Author: John Pavlovitz

Yes, there is a war on Christmas in America. The Evangelicals were right. The pulpit-pounding preachers were right. Franklin Graham was right. The Republicans were right. Donald Trump was right. Fox News was right. The Religious Right was right. Every single one of them was speaking gospel truth. They have all been warning me for years, and I didn’t want to believe them, lest hopelessness set in — but the proof is unavoidable now and I need to confess they were right and I was wrong. I once was blind and now I see it clearly. They told me...

The mass shooting at a Colorado Springs nightclub on the eve of Transgender Day of Remembrance that killed five people and left dozens clinging to life or permanently disfigured and traumatized, is not a surprise. Worse, it is entirely predictable. It is the rotten, putrid fruit of MAGA America and all it stands for and aspires to—and yet its rank-and-file seems accidentally or intentionally oblivious. In the wake of the murders at Club Q, as usual Republican politicians have lined up to once feign disbelief and pretend to care and to dole out phony expressions of abject shock and...

Dear American Church, I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is — you are slowly dying. If you are paying attention, you probably realize that. Your buildings are slowly clearing, your pews gradually emptying, your congregations visibly aging away, your voice carrying less resonance than it used to. There are many complicated and interconnected reasons for this, but here are a few broad strokes: You are dying because of your hypocrisy. People see the ever-widening chasm between who you say you are and what they regularly experience in your presence. They see the great...

This should be easy. We have just endured the most corrupt, inept, and relentlessly predatory presidential administration in our history. We have witnessed a willfully and tragically mismanaged public health crisis and a coordinated insurrection designed to overturn an election and install a despot. We have watched an extremist minority commandeer the highest court in our nation and mount an unprecedented repeal of the rights of women, of environmental protections, of voting rights. The coming election should be the slam dunk of the century, but it isn’t. We should be easily coalescing around our collective values, but we aren’t....