest nation that has ever existed.

This is not because we lack resources. It’s because we refuse to circulate them.

We have made political decisions—exposed as decisions by the fact that other wealthy nations have decided differently—to let healthcare be a commodity rather than a common provision.45 To let housing prices rise beyond reach while units sit empty as investments. To let food rot in warehouses while families line up at food banks. To let wages stagnate for decades while wealth concentrates beyond any precedent in human history.

The manna is rotting in our store-cities. We have more than enough for everyone. We simply refuse to release it.

But here’s what I’ve only recently begun to understand: the refusal to circulate isn’t just greed. It’s formation. The economy that shapes us doesn’t merely permit hoarding; it requires the fragmentation that makes hoarding feel necessary and solidarity feel impossible.

We’ve been taught to see ourselves as competitors rather than kin. The economy that shapes us insists that your gain threatens my security, that scarcity is real, that solidarity is naïve.46 We’ve been sorted into groups and taught that our group’s interests conflict with their group’s interests—that American workers compete with Mexican workers, that citizens’ needs conflict with immigrants’ needs, that my family can only flourish if some families don’t.

This sorting isn’t accidental. It serves a purpose.47

If workers across borders recognized their common interests, they might organize across borders. If citizens saw immigrants as fellow creatures rather than competitors, they might demand an economy that served everyone. If Western Christians understood that the Body of Christ includes believers in every nation—that our siblings in Guatemala and Somalia and Haiti are no less family than our neighbors—we might stop believing that borders mark the limits of our obligation.

The system that sorts us needs us to believe in the sorting.48 It needs us to identify with our group against other groups. It needs us to think that solidarity is impossible, that scarcity is real, that the best we can do is secure our own while hoping there’s something left for others.

This is the opposite of manna economics. And we’ve baptized it.

Dominative Christianity—the version I inherited, the version millions practice, the version that shapes our politics and forms our imagination—has largely made its peace with the refusal to circulate.49

We’ve found ways to spiritualize the Magnificat so it doesn’t threaten actual wealth distribution—which takes considerable interpretive creativity, given that Mary’s song is about as spiritually vague as a tax audit. We’ve performed the interpretive miracle of making Jubilee cost nothing—pretending it denotes spiritual release, inner freedom, personal salvation. We’ve reduced Christmas to a story about God solving our individual sin problem while leaving untouched the systems that grind the face of the poor.

Which is convenient, since interior problems don’t require anyone to redistribute anything.

And we’ve wrapped it all in the flag—performing the impressive theological feat of conscripting the God who refused borders into the service of border enforcement. Emmanuel—God with us—has been put on ICE. That line is too easy, which is part of what makes it unbearable.

The God who came to a colonized people under imperial occupation, was born to displaced refugees, and announced good news to the poor—this God has been conscripted into blessing our borders, baptizing our extraction economy, assuring us that our accumulation is providence and our refusal to share is prudence.50

The prophets had a word for this. They called it idolatry—serving gods who legitimate what the true God condemns.51

I would call it living the wrong story. Not the general, vague sinfulness we confess on Sunday mornings without meaning much by it—but the specific, concrete choice to inhabit Pharaoh’s narrative rather than God’s. The story where scarcity is real, solidarity is impossible, and siblings starve while store-cities overflow.

The Word Made Flesh

So what does Christmas offer?

I’ve just named Western Christianity’s captivity to an economy of accumulation—our complicity in systems that hoard while others hunger, our baptism of borders that fragment the human family, our refusal to circulate what we’ve received. If I stopped there, this would be a prophetic word without good news. Diagnosis without healing. That’s not the gospel. That’s just making everyone feel terrible and sending them home to feel terrible alone. I’ve preached that sermon. The congregation applauds, the guilt metabolizes into brunch, and nothing changes. Including me.

The prophets always paired judgment with invitation. “Return to me,” God pleads through Hosea, “and I will return to you.”52 The point of naming our false stories is never condemnation for its own sake. The point is to clear the ground for something else—something the false story has been blocking, something we couldn’t see while we were pretending everything was fine.

Christmas is that something else.

Go back to the manna one more time.

The jar in the Ark wasn’t stored for future consumption. It was kept as witness.53 A reminder across generations that God had provided, that the wilderness hadn’t killed them, that daily bread had come daily. The manna didn’t rot because it wasn’t hoarded—it was offered. Placed in the presence of the Word. Held in trust for the community’s memory rather than any family’s private security.

The manna that stayed sweet was the manna given back to God.

I think this is what the Incarnation looks like.

God had every resource of divinity—omnipotence, omniscience, the infinite abundance of eternal life. If anyone could have hoarded, God could have. If anyone had reason to secure divine prerogatives against uncertain futures, God did.

Instead: a baby in a feeding trough.54

God emptied. God vulnerable. God so committed to being with us that divine power was set aside, divine protection abandoned, divine distance collapsed into the intimate helplessness of an infant who couldn’t survive an hour without human care.55

This is not God fixing our problem from outside. This is God entering our condition from inside. Not working for us but being with us.56 Not solving our scarcity but sharing our vulnerability. Not distributing resources from above but becoming one of the ones who needs resources from below.

Here’s the Christmas truth the neuroscience confirms: you can’t heal firmware problems with software updates.57 You can’t think your way out of shame. You need presence—regulated nervous systems co-regulating dysregulated ones over time. The Incarnation isn’t a doctrinal solution to a conceptual problem. It’s God’s entry into the co-regulatory circuit. Emmanuel—God with us—isn’t just theology. It’s the neurobiological reality of healing: presence that holds us until our own systems can reorganize.

The theology I inherited taught me that Christmas was about transaction—humanity owing a debt we couldn’t pay, God sending Jesus to satisfy the divine requirement.58 But the more I sit with this, the more I suspect it mistakes not just the emphasis but the entire framework.

The problem isn’t that transactional theology gets the payment wrong. The problem is that debt, payment, and satisfaction are the wrong categories altogether.59 In that framework, God is the problem—offended honor requiring satisfaction. But in the story Luke tells, God is the solution—the one who invades territory occupied by hostile powers and liberates the captives.

Listen again to Jesus in Nazareth: “release to the captives, liberty to the oppressed.” That’s not payment language. That’s liberation language. Exodus language. The Incarnation isn’t God collecting what we owe. It’s God entering Pharaoh’s territory to set prisoners free.

The Incarnation isn’t primarily about God doing something for us. It’s about God being with us.60

Emmanuel. God with us61—in the mess, in the vulnerability, in the precarity that the powerful have always imposed on the displaced. Mary and Joseph were displaced people. Pushed by imperial census to a town that had no room for them.62 They were the ancient equivalent of refugees, migrants, the economically marginal people that empires shuffle around for administrative convenience. And God chose to be born among them. Not despite their marginality but into it.

The manna kept with the Word didn’t rot because it had been released.

Given over. Offered. Placed in the Ark not as private asset but as public witness. It remained sweet because it wasn’t clutched.

What if we released?

But I need to acknowledge something. “What if we released?” assumes you’re holding something.63

For many, the question lands differently. If you’ve never been sure you had a right to hold anything—if you’ve spent your life proving you deserve a place at the table, if your family’s accumulation was survival rather than greed, if you’ve been the perpetual foreigner never quite belonging to the fantasy—then “release” might sound like another demand from people who’ve always had enough.

The hoarding economy forms different people differently. Some it teaches to clutch from abundance, terrified of losing status. Others it teaches to clutch from precarity, desperate to finally have enough to belong. The manna story speaks to both, but differently. For the abundant, the word is: let go, your store-cities are rotting, there’s bread tomorrow. For the precarious, the word might be: you don’t have to earn your place, the manna was there before you gathered, you belong before you produce.

Same economy. Same table. Different paths to arrive there.

Not naive release that ignores genuine vulnerability. The people I know who are genuinely precarious don’t need lectures about letting go of wealth; they need the wealth that others are clutching.64 But those of us who are clutching—those of us with more than enough, whose anxiety about scarcity isn’t rational assessment but inherited formation—what if we practiced releasing?

We are not yet that people. I am not that person. The distance between here and there stretches farther than I can see.

But the direction is clear. And Christmas invites us to take a step.

Benediction

So this Christmas, remember the manna—that it rotted when hoarded and stayed sweet when offered. Remember Mary singing reversals in the prophetic perfect tense. Remember Emmaus, where recognition came not in the teaching but in the practice. Remember the Word made flesh, who held nothing back.

The manna we keep is the manna we release.

Go and do likewise. Not perfectly. Not all at once. But in the direction of release.

May the God who became flesh and dwelt among us teach you, by presence, what no theology could convey:

You are not alone.

You have enough.

You can let go.

Amen.

CODA

The Series

This essay belongs to Jazz, Shame, and Being With—a twenty-essay arc tracing shame and pride from neurobiology through theology to political formation. If you’ve been reading along, you know where we’ve been. If you haven’t, or if you’d like to see the architecture of where this is heading, the Reader’s Guide maps the full journey. Every essay is a real door. Start anywhere that calls to you.

The Appendix

For those who want the deeper ontological scaffolding beneath this essay—the philosophical grammar of participation, gift, and presence that distinguishes incarnational theology from its counterfeits—I’ve written a companion piece:

If you found yourself wanting to know why the manna-with-the-Word didn’t rot—not just that it didn’t—that’s where I trace the logic.

With open hands and steady presence,

Craig

Christmas 2025

Dear friends—

Here’s the short version: this appendix argues that being is gift, scarcity is lie, and manna economics isn’t sentimental nostalgia but metaphysical truth. If those claims sound like assertions that need defending, you’re the reader I wrote this for.

This piece accompanies my Christmas reflection, “The Only Manna We Keep”—but you don’t need to have read that essay to enter here. And if you start here and find yourself in over your head, the essay itself floats without this scaffolding. Come back when you’re ready, or don’t. The table is set either way.

Both pieces trace the same question from different angles: why the Christianity I inherited sings about God filling the hungry and emptying the rich, then blesses an economy that does the opposite. The essay follows that tension through Luke’s Gospel and the wilderness catechism. This appendix digs underneath—into the philosophical grammar of participation, gift, and presence that distinguishes incarnational theology from its counterfeits. It engages classical theism, affect neuroscience, and the work of Samuel Wells, David Bentley Hart, and Douglas Campbell.

I should be direct about what I’m doing here. These aren’t decorative additions to a pastoral essay. They’re load-bearing assumptions. If they fail, the argument fails. What follows is my attempt to show why the bet on abundance is rational.

1. Ontological Abundance

“Creation provides enough for everyone if everyone takes only what they need.” I wrote that sentence in the main essay and immediately heard the objection: naive optimism, ignorant of Malthus, blind to genuine scarcity.

The objection assumes what it needs to prove. It assumes that being is competitive—that existence runs on lack. Classical theism says otherwise. And if classical theism is right, the objection isn’t just wrong. It’s a category error dressed as realism.

The manna story isn’t teaching us that this particular resource happens to be sufficient. It’s teaching us that being itself is gift.

Pharaoh’s economy presupposes ontological scarcity—that existence is zero-sum competition, that my flourishing comes at the cost of yours, that the universe runs on lack. This is nihilism dressed as prudence. It assumes the void is the fundamental truth, and all our accumulation is defense against the darkness.

I find I cannot square this with the doctrine of God I inherited. God is not a being among beings who might run out of resources. God is Being itself—ipsum esse subsistens, the sheer act of existing from which all existence participates.1 There is no scarcity in God because God is not composed of parts that could be depleted. The manna that falls daily is icon of this metaphysical truth: being flows from an inexhaustible source.

The Neoplatonic tradition called this “the Good beyond being”—a Source that gives without losing, an overflow that doesn’t diminish what overflows.2 Christian theology distinguishes its account from necessary emanation by insisting that creation is free gift—but the nature of this freedom requires care. If divine freedom means God could have not created, we face the strange conclusion that love is accidental to God’s nature. If, however, divine freedom means God’s giving flows from who God eternally is—self-giving love that cannot not give, because giving is what God is—then “free” and “necessary” cease to be simple opposites. God doesn’t create under external compulsion; God creates because creation is the eternal expression of the love God is. The Source cannot be exhausted, and the giving cannot be constrained.

This is the ancient insight captured in the phrase bonum est diffusivum sui—the Good diffuses itself.3 But the diffusion is not compulsion. God does not give because forced to by some external necessity; God gives because giving is what Goodness is. The apparent tension between divine freedom and divine necessity dissolves: there is no God “behind” the giving who might have chosen otherwise. Self-giving is not a decision God makes but the character God has—eternally, without constraint.

This means Pharaoh’s economy isn’t just bad policy. It’s metaphysical error. Every store-city is a temple to a god that doesn’t exist. We’ve been tithing to the void. Every border we enforce, every division between “deserving” and “undeserving”—these aren’t just ethical failures. They’re reality-denials, attempts to live as if scarcity were true when every morning’s manna declares otherwise.

The Incarnation extends this logic. God “empties himself” (Philippians 2:7) not because kenosis diminishes divinity but because divinity is self-giving love that doesn’t cling. The baby in the manger doesn’t represent God giving up something precious and limited. It represents God being most fully God—abundant, excessive, poured out without remainder or reserve.

Manna economics is simply being consistent with being.

2. Three Registers of Scarcity

The main essay uses “scarcity” to do considerable work. But the word operates on at least three distinct levels, and collapsing them produces confusion.4

Psychological scarcity is the subjective experience of not-enough—the anxiety that drives hoarding regardless of actual resources. This is Pharaoh’s voice internalized, the formation that makes one clutch even when one has more than enough. My confession in the main essay about retirement accounts that never reach “enough” describes this register. Psychological scarcity is real in its effects even when materially unfounded.

Material scarcity is the empirical question of whether sufficient resources exist to meet needs. The main essay claims that material abundance exists—”we are the richest society in human history”—and that our problem is distribution rather than production. This is a factual claim subject to economic analysis. Economists will quarrel with it, and they should. But material scarcity, where it genuinely exists, is not the same as ontological scarcity. Genuine poverty doesn’t prove the universe is zero-sum.

Ontological scarcity is the metaphysical assumption that being itself is competitive—that existence runs on lack, that the cosmos is fundamentally a system of limited supply. This is the deepest register, usually unexamined, shaping how we perceive before we consciously think. Pharaoh’s economy doesn’t just create material scarcity or induce psychological scarcity; it forms subjects who assume ontological scarcity as the nature of things.

The manna story addresses all three. It provides material sufficiency (”those who gathered much had nothing over”). It counters psychological scarcity through daily practice of receiving. And it reveals ontological abundance—the God who provides inexhaustibly, whose giving doesn’t deplete the Giver.

This three-level analysis explains why “knowing better” so often fails to produce “doing better.” Information operates at the cognitive level. Psychological formation operates in the nervous system. Ontological assumptions operate in the pre-reflective structures of perception. You can intellectually affirm abundance while your body remains formed for scarcity and your perception remains structured by lack.

The logical relationship between these registers matters. Ontological abundance doesn’t automatically produce material sufficiency—if it did, no one would be hungry. The claim is more modest: ontological scarcity would make material sufficiency impossible in principle, while ontological abundance makes it possible in practice. The gap between possible and actual is where human agency, political arrangement, and sinful refusal operate. Pharaoh’s economy doesn’t just hoard grain; it forms subjects who believe hoarding is the only rational response to a universe of lack. Manna economics doesn’t magically fill every belly; it forms subjects capable of the trust and release that could fill every belly if practiced communally. The metaphysics underwrites the possibility; it doesn’t guarantee the outcome.

Transformation requires addressing all three levels—which is precisely what forty years of wilderness catechism, or a lifetime at the Eucharistic table, might accomplish.

3. Formation as Co-Regulation

Paul’s language for Christian formation is strikingly physical. “My little children, for whom I am again in the pain of childbirth until Christ is formed in you” (Galatians 4:19). The Greek morphoō means to shape or pattern—not cognitive instruction but embodied formation through sustained relational presence.

I’ve become convinced that we cannot understand what Paul means without the neuroscience we now have available. This isn’t reduction of theology to biology. It’s recognition that the tradition knew something about bodies that modernity forgot and that neuroscience is now recovering.

A methodological note is warranted here. The relationship between neuroscience and theology in this analysis is not one of validation—as if theological claims needed scientific confirmation to be credible, or as if neuroscience could adjudicate theological disputes. The relationship is better described as co-reference: both disciplines attend to the same embodied reality from different angles, using different vocabularies, asking different questions.5 Neither validates the other; both point to the same truth about how human beings are formed and malformed, constricted and opened. The convergence is not proof but resonance—the kind of resonance we should expect when two disciplines are genuinely tracking what is real.

Susan Eastman’s work on Paul makes this explicit: Paul’s maternal imagery emphasizes that “Christ is not an idea to be grasped but a life to be formed.”6 Formation happens the way a child is formed in the womb—through sustained presence, shared physiology, the slow work of one life taking shape within the environment of another.

Allan Schore’s research on affect regulation provides the neurobiological substrate for what Paul describes theologically. Right-brain-to-right-brain attunement—the process by which one regulated nervous system helps another regulate—isn’t metaphor. It’s measurable. The infant’s developing brain literally takes shape through interaction with the caregiver’s regulated presence. The neural architecture of self-regulation is built relationally, not autonomously.7

This has direct implications for the Emmaus encounter. The disciples had received excellent theological instruction. Their hearts burned during the Bible study. But recognition required presence, not proposition. The risen Jesus became known not in the teaching but in the breaking of bread—embodied practice, shared table, the physicality of gifts received and released.

Paul’s “renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2) uses nous—not detached intellect but the perceiving, interpreting self. English translations that render this as “mind” in the Cartesian sense miss Paul’s meaning. The nous isn’t a faculty that processes information. It’s the whole interpretive apparatus through which reality appears—what phenomenologists might call the “lifeworld” and what neuroscientists map as the predictive brain’s prior assumptions.

Daniel Siegel’s work shows how this interpretive apparatus forms. The brain doesn’t passively receive sensory data and then interpret it. The brain actively constructs perceptual reality based on prior experience—implicit memory shaping what we can see before we consciously look.8 A nervous system formed by Pharaoh’s anxiety literally cannot perceive the abundance that’s there. The predictive architecture filters it out as implausible.

This is why forty years of wilderness catechism were necessary. You cannot update firmware with software patches. The body that learned scarcity in Egypt needed daily practice of receiving to build new predictive models. Information—”God will provide”—wasn’t enough. The nous formed by Pharaoh’s store-cities required embodied counter-formation: manna every morning, Sabbath every week, the slow retraining of a nervous system that had learned to hoard.

The church’s Eucharistic practice isn’t merely commemorative. It’s formative in the neurobiological sense. Week after week, bodies gather. Bread is taken, blessed, broken, given. Nervous systems co-regulate in shared ritual. The renewal Paul commends isn’t cognitive reprogramming. It’s the slow reshaping of neural pathways through sustained community practice—implicit memory reformed by embodied repetition.

Hauerwas has spent a career insisting that Christianity is not beliefs to be held but practices to be inhabited. The neuroscience confirms what he intuited: you cannot think your way into a new way of living. You can only live your way into a new way of thinking.

4. Capital as Counter-Manna

Jonathan Levy’s Ages of American Capitalism offers a reframing I’ve found indispensable.9 Capital, Levy argues, is not accumulated wealth but a psychologically-mediated, future-oriented process—wealth deployed speculatively in expectation of future return.

This definition matters because capital so understood has an inherent “liquidity preference”: a structural drive toward optionality and exit rather than commitment and fixity. Capital wants to remain liquid—easily moved—rather than illiquid—bound to particular places, peoples, or purposes. This preference isn’t incidental. It’s constitutive. Capital that can’t exit isn’t fully capital; it’s just property.

The formation this produces is precisely counter-manna. Where manna economics teaches daily receiving and trust in tomorrow’s provision, capital’s liquidity preference teaches perpetual optionality and suspicion of commitment. Where manna forms subjects who can rest because provision is assured, capital forms subjects who cannot rest because exit must always remain possible. Where manna binds people to place and community through shared dependence, capital’s liquidity corrodes every bond that might impede mobility.

I want to be precise about what kind of claim I’m making. This isn’t mere analogy—noticing surface similarities between ancient grain-hoarding and modern capital. It’s a genus-species claim: both Pharaoh’s store-cities and capital’s liquidity preference are instances of the same underlying logic—the formation of subjects for scarcity-anxiety who seek security through accumulation and the preservation of exit options. They differ in mechanism (grain vs. liquidity, forced labor vs. wage labor) but share the same formational grammar. To use Aristotelian language: they are different species of the genus “scarcity-formation economy.” The connection is taxonomic, not merely illustrative.

The manna economy’s “daily bread” directly counters this formation: receive today, trust tomorrow’s provision, resist the anxiety that drives accumulation and exit. But this counter-formation requires what capital structurally prevents—communities stable enough to practice trust across time, relationships secure enough to bear the vulnerability of commitment, a horizon long enough to discover that tomorrow’s bread actually comes.

Capital doesn’t just create material precarity. It creates the ontological conditions under which manna economics becomes unthinkable. When every relationship is potentially temporary and every commitment potentially negotiable, daily bread sounds like dangerous naïveté. Pharaoh wins not by arguing but by forming subjects for whom his economy feels like the only realistic option.

This is what makes the church’s counter-formation so difficult and so necessary. We are not offering a competing investment strategy. We are offering a different ontology—one in which being is gift, provision is daily, and the liquidity that capital prizes is revealed as the restless anxiety of those who cannot trust.

But the difference goes deeper than ontology. Manna economics reconstitutes economic logic at its root.

In Pharaoh’s economy, receiving creates debt. When you receive from a finite supply, you are diminished—obligated, beholden, lesser than before. The gift carries a hook. Every favor must be repaid; every kindness creates leverage; every act of generosity positions the giver above the receiver. This is why capital’s liquidity preference makes perfect sense within Pharaoh’s formation: if receiving is always dangerous, the rational response is to preserve optionality, maintain exit capacity, never become too indebted to any particular relationship or place.

In manna economy, receiving creates capacity for gift. This inversion is possible only because the Source is inexhaustible. When you receive from infinite fullness, you are not diminished but enlarged—not obligated but freed for your own generosity. The gift carries no hook because there is always more where it came from. Wells observes that divine love “does not fundamentally lie in unequal gestures of sacrifice, but in mutual companionship and utter appreciation.”10 The love extended to creation is the same love the Trinity enjoys internally—non-competitive, generative, endless.

The difference is structural, not merely quantitative. Pharaoh’s economy forms subjects who experience every gift as potential trap, every generosity as subtle domination. Manna economy forms subjects who experience receiving as the condition of possibility for giving—not because they must repay, but because fullness naturally overflows. The widow’s mite and the boy’s loaves aren’t impressive sacrifices from scarcity; they’re natural offerings from those who have learned that giving doesn’t deplete.

This is why the church’s counter-formation must address all three registers simultaneously. It’s not enough to redistribute material resources if psychological scarcity still shapes perception. It’s not enough to cultivate feelings of abundance if ontological assumptions remain Pharaonic. The Eucharist works on all three levels at once: bread and wine are materially sufficient, shared practice rewires psychological formation, and the liturgy declares the ontological truth that being itself is gift from an inexhaustible Source.

5. The Fantasy of Belonging

David Bentley Hart’s recent analysis draws on Marx to illuminate something I’ve been trying to name for years: how national identity functions as what might be called a “fantasy of belonging.”11

The mechanism is psychological: shared ethnic or national identity creates the illusion of common interest between exploiter and exploited. Consider the poor white American Southerner who owned no slaves. He shared identity with planters—white, Southern, Christian—and this shared identity made the planter’s wealth feel like “our” prosperity, the planter’s enemies feel like “our” enemies. Material deprivation gets psychologically compensated by identity belonging.

The result, as Hart puts it, is that national identity fantasy “turns the hostility of the poor and of laborers away from those who actually exploit and oppress them, and against those who would naturally be their class allies around the world.” American workers see Mexican workers as competitors rather than fellow laborers with shared interests. The hostility that might challenge the system goes instead toward the foreign worker, and the system continues unchallenged.

Here’s where the shame-pride framework I’ve been developing across this series becomes essential. The fantasy of belonging isn’t merely ideological mystification—false consciousness that better information could dispel. It’s affective compensation for real wounds.

Toxic shame—the biological affect of relational rupture internalized as identity rather than heard as signal—seeks healing through pride-based compensation. Economic precarity generates shame. The worker who cannot provide, who fears the next layoff, who watches others accumulate what remains out of reach—this worker carries shame in the body, encoded as firmware, firing in milliseconds through subcortical systems.

The fantasy of shared ethnic identity offers hubristic pride as counterfeit remedy. “I may be struggling, but at least I’m one of us—not one of them.” This is the individual shame-to-disordered-pride dynamic operating at collective scale. The precarious worker who embraces national identity against immigrant “competitors” isn’t simply mistaken about economics. He’s found a way to manage unbearable shame through borrowed pride.

But the fantasy operates at a deeper level than affect regulation. National identity doesn’t just feel like belonging; it claims to be a form of genuine participation in something that transcends the individual. This is why nationalism has religious dimensions—it offers a counterfeit analogia entis, a false mediation between particular and universal. The poor white Southerner didn’t just feel connected to the planter; he believed he participated in something—whiteness, Southernness, “our way of life”—that transcended them both. This is the structural inversion of eucharistic participation. The Eucharist offers participation in Christ’s body across all borders; national identity offers participation in the nation-body against other nations. Both claim to connect particular to universal. Only one actually does. Nationalism is not merely bad politics or disordered affect. It is idolatrous participation in false transcendence—which is why it proves so resistant to mere argument.

The solution isn’t argument but alternative belonging—communities that offer genuine security without requiring the exclusion of others to maintain it. This is what manna economics provides, and what Pharaoh’s economy structurally prevents. At the wilderness table, belonging isn’t earned through productivity or maintained through exclusion. The manna falls on everyone. Your portion isn’t a function of your gathering. Identity comes from being fed, not from being better than those who aren’t.

Future essays will develop how attachment wounds that manifest in individuals as narrowed windows of tolerance and defensive pride structures also manifest at communal and peoplehood levels—how wounded communities generate the same compensatory patterns that wounded individuals do. For now, the point is this: the fantasy of belonging isn’t peripheral to capital’s functioning. It’s essential. Without identity formations that redirect class antagonism into ethnic competition, the solidarity that might challenge the system could emerge.

Borders aren’t just administrative conveniences. They’re shame-management infrastructure.

Wells offers language that crystallizes what I’m trying to describe. Sin, he argues, is not primarily transgressing a code but inhabiting a false story—”the misconstrual of a narrative such that a story of grace and abundance is distorted into one of resentment and scarcity.”12

This is exactly what the fantasy of national belonging does. It takes the true story—that being is gift, that provision flows from inexhaustible fullness, that we are made for communion across every boundary—and distorts it into a story of threat and competition. In the true story, the stranger is potential companion in the life of shared abundance. In the false story, the stranger is competitor for scarce resources, threat to precarious identity, enemy to be excluded.

Wells presses further: Sin is “a false story about God, that forgets or denies that God longs to be with us... Sin consequently is a false story about ourselves, that we do not belong in this story; about one another, that other people constitute threats to our being with rather than assets and companions; and about creation, that we can use it to create an alternative story rather than enjoy it as it belongs with us.”13

The fantasy of ethnic belonging is precisely such a false story. It tells the precarious worker that he belongs to “us” rather than “them”—that his identity is secured by exclusion rather than received as gift. It offers a counterfeit analogia entis, a false mediation between particular and universal: you matter because you’re white, or American, or Christian in the right way. But this belonging depends on others not belonging. It is secured by the border, maintained by the sort, sustained by the distinction between deserving and undeserving. The moment you extend the boundary, the belonging dissolves—which is why such formations are so ferociously defended.

The Eucharist offers the true story. At this table, belonging is not earned through productivity or maintained through exclusion. The bread falls on everyone. Your portion is not a function of your gathering. Identity comes from being fed, not from being better than those who aren’t. This is why Christian nationalism is not merely bad politics but theological error—it mistakes a false story for the true one, offers counterfeit participation in place of genuine communion, and manages shame through borrowed pride rather than receiving the only identity that cannot be taken away.

6. Borders as Ontological Convention

The main essay critiques borders that fragment human solidarity. But colleagues have pressed me: what is a border, ontologically considered? The question deserves a serious answer.

A border is the claim that being can be cleanly divided—that “mine” and “yours,” “us” and “them,” name real ruptures in existence. It presupposes that reality can be sliced into mutually exclusive territories, that identity is constituted by exclusion, that what I am depends on what I am not.

Classical metaphysics denies this. Being is not a genus divisible into species.14 The doctrine of divine simplicity means God cannot be divided; the doctrine of participation means creatures exist by sharing in what cannot be divided. You can draw lines on water, but water doesn’t take the ink. Borders are not ontologically fundamental.

But a further premise is needed to move from metaphysics to ethics: claims to ultimacy must be grounded in ontological reality. Administrative arrangements—practically necessary, historically contingent—can legitimately organize human life without claiming sacred status. What they cannot do is demand the kind of allegiance appropriate only to what is ontologically real. The nation-state that asks its citizens to kill and die for it claims ultimacy. The border that determines who eats and who starves claims ultimacy. These claims fail not because borders serve no purpose, but because the purpose they serve cannot justify the sacrifices they demand. Only what participates in Being itself warrants ultimate allegiance—and borders, however useful, do not.

A clarification on “contingent”: I am not arguing that borders are accidental in the sense of arbitrary or meaningless. Borders serve real functions in a world still marked by the Fall’s effects. What I am denying is their ultimacy—that they represent permanent features of being itself rather than provisional arrangements within creation’s current condition. The distinction is between “contingent as accidental” and “contingent as dependent.” Borders depend on conditions that will not persist into the eschaton. They are real but not final.

Hart’s recent work reveals the paradox at capitalism’s heart that makes this analysis urgent.15 Capital’s drive toward borderless mobility—goods, services, and money flowing wherever profit beckons—creates instability that only sovereign states can manage: legal frameworks, contract enforcement, currency systems, crisis intervention. But state sovereignty requires territorial boundaries.

The result: the most mobile capital paradoxically requires the most fixed borders. Each nation-state becomes what Hart calls an “area of absolute sovereignty, law, and coercive power, invested with a numinous aura of sacral inviolability.” This sacralization isn’t religious residue; it’s functional necessity. Capital needs bordered markets; bordered markets need the fiction of natural nations; natural nations need ethnic/cultural identity markers. The system that claims to liberate individuals actually requires the tribal identities it pretends to transcend.

This matters because it grounds the claim that fragmentation is not just unjust but confused. The system that sorts us into competing groups isn’t merely ethically problematic; it’s metaphysically mistaken. It treats as ontologically primary what is at best accidentally true. “American” and “Mexican” name administrative categories, not kinds of being. The sorting is violence against participation itself—a refusal of the communion that constitutes existence.

Paul’s declaration in Galatians—”no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female”—isn’t social aspiration. It’s ontological recognition. In Christ, the conventional boundaries are revealed as contingent—they were never ontologically real. They were Pharaoh’s lines drawn on being, pretending to divide what cannot be divided. Baptism doesn’t create a new reality; it reveals the reality that was always true but obscured by the conventions we’d mistaken for nature.

None of this means borders serve no purpose. Administrative distinctions can be practically necessary. But borders become idolatrous when they claim ultimacy—when they pretend to name real divisions in being rather than contingent arrangements subject to revision. The nation-state that demands sacrifice as if it were sacred confuses administrative convenience with ontological necessity.

Manna economics exposes this confusion. The bread fell on all Israel—not on this tribe’s territory rather than that one’s. The Jubilee returned land to families without respect for the property lines that debt-default had drawn. Sabbath economics doesn’t recognize the borders that Pharaoh’s economy requires.

7. Transactional Atonement as Pharaoh’s God

Penal substitutionary atonement smuggles Pharaoh into the doctrine of God.

I don’t mean this as polemic—though Hart has done that work brilliantly and I’m happy to cite him.16 I mean it as analysis. The conceptual architecture of the theory requires a God who operates by scarcity logic.

Consider what the contractual model assumes: a God whose honor is a limited quantity that can be depleted by human offense. A God who operates by ledger, tracking debts and payments. A God whose economy runs on scarcity—there’s only so much divine favor, and we’ve overdrawn the account.

But this is Pharaoh’s god. This is the deity of store-cities, the divine accountant tallying what’s owed, the cosmic version of the economy that produces anxious subjects to serve its endless hunger. If God operates by scarcity logic, then Pharaoh was right all along—hoarding is rational because even the divine realm doesn’t have enough.

The doctrine of divine aseity—that God needs nothing from creatures—stands in direct tension with any atonement theory that requires God to receive satisfaction.17 If God truly needs nothing, then “satisfaction” must mean something other than replenishing what was depleted. The Incarnation becomes not God collecting payment but God entering our captivity to set us free—which is precisely the Exodus pattern, precisely what Luke narrates, precisely what manna economics embodies.

The God of the manna story doesn’t operate by ledger. The God who gives bread every morning without depleting anything doesn’t need satisfaction—God is satisfaction, the infinite fullness from which all being flows. What could we possibly owe a God who has everything? What could we pay a God who needs nothing? The very categories of debt and payment assume a scarcity that doesn’t exist in God.

Douglas Campbell’s apocalyptic reading of Paul has been essential for me here.18 The difference between contractual and apocalyptic frameworks is enormous: in the contractual model, God’s wrath is the problem requiring solution; in the apocalyptic model, God’s love is the solution invading the problem. The Incarnation isn’t God settling accounts. It’s God entering Pharaoh’s territory to bring captives home.

This doesn’t mean sin is unserious or that the cross accomplishes nothing. It means the accomplishment must be understood differently—as liberation rather than transaction, as presence rather than payment, as God entering the territory occupied by hostile powers to set prisoners free. The Incarnation is invasion, not invoice.

But how does presence liberate? If the powers that hold us captive have real force—and they do; Pharaoh’s economy genuinely binds—what does divine presence accomplish that mere information cannot? Here the neuroscience of co-regulation offers theological illumination. A dysregulated nervous system cannot regulate itself by trying harder. It requires the presence of a regulated other—a nervous system already at rest that can, through sustained proximity, invite the dysregulated system into its rhythm.19 The Incarnation is God entering the co-regulatory circuit. Emmanuel doesn’t argue us out of Pharaoh’s formation; Emmanuel holds us until our systems can reorganize around a different center. The powers are real—not as ontological substances competing with God, but as formations, patterns, grooves worn into neural pathways and social structures. They are privative in the sense that they represent the absence of right relation, but privation can nonetheless bind. What breaks their hold is not counter-force but counter-presence: the slow, patient work of a regulated love that doesn’t leave.

This pneumatological dimension requires explicit Trinitarian naming—something I’ve left implicit until now.

The Incarnation is the Son’s entrance into Pharaoh’s territory. Emmanuel doesn’t send a message or dispatch a representative. The second Person crosses the threshold, takes on flesh formed by Pharaoh’s anxiety, and begins the slow work of being with those whose nervous systems have been shaped for scarcity. This is the Son’s characteristic work: embodying the Trinity’s utter commitment to be with creation.

But the Son’s work in first-century Palestine, however decisive, requires continuation. This is where the Spirit enters—not as afterthought or auxiliary, but as the Person through whom the Son’s presence extends across time and space. Samuel Wells makes a distinction I’ve found clarifying: Jesus Christ names the Trinity’s defining purpose; the Holy Spirit names the Trinity’s unfolding purpose.20 The Son is what God has done decisively; the Spirit is how that continues.

The Spirit is the Person who maintains co-regulatory presence across the gap that sin and death create. What the neuroscience describes as right-brain-to-right-brain attunement—the process by which one regulated nervous system helps another regulate—theology names as the Spirit’s ongoing work. The Spirit makes Christ present, fosters ways human beings are with Christ, prepares the way for the communion that has no end. The wilderness catechism begun at Sinai continues at the Eucharistic table. Week after week, the Spirit draws dysregulated systems into the rhythm of a love that holds without grasping.

And the Father? The Father is the inexhaustible Source from whom this abundance flows—the one who begets and sends, whose voice at Jesus’ baptism announces not transaction but delight: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” The manna that falls every morning is icon of the Father’s character: giving that doesn’t deplete, provision that doesn’t run out, abundance that makes Pharaoh’s store-cities look like the anxious hoarding they are.

This Trinitarian specification matters because it prevents the manna story from becoming merely ethical exhortation. We’re not being told to try harder at generosity. We’re being invited into the life of a God whose very being is self-giving love—a God who cannot not give, because giving is what God eternally is.

8. Ontological Habitation

The main essay follows Sam Wells in speaking of sin as “living the wrong story.” But I’ve come to think “story” is too weak. The issue isn’t narrative preference, like choosing between novels. It’s ontological habitation—inhabiting differently structured universes.

To live Pharaoh’s story is to inhabit a universe structured by scarcity. In that universe, being runs out, accumulation is rational, borders are necessary to protect what little there is. Everything appears within a horizon of lack. The perceptual field itself is organized around threat, competition, and the struggle for limited goods.

To live the manna story is to inhabit a universe structured by gift. In that universe, being overflows, release makes sense because more is always coming, borders are fictions maintained against the truth. Everything appears within a horizon of abundance. The perceptual field is organized around trust, communion, and the reception of unlimited grace.

These are not merely different interpretations of a neutral, pre-given world. They are differently structured horizons of perception—what we might call different experienced worlds, while acknowledging that translation and transformation between them remains possible.21 The forty years of wilderness catechism presuppose precisely this: that the Pharaoh-formed can learn to inhabit manna-reality. If the worlds were strictly incommensurable, conversion would be impossible. But conversion is difficult precisely because it requires more than cognitive assent—it requires the slow reformation of the predictive apparatus through which reality appears.

The phenomenological tradition helps here: our “world” is not simply given to neutral observation but constituted by embodied practices and pre-reflective orientations. Different formations produce different worlds—not subjectively (as mere perspective) but constitutively (as the structured field within which anything can appear).

The neuroscience material developed earlier in this appendix supports this. The “window of tolerance” isn’t just psychological; it’s epistemic. A nervous system formed by Pharaoh’s anxiety literally cannot see the abundance that’s there. The predictive brain constructs perceptual reality based on prior formation.22 What we see depends on what we’ve been trained to expect. Pharaoh’s formation doesn’t just make us act as if scarcity were true. It makes scarcity true for us—the only world our constricted perception can access.

The formation I’ve been describing is not merely epistemic but aesthetic. To inhabit manna-world is to perceive beautywhere Pharaoh-formation sees only weakness.

Consider the infant in the manger. The Pharaoh-formed look at this scene and see vulnerability, exposure, lack of protection—all the markers of what capital’s liquidity preference would classify as “bad investment.” A deity worthy of worship would surely arrive with power, provision, security. This baby has none of those. The Pharaoh-formed cannot perceive it as beautiful. They see only deficit.

But the Trinity’s internal life is characterized by what Wells calls “delight”—perceiving abundance rather than scarcity, rejoicing in fecundity rather than pinpointing defects, celebrating new configurations rather than lamenting the loss of familiar patterns. And delight, Wells observes, “is inherently non-violent: instead of coercing or exploiting deficit, it appreciates and validates assets. It is not looking to outwit, or dominate, but to build up and enhance.”23

The Christmas event isn’t just true. It’s beautiful. God appearing as an infant in poverty is aesthetically revelatory—it discloses the form of divine self-giving that the scarcity-formed cannot recognize as glory. Only formation that comes from sustained exposure to this form—looking at the manger, looking at the cross, practicing the release of what cannot be kept—enables one to perceive beauty in apparent defeat. The wilderness catechism trains not just new perception but new capacity for joy.

This aesthetic dimension matters because beauty moves us when argument cannot. The Pharaoh-formed subject may intellectually grasp that abundance is true without being able to see it as beautiful—without being drawn toward it, delighted by it, changed in the perceiving. Formation requires not just updated beliefs but trained desires, redirected loves, the slow reshaping of what strikes us as worthy of pursuit. The manna story is beautiful in ways that Pharaoh’s store-cities cannot be. The cross is beautiful in ways that the empire’s power cannot approximate. Learning to perceive this beauty is part of what it means to be converted from scarcity to gift.

This means conversion isn’t agreeing to different ideas. It’s learning to inhabit a different universe. Forty years in the wilderness. A lifetime at the table. Enough practiced receiving that the nervous system finally trusts: there’s bread tomorrow. There’s always been bread. Being itself is bread.

9. Particularity and Solidarity

The main essay’s critique of borders and fragmentation requires nuance that the prophetic mode doesn’t easily accommodate. Borders aren’t simply evil. Boundaries enable identity, and identity enables agency.24

The manna community wasn’t a universal abstraction. It was a particular people, with a particular story, learning a particular practice. Christian universalism doesn’t dissolve that particularity; it relativizes it under a higher allegiance while honoring it as the place where formation actually happens. You don’t become a citizen of God’s kingdom by ceasing to be Guatemalan or Somali or American. You become someone for whom “American” is no longer the most important thing you are—which frees you to love America rightly, without idolatry, without ultimacy.

Ched Myers has helped me see how the manna story bears on this.25 In the wilderness catechism, your portion is explicitly not a function of your gathering. “Those who gathered much had nothing over, and those who gathered little had no shortage” (Exodus 16:18). This directly contradicts the segmentation between “producers” and “takers” that pervades contemporary discourse.

The wilderness catechism teaches that provision comes from God’s abundance, not individual productivity; that sufficiency for all is possible when no one hoards; that the distinction between “makers” and “takers” is Pharaoh’s lie, not God’s truth.

Paul’s baptismal vision extends this economic logic to ethnic identity. In Galatians 3:26-28, Paul argues that baptism creates a community where “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Baptism, for Paul, dissolves precisely the identity markers that bordered markets require and that “producer/taker” rhetoric reinforces.

The apostolic confession “Jesus is Lord” doesn’t merely relativize national loyalty; it renders the entire project of ethnic and economic segmentation theologically incoherent. This is why Christianity must be constantly domesticated into national religions and why dominative Christianism baptizes economic hierarchies as divine order—the gospel’s universalism threatens both the fragmentation that capitalism needs and the shame-based hierarchies that disordered pride constructs.

The problem isn’t particularity per se. It’s particularity weaponized against solidarity. The Hart/Levy analysis shows how capital requires this weaponization: bordered markets need competing identities, and competing identities prevent the cross-border solidarity that might challenge capital’s mobility. The sorting serves the system.

But the solution isn’t dissolving all particularity into abstract universalism. That’s its own kind of violence—the violence of the “view from nowhere” that pretends to transcend location while actually imposing one location’s perspective on all others. Real solidarity is built through particular communities learning to act together across their differences, not by pretending differences don’t exist.26

The question isn’t whether to have borders but whether borders become walls or windows—whether particular belonging enables coalition with others or prevents it. Pharaoh’s economy needs borders that divide and conquer. Manna economics can honor particular communities while refusing to let them become prisons. The church is both catholic (universal) and always concretely local (particular congregations in specific places). The tension is constitutive, not resolvable.

This has practical implications for how Christians engage questions of migration, nationalism, and identity politics. We cannot simply denounce all borders as evil without becoming complicit in the abstracting violence that erases concrete communities. But we cannot defend borders as sacred without making idols of administrative arrangements. The path runs between—particular enough to enable formation, porous enough to prevent idolatry, oriented always toward the broader communion that particularity serves rather than blocks.

Conclusion: What Remains Unresolved

The Christmas reflection in the main essay makes theological claims that rest on philosophical foundations. This appendix has attempted to make those foundations explicit: that being is gift rather than scarcity; that scarcity operates on psychological, material, and ontological registers requiring different responses; that formation happens through co-regulation before it happens through cognition; that capital’s liquidity preference is counter-manna; that the fantasy of belonging manages shame through borrowed pride and offers counterfeit participation in false transcendence; that borders are administratively useful but ontologically contingent—conventional arrangements that serve practical purposes without tracking real divisions in being; that transactional atonement smuggles Pharaoh’s god into Christian doctrine; that formation produces different experienced worlds rather than different interpretations of the same world, while preserving the possibility of translation and transformation; and that the relationship between particularity and universality is constitutive tension rather than simple opposition.

I’m aware of what I haven’t resolved.

The relationship between material scarcity and ontological abundance remains underdeveloped. Saying “genuine poverty doesn’t prove the universe is zero-sum” is true but insufficient. People are hungry. The manna isn’t falling on their tents. A fuller account would need to address theodicy, the problem of evil, and why ontological abundance doesn’t translate into material sufficiency for everyone. I don’t have that account yet.

The political implications are gestured at but not developed. If borders are ontologically contingent but practically necessary, what policy follows? I’ve diagnosed without prescribing, criticized without constructing. Bretherton and Cavanaugh have done more constructive work here than I have, and I’m still learning from them.

But I can at least gesture toward direction. Future essays will develop how manna economics funds a politics of participatory communion. Wells insists that the eschaton must be “participatory, interactive, dynamic and unfolding”—not static preservation of the saved but endless being-with, meals and conversation and communion without end. The Eucharist, he argues, is constitutive of heaven, not merely commemorative of rescue: “There would have been a Eucharist even without the fall, because it enacts God’s companionship with us, initiated in the incarnation.”27

If this is true—if the goal toward which formation tends is not escape from materiality but its transformation, not individual salvation but cosmic communion—then political economy cannot be afterthought or application. It’s part of what we’re being formed for. The wilderness catechism trained Israel for Canaan; the Eucharistic table trains us for a feast that has no end. A politics adequate to this formation would neither baptize Pharaoh’s economy with pious language nor retreat into spiritual otherworldliness. It would embody, here and now, the pattern of the coming abundance—not as utopian achievement but as anticipatory practice, the way manna anticipated Canaan even while the people were still in the desert.

What such a politics looks like in detail—how it navigates the tension between particular belonging and universal communion, how it resists both nationalism’s idolatry and cosmopolitanism’s abstraction—remains to be developed. But the direction is set by the formation itself: toward practices that train for abundance, communities that form for trust, tables where the bread falls on everyone.

The relationship between individual and collective shame-pride dynamics needs the fuller treatment I’ve promised in future essays. I’ve asserted that wounded communities generate compensatory patterns analogous to wounded individuals. I haven’t demonstrated it.

None of this replaces the main essay’s pastoral invitation. You don’t need to grasp these philosophical arguments to practice manna economics. The disciples at Emmaus recognized Jesus in the breaking of bread, not in metaphysical analysis. Formation happens at the table before it happens in the seminar.

But for those who want to understand why the invitation makes sense—why daily bread isn’t naive optimism, why release isn’t self-destruction, why borders don’t have the ultimacy they claim—these foundations matter.

The manna story isn’t just ancient wisdom or inspiring metaphor. It’s true. Being really is gift. Scarcity really is lie. And Christmas really is God showing us what that truth looks like in flesh.

I could be wrong about any of this. Push back where you see the argument failing. That’s what colleagues are for.

Craig

Christmas 2025

© 2025 Craig Geevarghese-Uffman. You’re welcome to share this with attribution.

Endnotes