August was an interesting month in the US.
For starters, abortion was broadly legal in Massachusetts up to 24 weeks. After 24 weeks, it was still legal, but only under four exceptions.
1- Necessary to preserve the life of the patient
2- Necessary to preserve the patient’s physical or mental health
3- Warranted because of a lethal fetal anomaly or diagnosis
4- Warranted because of a grave fetal diagnosis incompatible with sustained life outside the uterus without extraordinary medical interventions.
You’d think this would’ve been enough, but just last month Governor Maura Healey signed an official bill removing all four exceptions, leaving it completely legal and acceptable after 24 weeks, as long as a physician green lights it.
To make it worse, this bill also removes the requirement that the abortion must take place at a hospital.
This signing was broadcast as if we were signing a peace treaty, with the governor at a desk surrounded by smiling middle aged women.
In the same month, a GoFundMe campaign for Lindsay Clancy’s family, the woman on trial for strangling and murdering her three young children after sending her husband away to run errands, has raised over a million dollars.
This is a woman who admitted to the act and yet people across the US, raised over a million dollars to support her and her parents. This started an internet phenomenon, where mothers across the nation filmed themselves crying, holding their own infants, captioning it “Same, Lindsay. Same.”
As if, they empathized with her postpartum symptoms so much, they forgot that she admitted to committing a triple homicide, infant triple homicide by the way.
And lastly, a video recording of a public roundtable in Chicago published July 4th 2025, started gaining a little attention. I stumbled onto this recording and I was absolutely sick to my stomach, almost in disbelief of what I was witnessing.
Katie Gibson, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, attempted to justify why the state should be able to intervene and control what our children should be taught.
The example she chose, of course, ended up being, in her words, “Christian fundamentalist tyrant” as the living conditions in which the state should be able to intervene.
In her words…
“Socialist analysis makes clear that the nuclear family form is an inherently repressive, racist, and hetero-sexist institution that functionally reinforces and reproduces capitalism.”
Really Katie?
By definition, the nuclear family is simply a household unit made up of two parents and their children living together in the same home. This is racist? Repressive?
Of course Eman Abdelhadi steps in defend her position by saying it’s for the child’s material needs…
“When we say family abolition, I think a lot of people think we mean kinship abolition… What we actually mean is the nuclear family as an economic unit… who your parents are, who you partner with, how many children you have… determine how much access to food, housing, clothing, education you’re going to have… The abolition of that economic unit… all of our material needs are taken care of by the collective.”
And then Katie Gibson steps back in to illustrate her point.
”So if you are born into a home headed by a Christian fundamentalist tyrant, for instance, you have the rights that that Christian fundamentalist tyrant gives you.”
Olivia Katbi steps in and in attempt to offer some peace of mind to those who might be reluctant to dropping off their kids at one of these government owned daycares or pre-k centers.
“We do have child watch at all our general meetings and we require like a background check for our child watch volunteers.”
But she really drops the ball later and admits…
“My daughter’s 16-month-old. I would never drop her off at child watch…”
The hypocrisy never ends folks.
More importantly, they SAY they don’t want to mean kinship abolition. That they mean the nuclear family as an economic unit.
But if you abolish the economic unit, somebody still has to raise the kid. And when the rubber meets the road, why is it that they always want to introduce child care.
Government controlled, funded childcare to be precise.
Whoever feeds the child forms the child. Marxists have always understood this and used this. First the fundamental needs. Then the education.
Then what they’re you’re allowed to know and say. The pattern is undeniable.
These may sound like three unrelated stories, but trust me, it’s not.
These are just three examples among countless others.
If our culture was a tree, these three examples are the fruit of the same morally decaying branch.
What do I mean?
Something has gone catastrophically wrong in America.
For the last several years I’ve been writing and speaking about what I call identity dysphoria.
Identity dysphoria is the state if psychological or emotional distress caused by the belief that one’s identity, purpose, and / or value is not being materialized.
In other words, it’s the deep rooted belief that “I’m not enough”, “I’m not good enough”, I don’t measure up”, or “ I don’t have what it takes”.
Whether this belief is true or not, it can spring up consciously or subconsciously and when it does, it’s almost always accompanied by strong feelings of shame and an emotional drive for validation.
Drive to prove it wrong and therefore remove the pain.
I wrote a book about it. I’ve coached people through it. I believe it is the root of most of what ails us as individuals.
And at some point, it became painfully obvious that this same condition has taken hold of my country.
My home.
America doesn’t know who she is anymore.
America is a melting pot, yes, but there used to be a shared identity, values, and culture that united us. It strengthened us. Despite our differences, we still knew who we were, what we stood for, and what we didn’t.
What unites us today?
In fact, we’ve almost rejected unity as a value entirely and replaced it with corporate clichés such as “diversity is our strength”.
Since when does diversity precede strength?
In the context of ethnic diversity, I understand why this idea has been propagated, but in almost any other context, strength comes from unity.
Sports teams, businesses, families, communities, churches and so on all understand and prove that what unifies us is what produces resilience: shared values, purpose, and identity.
We’ve lost this.
Above all the foundational values that we’ve lost, we’ve lost sight of morality. What we all agree is good, right, wrong, and virtuous.
John Adams famously wrote on Oct 11, 1798, in a letter to the officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Massachusetts Militia:
“We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Now he knew our nation wouldn’t only be made up of Christians, but he was making a point that a limited constitutional government such as ours, cannot restrain people whose passions are not already checked by a shared moral culture. That culture being one built on Biblical Christian morality.
I firmly believe our nation has grown steadily less moral and less unified, and left our culture so fragmented, this has left us as vulnerable as we have ever been.
Vulnerable to more chaos than can manage. Vulnerable to very dangerous ideologies that want to take advantage of our “diversity” and mold a new identity for America that they deem better.
How did this happen?
Who’s responsible for this?
Better yet, who can fix it?
It’s We The People.
Just like the founding generation, took it upon themselves equipped with the unshakeable conviction that a united people with God on there side could establish a free nation for themselves and their posterity…
In the same manner, we can get it back and protect it.
This is my message to the American Church.
When I say We The People, I do mean all of us, but I do think there’s a unique responsibility on the church specifically.
I’ll confess, as I’m just as guilty of this.
Separation of church and state has it’s place, it’s necessary to avoid theocracy, but it does not mean we as followers of Jesus say and do nothing in regards to the preservation of our nation.
Somewhere along the way, we lost our courage.
I for one, have held back, I’ll be the first to admit it. I was afraid of what people would call me or accuse me of.
Christian nationalist…
Too political…
Divisive or what have you.
The ones who seem more interested in owning the left than loving their neighbors.
And rightfully so, there are plenty of examples of individuals doing very un-christlike things in Christ’s name. I think this is one of the most evil acts you can commit, using Christ’s name to justify acts for your own self ambitions that He clearly condemns.
But somewhere along the way, we confused “don’t be a Christian nationalist” with “stay out of it completely”.
We, church, lost our identity first.
Not America.
We forgot our civic responsibility to be salt and light in our own country and left that seat for anyone else to sit in.
We as the church have lost our courage and we have called it wisdom.
Jesus, stood up to the elites, the corruption, and He flipped tables in the temple. He was just as much a lion as he was a shepherd. Yet, He commanded us let our light shine.
“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.
Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.
-Matthew 5:13-16
He told us to go into all the world and make disciples.
Listen…
The world NEEDS America and America NEEDS the church.
Even if they hate us, just like they hated Jesus, He never backed down.
There are always those with ears to hear, but how can they hear if we only speak up inside of our own comfortable walls on Sunday morning?
This nation needs the church, and the church needs to stop hiding.
If that sounds like something a Christian nationalist would say, I’d ask you to hear me out.
What I’m describing is not theocracy. It’s simply this: the truth needs to be spoken boldly by the people entrusted with it, before it’s too late to speak at all.
For decades, the American church has been slowly retreating from public life. It happened so gradually that most of us didn’t notice.
It started with good intentions.
Bill Hybels, the founder of Willow Creek Community Church, went door to door in the suburbs of Chicago in 1975 asking people why they didn’t attend church. The answers he received were what you would probably expect.
“Church is too boring.”
“It’s always about money.”
“It’s not relevant enough to my life.”
So Hybels built a church designed to remove every objection those surveys surfaced.
For example, drama sketches instead of liturgy. Short talks on fundamental needs instead of 45min expositions of Scripture. No offering plate passed to visitors.
Amongst other things.
It worked… at least on paper it seemed to. Willow Creek grew to about 25,000 people across seven campuses. This made it one of the largest churches on the continent.
And their model was franchised to thousands of pastors worldwide.
This model, later referred to as “seeker sensitive”, became the gold standard way to build a church.
However something interesting happened. In 2007, Willow Creek, the same church, published the results of a massive internal study they called “REVEAL”.
The study involved over 80,000 people across more than 200 churches...
And the findings were devastating.
What it revealed was that church activity, in fact, did NOT correlate with spiritual maturity at all.
The model was good at attracting seekers and forming new believers, but not for discipleship. The people furthest along in the faith were the most likely to be spiritually starving, and the most likely to leave.
Standing in front of thousands of pastors at his own leadership summit, Hybels, admitted the truth: “We made a mistake.”
The strategy sounded great on paper, but the gospel is not a business. We’re not building a product that requires market research in order to craft the perfect pitch.
It’s Jesus’s church. His church, not ours.
When you build an institution around what the unconverted say they want, the unconverted define the institution. That’s the opposite of discipleship and the opposite of what Jesus modeled.
Who are we trying to please?
What started as a strategy to reach the lost became a habit of letting the lost set the terms and eventually a silent retreat.
None of this is new.
There is a story in Scripture that perfectly illustrates this.
Around 1050 BC, Israel was asking God for a king. God was reluctant, but eventually He gave them Saul. It started out well, but eventually Saul had a flaw. None of us are perfect, but some flaws can be fatal.
The fatal flaw was disclosed when the prophet Samuel confronted him for disobeying God’s command. Saul’s response was:
“I have sinned, for I have transgressed the commandment of the Lord and your words, because I feared the people and obeyed their voice.”
Saul feared what his people thought, more than he feared what God thought. For this, God removed him from his throne and replaced him with David.
David, by contrast, walked onto a battlefield where an entire army was frozen in fear of the Philistine champion, Goliath. His question was not, “What will they say about me” or “is this the right political moment”…
Instead, his question was:
“Who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?”
The American church has modeled Saul’s priorities for at least forty years.
We have to be brutally honest… do we fear the people or do we fear God?
When I say fear, I mean reverence and high value. What do we value most?
I would have to say, barring the exceptions, in general we have feared the culture and our reputation more than we have feared the Lord.
We feared being called names bigoted, racists, fascists, intolerant, Christian nationalist and whatever knee jerk accusation that could be thrown our way.
We feared losing our seats, hurting the brand, losing donors or followers and somewhere along the way told ourselves we were being strategic, loving, relevant, or keeping the door open for the lost.
But is this what Jesus modeled?
Can we even say it’s working?
From 1975 to today, female church attendance dropped from 39% to 25%. Male attendance fell from 30% to 18%.
The world doesn’t need another institution that affirms what it already believes.
Walk into your local library and look at the pride display in the children’s section, right at eye level for a 6yr old, while the Bible story hour was canceled two years ago for being ‘exclusionary.’
Then ask yourself, who decided that? And where was the church when it happened?
Somewhere along the way, we took a constitutional principle designed to protect the church from the state and twisted it into something else.
The phrase “separation of church and state” comes from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptists in 1802.
They were a religious minority worried about government interference in their worship. Jefferson assured them that the First Amendment had erected “a wall of separation between church and state.”
What this meant what that the state couldn’t establish a national church or interfere with the free exercise of religion.
The wall was built to keep the government out of the church, not the church out of the government.
The founders never once believed Christian faith should be privatized or subordinate to ideologies. In fact, they believed the exact opposite.
John Adams famously wrote that the Constitution “was made only for a moral and religious people and is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
The entire system was designed on the assumption that virtue, largely built on the foundation of the christian faith, was the backbone of self government.
Just look at history.
The first Great Awakening took place from 1730-1740s.
The American Revolution took place from 1765 to 1776.
The second Great Awakening, 1790 to the 1840s.
We greatly underestimate how these events shaped the culture of our founding and the birth of our nation…
And honestly how far we’ve strayed.
There were a group of preachers called the the “Black Robed Regiment”. This was a name given by the British to these colonial American pastors who wore black clerical robes and preached sermons about liberty and taking a moral stand against tyranny.
These men shaped the political landscape during the American Revolution.
The entire civil rights movement was NOT a secular movement at all. It was organized in churches by pastors.
These were pastors who understood and believed that an unjust law, was no law at all. If we believe the gospel, then we must know that it has political implications.
And yet today, mention anything resembling a Christian conviction in public, and someone will invoke “separation of church and state” like a spell designed to make you disappear.
And we let them.
In 2024, a woman named Phyllis Morris and her local Women’s Forum in Sweetwater, Texas bought a nativity scene for the county courthouse lawn.
Keep in mind this was during Christmas.
They did their research, got written approval from the county judge and the county commissioners and they set it up themselves. Almost immediately, a letter to the editor of the local paper demanded the display be removed and decried it as a violation of the separation of church and state.
A public hearing was called. The room overflowed literally out the doors, into the halls, all the way to the entrance. News stations showed up, not only from their county but even surrounding ones.
And after all of that, the commissioners voted to let the nativity stay. Phyllis Morris had to research constitutional law, secure written government approval, and survive a public hearing... to put up a nativity scene.
At Christmas.
In literally Texas.
Just this year, 2026, Kimberly Polk, a Christian substitute teacher in Maryland, who taught preschoolers, used students preferred names, but refused to use preferred pronouns. She NEVER misgendered anyone, because she avoided pronouns entirely.
She asked for an accommodation and the school district refused.
A preschool substitute teacher who never once misgendered a child, whose only offense was quietly declining to say words she believed were untrue… and guess what?
The federal court ruled against her.
The court said the district’s policy was “neutral and generally applicable” and fired teachers who violated it. She lost.
In 2024, Louisiana tried passed a law requiring the Ten Commandments be displayed in public school classrooms. They were immediately challenged. A lower court struck it down.
Then in 2025, Texas passed a similar law. Also challenged.
The Fifth Circuit upheld Texas’s law in April of this year... by literally a 9-8 vote.
By one vote.
Seriously?
A classroom poster of the Ten Commandments required a federal appeals court to split 9-8 just to survive.
This is where we are in America.
We used to have debates about whether the state should even run a church (which it shouldn’t), but now under the same principle of “separation of church and state”, we’re debating whether a text that sits in the Supreme Court’s own courtroom can be hung in a 5th grade classroom without being declared unconstitutional.
This is what happens when the church cowers in silence.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does culture.
For a decade, the most visible Christian voice in the American public square was not a pastor.
He was just one of us.
Charlie Kirk walked onto college campuses with a folding chair and a microphone and took hostile question after hostile question for years.
He boldly took a stand and was just as much of a force for the Gospel as he was for the conservative movement.
Where were the rest of us?
Why was it that the young, spiritually starved youth of this nation followed him with such zeal?
Why were we so inspired?
It’s as if they saw someone doing something the church should’ve been doing all along. Something biblical, something Christlike. He was being the salt and light that Jesus told us to be.
He was murdered for it.
I remember being in my home in NYC when he was killed. I held my wife in my arms why she wept.
The following Sunday we went to Church and a young man who had been to our church a few times came that morning. He interrupted the service near the end and confronted our pastor, angry, and asked…
“You know I came to service today, I didn’t want to because you posted a picture mourning Charlie Kirk. But I came today to ask, “how could you support someone who spread so much hate and violence?” .
You know, my wife and I thought it was strange, we looked online and tried hard to find any other church in our city who posted about his murder.
We couldn’t find one, except our own church.
Not one pastor, not one church who spoke out about a christian man who took a stand for our country and the christian faith it was built on, who was murdered for it.
Where was the church?
But you know what we did find? Endless posts, endless videos of the world celebrating his death. Mocking his death.
I look up and I see a church that was once courageous, strong, who stood up to corrupt powers, who loved their neighbor, who once bore one another’s burdens…
When elites would refer to the church as “men who have turned the world upside down”. (Acts 17:6)
Now I see a church who is more influenced by the world, then a world influenced by the church. At least here in my country, my home.
WE, the church, lost our identity.
THEN America did.
We lost it first.
This my friends, was inevitable.
When you don’t know who you are, you will accept almost any identity that makes you feel righteous again. This is true for a person, and it is true for a nation.
America currently suffers from what I can only describe as identity dysphoria at the scale of nation, and the church let it happen.
We need to be strong and courageous again, just like our ancestors.
Our founders gave us a system designed to resist concentrated power. They modeled what a generation of courageous, strong, virtuous, and faithful people were capable of.
They gave us a governing philosophy that roots human dignity not in the government’s permission but in God’s design.
What they could not give us, because no generation can hand this to the next, is the will to defend it.
That part was supposed to be our job.
That part was supposed to be the church’s job.
Government should restrain public evil. It cannot produce private righteousness. The state cannot make anyone holy. That has never been its job and every time it has tried, it has failed.
So what do we do?
We must remember who we are.
Identity precedes behavior, not the other way around.
We are not a perfect nation. No honest person claims we are. But we are a nation founded on a set of ideas that were revolutionary in human history: that rights come from God, not government; that all people are created equal; that government exists to secure those rights, not grant them; that power must be divided because people are fallen; and that a free people, guided by virtue and faith, can govern themselves without a king.
These ideas emerged from a Christian understanding of human nature and human dignity.
The founding of our nation was not a secular project that Christians happen to live in.
It is, in its deepest logic, a Christian project.
Christian precisely because it refuses to compel belief.
Why?
Because you cannot have virtue without freedom. Freedom IS the prerequisite for virtue.
Some might object at this point, “America was not Christian, what the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli?”
You’d be quoting “America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion”, line.
Context is important. That line was a diplomatic assurance to a Muslim ruler that the United States was not a crusading church-state and would not make war on Muslims over religion.
It was NOT a confession of national atheism.
If you’re honest, you read everything in context, you can never arrive at the conclusion that America wasn’t built on Christian principles.
John Adams insisted the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.
9 out of the 13 states required Christian profession to even hold office.
The Declaration of Independence appeals to the “the Creator” and mentions “the Supreme Judge of the World” which is a reference to Jesus Christ in the book of Revelation.
November 1, 1777. Continental Congress gave a Thanksgiving proclamation.
They told the states to set a day so the people would make “penitent confession of their manifold sins” and ask “that it may please God through the merits of Jesus Christ mercifully to forgive” them.
They also asked God to “prosper the means of religion for the promotion and enlargement of that kingdom which consisteth in righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.”
This was literally Congress.
I could go on and on.
For far too long, the American church has compartmentalized the gospel and politics. We’ve told ourselves that sharing the gospel is our job, and governing the country is someone else’s. But the gospel is not a private transaction between an individual and God.
It is the announcement that Jesus is Lord over every square inch of creation, including the public square.
The early church didn’t merely evangelize the Roman world. They went out at night and picked up the infants that Rome had left on the hillsides to die. They adopted those innocent babies into their own families, just as we were adopted into the family of God in Christ.
And they did it until the very act of leaving children to die on hillsides was outlawed. That is a political action.
William Wilberforce spent 46 years fighting and losing and fighting again to end slavery in the British Empire.
Because he believed Christ’s dominion reached into the halls of government.
John Knox confronted a queen to her face. Dietrich Bonhoeffer conspired against his own government because he understood that silence in the face of evil is itself an act of complicity.
The black church in this country marched and organized and preached from the pulpit until Jim Crow finally fell.
Not one of those people believed they could keep their hands clean. Not one of them believed you must do nothing until you can do the perfect thing. And every single one of them was accused of dragging the gospel into the gutter of politics.
Thank God they did.
I am not asking you to join a political party.
I am asking you to remember who you are and to stop being afraid.
We sing, “You are worthy of my praise”, to God on Sunday mornings while we’re in our safe churches, but is He worthy of your dignity?
Is He worthy of your reputation? When He said to the disciples “follow me” they dropped everything.
Jesus knew what He was asking of us when He asked, but we’ve forgotten.
“In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.” - Jesus, John 16:33
If being a follower of Jesus was meant to be comfortable, He wouldn’t have sent the comforter.
He said, take heart.
Stop being afraid of what people will call you. The names are coming regardless. Stop being afraid of being labeled a Christian nationalist. Stop being afraid of losing your reputation, your platform, your seat at the table.
The Saul strategy did not work. It never works. Fearing the people gains nothing but temporary validation and will cost everything.
Stop telling yourself this isn’t your lane.
You are an American citizen, which means you have been granted the authority to govern. Stop outsourcing the formation of the next generation to algorithms and influencers and a public school system that increasingly treats your faith as as dissent and dissent violence.
And stop waiting for someone else to do it.
I don’t know about you, but I am done compartmentalizing and I am done letting timidity masquerade as wisdom.
America needs a movement. A movement that takes the culture seriously because God takes the culture seriously.
The whole testimony of Scripture is that God interrupts the cycle. He takes weak individuals and makes them strong. He gives them a new heart and breathes His Spirit within them.
He takes cowards and makes them courageous.
He takes a shepherd boy and puts him in front of a giant.
The question is whether we are willing.
We NEED to be willing.
The world needs America.
America needs the church.
And the church needs to stop hiding.
Remember who you are. Be strong and courageous.
Take heart.
Speak the truth.
The truth will set you free. The truth is a person and the world needs Him.
-Mitchell