Christian Mythbusters

Fr. Jared C. Cramer
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Each week Father Jared Cramer, the Rector of St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, MI, offers a brief 3-5 minute episode where he tried to unpack, debunk, and reconsider some of the ways we often think about Christianity and the church.

  1. 3D AGO

    God is Not a Man

    This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. Over the past few days, there’s been a good amount of controversy swirling around a comment from Texas politician and Presbyterian seminary student James Talarico. During a speech several years ago, Talarico said something that quickly went viral again this week: “God is nonbinary.” Critics pounced. Commentators circulated the clip as evidence that progressive Christians have abandoned traditional faith. But Talarico later said he was making a theological point that shouldn’t really be controversial—the idea that God is beyond human gender categories. Which brings us to today’s myth: the myth that God is a man… because apparently some people think that’s true.  And if you think about it for even a moment, that idea doesn’t make much sense. Christians believe God created the entire universe—space, time, matter, life itself. God is the source and ground of all being, the ultimate divine reality that exists beyond the limits of human biology. If God is the creator of gender, then God cannot be confined to a single gender. But here’s the thing: many people really do imagine God as literally male. I remember leading a Bible study early in my ministry, when I was still a brand-new priest. At one point in the discussion, an older woman in the group said something that genuinely surprised me. She told us that she believed God really was an old man with a long white beard—basically the same image you see in Renaissance paintings. And she didn’t mean that symbolically. She meant it quite literally. Now, to be clear, scripture often uses masculine language for God. Jesus taught us to pray “Our Father.” But the reality is the Bible also uses feminine imagery for God—comparing God to a mother eagle protecting her young, a woman searching for a lost coin, or a mother comforting her child. The point is not that God is male or female. The point is that every human metaphor eventually falls short. In fact, the very first chapter of the Bible pushes us in this direction. In Genesis we are told that human beings are created in the image of God: “male and female he created them.” Notice what that implies. The fullness of humanity reflects the divine image. No single gender contains it all. And that insight has something important to say for how Christians think about gender today. If all people bear the image of God, then transgender and nonbinary people are not mistakes. They are not outside of God’s creative intention. They, too, reflect the divine image in the world. In fact, that might be a particular gift the trans community offers the rest of us. Because their lives challenge the assumption that gender must fit neatly into simple binary categories, they remind us of something theology has always known: God transcends the boxes we try to place around reality. And so why would we be surprised when humans do the same?   In that way, the existence and witness of trans and nonbinary people can help reveal something profound about the mystery of God, about the reality of gender not being one or the other but a multitude of diversity.  When Genesis described God looking at creation, Genesis said God declared it “very good.” That blessing extends to the full diversity of humanity—including those whose lives challenge categories we once assumed were fixed. And this is something the great mystics of the Christian tradition understood very well. They taught that the deepest path into the heart of God is what theologians call the apophatic way—the path of realizing that God ultimately surpasses every concept, every category, every image we try to use. The closer we get to God, the more we discover that the divine mystery is always larger than our assumptions. And when we learn to live in that mystery, something beautiful happens: our theology becomes humbler, our compassion becomes wider, and we begin to recognize the image of God shining in people we might once have overlooked. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

    4 min

  2. MAR 4

    When Deconstruction Becomes Conversion

    This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. One of the biggest myths many of us carry about faith is this: that if your beliefs change, your faith must be failing. For a lot of people—especially those of us who grew up in evangelical environments—faith was often presented as a kind of finished product. The right doctrines. The right interpretations. The right answers. Once you “arrived,” the expectation was that you would simply defend those answers for the rest of your life. But life and the Holy Spirit have a way of complicating tidy answers. You encounter new ideas. You meet people whose experiences challenge what you were taught. You discover parts of scripture you had never really wrestled with before. The Holy Spirit moves in your heart, asking you to reconsider something you’ve always believed. And suddenly the faith that once felt certain begins to shift. For many people, that moment can be terrifying. Because if faith is supposed to be a fixed set of beliefs, then questioning those beliefs can feel like the beginning of the end. But the deeper Christian tradition offers a very different picture of faith. In the Rule of St. Benedict—the sixth-century guide for monastic life—monks take three vows: stability, obedience, and something called conversatio morum. That Latin phrase is famously hard to translate, but it’s often rendered as “conversion of life.” Not conversion as a one-time event. Conversion as a lifelong process. Conversatio morum assumes something many modern Christians forget: following Christ means continually being changed. Your understanding deepens. Your assumptions are challenged. Your life slowly reshapes itself around the way of Jesus. In other words, change is not a failure of faith… change is faith. That idea was enormously important for me personally. I grew up in an evangelical world where certainty was often treated as the highest virtue. But as I encountered the wider Christian tradition—scripture, history, theology, and the sacramental life of the church—I found myself asking questions that my earlier faith didn’t always know how to answer. For a while, that felt like everything was unraveling. But discovering this older Christian wisdom from St. Benedict reframed the entire experience. What I thought was “deconstruction” w something far older: conversion of life. Conversatio morum. It reminded me that the goal of Christianity is not intellectual rigidity. The goal is transformation after the mind of Christ. And in many ways, that realization is what eventually drew me into the Anglican tradition. Anglicanism holds deeply to the ancient faith of the church—its creeds, its scriptures, its sacramental life—but it also carries a humility about our understanding. It recognizes that the Holy Spirit is still at work reforming the church ever closer to God’s intent. That means we hold tradition seriously, but we also remain open to asking whether some of the church’s long-held assumptions were shaped more by culture than by the heart of God. Questions about the roles of women in the church, or about LGBTQ people and their place in the life of faith, have forced Christians to wrestle deeply with scripture, tradition, and lived experience.  And in many parts of the Anglican world, including my own, that wrestling has led to the recognition that what once seemed like the “traditional” position may actually have been culturally conditioned by forces of patriarchy, discrimination, or marginalization… that the Spirit may be leading the church toward a fuller understanding of God’s love and justice than we previously held. That too is conversatio morum. The apostle Paul puts it this way in his letter to the Romans: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” Notice that word: renewing. Not once but again and again and again. A Benedictine writer once captured the spirit of this beautifully with a simple phrase: “always we begin again.” That’s what the Christian life looks like. We learn. We grow. We repent. We reconsider. And through it all, the Spirit keeps shaping us more and more into the likeness of Christ. Always we begin again—a truth of discipleship that sometimes might feel scary but that is actually a profound gift. The myth is that faith means never changing. The truth is that following Jesus means being willing to be changed—again and again—as we grow ever closer to God’s intent for us to be a people of love, justice, humility, grace, and mercy—particularly for ourselves. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

    5 min

  3. FEB 18

    Ashes, Grace, and the Ragamuffin Gospel

    This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. Since most of you will be hearing this either on Ash Wednesday or sometime near the start of Lent, let’s talk about one of the most common myths surrounding this day. The myth is this: Ash Wednesday and Lent are about God wanting you to feel bad about yourself. I want to speak personally for a moment. Growing up in an evangelical context, I often felt like I never quite measured up. No matter how sincere my faith was, no matter how hard I tried, there was always this quiet sense that I was falling short—that real Christians were somehow stronger, purer, more certain than I was. Faith sometimes felt less like grace and more like a test I kept failing. And yet, strangely, when I encountered The Episcopal Church, Ash Wednesday became the day I first began to feel like I belonged. Because on Ash Wednesday, nobody is pretending. Nobody is polished. Nobody is performing spiritual success. We all come forward the same way—marked with ashes, named as dust, honest about our limits. Beat up, broken, and bedraggled… and still here. Still loved. Still called. Still held in grace. It was in the Season of Lent that I think I first began to understand what Brennan Manning called the Ragamuffin Gospel—the stunning truth that God’s love is not for the shiny and successful, but for ragamuffins: the bedraggled, the inconsistent, the ones who know they don’t have it all together. Manning wrote that “God loves you as you are, not as you should be, because none of us are as we should be.” That is the heart of Ash Wednesday. The ashes are not God saying, You are a failure. The ashes are God saying, You are human—and I am not done loving you yet . And if you grew up, like I did, with Rich Mullins somewhere in the background of your faith, you may remember how often he circled this same mystery. Mullins once said he wasn’t a good Christian—just a beggar showing other beggars where to find bread. That’s Ash Wednesday. Not the gathering of the spiritually impressive, but the gathering of beggars who know they need grace. In Scripture, ashes are never about worthlessness. They are about turning—repentance, reorientation, coming home. When people put on ashes in the Bible, they were not declaring, “I am nothing.” They were saying, “I want to live in what is real again. I want to return to God.” Ashes are not the mark of failure. They are the mark of hope—the sign that transformation is still possible. And notice this: everyone comes forward. The faithful and the doubting. The strong and the struggling. The certain and the searching. Ash Wednesday and Lent do not divide the worthy from the unworthy. They reveals something we all share—we are dust, we are fragile, we are unfinished… and we are loved anyway. Because “you are dust” is not the end of the sentence. In Genesis, God forms humanity from dust and breathes divine life into it. Dust, in the Christian imagination, is not trash. It is sacred material touched by God. To remember that we are dust is also to remember that we are beloved—created, sustained, and redeemed not by our performance, but by grace.. So if you have ever felt like you didn’t measure up—spiritually, morally, or personally—Ash Wednesday and Lent speak a different word. You do not have to pretend. You do not have to perform. You do not have to be impressive to belong. God meets us right here—in the ashes, in the honesty, in the ragamuffin truth of being human. And strangely, that is where freedom begins. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

    4 min

  4. FEB 11

    Conversion Is a Journey, Not a Moment

    This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. One of the most common myths about Christianity is that conversion is always sudden, dramatic, and once-and-for-all. Many people picture the blinding light, the voice from heaven, the instant turnaround of Saul becoming Paul on the road to Damascus. It’s a powerful story, and for many Christians—myself included growing up in an evangelical context—it becomes the model of what “real” conversion is supposed to look like. If you didn’t have a lightning-bolt moment, you might wonder whether your faith story somehow counts less. But the deeper truth of the Christian tradition is far richer and far more human. Yes, some people do experience dramatic, life-changing moments that feel like a Damascus Road. But most of us are converted not once, but many times. Conversion, in the Christian sense, is not merely a single event—it is a lifelong process of being reshaped by God’s love  . Consider St. Peter. His story is not one of a single, decisive turning point, but of repeated conversions. First, he leaves his nets and follows Jesus. Then, in fear, he denies Jesus three times. Later, he is restored and entrusted with the care of the flock, as Jesus tells him: “Feed my sheep.” But even that is not the end of his transformation. In the Book of Acts, Peter must undergo another conversion when he realizes, through the vision of the sheet filled with unclean animals and then the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, that Gentiles are fully welcomed into God’s people without preconditions. Everything in his religious upbringing, everything he thought Scripture said, had taught him otherwise, yet the Spirit made the old certainty impossible to hold. And still, Peter’s story continues. In Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, we hear that Peter later stopped eating with Gentile believers out of fear of criticism from more traditional Jewish Christians. Paul confronted him publicly. Even an apostle, even a leader of the Church, was still learning, still growing, still being converted. An ancient Christian tradition tells us that near the end of his life, during the persecution under Nero, Peter fled Rome in fear. On the road, he encountered the risen Christ and asked, “Lord, where are you going?”—Domine, quo vadis? Christ replied, “I am going to Rome to be crucified again.” In that moment, Peter experienced yet another conversion. He turned around, returned to the city, and faced martyrdom with courage. Even at the end, Peter was still becoming who God called him to be. This is the pattern many of us recognize in our own lives—not a single, perfect turning, but a journey marked by growth, failure, repentance, and renewal. The Benedictine tradition has a name for this: conversatio morum, often translated as “conversion of life.” It means an ongoing transformation, a daily turning toward God, a willingness to keep being changed. And that requires humility. It requires the courage to admit we might not yet fully understand God, Scripture, or even ourselves. It requires openness to discover that what we once thought certain may need to grow, deepen, or even be re-imagined in light of the Holy Spirit’s work. Above all, it requires attentiveness—to notice where God is moving in our lives, where love is calling us forward, where grace is inviting us to rise again after we fall. So if your faith has not been one dramatic moment but a series of small awakenings, setbacks, and new beginnings, take heart. You are not failing at Christianity—you are living it. The Christian life is not about arriving once and for all; it is about continuing to be converted, again and again, into the likeness of Christ through God’s love. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

    4 min

  5. FEB 4

    When Heavy Metal Sounds Like a Prophet

    This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. Earlier this week I was watching the Grammys, and one of the moments that really stayed with me was the memorial tribute honoring Ozzy Osbourne and his work with Black Sabbath. I know that might surprise some of you—either because I’m a Christian priest, or perhaps because you think I’m too young for his music (which, honestly, would be very kind of you to say). But that moment got me thinking about a myth I had to unlearn when I was younger: the fear I was taught to have of certain kinds of rock and roll. When I was growing up, especially in evangelical Christian circles, there was a deep anxiety about Satanism lurking in popular culture. In the late Cold War era, with rapid social change, declining trust in institutions, and genuine moral panic about drugs, violence, and youth culture, many Christians were told that the safest response was suspicion. Music became a convenient scapegoat. Bands like KISS or Black Sabbath weren’t just loud or strange; they were portrayed as spiritually dangerous, gateways to corruption, or even tools of the devil. But here’s the myth: that heavy metal, especially early metal, was primarily about glorifying evil. In reality, much of it was doing exactly the opposite. Black Sabbath’s dark imagery wasn’t an endorsement of violence or Satanism; it was a critique of evil. Their sound reflected the industrial grit, economic anxiety, and moral exhaustion of postwar Britain. They were naming the darkness of the world, not celebrating it. And that’s a deeply biblical move. Take the song highlighted in the tribute, War Pigs. Written during the Vietnam War, the song is a blistering condemnation of political leaders who send the poor and powerless to die while they themselves remain safe. “Generals gathered in their masses, just like witches at black masses”—that’s not praise. That’s accusation. The song imagines those responsible for war eventually facing judgment for their actions. When it was released in 1970, it became an anthem not just of rock and roll, but of the broader anti-war movement, giving voice to moral outrage many people felt but struggled to articulate. That’s prophecy. And prophecy doesn’t always come wrapped in polite language or religious packaging. One of the central Christian convictions I hold is that all truth is God’s truth, no matter where it comes from. Scripture itself is full of unlikely prophets: shepherds, foreigners, women whose voices were ignored, even a talking donkey. God has never limited truth-telling to officially sanctioned religious spaces. Music often takes on that prophetic role. You can hear it in folk artists like Bob Dylan or Joan Baez, in soul and gospel-infused protest songs by Nina Simone, in hip-hop, and yes, even in heavy metal. You can hear it today in artists like Jesse Welles, a folk troubadour who’s been compared to the great social commentators of the past; in his song United Health he criticizes the commodification of care with lines like, “There ain’t no you in United Health, there ain’t no me in the company, there ain’t no us in the private trust.” In Jesse’s music, just like the music of so many who came before him, artists in sist that music can and should challenge the powerful. So here’s the myth to bust: that God only speaks through “safe” or explicitly religious art. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that God’s Spirit has always been more adventurous than that. Sometimes the clearest moral vision comes from the margins, amplified through distorted guitars and uncomfortable truths. Rest in power, Ozzy, and rise in glory. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

    3 min

  6. JAN 28

    When Exhaustion is Evidence of Faith

    This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. One of the quiet myths I hear all the time—especially right now—is this: “If I’m exhausted by the news, my faith must be weak.” If you’re feeling that way, let me say this as clearly as I can: that myth is false. And believing it does real spiritual damage. Exhaustion is not a failure of faith. In fact, exhaustion is often a sign that your heart is still open—that you are still paying attention in a world that gives us endless reasons to shut down, harden up, or go numb. The truly dangerous spiritual posture isn’t weariness; it’s indifference.  The mystics of the church have known this for centuries—the pain and ache you feel in your heart is not because you are losing your connection with God. Rather, it is usually the Holy Spirit moving within you, pricking your heart, cultivating tenderness, compassion, and an impetus to action.  The Bible is also remarkably honest about this. The prophet Jeremiah—sometimes called the “weeping prophet”—doesn’t offer tidy spiritual slogans. He cries out. He accuses. He says, in effect, “God, this is too much, and I don’t understand why you’re letting it happen.” That’s not weak faith. That’s covenantal faith—the kind that trusts God enough to tell the truth. And of course, we see this most clearly in Jesus himself. Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus. Jesus laments over Jerusalem. Jesus prays in Gethsemane with such anguish that the gospel writers struggle to put it into words. At no point does Jesus treat grief, fear, or exhaustion as a spiritual defect. He treats them as part of loving a broken world without turning away from it. Christian faith is not about being endlessly resilient. It’s about being honest before God and one another. Lament is not a detour from faith; it’s one of faith’s deepest expressions. To lament is to refuse to pretend that injustice is normal, that violence is acceptable, or that suffering doesn’t matter. And here’s where this becomes especially important for how we live in the public square. Honest faith—faith that can name exhaustion and grief—actually makes deeper solidarity possible. When we stop pretending that we “have all the answers,” we can stand shoulder to shoulder with people of different faiths, or no faith at all, who are also grieving, angry, and yearning for a more just world. Lament becomes a shared language. When Christians lead with certainty alone, we often end up isolated. But when we lead with truth—when we say, “Yes, this is devastating, and yes, it hurts, and no, we don’t have a neat explanation”—we discover common ground. Not theological agreement, necessarily, but moral clarity and human connection. This kind of honesty doesn’t weaken resistance; it strengthens it. It keeps resistance from becoming performative or cruel. It reminds us that justice work is not about winning arguments, but about protecting human dignity. Lament keeps our resistance rooted in compassion rather than contempt, in love rather than despair. Christian hope, at its best, is not optimism. It’s not denial. It’s the stubborn refusal to believe that suffering gets the last word. And that kind of hope can coexist with tears, fatigue, and righteous anger. In fact, it usually does. So if the news has you worn down, don’t assume your faith is failing. It may be telling you something true: that the world is broken, that love is costly, and that God is still calling us—not to carry everything, but to show up honestly, together. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

    4 min

  7. JAN 21

    Faith, Fear, and the Fragile Work of Peace

    This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. Lately, I’ve been feeling a real knot of anxiety as I watch the news—especially rhetoric and posturing that seem to treat long-standing allies as expendable or weak. When powerful nations start speaking about smaller ones as though they are merely pieces on a chessboard, Christians should feel uneasy. And that uneasiness isn’t about partisanship; it’s about memory. It’s about what Christians learned, often painfully, in the aftermath of World War II. One common myth is that Christianity’s role in politics is limited to private morality—what individuals do in their personal lives. But after the devastation of the Second World War, many Christian leaders believed something much more expansive: that faith had something to say about how nations relate to one another. Churches across Europe and North America were deeply involved in rebuilding not only cities, but trust. Christian ethicists and statesmen argued that peace required structures strong enough to restrain aggression and relationships deep enough to prevent fear from metastasizing into violence. Alliances were not seen as signs of weakness, but as moral commitments—promises that human life mattered more than national ego. At the heart of that postwar vision were two convictions that Christianity holds together and that our age keeps trying to tear apart. The first is the dignity of every human life. Christians insist that people are not valuable because they are useful, powerful, or strategically convenient, but because they are made in the image of God. That belief has political consequences. It means that nations, like individuals, are not mere means to someone else’s ends. Respecting the dignity of human life leads naturally to respecting the dignity of peoples—their right to self-determination, their culture, their security, and their voice in shaping their own future. The second conviction is that peace is built through relationship, not domination. Christianity does not imagine peace as something imposed by the strongest actor getting its way. The Christian story is one in which reconciliation happens through costly commitment—through covenants, promises, and mutual responsibility. After World War II, many Christians believed that binding nations together in shared responsibility, even when it was inconvenient, was one way of taking sin seriously while still hoping for something better than endless cycles of revenge and fear. That’s why bullying rhetoric should trouble Christians so deeply. When nations are treated as obstacles to be overcome rather than partners to be engaged, the logic of the cross is replaced by the logic of coercion. Christianity does not deny that power exists or that threats are real. But it insists that power untethered from moral restraint becomes destructive, and that fear-based politics corrodes the very peace it claims to defend. Recovering a Christian vision of peace today does not mean pretending the world is simple or safe. It means remembering that strong relationships—patiently built, consistently honored, and mutually accountable—are not naïve ideals but hard-won lessons written in the ruins of the twentieth century. It means insisting that dignity and solidarity belong together: that honoring the worth of every person and every people requires us to resist both isolationism and imperial arrogance. Christians are called to be witnesses to that alternative vision, even when it makes us uncomfortable or anxious. Especially then. Because the peace of Christ was never secured by threats, and it has never been preserved by humiliation. It is carried forward by people and communities willing to choose covenant over convenience, and faithfulness over fear. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

    4 min

  8. JAN 13

    Why Christianity Must Be Anti-Fascist

    This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. In a moment when our society seems increasingly fractured—when fear, violence, and the abuse of power dominate political discourse—many Christians are asking a deeper question: What is the role of the Church when political authority itself becomes a threat to human dignity? Today I want to be very clear: the Church cannot remain silent, neutral, or “above it all” when actions and ideologies take on the shape of authoritarianism or fascism. This is not about partisan politics. This is about faithful Christian witness. And in moments like these, neutrality is not a moral option. So let’s start with the basics: what is fascism? Fascism is a political ideology marked by authoritarian control, suppression of dissent, hyper-nationalism, and the elevation of state power over human rights and human dignity. It thrives on fear and depends on dehumanizing “others”—immigrants, minorities, political opponents—portraying them as threats that must be controlled, removed, or eliminated. Violence is not a tragic failure of fascism; it is one of its tools. And that alone should tell Christians everything we need to know. This is not merely a policy disagreement. Fascism directly contradicts the Gospel’s insistence that every human being bears the image of God and that no authority stands above God’s justice. When the state claims ultimate loyalty, demands silence, or treats some lives as disposable, Christians are no longer dealing with politics as usual—we are dealing with idolatry. Many, myself included, see echoes of these dynamics today in how government power is exercised against vulnerable communities—at the border, in our cities, and in the language used to justify force. The recent killing of a U.S. citizen by an ICE agent in Minneapolis has sparked national outrage precisely because it reveals how easily state violence can be normalized. And the fact that we are outraged now, despite the over 30 people who have already been killed by ICE agents demonstrates how we have become numb to this problem. Video evidence from multiple angles made it clear that this woman posed no threat. The last thing she said to the agent was “That’s fine, dude, I’m not made at you.” Then she turned her wheel to leave and the agent shot her in the head and called her words I will not say out loud. Government officials rushed to justify lethal force, insisting we had not seen what we all clearly saw. As George Orwell wrote in the novel 1984, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” Make no mistake, this is how authoritarian and fascist systems train societies to accept the unacceptable. In response, some church leaders have refused to stay silent. An Episcopal bishop in New Hampshire recently told clergy that statements alone are no longer enough—that this is a time for bodily presence, moral risk, and real sacrifice. He urged them to be prepared not just spiritually, but practically, to stand with those most at risk, telling the it was time to make their wills. That is not extremism. That is Christian realism. Why does this matter theologically? Because silence in the face of injustice is not neutrality—it is complicity. Throughout Scripture, God consistently sides with the oppressed, the stranger, and the vulnerable. The prophets did not politely “disagree” with unjust rulers; they confronted them. Jesus did not accommodate violent systems; he exposed them, disrupted them, and ultimately he was executed by one of them. When Jesus overturned the tables in the Temple, he wasn’t making a partisan statement—he was declaring that worship divorced from justice is a lie. Likewise, a Church that refuses to oppose systems that dehumanize is no longer bearing witness to Christ; it is protecting its own comfort. History confirms this truth. From the early Christians who defied imperial worship, to figures like Dietrich Bonhoeffer resisting Nazis Germany, the Church has repeatedly faced the same question: Will you follow Christ—or will you accommodate power? Every time the Church has chosen safety over faithfulness, the results have been disastrous. So what does faithful action look like now? It begins with prayer and formation—but it cannot end there. It requires public witness, moral clarity, and courageous nonviolent resistance. It means showing up, naming injustice, protecting the vulnerable, and refusing to allow fear to dictate our faith. It also means loving our enemies—not by enabling harm, but by refusing to let hatred have the final word… and by working as hard as we can to rescue them from the fascist ideologies that have taken them captive. Too often, Christians confuse moral witness with political disagreement. But the Gospel does not ask us to be neutral observers of injustice. It commands us to act when human dignity is at stake. And make no mistake: that is what is at stake now. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today

    6 min
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About

Each week Father Jared Cramer, the Rector of St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, MI, offers a brief 3-5 minute episode where he tried to unpack, debunk, and reconsider some of the ways we often think about Christianity and the church.

Information

  • Creator
    Fr. Jared C. Cramer
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    134
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 Christian Mythbusters
  • Show Website
    Christian Mythbusters