Ancient Echoes Podcast

By: Jeric Yurkanin

I didn’t become an atheist overnight. I didn’t wake up one day and decide, “I’m done with God.”

It happened slower than that—more like a long, stubborn unraveling.

For years, I kept trying to make the pieces fit. I kept telling myself, This is just one bad church. Or, That’s just a few hypocrites. Or, If I keep searching, I’ll eventually find a community that actually looks like Jesus.

But the longer I stayed in it, the more I realized I wasn’t dealing with a few isolated problems—I was watching a pattern repeat itself. Different buildings. Different pastors. Same mechanics. Same contradictions. Same damage.

And the truth is, it wasn’t just experience that pushed me out. It was research. Historical study. Evidence. The deeper I went, the harder it became to pretend the story was as clean as I’d been taught. The unraveling wasn’t emotional impulsiveness—it was the slow collapse of explanations that stopped holding weight.

So no—this wasn’t one moment, one sermon, one church hurt. This was years of searching, years of wrestling, and then the realization that I’d stacked up more than a hundred reasons I couldn’t ignore anymore.

But eventually I had to face the pattern: I couldn’t find a church that genuinely followed the Jesus of the Gospels in a consistent, recognizable way. I found churches that used his name constantly. Churches that quoted him when it sounded inspiring. Churches that built entire brands around him. But when it came to living like him—loving enemies, caring for the poor, refusing power games, telling the truth even when it cost you, rejecting greed, protecting the vulnerable—those were treated like optional “nice ideas,” not the core of the faith.

What shook me the most was realizing that a lot of modern Christianity doesn’t even seem to like the Jesus in the Gospels. The Jesus who confronts religious leaders, exposes hypocrisy, warns about wealth, breaks social rules to include outsiders, and refuses to play the domination game—he’s inconvenient. He’s not the tough, tribal, victory-obsessed figure people want. So they rework him. They rewrite him. They turn him into a symbol for strength, hierarchy, and certainty. They build a “Jesus” who blesses their politics, their culture, and their comfort—then call anyone who questions it “deceived” or “rebellious.”

And that’s when I started noticing something I couldn’t unsee: Christianity wasn’t functioning like one faith anchored to one clear teacher. It was functioning like thousands of smaller religions—each one shaped by the preferences of the pastor, the subculture, and the region. One church would preach one message with absolute confidence, and the church half a mile away would preach the opposite with the same certainty, using the same Bible, claiming the same Holy Spirit. The “truth” seemed to change depending on which building you walked into.

Then there was the constant contradiction around “the law.” Churches would reach into the Old Testament like a weapon when they wanted to control people—especially when it came to sexuality, gender, and social boundaries. They’d quote ancient rules to shame and condemn, to draw lines between “us” and “them,” to keep people afraid and compliant. But when those same rules threatened their comfort—rules about money, debt, exploitation, honesty, care for immigrants, generosity, justice—they’d suddenly remember a different sermon: “We’re not under the law.”

So which is it?

Either the law is binding, or it isn’t. But in practice, it’s binding when it helps the institution control people, and it’s “fulfilled” when it challenges the institution’s greed, politics, or lifestyle.

That hypocrisy wasn’t just annoying. It was theological. It exposed the game. “Sin” became a selective word. Entire groups of people were treated like moral emergencies while greed and cruelty were either ignored or quietly blessed. Churches would rail against certain identities as “abominations” while normalizing the love of money, the obsession with status, the celebration of violence, and the casual dishonesty required to keep a religious machine running. I watched people talk endlessly about “holiness,” but treat basic decency—kindness, humility, empathy—as if it were weak.

And the money. I can’t pretend that didn’t play a massive role. The Jesus of the Gospels looks suspiciously hostile toward religious profiteering. He doesn’t flirt with wealth; he warns people about it. He doesn’t build fundraising empires; he flips tables. Yet Christianity in America has produced an entire economy built on branding, platform-building, constant giving campaigns, manipulation, fear, and the idea that “God will bless you if you sow a seed.” I watched people confuse generosity with spiritual superiority and confuse tithing with obedience—because the system needs money to survive, and guilt is an effective tool.

By the end, it felt like Jesus wasn’t shaping the church. The church was shaping Jesus.

Scripture became a toolkit, not a compass. Verses were cherry-picked like proof texts. Context was optional. Translation debates were ignored unless they helped someone win an argument. And the parts of Jesus’ teaching that should have been unavoidable—love your neighbor, love your enemy, forgive, don’t hoard wealth, stop performing religion for applause—were either softened, spiritualized, or pushed aside.

That’s when my “faith” started to feel less like truth and more like loyalty to a narrative.

I also had to reckon with history—the stuff churches often avoid because it ruins the clean story. Christianity’s track record isn’t just a few embarrassing moments. It’s centuries of violence, coercion, and control—often justified with scripture. And even closer to home, American Christianity has repeatedly baptized injustice: it found ways to bless slavery, bless segregation, bless conquest, bless cruelty—then later act like it was always on the side of righteousness. The pattern wasn’t that Christians occasionally fail to live up to their values. The pattern was that the institution repeatedly reshaped “God’s will” to match the cultural power structures of the moment.

That’s what finally pushed me over the edge: if “God’s truth” can be used to justify almost anything depending on the era—if the “Spirit” leads people to opposite conclusions on basic morality—if churches can condemn vulnerable people while excusing greed, deceit, and abuse—then what am I actually looking at?

Divine consistency?

Or human invention?

And once that question landed, I couldn’t force myself to un-ask it.

So I left. Not because I wanted to be rebellious. Not because I “just wanted to sin.” I left because I couldn’t keep pretending the system was what it claimed to be. I couldn’t keep worshiping a God whose character seemed to change depending on who was preaching. I couldn’t keep giving my conscience to gatekeepers who kept moving the goalposts while calling it “unchanging truth.”

Becoming an atheist, for me, wasn’t about trading faith for bitterness. It was about trading certainty for honesty.

I’m not saying every Christian is fake. I’ve met some genuinely good people inside the faith. But the deeper I looked, the more I realized many of them were good in spite of the system, not because of it. They were good because they were human—because empathy is human. Compassion is human. Integrity is human. And the most unsettling thought I had on my way out was this:

If you can remove the supernatural claims and still keep the best parts—love, generosity, community, meaning—then maybe the supernatural claims were never the foundation at all.

Maybe they were the packaging.

And once I saw that, I couldn’t go back.

By: Jeric Yurkanin 

I used to think Christianity was the one place on earth where power didn’t corrupt. I really believed that. I believed the pastors. I believed the slogans. I believed the “Bible alone” talk like it was a spiritual immune system—like it protected the faith from the same motives that poison everything else: money, control, ego, image, politics. I didn’t just believe it in my head either. I built parts of my life around it. And the longer I stayed in it, the more I realized the whole thing survives by teaching you one essential habit: always read the story like you’re the hero.

That’s why that “Disney Princess theology” line hits so hard. Because it describes exactly what I watched—and what I did. Every story, you’re Esther. You’re the brave underdog. You’re Peter, the imperfect disciple who still loves Jesus deep down. You’re the woman anointing Jesus, the humble one who “gets it.” You’re Israel escaping slavery. You’re never Xerxes. Never Pharaoh. Never the empire. Never the Pharisee. Never the crowd. Never the people who benefit from the system while pretending they’re the victims of it. Christianity trains you to locate yourself as the righteous remnant, even when you live in the most powerful country in the world with a history soaked in conquest, slavery, and segregation. We were taught to see ourselves as Israel, not Egypt. And that’s not just a cute metaphor. That’s a moral blindness that has consequences.

Because when you’re always Israel, you never have to ask what it means to be Egypt. You never have to ask what it means to be the people with the laws, the weapons, the propaganda, the courts, the money, the land, the “God is on our side” speeches. You never have to ask if you’re the one building an economy on someone else’s suffering. You never have to ask if you’re the one deciding who counts as clean, who gets punished, who gets excluded, who gets forgiven, who gets rights, who gets to be called “abomination.” And as long as you keep the hero costume on, you can do almost anything and still feel holy.

The thing evangelicals don’t want to deal with is that Christianity’s public track record isn’t some innocent love story that got “corrupted” by a few bad apples. It’s a long, consistent pattern of institutions aligning with power and then calling that alignment “God.” American Christians love to act like history started in 1950 with a KJV Bible and a revival tent, but the faith has a timeline, and it’s ugly. Crusades. Forced conversions. Executions and punishments for “heresy.” Church-state systems where the gatekeepers controlled what people could read, what they could say, what they could question, and what would happen to them if they did. You can’t pretend Christianity is pure while ignoring how often it has functioned like government with a halo.

And then America happened, and the same instincts just got baptized in red, white, and blue. Christianity gave moral cover to slaughter Native people—thousands upon thousands—because expansion was framed as “destiny” and violence was framed as “civilizing.” Christianity gave cover for slavery, and when slavery became too indefensible, it gave cover for segregation. It wasn’t random. It was systemic. Pastors preached it. Politicians codified it. Courts enforced it. Churches normalized it. And when people needed a scapegoat, Christian society did what power always does: it found a target and called it righteousness. Salem wasn’t some random spooky pagan moment. It was a Christian moral panic that killed women under a society convinced it was doing God’s work. It’s not an accident that the victims are always the vulnerable and the “outsiders” and the ones with less power. That’s what systems do.

But here’s what really broke it for me: the selective morality. The way evangelicals turn certain issues into life-or-death “biblical truth,” while ignoring other things that the Bible screams about. The way they tell LGBTQIA people they can’t marry because it’s “sin,” while excusing war like it’s normal. The way they obsess over who’s having sex with who, while shrugging at greed, exploitation, racism, cruelty, and corruption—stuff that, if we’re being honest, is condemned constantly in their own Scriptures. I watched churches preach “abomination” at queer people while platforming leaders who lie, cheat, brag, demean, and stir violence—and the only reason it’s tolerated is because those leaders promise power. It’s never been about holiness. It’s about which “sins” threaten the system and which ones serve it.

And the “pastor” thing—man, once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Pastors building empires off fear-based sermons, guilt-based giving, and constant manipulation. “God told me” becomes the ultimate cheat code. They can say anything, demand anything, shame you into anything, and if you push back you’re “rebellious,” “bitter,” or “deceived.” Meanwhile, the money flows up. The brand grows. The building expands. The staff multiplies. And if you question the machine, you’re the problem. They’ll call greed a blessing and call dissent a spiritual attack. And then they’ll turn around and point at the LGBTQIA community like that’s the great moral emergency of our time. It’s disgusting.

They also sell this myth that Christians “just follow the Bible,” but that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is curation. They ignore thousands of commands and laws across the Bible and act like nobody’s ever noticed. They’ll scream about a handful of verses while ignoring huge portions of the text that would actually challenge American capitalism, nationalism, and the church’s obsession with wealth. They’ll ignore the constant warnings about rich people. They’ll ignore the themes of debt forgiveness and caring for the poor and refusing exploitation. They’ll ignore the parts that would force them to confront how their politics treats immigrants, the poor, and marginalized people. They cherry-pick what fits their culture-war agenda and then call it “biblical.” It’s not “Bible-believing.” It’s agenda-believing with Bible wallpaper.

And when you zoom out further, the trust issue gets even bigger. The printing press wasn’t invented until the 1400s, which means for most of Christian history the texts were hand-copied, scarce, controlled, filtered, translated, and interpreted under the same kinds of institutions that always crave control: churches tied to governments, kings, elites, clerical authorities. I’m not even saying every scribe was evil. I’m saying humans are humans, and institutions are institutions. If you don’t trust politicians today—and you shouldn’t—why are you so quick to assume ancient power structures were magically pure? Today we have lobbying, campaign money, propaganda, false promises, public moral theater, private corruption. That’s how power works. So when people tell me to just “trust” that centuries of gatekeepers didn’t shape the narrative in ways that benefited them, I can’t take that seriously anymore. It asks me to suspend skepticism in the one area where skepticism is most necessary.

That’s the irony: evangelicals love to say “don’t trust the world,” but they trust the systems that handed them their religion more than they trust their own conscience. They treat the institution like it’s exempt from history. They treat the Bible like it fell out of the sky into English, already formatted, already footnoted, already agreeing with their politics. They treat Christian America like it was a golden age, even though the so-called “Christian nation” version of America was built on genocide, slavery, segregation, and moral panic. They want the benefits of innocence without the responsibility of truth.

And politics? Politics has always loved religion because religion is the easiest way to turn people into soldiers without calling them soldiers. You hand them a holy story. You give them an enemy. You tell them their side is God’s side. You tell them dissent is rebellion. You tell them suffering is “persecution.” You promise them victory if they stay loyal. You collect money. You collect votes. You collect obedience. And the people who benefit from it will call it revival while the vulnerable get crushed under it.

That’s why “Disney Princess theology” isn’t just a meme. It’s a warning. If you always see yourself as the hero, you will never confess complicity. If you always see yourself as Israel, you will never confront the ways you function like Egypt. If you always see yourself as the faithful disciple, you will never admit you’re part of the crowd that chants for someone else’s suffering. And when your religion trains you to see yourself as innocent by default, it becomes the perfect tool for a system that needs you obedient, angry, and sure.

I didn’t leave Christianity because I wanted to sin. That’s the lazy story they tell to protect themselves. I left because the longer I looked, the more I saw a machine that survives by fear, selective morality, and historical amnesia. I left because I watched people call cruelty “truth” and call love “compromise.” I left because I watched pastors preach humility while building kingdoms. I left because I watched politicians use God like a campaign slogan. I left because I couldn’t keep pretending that a system with this much blood on its hands was the moral compass it claimed to be.

And once you stop reading the Bible like you’re the princess in every story, you start seeing what’s really there: power, propaganda, scapegoats, gatekeepers, empires, and a religious industry that’s very good at making itself the hero while it does harm. That’s not spiritual maturity. That’s branding. That’s control. That’s a system protecting itself. And it’s a very human book, written by men to control , conquer, gain power and make money.

BY: JERIC YURKANIN

When I first started waking up inside evangelical Christianity, I didn’t wake up because I read one atheist book or watched one documentary. I woke up because I kept running into the same problem again and again—one that no amount of worship music, sermons, or Christian slogans could fix:

The fruit didn’t match the claims.

And I don’t mean that in the easy, dismissive way people brush it off with, “Christians aren’t perfect.” I already know nobody is perfect. I’m not asking for perfection. Evangelical Christianity doesn’t even claim perfection—it claims something else: transformation. A supernatural inner change that’s supposed to show up outwardly, in real life, in observable patterns.

Not just on Sundays. Not just in church language. Not just during emotional moments. In character. In relationships. In how people treat other people—especially when nobody’s watching, and especially when money, power, or reputation are involved.

That’s why this matters. Because evangelical Christianity doesn’t sell itself as “a good moral community.” It sells itself as “God living inside people.”

The Bible itself sets a measurable standard. It says the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And Jesus says people will know you’re his disciples by how you love one another. That’s not a small claim. That’s not vague. That’s a bold identity marker. It’s basically saying you won’t need arguments or threats—the love will be obvious.

So eventually the question became too loud to ignore: if this is real… why is it so rare to actually see?

Because here’s something you learn once you’ve been in church long enough: church is one of the easiest places on earth to look holy. It’s the easiest place to perform kindness for an hour. It’s the easiest place to smile because you’re supposed to smile. It’s the easiest place to say “God bless you” and “I’ll pray for you” and “brother” and “sister,” while still living like a completely different person the other 166 hours of the week.

Anyone can do that. Humans are good at social performance. We do it at weddings. Funerals. Family gatherings. Work events. We can all play a role for a couple hours when there’s pressure to fit in.

But evangelical Christianity doesn’t claim it produces a good performance. It claims it produces a new person.

And the difference between those two things is everything.

Because the real test of “fruit” isn’t how people act in a sanctuary. The real test is how they act when they’re stressed, offended, corrected, inconvenienced, or challenged. How they act when they don’t get their way. How they act when they’re not being watched. How they act when someone questions their authority. How they act when someone is hurting and needs patience, not platitudes. How they act when money is involved, when power is involved, when reputation is involved.

That’s where transformation should show up if it’s real.

And that’s where I kept seeing the opposite.

After years inside evangelical culture, I started noticing that it reliably produces a different kind of “fruit”—not the one it advertises, but the one it runs on.

It produces fear and calls it “conviction.” Fear of sin. Fear of hell. Fear of being deceived. Fear of being “lukewarm.” Fear of asking the wrong question. Fear of “opening doors.” Fear of your own mind.

It produces shame and calls it “repentance.” Shame about thoughts. Shame about desires. Shame about doubt. Shame about depression. Shame about trauma responses. Shame about not fitting the mold. Shame about being honest.

It produces self-surveillance and calls it “guarding your heart.” Monitor your motives. Monitor your feelings. Monitor your media. Monitor your temptations. Monitor your friendships. If you’re not monitoring yourself, you’re told you’re drifting.

It produces tribalism and calls it “being set apart.” Us versus them. Saved versus lost. Clean versus unclean. “Biblical” people versus “compromised” people. The in-group versus everyone else.

It produces performance and calls it “passion.” Serve more. Give more. Show up more. Pray more. Cry more. Be louder. Be more certain. Be more intense. And if you’re not intense, you must not be serious.

It produces control and calls it “accountability.” Not accountability the way healthy adults mean it. Often it becomes leverage. Surveillance. Social pressure. A tool to keep people compliant.

And it produces image management and calls it “unity.” Don’t be divisive. Don’t cause trouble. Don’t bring that up publicly. Protect the witness. Protect the church’s reputation. Protect the brand.

When you strip the labels away, much of what’s happening doesn’t look like love. It looks like behavior management in a high-pressure social environment that rewards conformity and punishes honesty.

And the clearest place this became undeniable to me was where “fruit” should be most obvious: money and power.

Because if the Holy Spirit is real—if God actually lives in believers and produces kindness, gentleness, and love—then it should show most clearly when Christians have authority over other people. It should show in how Christian bosses treat employees. It should show in how ministries treat staff. It should show in how churches treat volunteers. It should show in how leadership handles criticism, conflict, and burnout.

If anything should look different, it should be the places where believers claim God is most present: churches and ministries.

But the more I watched, the more it often felt like those places were indistinguishable from any other human institution. Sometimes it felt worse, not because Christians are uniquely evil, but because spiritual language is used to justify what would otherwise be recognized as unhealthy or abusive.

I watched Christian-owned businesses loudly claim “values” while treating employees like machines—profit first, output first, people last. I watched workers pressured to sacrifice family time, health, and basic boundaries while being told it was “honoring God.” I watched burnout become normal and compassion become conditional.

And yes, this happens in secular workplaces too. That’s not the point.

The point is that Christianity claims supernatural transformation. It claims the Spirit produces kindness and gentleness. It claims love is the marker.

So when a workplace owned and led by “Spirit-filled” believers looks just as ruthless—or sometimes even more manipulative because guilt is involved—something doesn’t add up.

In a secular workplace, exploitation is at least honest in one way: it’s called business. In a Christian workplace, exploitation can be wrapped in spiritual guilt, which makes it harder to resist. Now you’re not just saying no to a boss. You’re saying no to “God.” You’re not just quitting a job. You’re “abandoning a calling.” You’re not just protecting your mental health. You’re “being selfish” and “not trusting the Lord.”

That’s a different kind of trap.

And the church world itself often exposes this even more. If the Holy Spirit is real, churches and ministries should be the safest environments on earth. Compassionate. Gentle. Honest. Humble. But many people who have worked inside big evangelical ministries describe environments that look like corporate ladders with a halo: high demands, low boundaries, pressure to perform, brand protection, leadership insulated from accountability, and staff expected to absorb the cost.

When leaders become celebrities, they often stop being shepherds. They become executives. And executives protect the institution first. The machine always comes before the person.

That’s why church scandals and workplace toxicity in Christian organizations hit different. It isn’t just hypocrisy. It’s evidence that the “fruit” isn’t reliably present even where it’s supposed to be strongest.

Teen Mania is one example that comes up for a lot of people because many former participants and staff have described intense, high-control environments—what some call cult-like—where “boot camp” pressure was spiritualized, and where manipulation and harm were justified as “God’s will.” I’m not claiming every person had the same story. But the reason it matters is because it illustrates a wider pattern: when control is spiritualized, abuse becomes easier.

Because once you can re-label harm, you can make almost anything “holy.”

Humiliation becomes “humility training.” Exhaustion becomes “sacrifice.” Pressure becomes “calling.” Obedience to leaders becomes “obedience to God.” Questions become “lack of faith.” Dissent becomes “rebellion.” Trauma becomes “refining.”

And once people believe God is behind it, they will tolerate what they would never tolerate in any normal environment.

That’s not spiritual growth. That’s how high-control systems maintain control.

Whenever you point out these patterns, evangelicalism has a set of canned responses ready. “Christians aren’t perfect.” “Don’t judge Jesus by His followers.” “The church is a hospital for sinners.” “Don’t look at man—look at Jesus.”

At first those lines sound wise. Over time I realized they function like shields. They don’t explain the problem—they deflect the problem. They make the belief system impossible to evaluate no matter what it produces.

But Christianity doesn’t claim perfection. It claims transformation. It claims the Spirit produces fruit. It claims love is the marker. It claims people will know by the result.

So when the observable pattern is harshness instead of kindness, control instead of gentleness, superiority instead of humility, greed instead of generosity, gossip instead of peace, and manipulation instead of love, it’s not enough to say “no one is perfect.” That response turns the faith into something unfalsifiable—something that can never be questioned no matter what it produces.

And “don’t look at man—look at Jesus” is even more revealing, because you can’t access Jesus in evangelicalism without man. Man wrote the Bible. Man translated it. Man selected the canon. Man interprets it. Man preaches it. Man decides what counts as “sound doctrine.” Man tells you what questions are acceptable.

Then man turns around and says don’t look at man.

It’s a clever move. It lets the institution claim authority when it wants compliance and avoid responsibility when it causes harm.

My personal reality check was painful but simple. After about fifteen years as an adult Christian—being around hundreds of church people—I can count on one hand how many felt consistently sincere. People who were genuinely kind, compassionate, humble, patient, and safe. Not performative. Not superiority-driven. Not brand-obsessed. Not controlling.

Those people existed, and I’m grateful they did.

But they felt like exceptions, not the norm.

And at some point I had to ask a question I used to avoid: if the Holy Spirit is real and active the way evangelicalism claims, why do the results so often look like ordinary human systems?

Because you can get most of what evangelical Christianity produces without a supernatural God. You can get community through shared identity. You can get emotional highs through music and crowd psychology. You can get moral language through tradition. You can get “conviction” through fear conditioning. You can get devotion through social pressure. You can get certainty through authority structures. You can get conformity through rewards and punishments. You can even get spiritual experiences through suggestion and expectation.

None of that requires the Holy Spirit.

It requires a human group, a shared narrative, and reinforcement.

And that’s where my conclusion became less about anger and more about honesty. I’m not claiming I scientifically proved God doesn’t exist anywhere. But I am saying this: when a belief system makes strong claims about what God does in people, and the observable pattern doesn’t match those claims, it becomes reasonable to doubt the system.

In every other area of life, if someone claims a product changes lives and you don’t see it changing lives, you stop buying it. You don’t keep paying for it and then blame yourself for “not believing hard enough.”

But evangelicalism often does exactly that. It shifts the blame back to the individual. You didn’t surrender enough. You didn’t pray enough. You didn’t read enough. You have hidden sin. You’re bitter. You’re deceived. You’re under attack.

That’s not a loving truth system. That’s a self-protecting machine.

For years, fear held the whole structure together—fear of hell, fear of being wrong, fear of losing community, fear of disappointing God. But once I stepped back and evaluated the claims the way we evaluate truth anywhere else—patterns, outcomes, evidence—the “Holy Spirit transformation” story started to look less like reality and more like religious marketing.

And this is what it comes down to for me:

When the fruit doesn’t match the claims, you’re allowed to stop pretending it does. You’re allowed to tell the truth. You’re allowed to say, “This isn’t what you promised.” You’re allowed to say, “This doesn’t add up.”

You’re allowed to stop calling performance “transformation.”

And for me, that was the beginning of freedom.

By: Jeric Yurkanin

If you want to understand why so many churches feel less like spiritual communities and more like political factories, you have to stop asking whether individual Christians are sincere. Sincerity is real. Lots of people genuinely believe they’re defending truth, protecting families, or “saving the nation.” The question isn’t whether they mean it. The question is what their systems reward. Because systems don’t run on sincerity. They run on incentives.

Modern American church culture has built a machine that feeds on a simple cycle: fear produces loyalty, loyalty produces money, money produces influence, and influence produces more fear to keep the whole thing from collapsing. It’s not a secret conspiracy. It’s a business model wrapped in religious language. And like most business models, it survives because it works.

The fuel is fear. Not the healthy kind of fear that warns you not to touch a stove. The kind of fear that keeps you emotionally dependent: fear of outsiders, fear of cultural change, fear of losing status, fear of losing your children, fear of “being on the wrong side,” fear of punishment in the next life, fear that everything you love is under attack. Fear is powerful because it compresses the mind. It turns complex reality into a simple battle: good people versus bad people, God’s team versus Satan’s team, truth versus deception, us versus them. When someone is scared, they don’t ask better questions—they look for a protector. And churches that position themselves as the protector become indispensable.

Then comes identity. Once a church ties faith to a political tribe, the faith stops being primarily about transformation and becomes primarily about belonging. “Christian” becomes less a spiritual path and more a badge: this is who we are, and this is who we’re not. At that point, the church no longer needs to persuade people with depth; it only needs to reinforce identity. And identity reinforcement is cheap. It can be done through slogans, outrage clips, memes, selective Bible quotes, and “prayer” that functions like political messaging with religious frosting.

This is where the pulpit becomes a campaign platform without officially becoming a campaign platform. A pastor doesn’t have to say, “Vote for this person.” They only have to preach a world where there is exactly one “Christian” way to vote, and where the opposite vote is not just wrong but immoral, demonic, or anti-God. The congregation gets the message. The pastor keeps plausible deniability. The machine keeps moving.

Now add money, because money is what turns ideology into infrastructure. A political church doesn’t survive on beliefs alone. It survives on recurring revenue. That revenue comes from offerings, donations, subscriptions, merch, conferences, and media ecosystems that keep people emotionally hooked. The genius of the system is that it turns giving into proof of righteousness. Giving isn’t just support; it’s “obedience.” And if you can make giving feel like obedience to God, you can fund almost anything while insulating yourself from accountability. Question the budget? You’re “divisive.” Question the leader? You’re “rebellious.” Question the political messaging? You’re “compromising.” The money keeps flowing because the cost of asking questions becomes social exile.

Once money builds infrastructure, infrastructure demands protection. You can’t run a media brand, staff salaries, mortgages, and conference circuits on uncertainty. You need a stable audience. And stable audiences require stable enemies. That’s why the machine keeps cycling new threats. The threat can be moral decay, secularism, wokeism, immigrants, atheists, LGBTQ people, liberals, “Marxism,” the media, the universities—whatever works this month. The details change, but the function stays the same: create a fear object, offer the church as the safe place, and frame dissent as betrayal.

The political side of this machine works overtime because politicians benefit from it too. A religious voting bloc is one of the most valuable assets in modern politics because it’s not just a group of voters—it’s a ready-made distribution network. Churches are built-in communities with weekly gatherings, trusted voices, and strong social pressure. If a politician can tap into that network, they gain something campaigns can’t easily buy: loyalty that feels like righteousness. Politicians don’t have to be saints to benefit from that. They only have to promise protection and appoint the right judges and signal the right enemies. In return, the church becomes a turnout machine.

And here’s the darkest piece: a lot of modern church culture has learned to treat power as a substitute for spirituality. When churches can’t convincingly show the fruit they claim—humility, honesty, compassion, justice—they shift the proof from character to control. Proof becomes “we’re winning.” We’re winning elections. We’re winning court cases. We’re passing laws. We’re “taking the country back.” That’s why a leader’s personal behavior becomes irrelevant as long as the leader advances the tribe’s power. The movement becomes less about the teachings of Jesus and more about the protection of an identity.

This is how a religion becomes a cultish political culture without calling itself a cult. It creates a closed reality where outside information is treated as hostile, critics are treated as evil, and loyalty is treated as holiness. It trains people to distrust anyone who challenges the narrative. It reframes accountability as persecution. It elevates leaders who “fight,” not leaders who heal. It rewards aggression as “boldness.” And it baptizes cruelty as “telling the truth.”

The media ecosystem is what keeps this machine running between Sundays. In past centuries, a church’s influence was mostly local. Today it’s constant. People can live inside a 24/7 stream of outrage-driven religious content that tells them what to fear, who to hate, and how to interpret every news event as spiritual warfare. This is where religion becomes entertainment and entertainment becomes indoctrination. If someone watches hours of content that frames politics as a battle against darkness, they will eventually stop seeing opponents as humans. They will see them as threats. That’s not discipleship. That’s training.

And the machine has a built-in defense mechanism: it prevents introspection by keeping people busy. Busy with moral panics. Busy with petitions. Busy with campaigns. Busy with “prayer meetings” that are really political rallies. Busy with defending the tribe. If you keep people busy fighting enemies, they don’t notice the emptiness inside the institution. They don’t notice the exploitation. They don’t notice the hypocrisy. They don’t notice that Jesus’ teachings have been replaced with culture-war talking points.

This is the part that hurts, especially for former evangelicals: the machine often survives by hijacking the language of God to protect human power. It uses “faith” to shield leaders from scrutiny. It uses “unity” to silence victims. It uses “forgiveness” to rush past accountability. It uses “discernment” as a license to believe conspiracy. It uses “spiritual warfare” to avoid factual correction. It uses “revival” as a marketing strategy. It uses “family values” as a political weapon while ignoring the families crushed by poverty, racism, abuse, and neglect inside the very communities that preach those values.

So what does it mean to say churches and Christian politicians work overtime to keep it running? It means they constantly reinforce the incentives that sustain the system:

They keep the crowd emotionally activated so the crowd keeps giving.

They keep the narrative black-and-white so the crowd stays loyal.

They keep the enemy list fresh so the crowd stays afraid.

They keep the leader untouchable so the brand stays stable.

They keep “truth” defined as tribe agreement so no one can challenge it.

They keep Jesus in the logo while removing him from the method.

This is why the machine doesn’t collapse when it’s exposed. Exposure doesn’t automatically end a system. Sometimes exposure only strengthens it because the machine has trained its people to interpret criticism as persecution. “See? They hate us. We must be right.” That’s a perfect closed loop. It turns reality into confirmation.

And if you want a final, blunt statement—one that’s hard to say but historically accurate as a pattern—here it is: the American church has often preferred power to repentance. Repentance is slow. Repentance is humiliating. Repentance requires giving up control. Power is intoxicating, measurable, and marketable. Power can be defended as “influence.” Power can be baptized as “advancing the kingdom.” Power can be justified as “protecting children.” But power almost always demands a sacrifice, and the sacrifice is usually truth, compassion, and integrity.

If someone asks what to do with this, the answer isn’t “hate Christians.” That’s lazy. The answer is to stop confusing faith with tribal politics and stop confusing institutional survival with spiritual truth. Healthy communities can still exist. But they require a different set of incentives: transparency, accountability, humility, and the courage to say “we were wrong” without turning it into a fundraising pitch.

Because the moment a church is more afraid of losing influence than it is afraid of lying, it has already chosen its god.

If you want, I can turn this into a sharper “closing monologue” style ending for your series—something that reads like a final podcast narration with punchy cadence, pauses, and mic-drop lines.

By: Jeric Yurkanin

If you grew up in American church culture, you were probably taught some version of this story: Christianity is timeless, the Bible is clear, and politics is what happens “out there” in the sinful world. Then you grow up, look around, and realize a huge portion of American Christianity doesn’t merely participate in politics—it’s structured around it. That didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen by accident. It happened because American Christianity moved through the modern era the same way most institutions do: it adapted to whatever protected its authority, preserved its identity, and maintained its cultural influence.

In the early 1900s, American Protestantism—especially among educated and urban sectors—was already splitting into two broad instincts. One instinct tried to harmonize faith with modern scholarship, science, and historical Bible study. The other instinct treated modernity as a threat and responded by building a fortress. That fortress mentality is where you start seeing the modern obsession with certainty harden: “inerrancy,” literal readings, boundary policing, and a moral panic approach to change. This is also where the modern word “fundamentalist” takes shape—not merely as a theology, but as a posture: if the world is changing, then your job is to fight, resist, and purify.

By the 1920s, the modernist–fundamentalist conflict isn’t just a church argument. It becomes a public spectacle. The famous Scopes era tells you something important about American religion: it has always been tied to cultural power. The fight isn’t only “What is true?” It’s “Who gets to define what students learn?” “Who gets to define moral norms?” “Who gets to define what counts as ‘American’?” In other words, this is an authority struggle. And once religion becomes an authority struggle, it naturally drifts toward politics, because politics is the arena where authority becomes enforceable.

Through the mid-1900s, American Christianity also develops something that people don’t always recognize as a political force: civil religion. In the Cold War era, Christianity becomes part of the national self-image—America as morally superior to “godless communism.” Religion becomes a symbolic badge of American identity. This matters because when Christianity becomes a national symbol, it becomes useful to politicians and institutions who want unity, loyalty, and moral legitimacy. That’s not a conspiracy; it’s a function. Nations use religion to stabilize narratives about themselves.

At the same time, mass media changes everything. Radio, then television, then national ministries create a new kind of religious authority: the celebrity preacher and the media-driven movement. When religious influence is mediated through mass communication, it becomes scalable. But it also becomes competitive. It rewards charisma, confidence, simple messaging, and emotionally gripping narratives. It’s not hard to see how this environment can produce sincere spiritual leaders—and also produce religious entrepreneurs. The method doesn’t care which one you are. The method rewards whoever holds attention.

Then the 1960s and 1970s hit, and American Christianity enters a stress test it never fully passes. Civil Rights exposes deep moral contradictions. Some churches support civil rights; others resist or remain silent. That alone permanently complicates the story of “Christian morality,” because it becomes obvious that Christians can read the same Bible and land on opposite sides of history. That doesn’t merely create theological disagreement—it creates legitimacy crisis. When a religion claims moral authority but cannot reliably produce moral clarity on major human issues, it becomes vulnerable to a new strategy: replacing moral authority with identity loyalty.

Meanwhile, cultural change accelerates. Sexual norms shift. Women’s roles shift. Public trust in institutions is shaken. Supreme Court decisions remove certain forms of state-sponsored religion from public schools. And all of this is experienced by many conservative Christians not as “society evolving,” but as “our world being taken.” That is the emotional fuel of the modern Christian Right: not simply belief, but loss—loss of cultural control, loss of default status, loss of the feeling that “we run the moral center of the country.”

Here’s a detail many church histories conveniently skip: conservative Christian political mobilization did not begin as a single-issue “pro-life” movement in the neat way it’s often marketed today. Even within major evangelical institutions, abortion stances were more complex in the early 1970s than modern talking points admit. For example, the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a 1971 resolution that framed abortion as a matter with exceptions and complexities rather than a flat “all abortion is murder” line.  That matters historically because it shows how moral issues can become hardened and weaponized over time as political boundary markers.

Then comes the late 1970s into the 1980s: the Christian Right becomes an organized political machine. The Moral Majority (founded in 1979) becomes one of the best-known symbols of this mobilization.  Its genius wasn’t theological depth—it was organizational clarity: register voters, frame cultural change as moral collapse, and tie Christian identity to conservative politics. This is when the alliance between large segments of conservative evangelicalism and the Republican Party becomes more formalized and strategic, with Reagan-era politics becoming a major gravitational center. 

By the 1990s, that machine evolves. The Christian Coalition becomes another major vehicle for mobilizing conservative Christians, especially at the grassroots level.  This period helps explain something crucial: American Christianity increasingly behaves like an interest group. It doesn’t just preach values; it seeks policy outcomes. It learns the language of elections, judges, school boards, and culture war framing. And once a religious community defines itself by political wins and losses, it starts to measure “faithfulness” by voting behavior, not just spiritual practice.

The 2000s deepen the fusion. After 9/11, national identity, security, and moral framing intensify across American life. Evangelical influence remains high in Republican politics, and “values voters” language becomes common. At the same time, debates about same-sex marriage and “religious liberty” become major rally points. Christianity becomes not only a moral voice, but a cultural-defense movement: protecting “traditional” identity against perceived social collapse.

Then comes the 2010s, and this is where the story gets impossible to ignore. Same-sex marriage becomes legal nationwide in 2015, and many conservative Christian communities interpret this as another major cultural defeat. The stage is set for a political figure who can do what religious leaders increasingly struggle to do: win. That’s one of the keys to understanding why Donald Trump becomes a dominant figure among white evangelicals. The relationship isn’t best explained as “they thought he was morally pure.” A lot of the relationship is transactional and institutional: judges, policies, cultural pushback, and the promise to fight.

This is where an agnostic historian has to be blunt: when a religion feels like it’s losing the culture, it becomes willing to partner with power—even power that doesn’t match its stated moral ideals—if the partnership restores influence. That’s not uniquely Christian. That’s how threatened identity groups behave. But it collides hard with the church’s own claims about character, humility, truth, and integrity.

By the time you get to the 2020s, American Christianity is not just divided—it’s polarized into identity tribes. The COVID era, intensifying partisan media ecosystems, and ongoing culture-war battles all amplify that polarization. Abortion politics reaches a major turning point when the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022 overturns Roe and returns abortion policy to the states.  For decades, conservative Christians had treated Roe as a mobilizing symbol; Dobbs becomes proof that long-term political strategy—especially judicial strategy—can reshape the country.

Now bring it to your endpoint: 2024–2025 and Trump’s return to office. The 2024 presidential election resulted in a Trump victory, and he was inaugurated on January 20, 2025.  In that election, white evangelical Protestants again formed one of the strongest religious constituencies for Trump—often described as “more than eight in ten” support in exit-poll style reporting.  That doesn’t mean all Christians supported him. It doesn’t mean all Republicans are evangelical. It does mean the long-term alliance between white evangelical identity and Republican electoral power is still one of the defining features of American politics.

This is also where the term “Christian nationalism” enters mainstream discussion—not as a generic insult, but as a measurable cluster of beliefs about Christianity, American identity, and the role of government. PRRI’s work, for example, categorizes Americans into groups like “Adherents,” “Sympathizers,” “Skeptics,” and “Rejecters” based on responses to questions about whether the U.S. should be a Christian nation in a governmental sense.  Whether someone likes that framing or hates it, the underlying reality is visible: a portion of American Christianity increasingly defines faith as national identity and national identity as faith.

So what’s the historical through-line from 1900 to 2025?

American Christianity doesn’t simply become political because “politicians corrupted it.” It becomes political because it was repeatedly incentivized to treat cultural power as proof of righteousness. Once you treat influence as evidence that God is on your side, losing influence feels like spiritual persecution—even when it’s just demographic change, pluralism, and the normal evolution of a modern society. And once you feel persecuted, you’ll accept almost any alliance that promises protection and retaliation.

That’s the machine logic. The machine doesn’t require everyone to be insincere. It only requires a system where fear, identity, and power reinforce each other.

And here’s the uncomfortable conclusion that a former evangelical critic can’t avoid: by 2025, a large slice of American Christianity has functionally rewritten “the gospel” into something closer to a political loyalty test. Not officially, not in every church, not in every denomination—but culturally. In practice. In vibes and social consequences. The faith becomes less about a spiritual way of being in the world and more about defending a tribe, winning courts, controlling schools, and defeating enemies.

If you want, I can write Part 7B as a tighter “case study” version focused specifically on how abortion, courts, and media formed a single pipeline—from the late-1970s Christian Right to the Dobbs era and then to Trump’s political dominance among white evangelicals.

By: Jeric Yurkanin

By the 1800s, Christianity in the West is no longer just fighting over which church should run the nation. It’s fighting over something bigger: who gets to define reality in a world being remade by factories, science, revolutions, mass literacy, and global empire. This century is where Christianity learns how to function in modernity—sometimes by adapting, sometimes by resisting, and often by reinventing itself into forms that look eerily familiar today: mass movements, celebrity preachers, media-driven campaigns, missionary expansion tied to empire, and a growing obsession with “correct belief” as a boundary marker.

The 1800s are also where the old story—“Christian society as the default”—starts collapsing in slow motion. Not instantly, not everywhere, but steadily. People leave rural villages for cities. Old social hierarchies strain. Poverty concentrates. New political ideologies emerge. And in the background, the modern mind is forming: confidence in progress, confidence in reason, and increasing suspicion that religious institutions are more human than divine.

Europe: Faith under pressure from modern knowledge and modern politics

In Europe, the 1800s are a tug-of-war between secularizing forces and religious revival/reassertion. On one side you have revolutions, nationalism, and the growth of modern states trying to reduce the church’s control over education, law, and public life. On the other side you have churches—Catholic and Protestant—trying to protect their authority in a world that is no longer automatically obedient.

In many places, the church loses property, loses legal privilege, and loses cultural monopoly. But that doesn’t mean religion disappears. It means religion becomes contested. And contested religion tends to polarize. When a tradition stops being the unquestioned default, it often hardens into identity politics: the church becomes “who we are” against the forces that threaten “who we are.” That’s why you see so many 19th-century battles over schooling, public morality, and national identity. The fight is never only about God. It’s about control of the future.

This is also the century where historical criticism of the Bible grows into a serious intellectual movement. Scholars study manuscripts, sources, authorship, and development over time. The Bible becomes, in the academic world, a text with history rather than a single timeless voice. That shift doesn’t automatically destroy faith, but it destroys the illusion that the Bible dropped into the world as a clean, uniform document. And once that illusion breaks, institutions feel threatened. The response tends to split: some embrace critical study and try to reinterpret faith in modern terms; others double down and treat skepticism as rebellion.

Science intensifies that pressure. By mid-century, evolutionary theory becomes a flashpoint (not because it’s the first scientific challenge, but because it hits human identity and origins). The deeper issue isn’t fossils; it’s authority. If modern knowledge can explain the world without church control, then the church has to either adapt or fight. And fighting is tempting because it rallies loyalists and draws clear boundaries—one of the oldest institutional survival strategies.

The Catholic Church, in particular, responds to modernity with a strong push to centralize authority. The papacy becomes more explicitly a symbol of certainty in a confusing world. In this environment, Catholic identity hardens in some places into a defensive fortress: clear doctrine, clear hierarchy, clear obedience, clear lines. Whether one sees that as faithful clarity or institutional anxiety depends on one’s lens, but the historical pattern is consistent: modernity pressures institutions, and pressured institutions often respond by tightening control.

Meanwhile, in Protestant Europe, you see both revival energy and social reform impulses. Evangelical revivals surge in Britain and beyond, emphasizing personal conversion, moral seriousness, and active mission. At the same time, industrial cities create humanitarian crises that force churches to confront poverty not as an individual failing but as a structural reality. This is one root of what becomes known as the Social Gospel impulse—efforts to frame Christianity as a force for social justice and reform, not only personal salvation.

And above all, Europe’s Christianity becomes global in a new way through empire. The 1800s are the century of expanded European imperial reach, and missions are entangled with that expansion. Missionaries often genuinely believe they’re bringing good news and moral reform, but the mission frequently travels inside an imperial pipeline: European power opens doors, European money funds institutions, European assumptions shape “civilization,” and conversion becomes intertwined with cultural transformation. That’s one of the century’s most uncomfortable truths: Christianity is often packaged as salvation while functioning as cultural replacement. Even when individuals act with compassion, the system can still erase local identities. And in the long run, that entanglement leaves scars that later generations can’t ignore.

America: from revival culture to religious industry

In the United States, the 1800s are where Christianity becomes unmistakably mass movement religion. The nation is expanding westward, building new towns, and forming a culture where religion is increasingly voluntary and competitive. In that environment, churches learn a hard rule: if people don’t have to belong, you have to persuade them. You have to create urgency. You have to create identity. You have to win attention.

This is the century of revivals and awakenings, but more importantly, it’s the century where revival becomes a method. Christianity in America learns techniques: altar calls, anxious benches, public testimonies, traveling evangelists, printed tracts, emotional appeals, and clear binary categories—saved/lost, converted/unconverted, inside/outside. These methods are powerful because they’re portable. They work in new towns, on frontiers, in cities, anywhere you can gather a crowd. And because they work, they spread.

Here’s where the former evangelical critic in me speaks plainly: once religion discovers repeatable methods that produce measurable results, it begins behaving like an industry—whether it admits it or not. Not because everyone is corrupt, but because systems reward what works. Charisma becomes currency. The ability to draw crowds becomes authority. Emotional intensity becomes proof. And once those things become proof, you can build machines around them.

America’s religious expansion is also deeply tied to reform movements. Many Christians in the 1800s are active in abolitionism, temperance, prison reform, women’s education, and various humanitarian causes. The faith is not only inward. It produces activism. But the century also exposes Christianity’s moral contradictions in a way that permanently damages its credibility: American slavery is not merely tolerated by many churches; it is defended by many churches, often with Scripture. That fact matters because it shows how easily a sacred text can be recruited to protect an economic system.

When slavery becomes the central national crisis, American Christianity fractures alongside the nation. Denominations split North and South. Sermons become political weapons. The Bible becomes a courtroom where both sides claim God’s endorsement. This is not an accidental side story. It reveals something structural: in a culture where Christianity is treated as moral authority, controlling biblical interpretation becomes a way of controlling public conscience. And when money and power are on the line, conscience is often for sale.

After the Civil War, the United States enters rapid industrialization. Cities swell. Immigrants arrive in large waves. Wealth concentrates. Labor exploitation expands. And again, Christianity responds in competing ways. Some forms of faith emphasize personal salvation and moral behavior as the solution to social chaos. Other forms emphasize systemic reform—labor rights, poverty relief, public health, education, and the idea that Christian ethics should shape society. The tension between “save souls” and “change systems” becomes a recurring fault line, and you can still see it today.

Immigration also changes American Christianity dramatically. Large numbers of Catholic immigrants reshape the religious landscape and intensify Protestant anxieties. Anti-Catholic sentiment rises because Catholicism is associated with foreign authority and different social practices. This conflict isn’t only theological; it’s cultural and political. It’s another reminder that religion in the modern West is often a proxy for identity and power.

The birth of modern “inerrancy anxiety” and the road toward fundamentalism

Across both Europe and America in the 1800s, you can watch the seeds of modern fundamentalism forming—even before the term exists. The pattern is predictable. As modern scholarship, science, and social change pressure traditional authority, many believers respond by turning the Bible into an immovable object: if everything else shifts, Scripture must be perfectly stable. This is where strict doctrines of inerrancy and “literalism” become more central for some communities. The Bible becomes less a library of texts with history and more a single seamless certainty machine.

This shift is not only theological. It’s psychological and institutional. When people feel the ground moving, they want a rock. Institutions also want a rock because a rock is easier to govern. A complex, historically embedded Bible produces complex readers. Complex readers ask questions. Questions are hard to control. Certainty is easier. Certainty creates loyalty. Certainty creates clear boundaries. Certainty builds strong movements.

At the same time, other Christians move in the opposite direction, trying to reinterpret Christianity in ways compatible with modern knowledge—emphasizing ethics, social reform, and a less supernatural framework. That creates a widening split: Christianity as modernized moral vision versus Christianity as fortress certainty. The 1900s will intensify that split into culture wars.

Missions, empire, and the uncomfortable expansion of “Christian civilization”

One more theme binds Europe and America in the 1800s: missions explode. Churches organize missionary societies, fund global work, translate texts, build schools and hospitals, and spread Christian teaching across the globe. There are real humanitarian contributions in this story. But there is also a darker structural reality: missions are often fused with the idea of “civilizing” the world. That framing treats European and American culture as the standard and local cultures as inferior. Conversion becomes tangled with Westernization.

This is why the legacy of 19th-century missions is complicated. In some places, Christianity becomes a genuine local faith expressed in indigenous ways. In other places, it arrives as a partner of colonial domination. Both are true, and pretending only one side exists is a form of historical dishonesty. The important point for your series is that Christianity’s global spread in this era is not just spiritual enthusiasm—it’s also an extension of Western power structures.

The takeaway: the 1800s create modern Christianity’s DNA

By 1900, Christianity in Europe and America has been reshaped into something recognizably modern. In Europe, it’s forced into conflict with modern states, modern knowledge, and post-revolution politics. In America, it becomes a competitive marketplace religion built on revival methods, mass persuasion, and strong boundary-making. Across both, industrialization and empire push Christianity into new roles: moral reform movement, identity fortress, humanitarian institution, political ally, and cultural exporter.

And here’s the punchline that connects to your larger critique: the 1800s are where Christianity learns how to become a machine without calling itself a machine. It learns systems, techniques, institutions, publishing networks, funding models, celebrity leadership, and loyalty frameworks. None of this means every believer is fake. It means modern Christianity is historically conditioned. It developed under specific pressures, and it adopted whatever tools helped it survive and spread.

Part 7 can take us from 1900 to the present: mass media, radio/TV preachers, the industrial growth of evangelical institutions, world wars, the Cold War alliance between Christianity and nationalism, the rise of the Religious Right, prosperity theology, megachurch branding, and the fear-based afterlife messaging that keeps the machine running.

If Part 4 showed how Christianity in Europe and England became a state project between 1200 and 1600, Part 5 is where the consequences fully bloom. The period from 1600 to 1800 is not a quiet “church history” chapter. It’s the era when Christianity becomes a contested public system—fought over in civil wars, exported into colonial projects, challenged by new intellectual movements, and reinvented through revivals. This is also the era where modern religious instincts start to form: the instinct to control belief through the state on one hand, and the instinct to spread belief through persuasion, print, and emotion on the other. It’s where Christianity begins shifting from “the official order” into something that increasingly has to compete for loyalty.

In the early 1600s, the biggest reality in England is that the Reformation didn’t settle anything. It created a national church, yes, but it also created permanent conflict about what that church should be. Some wanted the Church of England to remain more traditional and sacramental. Others wanted it “purified” from anything that smelled Catholic. These weren’t merely theological differences. They were identity wars. The English crown needed religious uniformity to stabilize the nation, but religious uniformity is a dream that never survives real people. When you force everyone into the same religious structure, you don’t create unity—you create pressure. And pressure eventually finds a crack.

That crack becomes an earthquake in the English Civil War (mid-1600s). The war is not purely “religious,” but religion is deeply tangled into it—authority, legitimacy, and who gets to define the moral order of the nation. Puritans, Anglicans, and other groups interpret the same Bible through different lenses, and those lenses map onto political loyalties. This is a hard truth for modern religious people to swallow: the Bible does not prevent civil conflict. The Bible is often recruited into civil conflict. And when a society treats religion as the foundation of public order, the fight over religion becomes the fight over the nation itself.

The result is that Christianity becomes even more obviously institutional and political. Under Cromwell and the Commonwealth, you see experiments in governance that disrupt older structures. Then, with the Restoration of the monarchy, you see a push to reassert order. But the spiritual damage is done: once people witness “Christian” factions fighting for control of the state, it becomes harder to believe that the system is purely divine. The mask slips. Religion looks less like a single sacred truth and more like a battlefield of competing authorities.

Out of this comes a crucial development: dissent becomes a permanent feature. Even when states attempt to enforce religious uniformity, religious variety keeps growing. Nonconformists—Baptists, Quakers, and other groups—continue to exist, often persecuted, sometimes tolerated, always watched. This matters because it forces Christianity to evolve new methods. When you can’t rely on the state to enforce belief in every soul, you have to convince people. You have to persuade. You have to preach. You have to publish. You have to build communities that survive without government protection. That’s one of the seeds of modern evangelical-style religion: a faith that learns to spread through communication and emotional force rather than legal compulsion.

At the same time, Europe as a whole is exhausted by confessional conflict. The Thirty Years’ War (early-to-mid 1600s, centered in the Holy Roman Empire) becomes one of the most destructive religiously entangled conflicts in European history. Again, it’s not purely theological; it’s political and dynastic too. But the public memory of brutal “religious wars” feeds a growing desire for stability, toleration, and new ways of grounding public life that don’t depend on theological agreement. When people watch Christians butcher other Christians for decades, the claim that Christianity naturally produces peace loses credibility. The hunger for a different foundation grows.

That hunger helps fuel the rise of Enlightenment thought in the 1600s and 1700s. The Enlightenment isn’t one single anti-Christian movement. It’s a broad shift toward reason, scientific inquiry, skepticism of inherited authority, and the belief that society can be organized through human understanding rather than sacred decree. Some Enlightenment thinkers remain religious. Some become deists. Some become openly skeptical. But the trend is unmistakable: authority begins to move away from “because the Church says so” toward “show the evidence” and “make the argument.” And once that shift happens, Christianity has to adjust. It can no longer rely on being the default intellectual framework of European society.

This is also where the Bible itself becomes a new kind of object. In earlier centuries, the Bible is a sacred text used within church authority structures. In the 1700s, the Bible increasingly becomes something people analyze historically: manuscripts, sources, authorship, context, contradictions, development. The rise of critical study doesn’t instantly destroy belief, but it introduces a permanent tension between faith and modern scholarship. And institutions respond differently: some adapt, some resist, some condemn. That tension is still alive today every time a church tells people not to “overthink” and a historian tells people to stop pretending the text fell from heaven in English.

Now pivot to the colonies, because Christianity’s story from 1600 to 1800 is inseparable from expansion. England’s colonial projects export versions of Christianity into North America and elsewhere. But this export is never purely spiritual. Christianity travels with the flag, the economy, and the hierarchy of empire. In many contexts, Christian language becomes a tool for legitimizing colonization. Conversion can be framed as salvation and civilization, while land theft and cultural erasure are framed as destiny. This is one of the darkest facts of Christian history: the religion of Jesus is often carried by systems that act nothing like Jesus, while insisting they do.

In North America, different colonies develop different religious patterns. Puritan New England builds a moral community model with high expectations, strong social discipline, and a belief that the community is a covenant society. Other regions are more pluralistic. Over time, the colonies become a mix of state-supported religion and religious competition. That mix becomes crucial for what Christianity turns into in the United States.

Because when religion has to compete, it becomes entrepreneurial. It becomes marketing. It becomes persuasion. It becomes “movement.” It learns to speak the language of the people rather than the language of elite institutions. This is where revivals matter. The First Great Awakening (1700s) is not simply “people got saved.” It’s a shift in how religion spreads and how authority works. Revivalism emphasizes personal experience, emotional response, and direct appeal. It also often bypasses traditional institutional gatekeepers. That can look like spiritual liberation to some and chaotic destabilization to others. Both reactions are historically accurate.

Revivalism also teaches Christianity a new habit: making the individual the central battlefield. If medieval Christianity often framed the church as the public order, revival Christianity frames the heart as the battlefield. You don’t just belong because you were born into Christendom. You belong because you had an experience, made a decision, felt conviction, got “converted.” That focus on the individual becomes one of the most enduring features of modern evangelical culture. And it’s historically connected to the decline of a single unified church-state system. When you can’t guarantee conformity through law, you target conscience through preaching.

But there’s a shadow side. Revivalism can create sincerity, but it can also create performance. If the community measures authenticity by emotional response, people learn to display the right responses. If salvation becomes a visible moment, people learn to narrate themselves into that moment. If leaders gain influence through crowds, charisma becomes currency. And once charisma becomes currency, you’ve opened the door for religion to become an industry. You don’t need to be cynical to see the risk. You only need to observe how humans behave when attention and authority reward certain patterns.

Now fold in the American Revolution (late 1700s) and its relationship to religion. In the new American context, formal state churches weaken over time, and religious pluralism expands. That creates an environment where religion is increasingly voluntary. Voluntary religion behaves differently than state religion. It uses media. It uses networks. It uses emotional energy. It forms denominations. It competes. It creates branding, even if it doesn’t call it branding. This is a major pivot point: Christianity begins moving from “the official system” toward “a marketplace of beliefs.”

Meanwhile, back in Europe, Christianity continues to wrestle with modernity. Rationalism, scientific advancement, political revolutions, and shifting social orders challenge the old assumption that society is naturally anchored in church authority. Christianity responds in multiple ways: some traditions adapt, some retrench, some spiritualize, some politicize. The idea that Christianity is one thing with one reaction to modernity is another church myth. Christianity is a set of competing responses to the same historical pressures.

So what’s the main lesson of 1600–1800? It’s the transition from enforced religion to contested religion. In 1200–1600, Christianity functioned largely as a state-supported order system in Europe. In 1600–1800, that order system begins to fracture under war, dissent, intellectual change, and colonial expansion. Christianity begins learning how to survive without being the default. It becomes more persuasive, more emotional, more publishable, more entrepreneurial. It also becomes more likely to fuse with national identity projects and colonial projects, because institutions under pressure often ally with power to protect themselves.

And here’s the former evangelical critique that ties it all together. Modern church culture often pretends it represents “original Christianity.” But a lot of what people call “biblical Christianity” today—decision-based conversion, revival emotion, celebrity preaching, marketing language, competition between churches—emerges in recognizable form through these centuries. It’s not necessarily evil. It’s historical. But once you know it’s historical, you can stop treating it like it’s divine inevitability.

This era is also where the machine starts to look like a machine. Once Christianity becomes something that must compete for attention, it naturally begins adopting methods that work: persuasion, branding, emotional intensity, clear in-group/out-group boundaries, and narratives that simplify complex history into easy certainty. That’s not a conspiracy. It’s what institutions do when survival depends on loyalty.

Part 6 can pick up from 1800–1900 and trace how modern evangelicalism industrializes further through mass media, nationalism, missions, abolition/segregation conflicts, and the rise of fundamentalism. And if you want it, Part 7 can move into 1900–present and show how American Christianity becomes a culture war machine with marketing strategies, political alliances, and fear-based afterlife messaging that functions like a control system.

By: Jeric Yurkanin

By the year 1200, Christianity in Western Europe wasn’t mainly a movement. It was the cultural weather. It had courts, universities, bishops with land and legal power, and a papacy that didn’t just speak about heaven—it negotiated with kings on earth. This is the period where it becomes harder to pretend Christianity was simply “a faith” separate from politics. In medieval Europe, Christianity was an operating system for society: law, legitimacy, education, morality, and public order all leaned on it. And once a religion becomes the skeleton of public life, it stops being only a set of beliefs. It becomes an institution that has to protect itself, fund itself, police itself, and justify its authority. That’s where a lot of later “Christian history” makes more sense: it’s not just spiritual evolution; it’s institutional survival.

In the 1200s, the Catholic Church reached a high point of influence, but that influence came with constant tension. Popes were trying to assert universal authority over Christendom while monarchs were trying to consolidate power in their own territories. Theologians and scholars were building massive intellectual systems in universities—scholastic theology, careful argumentation, definitions, categories, methods. This is where Christianity becomes deeply “academic” in the West, not because God suddenly became more logical, but because education became a pathway to power. If you can define doctrine, you can define orthodoxy. If you can define orthodoxy, you can define who belongs. And once belonging is tied to social stability, the line between spiritual leadership and social control gets thin.

At the same time, this era is full of genuine religious energy. You get reform movements, new devotional practices, and the growth of mendicant orders like Franciscans and Dominicans—groups aimed at preaching, poverty, and moral renewal. That’s important because it shows the constant rhythm of Christian history: whenever the institution becomes wealthy or rigid, new movements rise to call it back to simplicity. But the institution rarely allows reform to remain free. It either absorbs it, regulates it, or crushes it. That’s not unique to Christianity; it’s a pattern of institutions.

Also in this period, the Church tightens mechanisms for dealing with dissent. “Heresy” isn’t treated like a wrong opinion; it’s treated like a social threat. In a world where religion underwrites the order of society, disagreement isn’t just disagreement. It’s destabilization. That’s why the medieval West develops stronger systems of investigation and discipline against movements deemed dangerous. Again, you can read that as “protecting truth,” but if you’re reading like a historian, you also see it as protecting an institution that holds society together—an institution that fears fracture.

The 1300s hit Western Christianity with crises that expose how fragile the “holy order” really was. The Black Death doesn’t just kill people; it shakes confidence in the world’s moral structure. If society believes God’s order runs through Church authority and sacramental life, and then plague devastates the population, it forces uncomfortable questions. On top of that, the papacy experiences major political humiliation and instability. The Avignon Papacy (popes residing in Avignon rather than Rome) and the later Western Schism (rival claimants to the papacy) don’t merely create administrative problems. They rupture the image of unified spiritual authority. If the “one true Church” can’t even agree on who the pope is, the institution’s claim to clear, unquestionable guidance begins to look less like divine certainty and more like human politics.

By the 1400s, Europe is full of reform pressure. There’s increasing criticism of clerical wealth, corruption, and the moral gap between the Church’s claims and its visible behavior. There’s also growing interest in returning to sources—especially as Renaissance humanism spreads. Humanism isn’t simply “anti-religion.” It’s a scholarly movement that emphasizes languages, texts, and classical learning. But it has a disruptive effect: it teaches educated people to read critically, compare manuscripts, and question traditions that are not grounded in earlier sources. That becomes combustible when applied to Christianity, because Christianity in the medieval West isn’t just Scripture—it’s Scripture plus centuries of layered traditions, legal structures, and power arrangements. When people begin to ask, “Where did this come from?” the institution often doesn’t like the answer.

Then comes the printing press in the mid-1400s, and it’s hard to exaggerate what this does. Printing changes the speed of ideas. It creates a broader reading public. It makes arguments reproducible. It turns debates that used to be local and slow into debates that can spread across borders. If medieval Christianity was partly held together by controlled access to texts and education, printing loosens that control. It doesn’t create reform by itself, but it becomes a megaphone for reform once the spark hits.

That spark, in the early 1500s, is what we now call the Protestant Reformation. In popular retellings, it’s “Luther vs. the Catholic Church,” as if it were a single heroic conscience story. Historically, it’s bigger and messier. It’s a collision of theology, economics, politics, national identity, and institutional exhaustion. Luther’s critique of indulgences is important, but it lands in a world already saturated with resentment toward church taxation, clerical privilege, and the sense that Rome is extracting wealth. Reform becomes plausible because many people—princes and peasants alike—already feel the system is broken.

Once reform begins, it fractures. That’s another myth churches often teach: that reform was one clean return to “true Christianity.” In reality, the Reformation becomes multiple reformations. You get Lutheran movements in parts of Germany and Scandinavia, Reformed movements tied to Swiss and later Calvinist streams, radical movements like Anabaptists that reject state control of the church, and many local variations shaped by politics. The theology matters, yes, but what really changes the game is that Christianity in Western Europe stops being a single institutional block. It becomes competing confessional systems—often tied directly to the state.

And that brings us to England, where Christianity’s story from 1200–1600 has its own distinct shape. In the medieval period, England is Catholic like the rest of Western Europe, with monasteries, bishops, pilgrimages, relics, sacraments, and a deep intertwining of church life with public life. But England also develops a strong tradition of tension with external authority—especially when that authority is seen as foreign control. Long before Henry VIII, you can see seeds of resistance in theological and political critiques.

One of the most important English pre-Reformation figures is John Wycliffe in the late 1300s, associated with criticism of ecclesiastical wealth, emphasis on Scripture, and the idea that the Bible should be accessible in the language of the people. The later Lollard movement becomes a symbol of English religious dissent and reform pressure. Even if it doesn’t “win” in the 1400s, it shows that reform impulses exist in England before the official break with Rome.

Then the 1500s arrive, and England’s Reformation takes a distinct path: it’s driven as much by dynastic politics as by theology. Henry VIII’s break with Rome is not initially a clean Protestant conversion story. It’s a power and succession crisis. Henry wants an annulment; Rome will not grant it; political alliances and authority claims collide; and England’s monarchy asserts control over the church in its realm. The result is a transformation that is both religious and administrative: the English church becomes a national church under the crown. This is one of the clearest examples in history of how Christianity can shift shape not only because of beliefs, but because of political necessity.

The dissolution of the monasteries under Henry is a major earthquake. Monasteries were not only spiritual centers; they were economic and social institutions—landowners, employers, providers of charity, keepers of learning. Dissolving them redistributes wealth and land, strengthens the crown, and permanently changes religious life. Reform, in England, isn’t just sermons. It’s property. It’s power. It’s who controls resources.

After Henry, England swings. Under Edward VI, Protestant reforms accelerate. Under Mary I, Catholic restoration attempts to reverse them, and persecution intensifies the sense of religious conflict. Under Elizabeth I, the settlement seeks a middle path—Protestant in doctrine, structured in a way that can hold a nation together. This is where English Christianity becomes deeply tied to national identity. To belong religiously is also, in many ways, to belong politically. And that linkage always has consequences: when the state defines faith, dissent becomes treason-adjacent. “Heresy” becomes “disloyalty.” Religion becomes a tool for unity and a weapon against the “other.”

This is also the era where people often romanticize “returning to biblical Christianity,” but the historian’s lens has to be honest: what often returns is not pure simplicity, but new institutions. The Catholic Church responds with what’s often called the Counter-Reformation or Catholic Reformation, including internal reforms and the Council of Trent. Protestants build their own confessional structures, catechisms, church courts, and enforcement mechanisms. England builds a national church with its own conformity demands. Radical groups dissent and are persecuted by both Catholics and Protestants. The dream of reform collides with the reality of governance. Once Christianity becomes a public order project, every side tends to police boundaries.

So what is the big through-line from 1200 to 1600? It’s this: Christianity in Western Europe becomes openly what it already was beneath the surface—an institution competing for authority in society. Medieval Catholicism shows how a unified religious system can anchor a civilization, but also how that system can become vulnerable to corruption, political manipulation, and internal fracture. The Reformation shows how reform can become liberation for some and domination for others, depending on which authorities take control. England shows how quickly theology can become a state tool, and how “the church” can become a national instrument of stability and identity.

And here’s the former evangelical critic point that matters for your series: when modern churches tell this story, they often tell it like a morality tale—good reformers vs. bad Catholics, or faithful Catholics vs. rebellious Protestants, or “true believers” vs. “corrupt institutions.” That’s not how history reads. History reads like humans using religion to make meaning, to build power, to resist power, to protect communities, and sometimes to profit. There were sincere believers in every camp. There were also opportunists in every camp. And the institution—whether Catholic or Protestant—consistently tried to preserve itself once it had something to lose.

If you want to understand why modern Christianity often feels like a machine, this period is part of the answer. Between 1200 and 1600, Christianity in Europe becomes fully entangled with statecraft, identity, education, and control. That doesn’t mean every believer was a manipulator. It means the system they lived inside rewarded certain behaviors: conformity, loyalty to authority, enforcement of boundaries, and the framing of dissent as danger. Once a faith becomes a public order system, it almost always develops a policing instinct.

By: Jeric Yurkanin

If Part 1 established the Greek-shaped cultural backdrop and Part 2 showed how Rome inherited that world and enforced political control, Part 3 is where we get to the internal landscape—the Jewish world of ideas, anxieties, factions, symbols, and expectations that shaped what people heard when Jesus spoke. This is the piece that church reading habits often flatten into cartoon simplicity. In sermons, “the Jews” become a single monolithic group, “the law” becomes a generic villain, and “the Messiah” becomes a universally agreed-upon concept that everyone somehow misunderstood until the church got it right. That’s not history. That’s religious storytelling designed to keep things tidy.

The Jewish world of the first century is better understood as a living tradition under pressure. It’s not static. It’s not uniform. It’s wrestling. It’s responding to centuries of cultural influence, political domination, internal leadership conflict, and collective trauma. If you keep that in mind, a lot of New Testament material stops feeling random. It starts feeling like the heated conversations of a people trying to figure out how to remain themselves under empire.

Start with the temple. For modern Christians, the temple is often treated like a quaint religious site—important, sure, but mainly as theological symbolism that sets up Jesus. Historically, the temple is a national nerve center. It’s the symbolic heart of covenant identity. It’s the place where worship, economics, priestly authority, and political negotiation overlap. It’s not only a sacred place; it’s also an institution. It collects money. It regulates sacrifices. It employs people. It is tied to local elite networks. And because Rome controls the region, the temple is also a political hot zone. Whoever manages the temple has influence. Whoever controls access to the temple has leverage.

That’s why temple language in the New Testament is always more charged than church sermons usually admit. When Jesus disrupts money-changers or challenges temple practices, it’s not like calling out a minor church committee. It’s a public challenge to a powerful institution operating under foreign rule. It touches finances, leadership legitimacy, and public order. In a politically tense environment, even religious critique can be treated as agitation.

Now layer in purity and law. Modern evangelical teaching often turns “the law” into a simple foil: legalism bad, Jesus good, end of story. But in an occupied land, law is not only personal morality. It’s identity survival. Practices like Sabbath, dietary boundaries, and ritual purity function as cultural boundaries that preserve distinctiveness. They remind people who they are when the world is constantly trying to tell them who to become. In other words, “purity” isn’t only about being spiritually clean. It’s about being a people.

That doesn’t mean every purity debate is pure-hearted. Institutions can weaponize purity language. Leaders can use it to control people. Communities can use it to exclude and shame. Those dynamics are as old as religion itself. But if you don’t understand the identity function of law observance, you will misunderstand the intensity of first-century debates. When people argue about purity, they may also be arguing about assimilation. When they argue about table fellowship, they may also be arguing about who truly belongs. When they argue about Sabbath practices, they may also be arguing about how to resist a world that tries to absorb them.

This is part of why meals matter so much in the New Testament. Modern readers sometimes treat table fellowship as an incidental detail. Historically, who you eat with is identity. It’s boundary. It’s shared life. If you can share a table, you can share community. If you refuse table fellowship, you’re drawing a line. That’s why disputes about meals and shared food become massive in early Christian communities—especially once Gentiles start joining. It’s not petty. It’s a social earthquake. Eating together is a public declaration of belonging.

Now let’s talk factions—because this is where the “the Jews” stereotype collapses. First-century Judaism includes multiple groups with different priorities, different social bases, and different relationships to power. It’s a spectrum, not a single personality. You can’t reduce it to “religious leaders bad” without doing violence to the historical record.

The Sadducees are often associated with priestly elites and temple leadership. They are tied to institutional power. That doesn’t automatically make them villains, but it does shape their incentives. Groups tied to stability and temple control are more likely to emphasize order, continuity, and collaboration with ruling authorities if that protects their influence. When you control the temple, you are part of the system that the empire needs to keep stable. That makes your relationship to Rome complicated.

The Pharisees, often portrayed in church sermons as one-dimensional hypocrites, are more complex historically. They’re frequently associated with interpretations of law and traditions that shape everyday life. They become linked to popular religious practice rather than purely priestly power. That doesn’t make them automatically good or bad; it means their concerns are different. Many purity and law debates are not about narcissistic legalism in the abstract. They’re about how to preserve covenant faithfulness in daily life under pressure. Again: that can be sincere, it can be harsh, it can be controlling, and it can be mixed. But it’s not a children’s story.

The scribes are often connected to interpretation, teaching, and legal expertise. Think of them less like modern pastors and more like trained interpreters of texts and tradition in a world where texts are central to identity. In a culture shaped by Scripture, interpreters matter. That’s why Jesus’ clashes with teachers are not only moral confrontations; they’re authority confrontations. Who gets to say what God is doing? Who gets to define faithfulness? Who gets to interpret the story?

There are also groups like the Essenes or separatist communities (often associated by scholars with desert communities) who represent another strategy: separation. If the temple and the leadership are compromised, withdraw. Form a purer community. Wait for God’s intervention. That strategy becomes attractive in times when institutional religion feels corrupted by power. And if that sounds familiar, it should. One of the ironies of church history is how often modern Christians criticize ancient separatists while replicating the same impulses in new forms.

Then there are revolutionary or resistance impulses often associated with zealot-like movements. You don’t need to paint them as a single organized party to understand the reality: when people live under occupation, some will choose resistance. Some will advocate violence. Some will advocate nonviolent purity. Some will collaborate. Some will simply survive. And all of this exists in the same land at the same time.

This matters for Jesus, because it means he enters a world where “What should we do?” is not one question but many. Do we resist Rome? Do we cooperate? Do we withdraw? Do we focus on temple reform? Do we focus on personal holiness? Do we wait for apocalyptic intervention? Do we pursue political strategy? These are living questions. In a pressured world, people can’t avoid them.

That leads to apocalyptic expectation. “Apocalyptic” is often misunderstood as end-of-the-world obsession. Historically, it’s a way of interpreting history when the present feels unjust and unbearable. Apocalyptic thought says, in essence: the world is dominated by powers that are not ultimate, and God will act decisively to set things right. It often includes cosmic imagery, angels and demons, visions, and dramatic judgment scenes. That kind of thought becomes attractive when people are convinced the system cannot be fixed by normal reform. If the present order is too corrupt or too powerful, only God can break it.

Apocalyptic expectation is one reason demon language and exorcism stories make sense in the Gospels. Modern readers often trip over demons because we treat them as either primitive superstition or literal horror movie content. Historically, demon language can function as a way of describing the experience of oppression, illness, chaos, and spiritual threat in a world that feels ruled by hostile powers. Whether you interpret demons literally or psychologically or culturally, the point is that demon language fits a worldview where the present age is contested territory. It’s not simply an irrational add-on. It’s part of how people narrate suffering and domination.

This is also why the language of “binding the strong man,” “authority,” “unclean spirits,” and “deliverance” resonates. It’s not only about individual inner peace. It’s about the conviction that the world is under a kind of captivity and needs liberation. Again, you can debate theological truth claims, but you can’t ignore the historical function: these stories communicate that a new authority is arriving, that oppressive forces are being challenged, and that God’s rule is breaking in.

This brings us to the loaded concept of “kingdom of God.” Church culture often spiritualizes it into a private feeling or a future heaven. But in the first century, kingdom language is about rule. It’s about sovereignty. It’s about whose order will shape the world. People living under empire do not hear “kingdom” like a calm metaphor. They hear it as a threat to the present power structure—unless it is deliberately framed as purely internal and harmless. That’s why Jesus’ kingdom teaching creates both attraction and conflict. It offers hope to people crushed by the system, but it also frustrates people who want a straightforward political revolution. It is disruptive in multiple directions at once.

If you’ve ever wondered why crowds can be enthusiastic one moment and hostile another, this helps explain it. In an occupied land, hope is volatile. People want deliverance, but they don’t all agree on what deliverance should look like. A teacher who speaks about God’s kingdom can be interpreted as a revolutionary, a reformer, a prophet, a threat, or a disappointment—depending on what the listener desperately wants.

Now we need to talk about the term “Messiah,” because modern Christianity often treats it like a prepackaged doctrine. Historically, messianic expectations vary. Some imagine a restored Davidic king who will defeat enemies and restore Israel. Some imagine priestly purification and temple reform. Some imagine a prophetic figure. Some imagine apocalyptic agents of judgment. Some imagine multiple figures. And for many ordinary people, “messiah” might simply be a shorthand for “God finally does something.” That diversity matters because it explains the confusion and conflict around Jesus’ identity in the Gospels. It also explains why early Christians had to argue so hard about what kind of Messiah Jesus was, and why they framed his death and resurrection the way they did. They weren’t writing to people who all agreed on the definition.

Resurrection beliefs also sit in this Second Temple landscape. In some Jewish thought of the period, resurrection becomes a way of insisting that God’s justice extends beyond the present injustice. If empire can kill the righteous, then the story needs an answer that isn’t limited to the present age. Resurrection becomes a hope that God will vindicate the faithful and reverse the world’s wrongs. Judgment becomes a hope that oppressors do not win forever. These ideas don’t emerge in a vacuum; they intensify in environments where suffering and domination are persistent.

All of this helps explain why the New Testament is not mainly a calm spiritual handbook. It’s full of urgency. It’s full of conflict. It’s full of identity negotiation. It’s full of boundary questions. It’s full of hope and fear, courage and compromise, loyalty and betrayal. Those are the realities of communities living under pressure.

And now the former evangelical critique: when churches ignore this complex Second Temple world, they often replace it with a simplistic morality play. Pharisees become cartoon villains, the law becomes a straw man, and Jesus becomes the founder of a new religion called “Christianity” that replaces Judaism like a software update. That isn’t how history works, and it’s not even how the earliest Christian movement understood itself. Jesus is a Jewish figure speaking to Jewish audiences inside Jewish debates. The earliest followers argue about Scripture because Scripture is their shared foundation. The earliest conflicts are internal because the movement begins inside Judaism, not outside it. When later church institutions teach otherwise, they often do it for institutional convenience. It makes Christianity feel cleaner, more separate, and easier to market as a complete replacement rather than a contested development inside a complex world.

This flattening has consequences. It fuels anti-Jewish readings that have haunted Christian history. It also trains believers to think context is irrelevant, which makes them vulnerable to modern manipulation. If you can convince people that the Bible is a culture-free instruction manual, you can use it to enforce whatever your current institution prefers while pretending it’s simply “God’s obvious truth.” But once you understand the Second Temple world, you can’t easily do that. You’re forced to see that texts are arguments, that words are loaded, that communities are pressured, and that interpretation is always entangled with real life.

By: Jeric Yurkanin

The Jewish world of the first century is better understood as a living tradition under pressure. It’s not static. It’s not uniform. It’s wrestling. It’s responding to centuries of cultural influence, political domination, internal leadership conflict, and collective trauma. If you keep that in mind, a lot of New Testament material stops feeling random. It starts feeling like the heated conversations of a people trying to figure out how to remain themselves under empire.

Start with the temple. For modern Christians, the temple is often treated like a quaint religious site—important, sure, but mainly as theological symbolism that sets up Jesus. Historically, the temple is a national nerve center. It’s the symbolic heart of covenant identity. It’s the place where worship, economics, priestly authority, and political negotiation overlap. It’s not only a sacred place; it’s also an institution. It collects money. It regulates sacrifices. It employs people. It is tied to local elite networks. And because Rome controls the region, the temple is also a political hot zone. Whoever manages the temple has influence. Whoever controls access to the temple has leverage.

That’s why temple language in the New Testament is always more charged than church sermons usually admit. When Jesus disrupts money-changers or challenges temple practices, it’s not like calling out a minor church committee. It’s a public challenge to a powerful institution operating under foreign rule. It touches finances, leadership legitimacy, and public order. In a politically tense environment, even religious critique can be treated as agitation.

Now layer in purity and law. Modern evangelical teaching often turns “the law” into a simple foil: legalism bad, Jesus good, end of story. But in an occupied land, law is not only personal morality. It’s identity survival. Practices like Sabbath, dietary boundaries, and ritual purity function as cultural boundaries that preserve distinctiveness. They remind people who they are when the world is constantly trying to tell them who to become. In other words, “purity” isn’t only about being spiritually clean. It’s about being a people.

That doesn’t mean every purity debate is pure-hearted. Institutions can weaponize purity language. Leaders can use it to control people. Communities can use it to exclude and shame. Those dynamics are as old as religion itself. But if you don’t understand the identity function of law observance, you will misunderstand the intensity of first-century debates. When people argue about purity, they may also be arguing about assimilation. When they argue about table fellowship, they may also be arguing about who truly belongs. When they argue about Sabbath practices, they may also be arguing about how to resist a world that tries to absorb them.

This is part of why meals matter so much in the New Testament. Modern readers sometimes treat table fellowship as an incidental detail. Historically, who you eat with is identity. It’s boundary. It’s shared life. If you can share a table, you can share community. If you refuse table fellowship, you’re drawing a line. That’s why disputes about meals and shared food become massive in early Christian communities—especially once Gentiles start joining. It’s not petty. It’s a social earthquake. Eating together is a public declaration of belonging.

Now let’s talk factions—because this is where the “the Jews” stereotype collapses. First-century Judaism includes multiple groups with different priorities, different social bases, and different relationships to power. It’s a spectrum, not a single personality. You can’t reduce it to “religious leaders bad” without doing violence to the historical record.

The Sadducees are often associated with priestly elites and temple leadership. They are tied to institutional power. That doesn’t automatically make them villains, but it does shape their incentives. Groups tied to stability and temple control are more likely to emphasize order, continuity, and collaboration with ruling authorities if that protects their influence. When you control the temple, you are part of the system that the empire needs to keep stable. That makes your relationship to Rome complicated.

The Pharisees, often portrayed in church sermons as one-dimensional hypocrites, are more complex historically. They’re frequently associated with interpretations of law and traditions that shape everyday life. They become linked to popular religious practice rather than purely priestly power. That doesn’t make them automatically good or bad; it means their concerns are different. Many purity and law debates are not about narcissistic legalism in the abstract. They’re about how to preserve covenant faithfulness in daily life under pressure. Again: that can be sincere, it can be harsh, it can be controlling, and it can be mixed. But it’s not a children’s story.

The scribes are often connected to interpretation, teaching, and legal expertise. Think of them less like modern pastors and more like trained interpreters of texts and tradition in a world where texts are central to identity. In a culture shaped by Scripture, interpreters matter. That’s why Jesus’ clashes with teachers are not only moral confrontations; they’re authority confrontations. Who gets to say what God is doing? Who gets to define faithfulness? Who gets to interpret the story?

There are also groups like the Essenes or separatist communities (often associated by scholars with desert communities) who represent another strategy: separation. If the temple and the leadership are compromised, withdraw. Form a purer community. Wait for God’s intervention. That strategy becomes attractive in times when institutional religion feels corrupted by power. And if that sounds familiar, it should. One of the ironies of church history is how often modern Christians criticize ancient separatists while replicating the same impulses in new forms.

Then there are revolutionary or resistance impulses often associated with zealot-like movements. You don’t need to paint them as a single organized party to understand the reality: when people live under occupation, some will choose resistance. Some will advocate violence. Some will advocate nonviolent purity. Some will collaborate. Some will simply survive. And all of this exists in the same land at the same time.

This matters for Jesus, because it means he enters a world where “What should we do?” is not one question but many. Do we resist Rome? Do we cooperate? Do we withdraw? Do we focus on temple reform? Do we focus on personal holiness? Do we wait for apocalyptic intervention? Do we pursue political strategy? These are living questions. In a pressured world, people can’t avoid them.

That leads to apocalyptic expectation. “Apocalyptic” is often misunderstood as end-of-the-world obsession. Historically, it’s a way of interpreting history when the present feels unjust and unbearable. Apocalyptic thought says, in essence: the world is dominated by powers that are not ultimate, and God will act decisively to set things right. It often includes cosmic imagery, angels and demons, visions, and dramatic judgment scenes. That kind of thought becomes attractive when people are convinced the system cannot be fixed by normal reform. If the present order is too corrupt or too powerful, only God can break it.

Apocalyptic expectation is one reason demon language and exorcism stories make sense in the Gospels. Modern readers often trip over demons because we treat them as either primitive superstition or literal horror movie content. Historically, demon language can function as a way of describing the experience of oppression, illness, chaos, and spiritual threat in a world that feels ruled by hostile powers. Whether you interpret demons literally or psychologically or culturally, the point is that demon language fits a worldview where the present age is contested territory. It’s not simply an irrational add-on. It’s part of how people narrate suffering and domination.

This is also why the language of “binding the strong man,” “authority,” “unclean spirits,” and “deliverance” resonates. It’s not only about individual inner peace. It’s about the conviction that the world is under a kind of captivity and needs liberation. Again, you can debate theological truth claims, but you can’t ignore the historical function: these stories communicate that a new authority is arriving, that oppressive forces are being challenged, and that God’s rule is breaking in.

This brings us to the loaded concept of “kingdom of God.” Church culture often spiritualizes it into a private feeling or a future heaven. But in the first century, kingdom language is about rule. It’s about sovereignty. It’s about whose order will shape the world. People living under empire do not hear “kingdom” like a calm metaphor. They hear it as a threat to the present power structure—unless it is deliberately framed as purely internal and harmless. That’s why Jesus’ kingdom teaching creates both attraction and conflict. It offers hope to people crushed by the system, but it also frustrates people who want a straightforward political revolution. It is disruptive in multiple directions at once.

If you’ve ever wondered why crowds can be enthusiastic one moment and hostile another, this helps explain it. In an occupied land, hope is volatile. People want deliverance, but they don’t all agree on what deliverance should look like. A teacher who speaks about God’s kingdom can be interpreted as a revolutionary, a reformer, a prophet, a threat, or a disappointment—depending on what the listener desperately wants.

Now we need to talk about the term “Messiah,” because modern Christianity often treats it like a prepackaged doctrine. Historically, messianic expectations vary. Some imagine a restored Davidic king who will defeat enemies and restore Israel. Some imagine priestly purification and temple reform. Some imagine a prophetic figure. Some imagine apocalyptic agents of judgment. Some imagine multiple figures. And for many ordinary people, “messiah” might simply be a shorthand for “God finally does something.” That diversity matters because it explains the confusion and conflict around Jesus’ identity in the Gospels. It also explains why early Christians had to argue so hard about what kind of Messiah Jesus was, and why they framed his death and resurrection the way they did. They weren’t writing to people who all agreed on the definition.

Resurrection beliefs also sit in this Second Temple landscape. In some Jewish thought of the period, resurrection becomes a way of insisting that God’s justice extends beyond the present injustice. If empire can kill the righteous, then the story needs an answer that isn’t limited to the present age. Resurrection becomes a hope that God will vindicate the faithful and reverse the world’s wrongs. Judgment becomes a hope that oppressors do not win forever. These ideas don’t emerge in a vacuum; they intensify in environments where suffering and domination are persistent.

All of this helps explain why the New Testament is not mainly a calm spiritual handbook. It’s full of urgency. It’s full of conflict. It’s full of identity negotiation. It’s full of boundary questions. It’s full of hope and fear, courage and compromise, loyalty and betrayal. Those are the realities of communities living under pressure.

And now the former evangelical critique: when churches ignore this complex Second Temple world, they often replace it with a simplistic morality play. Pharisees become cartoon villains, the law becomes a straw man, and Jesus becomes the founder of a new religion called “Christianity” that replaces Judaism like a software update. That isn’t how history works, and it’s not even how the earliest Christian movement understood itself. Jesus is a Jewish figure speaking to Jewish audiences inside Jewish debates. The earliest followers argue about Scripture because Scripture is their shared foundation. The earliest conflicts are internal because the movement begins inside Judaism, not outside it. When later church institutions teach otherwise, they often do it for institutional convenience. It makes Christianity feel cleaner, more separate, and easier to market as a complete replacement rather than a contested development inside a complex world.

This flattening has consequences. It fuels anti-Jewish readings that have haunted Christian history. It also trains believers to think context is irrelevant, which makes them vulnerable to modern manipulation. If you can convince people that the Bible is a culture-free instruction manual, you can use it to enforce whatever your current institution prefers while pretending it’s simply “God’s obvious truth.” But once you understand the Second Temple world, you can’t easily do that. You’re forced to see that texts are arguments, that words are loaded, that communities are pressured, and that interpretation is always entangled with real life.

By: Jeric Yurkanin

THE HELLENISTIC ERA: The Missing Backdrop Behind the New Testament (An Agnostic Historian, Former Evangelical Critic)

If you grew up in church, you were probably trained—without anyone explicitly saying it—to read the Bible like it lives in a sealed container. The Old Testament ends, the New Testament begins, and the world feels basically unchanged except that now Jesus is here, now Rome is here, and now “the Gospel” is here. That habit creates a convenient illusion: it makes the New Testament look like it dropped into the world fully formed, as if the culture, language, and political pressures surrounding it were background noise rather than the environment that shaped it.

History doesn’t work that way. Empires don’t come and go quietly. Languages don’t spread without consequences. Cultures don’t mix without reshaping the people inside them. And religious communities—especially minority communities living under powerful empires—don’t stay the same just because they want to. They adapt, they fracture, they argue, they harden, they compromise, they resist, and they reinterpret their own traditions in order to survive.

That’s what the Hellenistic era is: the long, messy, deeply formative period that rearranged the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East after Alexander the Great. And if you want the New Testament to make historical sense—why it’s written in Greek, why “kingdom” language feels explosive, why identity debates are so intense, why synagogue life matters, why concepts like “gospel” and “Lord” can sound both spiritual and political—you have to walk through the Hellenistic world that built the stage.

This isn’t a devotional. It’s not a verse duel. It’s not a “gotcha.” It’s context. The kind of context that makes religious slogans feel less magical and more human. And if you’re a former evangelical like me—someone who heard the Bible preached as timeless, culture-free certainty—this context can feel like oxygen. Because once you see the world behind the text, you stop confusing modern church habits for ancient reality.

The term “Hellenistic” comes from Hellas, the Greek word for Greece, but the Hellenistic era isn’t simply “Greek history.” It’s the Greek-shaped age that begins when Alexander’s conquests explode Greek culture outward and continues as his successors fight over and govern the territories he took. Traditionally, historians date the Hellenistic era from 323 BCE, when Alexander died, until roughly 31–30 BCE, when Rome’s rise ends the last independent Hellenistic kingdom in Egypt. But the more important truth is not the exact endpoint. It’s the cultural fact: Greek language and culture became the dominant public framework across huge parts of the region for centuries, and that framework remained powerful even after Rome became the political boss.

That last line matters, because the New Testament era is often described as “the Roman world,” and politically that’s correct. But culturally and linguistically, much of the Eastern Mediterranean was still operating on a Greek channel. Rome ruled the system. Greek shaped the streets. Judaism carried deep roots beneath both. Early Christianity was born at the intersection of those three forces.

To understand why this matters, you have to understand what Alexander actually did. Alexander didn’t just conquer land. He accelerated a cultural transformation by founding and refounding cities, encouraging Greek settlement, spreading Greek education and administration, and making Greek language useful for anyone who wanted access to the new order. You didn’t have to stop being who you were to participate in the Greek-shaped world, but you did have to learn its language, its public habits, and its social expectations if you wanted influence, security, or status.

After Alexander died, his empire didn’t become one neat kingdom under a single crown. It fractured. His generals and successors—often called the Diadochi—carved the territory into competing realms. In the broad strokes relevant to Bible context, you mainly need to recognize two major powers that mattered for Judea and Jewish life: the Ptolemies (centered in Egypt) and the Seleucids (centered in Syria and Mesopotamia). Judea didn’t get to choose which empire hovered over it. It became contested ground, passed between larger powers, taxed, managed, and pressured by rulers who saw the land as strategic property. That’s what small regions become under empires: not sovereign homelands, but pieces on a board.

And in that environment, “Hellenization” becomes more than a vocabulary word. It becomes a daily negotiation. Hellenization isn’t simply Greek people moving in. It’s Greek being treated as the normal way to do public life. Greek language. Greek education. Greek civic identity. Greek architecture. Greek entertainment. Greek ideas of status, virtue, and belonging. Over time, this created an atmosphere where Greekness could feel like advancement and modernity, and non-Greekness could be framed as backwardness. Even if you remained fully committed to your ancestral traditions, you still had to live beside a dominant culture that subtly trained people to admire Greek ways.

If that dynamic sounds familiar, it should. You don’t have to copy-and-paste modern experiences into the ancient world, but you can recognize the pattern: when a powerful culture spreads, it doesn’t only spread soldiers. It spreads assumptions. It spreads what counts as “educated.” It spreads what counts as “respectable.” It spreads what counts as “normal.” And minority communities feel that pressure even if nobody is holding a sword to their neck. The sword is sometimes social and economic. The cost of resistance can be humiliation, exclusion, or the closing of doors.

For Jewish communities, this pressure raised real identity questions. Not abstract theology questions. Life questions. Are we still ourselves if our children are trained in Greek schools? Are we still faithful if our public leaders adopt Greek names? Are we still “Israel” if we operate in Greek language and Greek cities? Are we compromising if we participate in the dominant culture’s institutions? Or are we being practical and surviving? Those debates didn’t happen once. They happened for generations, and they created fault lines that carry into the world of the Gospels.

One of the most overlooked consequences of Hellenism is linguistic. Koine Greek—the common, everyday form of Greek that developed and spread widely—became a shared language across much of the Eastern Mediterranean. This doesn’t mean Hebrew vanished. It doesn’t mean Aramaic wasn’t spoken. It means Greek became a bridge language: the language of trade, administration, and cross-cultural communication. In city life especially, Greek became a tool for mobility. If you wanted to do business across regions, if you wanted access to education, if you wanted to function in imperial systems, Greek helped you do that.

That single fact explains something that church sermons often treat like a spiritual mystery: why the New Testament is written in Greek. It’s not because God loves Greek more than other languages. It’s not because early Christians wanted to sound philosophical. It’s because Greek was the language that traveled. If a movement wanted to speak across cities, across regions, across mixed audiences, Greek was the obvious medium. When you strip away religious romance, the history becomes almost obvious: messages spread in the language people share.

This is also why so many core Christian terms are Greek terms—because the earliest Christian texts we have are Greek texts. And those terms didn’t float above culture. They carried cultural weight. This is where my former evangelical critique becomes unavoidable: modern Christianity often treats key Bible words as if they are timeless containers with fixed meanings, as if the words were born in a vacuum and dropped into our language ready-made. That approach makes interpretation lazy, and laziness makes manipulation easier. Words have histories. Words pick up associations. Words land differently in different contexts. In a Greek-and-Roman world, “good news” isn’t only a personal spiritual feeling. It’s also a public announcement category. “Lord” isn’t only a worship word. It’s also a loyalty and authority word. “Savior” isn’t only a private religious label. It can be political honor language too.

You don’t need to deny anyone’s faith claims to acknowledge this. You only need intellectual honesty. The New Testament is written into a world where language is never purely religious. It’s civic. It’s social. It’s political. It’s public. That’s what makes the earliest Christian proclamation both compelling and dangerous. It doesn’t exist in a private bubble.

Another consequence of Hellenism is that Jewish Scripture and Jewish life become increasingly diaspora-shaped. The diaspora wasn’t new—Jewish communities had existed outside Judea for centuries—but the Hellenistic era accelerated the reality that many Jews lived and thrived far from Jerusalem. They built communities in Greek cities. They engaged in Greek public life to varying degrees. They needed ways to preserve identity without living next door to the temple. That created religious developments that matter enormously for the New Testament.

One of those developments is the growth and importance of the synagogue as a local community center. If you’re far from the temple, you still need spaces for teaching, prayer, and identity formation. Synagogues functioned as places where communal life could gather around Scripture and tradition. That matters because when you read later accounts of early Christian activity, you’re not watching missionaries invent public religious conversation from scratch. You’re watching them step into existing Jewish communal spaces where Scripture was read, debated, and applied to life in diaspora settings.

Another development is Scripture in Greek. Many Jewish communities operated in Greek-speaking environments, and over time Jewish Scriptures were translated into Greek. This translation tradition is commonly called the Septuagint. The details of how and when each book was translated are complex, and the popular legend version—often presented like a neat miracle story—is far cleaner than real history. But for our purposes, the main point is simple and huge: many Jews heard and read their Scriptures in Greek. That means the “Bible” in the New Testament world was not always heard in Hebrew. The language of Scripture could be Greek for many communities. And if Scripture is in Greek, interpretation is shaped by Greek vocabulary choices, Greek conceptual categories, and the realities of translation itself.

This is where a former evangelical critic can’t help but sigh. Because a lot of modern church fights are built on the assumption that “the Bible clearly says” something in English, as if English phrasing is identical to ancient meaning. But the ancient world didn’t run on English. The Jewish world didn’t run on one single language. And translation is never a neutral copy-paste. It’s interpretation. It’s choosing one word instead of another. It’s carrying a concept across cultural boundaries. When you accept that, you don’t become anti-Bible. You become historically literate. And historically literate people are harder to control with slogans.

The Hellenistic era also shaped Jewish thought in ways that go beyond language. When communities live under pressure, they don’t merely repeat old traditions. They apply them to new conditions. They reinterpret. They develop new emphases. They produce new literature. They debate what faithfulness means when faithfulness has a cost. That’s part of why the period between the Old and New Testaments is not some empty silence. It’s a furnace. And furnaces change metals.

Some Jews responded to Hellenistic influence with adaptation. They learned Greek. They participated in commerce. They lived in cities. They navigated the dominant culture without seeing it as betrayal. Others responded with resistance, emphasizing boundary markers like Sabbath observance, dietary practices, and circumcision as identity anchors. And many communities lived somewhere in between, blending pragmatic participation with strong internal identity.

This variety matters because it produces internal conflict. Again, not theoretical. Real conflict. In any community under pressure, some people will call others compromisers, and others will call the resisters unrealistic or dangerous. When you later see sharp debates in the New Testament era about purity, law, tradition, authority, and identity, you are seeing the downstream effects of centuries of earlier pressure. You’re not seeing a brand-new argument invented on the spot. You’re seeing a long-standing tension erupt in specific ways.

The most dramatic example of Hellenistic pressure becoming explosive comes under the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes in the second century BCE. The details can fill books, but the core reality is teachable: political power, internal Jewish leadership conflict, and cultural pressure collided into a crisis that struck the heart of Jewish worship in Jerusalem. Traditional practices were attacked, and the temple—central to Jewish religious identity—was desecrated in a way that wasn’t merely offensive but symbolic. It was power saying, “Your center is not yours.”

That crisis triggered what is often called the Maccabean revolt, associated with the priestly family of Mattathias and his sons, including Judas Maccabeus. The revolt wasn’t simply a spiritual protest. It was armed resistance. And it succeeded in ways that mattered. The temple was eventually rededicated, and the memory of that rededication becomes tied to the festival of Hanukkah. You don’t have to share a religious interpretation of these events to recognize their psychological and cultural impact. When a community’s sacred center is attacked and then reclaimed through struggle, it hardens identity. It increases suspicion toward cultural assimilation. It deepens the expectation that God’s story includes liberation. It trains people to hope for deliverance in concrete terms.

This is the part many modern Bible readers miss. They read the Gospels and assume the first-century Jewish world is simply waiting for a spiritual teacher. But the land was soaked in historical memory. The people carried trauma from desecration and domination. They carried stories of resistance and temporary victory. That kind of memory makes certain words burn.

When people in a colonized or occupied world talk about “kingdom,” they are not talking about a church sermon series theme. They are talking about power. They are talking about who rules. They are talking about whose law wins. They are talking about whether their children will live under foreign boots forever. Even if you believe Jesus redefined the meaning of kingdom, the historical fact remains: the word “kingdom” landed in a world where kingdoms were the problem. It was never a neutral religious word.

After the revolt, the Hasmonean dynasty emerges, and Judea experiences a period of Jewish rule that is often remembered as a kind of regained independence. But this era wasn’t a clean golden age. It involved power struggles, expansion, internal conflict, and a complicated relationship between religious authority and political ambition. It’s here that we can begin to see the seeds of later divisions. When religious leadership becomes entangled with state power, factions form. Some people defend the system. Some people oppose it. Some people separate. Some people try to reform. When later Jewish groups appear in the New Testament world—groups with different views of law, temple, politics, and purity—they didn’t fall out of the sky. They are the children of earlier centuries.

It’s also worth naming something that church culture often avoids because it complicates the clean narrative: the Hellenistic era wasn’t only about oppression. It was also about intellectual and cultural exchange. Greek philosophy, ethics, rhetoric, and ways of reasoning were part of the environment. Jewish thinkers didn’t live in a sealed jar. Some engaged Greek thought openly. Others resisted it fiercely. Some translated Jewish ideas into Greek categories to communicate with broader audiences. This isn’t “corruption” or “purity” in some cartoon sense. It’s what human communities do when they live among other human communities. They borrow. They adapt. They translate. They argue about whether borrowing is betrayal. That argument alone explains a lot about later religious conflict.

And this leads us to a key teachable point: the New Testament sits at the end of a long process of cultural layering. The first-century world is not simply Jewish and not simply Roman. It’s Jewish identity formed under Greek cultural dominance and then ruled under Roman political power. Rome does not erase Greek influence. Rome often absorbs and uses it. The result is a world where Greek remains a major language of public life, where Roman authority polices the political order, and where Jewish communities are wrestling with identity, purity, compromise, resistance, and hope.

If you want to understand why early Christianity spread the way it did, you need to hold that layered world in your head. Greek language made ideas portable across cities. Roman infrastructure connected regions. Jewish diaspora networks provided established communal spaces and shared Scriptures. Christianity didn’t expand in a vacuum. It moved through existing channels like water through riverbeds already carved.

I’ll end Part 1 with a blunt observation from my former evangelical side: a lot of church teaching quietly discourages this kind of historical reading because history ruins the illusion of effortless certainty. When you see the Hellenistic era, you can’t pretend the New Testament dropped into the world as a culture-free instruction manual. You’re forced to admit that the Bible is a collection of texts produced by communities living under empire, negotiating identity, translating sacred tradition across languages, and making meaning under pressure. That doesn’t automatically disprove religious claims. But it absolutely challenges the institutional habit of using the Bible as a simple weapon: quote a line, shut down discussion, enforce conformity.

History makes you ask better questions. Better questions are harder to control. And that’s why the Hellenistic era isn’t trivia. It’s one of the keys to reading the New Testament like an adult.

—————-

WHEN THE CHURCH BECOMES THE CULTURE

How Fear Shaped Jim Crow Christianity

By: Jeric Yurkanin

If you want to understand a major thread of American Christianity in the 20th century, you can’t only ask what people believed. You have to ask what they were afraid of—and what they were trying to protect.

Because fear doesn’t merely influence religious communities.

Fear can author their priorities, fund their institutions, shape their “moral emergencies,” and decide who counts as “righteous,” who counts as “dangerous,” and which injustices are treated as sacred order.

Jim Crow Christianity is one of the clearest case studies of that process.

This isn’t a post about whether “faith is good” or “faith is bad.” It’s a post about how a religious institution can absorb the culture around it—especially when that culture offers status, belonging, political influence, and financial stability—and then preach that culture back as divine.

And yes: we’re naming names. History has names.

1) The Pastor Who Preached Segregation as Divine Design

In May 1954, the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, beginning the legal end of public-school segregation. Days later, a Dallas pastor named Carey Daniel delivered a sermon in defense of segregation—then published it as a pamphlet titled “God the Original Segregationist.”  

That title alone tells you the move being made:

Not “I prefer segregation.”

Not “I’m worried about social change.”

But: segregation is authored by God—therefore questioning it is rebellion against the highest authority possible.

The pamphlet didn’t remain a local curiosity. Accounts of its reach describe it being distributed through the Citizens’ Councils—networks of segregationist organizing that presented themselves as “respectable” resistance to integration.  

It was popular enough that the Dallas Morning News ran an abridged version in 1955.  

And over roughly a decade, the pamphlet is commonly reported as selling over a million copies—not as underground contraband, but as culturally reinforced moral messaging.  

That matters because it reveals something uncomfortable:

This wasn’t just “a few extremists.”

This was a social ecosystem where segregationist theology could be printed, distributed, promoted, and received as normal.

2) What Jim Crow Christianity Was Really Made Of

When people ask, “How could religious communities defend segregation?” they often want a simple answer:

• “They were ignorant.”

• “They were hateful.”

• “They were uniquely evil.”

Sometimes, sure. But history is usually uglier and more human than that.

Jim Crow Christianity wasn’t powered by brilliant reasoning. It was powered by fear—and fear is efficient. Fear organizes communities. Fear raises money. Fear creates loyalty. Fear gives people a common enemy and a shared mission.

In the Jim Crow South, fear had a very specific target: integration.

But beneath that target were deeper fears that show up in almost every era where religion fuses with power.

Fear of losing status:

When a society is built on a hierarchy, equality doesn’t feel like “fairness.” It feels like loss.

Many white Christians feared what would happen if Black Americans gained:

• real voting power

• equal educational access

• economic mobility

• equal treatment under law

• social power that couldn’t be controlled

So segregation functioned like a status-protection system, and religious language helped make that system feel moral rather than self-interested.

Fear of social change:

Change can feel like chaos when you’re accustomed to the world being arranged for you.

So integration was framed as:

• disorder

• collapse

• cultural decay

• “outsiders” threatening “our way of life”

Fear turns “I don’t want this” into “I must stop this.”

Fear inside the institution

Institutions don’t only run on beliefs. They run on incentives.

Leaders often knew what their audiences expected. They knew what donors would reward. They knew which messages kept people in seats and kept offerings steady.

And they knew what could happen if they challenged the system:

• losing members

• losing income

• losing influence

• losing the building

• losing “community respect”

Even when individuals privately wrestled, the institution rewarded the voice that protected the institution. The safest path wasn’t truth. The safest path was stability.

Fear of government consequences:

Once integration moved from “social pressure” to “legal reality,” segregationist religious institutions faced a different kind of threat: policy, enforcement, and financial consequence.

That’s when you begin to see how quickly “conviction” can evolve when a protected status is at risk.

3) Bob Jones Sr.: Turning Segregation into a Loyalty Test

If Carey Daniel shows the pamphlet-and-pulpit side of segregationist theology, Bob Jones Sr. shows the broadcast-and-institution side.

On April 17, 1960 (Easter Sunday), Bob Jones Sr. delivered a radio address titled “Is Segregation Scriptural?” broadcast from Greenville, South Carolina. Multiple historical accounts describe it as an early-morning broadcast intended for listeners preparing for Sunday services.  

A printed version of the address circulated as well; one PDF copy preserves the text in pamphlet form.  

The reason this address matters isn’t only that it defended segregation. It’s how it defended it: by transforming a social arrangement into a spiritual loyalty test.

A widely cited line from the address captures that dynamic:

“If you are against segregation and against racial separation, then you are against God Almighty.”  

That sentence is the blueprint of institutional control:

• It doesn’t argue with you.

• It labels you.

• It doesn’t persuade; it disciplines.

• It doesn’t invite conversation; it demands compliance.

If you dissent, you’re not just “wrong.”

You’re disloyal. Dangerous. A threat.

This is how religious systems can enforce social hierarchy: turn policy into morality, then morality into identity, then identity into salvation-or-damnation language.

And once it’s framed that way, the cost of disagreement skyrockets. People don’t just fear being unpopular—they fear being spiritually condemned, socially isolated, and cast out of their community.

4) Jerry Falwell Sr.: Segregation, Institutions, and the “School Exit” Strategy

Jerry Falwell Sr. is a complicated figure historically—because later decades rewrote his public image into a broader political brand. But earlier records include explicit opposition to desegregation.

Falwell delivered a sermon in 1958 titled “Segregation or Integration: Which?” and it is referenced in multiple historical and academic sources (including reprints and later citations).  

But the most historically significant part of the Falwell thread isn’t only what was said from a pulpit—it’s what was built.

In 1967, Falwell founded Lynchburg Christian Academy (later Liberty Christian Academy). Major reference works note that when it was founded, a local newspaper reported it as “whites only,” a claim Falwell later refuted.  

Whether people want to frame these schools as “religious alternatives” or “segregation academies,” one thing is historically undeniable:

A wave of private schools—many tied to churches—expanded across the South as public schools desegregated, providing a structured way for white families to avoid integrated classrooms.  

This is where Jim Crow Christianity becomes more than rhetoric. It becomes infrastructure.

Because infrastructure outlives sermons.

A sermon is a moment.

A school is a pipeline: enrollment, tuition, donors, alumni, identity, and political influence.

When religious institutions build parallel systems—schools, colleges, media networks—they aren’t just “teaching beliefs.” They’re shaping a whole environment where those beliefs feel normal, safe, and unquestionable.

5) Citizens’ Councils, “Respectability,” and the Business of Moral Panic

To understand why materials like Carey Daniel’s pamphlet could spread so widely, you have to understand the machinery of segregationist organizing.

The White Citizens’ Councils (often described as “respectable” segregationists compared to more openly violent groups) helped coordinate resistance strategies and messaging—social pressure, economic pressure, and political pressure—while presenting themselves as defenders of order and tradition.  

Pamphlets, sermons, and radio broadcasts weren’t merely spiritual artifacts. They were media in a broader resistance movement.

And media works best when it offers people:

• a villain

• a crisis

• a simple story

• a reason to feel righteous

• a plan of action

• a “community of the faithful”

• and a way to punish dissenters

In Jim Crow Christianity, the villain was integration and those who supported it. The crisis was “our way of life is under attack.” The plan was resistance—social, political, institutional.

The result was a moral panic that could be monetized and organized.

6) The Financial Trigger: Tax-Exempt Status and Institutional Panic

Now we get to the part that makes people uncomfortable, because it forces a simple question:

When did “convictions” start changing—and why?

The IRS concluded in 1970 that it could no longer justify tax-exempt status for private schools that practiced racial discrimination, and in 1971 issued Revenue Ruling 71-447, stating that a private school without a racially nondiscriminatory policy for students does not qualify as “charitable” for these purposes.  

This policy shift set up the legal conflict that became one of the most important religion-and-public-policy cases of the era: Bob Jones University v. United States.

The Supreme Court’s decision (1983) upheld the IRS’s authority to deny tax-exempt status to racially discriminatory private schools, emphasizing the public policy interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education.  

And the timeline matters:

• The IRS warned Bob Jones University about policy changes and intent to revoke in the early 1970s.  

• The IRS revoked Bob Jones University’s tax-exempt status effective January 19, 1976 (as described in legal summaries and policy discussions).  

• The issue escalated through litigation, culminating in the Supreme Court decision in 1983.  

Here’s why this is so revealing:

For years, segregation was preached as sacred order. But as soon as legal and financial consequence became real—especially around schools—religious leaders began reframing their political story, seeking new rallying points, and organizing more aggressively.

That doesn’t mean every person’s heart was cynical. History is never that clean.

But institutionally, you can see the pattern:

Beliefs harden when they protect status; beliefs soften when they threaten survival.

7) “They’ll Tell You It Was Something Else”: Debates About the Origins of the Modern Religious Right

There’s an ongoing historical debate about what “activated” the modern conservative religious political movement in the late 1970s.

A widely cited argument by historian Randall Balmer is that early mobilization energy was driven less by abortion (at first) and more by resistance to desegregation and government pressure on segregated religious schools—especially issues around tax exemptions.  

This perspective shows up in multiple mainstream discussions, including documentaries and political-history summaries that point to private Christian schools and tax policy as key catalysts for organizing.  

However, that narrative is contested. Some evangelical historians argue Balmer’s account is overstated or simplified, pointing to multiple factors—school prayer, broader cultural change, political strategy, and denominational dynamics—and they explicitly dispute the claim that tax-exempt status disputes were the trigger.  

Why include both?

Because if you’re doing honest history, you don’t treat one storyline as a sacred myth. You compare claims, weigh evidence, and acknowledge complexity.

But even with debate, two things remain sturdy:

1. Segregation and desegregation shaped religious institutions profoundly, especially through schools and cultural backlash.  

2. Tax policy and government enforcement around discriminatory education became a major flashpoint that forced institutions to choose between maintaining discriminatory policies and maintaining protected financial status.  

So even if someone disputes the “origin story” headline, the structural relationship between segregation, institutions, and political mobilization is not optional—it’s documented.

8) How Jim Crow Christianity Manufactured Certainty

If you’ve deconstructed, this part will probably feel familiar.

The system didn’t merely defend segregation with arguments. It defended segregation with certainty—and certainty is a powerful social weapon.

Here are the mechanisms, stripped of religious vocabulary, as an institutional behavior pattern:

(1) Sacred framing

Treat a social arrangement as non-negotiable. Present it as “the natural order.” Then disagreement becomes not just disagreement—it becomes moral revolt.

(2) Moral inversion

Those demanding equality are framed as “agitators.” Those enforcing hierarchy are framed as “peacekeepers.”

The oppressed become the problem for wanting too much.

The powerful become victims for being asked to change.

(3) Community pressure disguised as “principle”

Leaders often mirror the fears of the crowd while claiming “conviction.”

In a tight community, you don’t even need explicit threats. The incentives are already built in.

(4) Institutional self-preservation

Organizations protect:

• donor pipelines

• reputation

• growth

• accreditation

• political access

• tax status

• social influence

Once you see religion as institution, you begin to notice something:

Institutions don’t primarily protect truth. They protect continuity.

(5) Enemy production

A system bound together by fear needs an enemy to stay cohesive. Without an enemy, the group fractures. With an enemy, the group unites.

So the system produces enemies:

• “outsiders”

• “agitators”

• “government overreach”

• “moral decay”

• “replacement”

• “corruption”

• “invasion”

The vocabulary changes by era. The mechanism remains.

9) Why Schools Were the Perfect Battlefield

If you’re trying to preserve hierarchy, schools are a strategic target because schools create:

• friendships

• dating pools

• future networks

• economic opportunity

• worldview normalization

• identity formation

Schools are not neutral. They are culture factories.

When desegregation threatened the old social order, many religious communities didn’t only complain. They built alternatives.

And those alternatives did three things at once:

1. preserved social separation

2. generated revenue

3. produced the next generation’s identity

That’s why the battle wasn’t only about ideology—it was about pipelines.

And pipelines are where power reproduces itself.

10) The Myth of “It Was Just the Past”

It’s tempting to treat Jim Crow Christianity as a museum exhibit:

“Look how wrong they were back then.”

But the deeper lesson isn’t “people were racist.” Everyone already knows that.

The deeper lesson is: fear can create doctrine.

And once fear becomes doctrine, a community can do almost anything while feeling morally justified.

So the real question isn’t only historical. It’s personal and present:

• Where do we let fear decide what’s “truth”?

• Where do we confuse institutional preservation with moral principle?

• Where do we punish dissent to keep the group stable?

• Where do we treat social hierarchy as sacred order?

Because fear doesn’t disappear. It changes topics.

11) A Deconstruction Lens: What This Reveals About “Truth”

If you’re coming out of religious certainty, Jim Crow Christianity forces a painful realization:

People can sincerely believe they’re defending truth… while actually defending power.

And the system can reward them for it.

This is why the line “Don’t look at people—look at the divine” often rings hollow after deconstruction.

Because “the divine” is always mediated through:

• institutions

• translations

• publishing networks

• seminaries

• donor incentives

• cultural assumptions

• political alliances

• social pressure

• and authority structures

That doesn’t mean spirituality is impossible. It means institutional religion is never as pure as it claims.

If a system says, “Ignore the humans,” it’s often because the humans are doing something they don’t want you to notice.

12) What Carey Daniel, Bob Jones Sr., and Falwell Reveal as a Pattern

These figures were not identical. Their contexts differed. Their methods varied.

But the pattern is consistent:

1. A social hierarchy is threatened.

2. Fear rises—status, identity, belonging, control.

3. Religious authority declares the hierarchy sacred.

4. Dissent is framed as moral rebellion.

5. Institutions build infrastructure to preserve separation.

6. When consequences arrive (legal/financial), messaging adapts.

7. Political organizing intensifies under the banner of “religious freedom,” often reframing what began as segregation defense into broader culture-war narratives.  

Again: you don’t have to claim everyone is cynical. You only have to observe what systems do when threatened.

13) How Power Hides in “Values” Language

One of the most effective moves in American religious politics is language laundering.

Instead of saying:

• “We want separation.”

You say:

• “We want values.”

Instead of saying:

• “We want control.”

You say:

• “We want order.”

Instead of saying:

• “We want the hierarchy.”

You say:

• “We want tradition.”

Instead of saying:

• “We don’t want equality.”

You say:

• “We want freedom.”

Words like “freedom,” “order,” “values,” and “tradition” can be sincere.

But historically, they have also functioned as camouflage—a way to make social power sound like moral purity.

And once the language is laundered, the community can support the same outcomes while believing they’re supporting something noble.

14) How to Spot Fear-Based Theology Without Quoting a Single Verse

You don’t need sacred texts to recognize fear-based religion. You can spot it by behavior and incentives.

Here are the tells:

(A) It needs a constant emergency

If every year there’s a new “final battle,” you’re not in a spiritual community—you’re in a perpetual mobilization machine.

(B) It treats outsiders as threats by default

If difference is always danger, you’re watching identity panic disguised as morality.

(C) It rewards loyalty over honesty

If the worst sin is questioning leaders, you’re not watching devotion—you’re watching control.

(D) It punishes nuance

Nuance threatens certainty. Certainty is the glue. So nuance is labeled compromise, weakness, betrayal.

(E) It follows money

Watch when beliefs change:

• Do they change after careful moral reflection?

• Or after public pressure, lawsuits, loss of donors, accreditation threats, or tax policy?

The Bob Jones tax-exemption battle is a textbook example of institutional collision with public policy—and how a system frames that collision as persecution rather than accountability.  

15) Why This History Still Matters

Because the same mechanism repeats.

Different topic. Same structure.

Fear produces enemies. Enemies produce unity. Unity produces money and political leverage. And political leverage produces protection for the institution.

Jim Crow Christianity is not only about racism in the past. It’s about how a religious brand can become a political instrument in any era.

And it’s about how a community can confuse “being under attack” with “being right.”

Sometimes the institution really is being criticized unfairly.

Sometimes it really is being held accountable.

But fear-based systems don’t carefully differentiate. They flatten everything into persecution—because persecution is the best fundraising letter ever written.

16) Closing: When the Church Becomes the Culture

Jim Crow Christianity wasn’t a glitch. It was a predictable outcome of a religious machine that fused itself to:

• social hierarchy

• identity panic

• political power

• institutional preservation

When that happens, the institution stops asking, “What’s right?”

It starts asking:

• What keeps us stable?

• What keeps us funded?

• What keeps us influential?

• What keeps our people loyal?

• What keeps our enemies clear?

And then it builds sermons, schools, and political campaigns around those questions.

If you’re deconstructing, this history can feel like grief.

Because you realize something heavy:

Sometimes what was sold as “truth”…

was a cultural system wearing religious clothing.

When “The Holy Spirit” Became a Soundtrack

(A former Christian, now atheist perspective)

By: Jeric Yurkanin

When I was an evangelical Christian, I genuinely believed the Holy Spirit was real—and that I could feel Him. I didn’t think I was faking it. I wasn’t trying to be dramatic. I wasn’t there for a show.

But after years inside it, something shifted.

Around 2017, I started realizing what I was calling “the Holy Spirit” during worship wasn’t actually different from what people experience at any emotional concert—rock, rap, country, whatever. For the next five years, even while I was still a Christian, I knew deep down: this isn’t a supernatural presence… it’s a human response.

Modern church culture had tied “the Holy Spirit” to worship music—and emotional experience became the “evidence” that God was present.

Not always intentionally. Not every worship leader is a manipulator. Not every church is doing it on purpose.

But the system trains you—week after week—to interpret predictable psychological and social effects as supernatural.

And once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.

1) Churches Train You to Label Emotion as “God”

Think about how often you hear lines like:

“Do you feel that? That’s the Holy Spirit.” “God is moving right now.” “If you’re crying, God is healing you.” “If you feel peace, that’s His presence.”

Over time you’re conditioned to connect certain sensations to one conclusion:

Feeling something = God is here.

So your brain learns a shortcut:

Calm = “God’s peace” Tears = “God’s presence” Goosebumps = “God’s anointing” A lump in your throat = “conviction” Euphoria = “breakthrough”

It becomes automatic—because that’s how humans work. We learn patterns.

2) Worship Music Regulates Your Nervous System (and That Feels Spiritual)

From my atheist perspective now, a lot of what I used to call “the Spirit” was my body shifting states.

Worship music is designed to do things like:

slow your breathing soften your defenses create a sense of safety lower anxiety make you feel open and connected

That’s nervous system regulation.

Slow tempo. Warm chords. Long pads. Gentle repetition. Dim lights. Hands raised. Eyes closed.

That’s not “proof God arrived.”

That’s a room full of humans being guided into a calm, receptive state—through music.

And it works. Music is powerful.

3) Repetition Creates a Trance-Like Focus

A lot of worship music repeats the same lines for minutes:

“You are good… you are good…”

“Holy Spirit come…”

“I surrender…”

Repetition narrows your attention. It quiets the inner chatter. It becomes meditative—almost trance-like.

In other settings we’d call that:

meditation mantra hypnosis-lite guided emotional experience

In church we called it:

“The presence of God.”

Same human mechanism. Different label.

4) The “Build” Is Emotional Engineering

Worship sets often follow a predictable arc:

slow intro emotional build drums enter key change / lift big chorus swell sudden drop back down quiet moment prayer talk repeat

That build-and-release pattern is literally what movie soundtracks do to pull emotion out of you.

It triggers dopamine. It creates catharsis. It makes you feel like something “broke” inside you.

And then the pastor steps up at the emotional peak and says:

“God is moving.”

So the emotional high becomes a spiritual conclusion.

5) Group Psychology Amplifies Everything

A room full of people singing the same words, swaying together, crying together—creates real human power.

That’s community bonding and social synchronization.

In psychology, group experiences like that can produce a shared emotional surge. People feel:

unity belonging meaning “something bigger than me”

It’s not fake. It’s just human.

But churches often translate that into:

“That’s God.”

6) Authority Cues Tell You What Your Feelings Mean

Here’s the part I didn’t notice until later:

Your feelings don’t interpret themselves. Leaders interpret them for you.

If a worship leader says:

“Someone’s being healed.” “I sense chains breaking.” “God is saying…” “If you feel heat… that’s the Spirit.”

You start scanning your body for something to match the moment.

Maybe you feel warmth. Or tingling. Or emotion.

Now your brain goes: That must be God.

From the outside, it looks like a suggestion loop:

create emotional environment name the emotion as supernatural people experience emotion emotion becomes proof system reinforces itself

7) “Conviction” Often Looked Like Guilt + Relief

There were nights I called it “conviction.”

Now, I see it as something more normal:

guilt grief longing regret relief the desire to reset your life

Music pulls memories out of you. Lyrics frame the memories as sin. The altar call offers a solution.

You cry. You feel release. You feel clean.

Then you think:

“God just touched me.”

From my atheist perspective now:

That’s emotional processing—real, powerful, human—packaged as spiritual certainty.

8) Why This Matters

Because once “Holy Spirit” becomes the feeling, churches can use feelings to sell certainty.

It becomes:

“If you felt it, it must be true.” “If you didn’t feel it, something’s wrong with you.” “If you doubt, you’re resisting God.”

And that creates a loop of dependence:

You come back to re-feel the high.

You call the high “God.”

You interpret the high as proof.

You stay.

Again—this doesn’t mean everyone is lying.

But it does mean the system can keep running even without anything supernatural happening.

Music can do the job.

Closing: What I Believe Now

As a former Christian and now atheist, I don’t deny that worship nights can feel intense, healing, and real.

I just don’t see them as evidence of divine presence anymore.

I see them as:

music psychology group bonding nervous system regulation meaning-making suggestion and expectation emotional release

And once I understood those mechanics, I stopped being afraid of my own feelings.

Because feelings are powerful.

But feelings aren’t proof.

And in my experience, a lot of what I was taught to call “the Holy Spirit” was simply being human in a carefully designed environment—with a religious label placed on top of it.

God Can’t Look at Sin”… So How Does the Old Testament Even Exist?

(A former Christian’s take — now an atheist)

One of the most common lines I heard in evangelical Christianity—usually said with a serious voice, usually meant to create fear—was this:

“God hates sin and cannot look at sin.”

I heard it so many times that it became automatic.

God is “holy.” Sin is “gross.” God turns away. God can’t be around you. God can’t even look.

And as a Christian, that idea kept me anxious, constantly evaluating myself, constantly worried that I was one wrong move away from God distancing Himself.

But now, as someone who spent years inside that world and then finally stepped out… I have to say it plainly:

That statement doesn’t hold up—logically or biblically.

And in hindsight, it functioned more like a control tool than a truth.

The moment I used common sense, it started falling apart.

Because if God “cannot look at sin”… then how does the Old Testament even exist?

1) The Bible Is Full of Sin… and God Is Still “There”

If the claim is literally true, you’d expect the Bible to show God constantly distancing Himself every time humans mess up.

But the Old Testament is packed with:

incest rape and sexual violence deception slavery regulations war murder polygamy power abuse

And yet the stories continue—with God allegedly speaking, guiding, commanding, judging, rewarding, selecting leaders, building nations.

So what’s the honest conclusion?

Either God can “look at sin,” and the slogan is exaggeration,

or the slogan is simply not a serious claim—it’s a fear line meant to keep people in check.

From where I stand now, it looks like the second one.

2) “Sin” Changes Depending on the Era — That Should Be a Red Flag

Evangelicalism treats “sin” like it’s stable, clear, and unchanging.

But in the Bible, what gets tolerated or normalized shifts depending on culture and time.

Example: polygamy.

In modern Christianity, polygamy is treated as obviously sinful.

But in the Old Testament it’s everywhere—even among “heroes” of the faith.

Men with multiple wives are still presented as:

chosen blessed central to God’s story

So… is polygamy sin or not?

Christians usually answer with something like:

“God allowed it back then.”

Okay, but then be honest about what that means:

The moral standard isn’t being applied consistently.

The religion adapts. The rules shift. The interpretation evolves.

From my perspective now, that looks less like divine truth and more like human morality evolving while theology tries to keep up.

3) The “God Can’t Look at Sin” Line Collapses Under the OT’s Own Portrayal of God

Here’s the part that gets uncomfortable fast.

Evangelicals will say God is so pure He can’t even look at sin.

But the Old Testament also portrays God doing things that—if a human ruler did them—we’d call immoral:

flooding the world (mass death) killing the firstborn in Egypt commanding violent conquest collective punishments

Christians usually respond:

“When God does it, it’s not sin. He’s God.”

And from the outside looking in, that’s not a compelling explanation—that’s special pleading:

“It’s wrong when humans do it, but holy when God does it.”

That kind of reasoning isn’t how we treat truth in any other area of life.

It’s how we treat a belief system we’re emotionally invested in—one we’ve been taught not to question.

4) What That Phrase Actually Did to Me (and to a lot of people)

Looking back, “God can’t look at sin” didn’t produce love, humility, or healing.

It produced:

fear shame self-surveillance dependence on religious authority pressure to perform

Because if you believe God turns His face from you when you fail, you become easier to manage.

You will:

over-confess over-serve over-give over-submit and under-question

And if you do question, you’ll be told you’re “rebellious,” “deceived,” or “under attack.”

That’s not spiritual growth. That’s behavior control.

5) “Don’t Look at Man — Look at Jesus” Becomes a Shield

Another phrase I heard constantly was:

“Don’t look at man—look at Jesus.”

But here’s what “former Christian me” eventually couldn’t ignore:

Man wrote the Bible.

Man printed it.

Man translated it.

Man interprets it.

Man runs the churches.

Man controls the money.

Man decides who’s “in” and who’s “out.”

So “don’t look at man” often means:

Ignore the human fingerprints all over the whole system.

Don’t follow the money.

Don’t connect the patterns.

Don’t look too closely at leadership behavior.

Don’t notice how often institutions protect themselves.

Because if you do… the machine starts falling apart.

6) Where I Landed

This is why, as a former Christian and now an atheist, I can’t treat slogans like “God can’t look at sin” as profound truth.

They function like tools:

tools to keep people afraid tools to keep people dependent tools to discourage logic tools to discourage accountability

And the hardest part to admit is this:

I was sincere. I tried. I studied. I defended it.

But the deeper I went, the more I saw contradictions that were being held together by fear and “don’t question it” language.

So now I choose honesty over performance.

Not because I’m angry.

Not because I “wanted to sin.”

Not because I’m bitter.

Because the logic didn’t hold.

And when the fruit doesn’t match the label… eventually you stop blaming yourself and start questioning the system.

An agnostic, former long time evangelical reading of why churches fixate on “abomination” while greed and lying get a free pass

I’m writing this as someone who lived inside the system for a long time.

I was an evangelical Christian for years. I read the Bible often. I went to church. I listened to sermons, took notes, sat through altar calls, watched the same “hot-button sins” get recycled like a playlist. I’m agnostic now, but I’m not writing this to mock faith or dunk on Christians. I’m writing because once you see the pattern, it’s hard to unsee.

A lot of churches in America fixate on “abomination” language—usually aimed at a narrow set of issues—while some of the most destructive, everyday sins in the Bible itself get treated like background noise. Greed. Lying. Exploitation. Image management. The stuff that breaks families, rots leadership, and hollows out communities from the inside gets a free pass… while the “sins we can spot” get the spotlight.

That isn’t an accident. It’s a system.

“Abomination” becomes a weapon, not a mirror

In many evangelical spaces, “abomination” isn’t used like a spiritual warning meant to lead people toward repentance. It’s used like a gavel. A conversation-stopper. A label you can slap on a group of people to signal, “We’re the clean ones.”

But if we’re actually going to let the Bible define what deserves moral alarm, we have to be honest: Scripture doesn’t reserve its harshest language for the handful of sins church culture loves to platform.

The Bible uses “abomination” language for things that are painfully common in “respectable” religion:

Lying: “Lying lips are an abomination…” (Proverbs 12:22) Cheating / dishonest gain: “Dishonest scales are an abomination…” (Proverbs 11:1)

Those aren’t fringe issues. They’re core character issues. The kind that show up in leadership, business, politics, church boards, and “good Christian families” all the time.

So why don’t they get preached with the same intensity?

The selective Bible problem isn’t about theology—it’s about incentives

One of the first cracks for me wasn’t a single verse—it was watching how churches decide what counts as “serious.” You’d hear “the Bible is our final authority,” but that authority was applied like a spotlight, not a floodlight.

Take food laws as an easy example. The Old Testament has clear dietary boundaries (Leviticus 11; Deuteronomy 14). Pork is “unclean.” Most Christians I grew up around didn’t lose sleep over bacon. They’d just say, “That was the Old Covenant,” or “That was ceremonial,” or “Jesus fulfilled that.”

Maybe. Fine. But that immediately raises the real question:

What’s the method?

How do we decide what still applies—and why do the parts we drop tend to be the parts that would inconvenience us socially or financially?

Because you can’t honestly claim “we follow the Bible” while treating Scripture like a buffet—unless you admit that something other than the Bible is actually running the selection process.

And in practice, what often runs it is this: what’s enforceable, what’s profitable, and what protects the institution.

Greed and lying get a pass because they’re useful

Here’s what I’ve watched, up close, for years:

1) Greed funds the machine

The New Testament doesn’t whisper about money. Jesus talks about wealth constantly. The prophets rage against exploitation. The epistles call greed idolatry. And yet greed is one of the most tolerated sins in modern church culture—because confronting it risks the budget.

When big givers and influential families are living in obvious materialism, predatory business practices, or status worship, many churches will soften the language. They’ll preach “generosity” (safe) without naming “greed” (costly). They’ll celebrate “blessing” without interrogating “how we got here.”

But if a pastor preached against the love of money the way some preach against sexuality, it would hit close:

It would challenge donors. It would challenge leaders. It would challenge the whole “God wants you to prosper” vibe. It would challenge capitalism-as-discipleship.

And it might cost people—and churches—something real.

2) Lying protects reputations

Church culture is often built on image. Lying—especially the clean, religious kind—protects the brand.

Not just “telling lies,” but:

spin selective storytelling performance spirituality hiding abuse “for the sake of the ministry” covering for leaders to avoid scandal pretending everything is fine because “we’re blessed”

In churches obsessed with optics, truth is dangerous. So dishonesty becomes normalized—then baptized as “wisdom,” “discernment,” or “protecting unity.”

3) These sins wear suits

Greed and lying are respectable. They don’t always look like rebellion. They look like:

success leadership “being shrewd” “providing for your family” networking “God opening doors”

In other words, they can hide in plain sight. And because they’re common among insiders, calling them out would require real accountability, not just moral outrage.

Meanwhile, “abomination” is aimed at the sins that don’t threaten the church

The loudest “abomination” preaching tends to target sins that are:

easy to identify from the outside culturally stigmatized already connected to outsiders more than insiders not financially tied to church stability

That’s why church culture often obsesses over things like sex and identity issues while staying oddly quiet about:

exploitation divorce-for-convenience among insiders racism (systemic or personal) financial corruption spiritual abuse manipulative leadership lying from the pulpit in the form of false certainty

Because if you name those things, you’re not just targeting “them.” You’re confronting “us.”

Even the Bible’s own “sin lists” don’t let greed off the hook

This is the part that makes the selective outrage feel intellectually dishonest.

In the New Testament lists people love to quote, greed shows up plainly:

Greed is idolatry (Colossians 3:5) The “love of money” is treated as spiritually destructive (1 Timothy 6:10) “The greedy” appear right alongside other sins in lists that get used for moral policing (1 Corinthians 6:9–10)

So if churches were consistent with the texts they claim to treat as authoritative, greed would be treated like a spiritual emergency. Lying would be treated like moral rot. Exploitation would be treated as violence.

But too often, those sins get reduced to “nobody’s perfect.”

What I learned: outrage is often a substitute for integrity

A church can feel “holy” without ever becoming honest.

It can build an identity around what it condemns while ignoring what it excuses. It can preach purity while allowing exploitation. It can “stand for truth” while practicing deception. It can claim moral authority while refusing accountability.

That’s why the “abomination” label becomes so tempting: it provides certainty, superiority, and a target. It gives people something to fight that doesn’t require them to look in the mirror.

Because greed and lying require a mirror.

A simple consistency test

If you’re a Christian reading this, here’s the test I wish more churches would apply:

If God hates “abomination,” why is dishonesty so normal in leadership culture? If holiness matters, why is greed treated like a lifestyle choice instead of idolatry? If the Bible is the standard, why are churches loud about what doesn’t cost them and quiet about what does? If “fruit” matters, why is the fruit so often fear, pride, scapegoating, and hypocrisy instead of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and self-control?

You don’t need to be agnostic to see the problem. You just need to be honest.

Closing: the sins that pay rent

From where I stand now, one of the biggest threats to the credibility of American Christianity isn’t “the world” or “secularism.” It’s the way churches often protect the sins that keep the lights on.

Greed and lying don’t get a pass because Scripture is unclear.

They get a pass because confronting them would threaten the institution, expose the leadership culture, and demand repentance from insiders—not outsiders.

And that’s why “abomination” preaching so often feels less like moral conviction and more like social control.

Because the sins that destroy communities from the inside…

are often the same sins that pay rent.

And the “Holy God Can’t Look at Sin” Claim That Doesn’t Survive the Text

What You Won’t Learn in Church:

Written by: Jeric Yurkanin

I’m writing this as a former long-time Christian who read the Bible constantly for about 15 years—so this isn’t me trying to mock people for believing. It’s me naming something I couldn’t unsee once I stopped treating the Bible like a protected object.

Churches love to say the Bible is the ultimate moral standard. They preach that God is perfectly holy, that He “hates sin,” and that sin is so repulsive to Him that He “can’t even look at it.”

But when you actually read the Torah—and the larger Christian Bible—you run into a major problem:

The same God described as too holy to “look at sin” repeatedly commands actions that would be labeled sinful or evil if humans did them… and the narratives often portray God Himself doing things that, by normal moral reasoning, look like the very behavior churches condemn.

This isn’t about a couple “hard verses.”

It’s a structural contradiction.

WHAT THE LAW ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE

Large portions of the Old Testament present a theocratic legal system—religion and government fused together—where execution is prescribed for a wide range of behavior.

Examples include death penalties for:

• Witchcraft / sorcery (Exodus 22:18)

• Adultery (Leviticus 20:10)

• Blasphemy (Leviticus 24:14–16)

• Mediums / spiritists (Leviticus 20:27)

• Working on the Sabbath (Exodus 31:15)

• Cursing father or mother (Leviticus 20:9)

• Certain sexual violations (Leviticus 20:13 and surrounding laws)

You can debate ancient legal categories and context, but you can’t honestly claim this is a simple “pro-life,” nonviolent moral guide. The text repeatedly frames death as the solution to “sin,” impurity, and disobedience.

THE SELECTIVE AUTHORITY PROBLEM

What I watched for years was selective application:

• If a verse supports the church’s existing values, it’s timeless truth.

• If a verse becomes morally embarrassing, it becomes “that was a different time.”

So “biblical authority” becomes less about consistent ethics and more about permission—permission to enforce certain rules (usually around sex, identity, and control) while discarding rules that would expose hypocrisy.

“GOD CAN’T LOOK AT SIN”… BUT HE’S ALWAYS AROUND IT

Many Christians repeat some version of “God is too holy to look at sin.” They’ll cite ideas like God being “of purer eyes than to see evil” (Habakkuk 1:13) or that God “hates” wickedness (Psalm 5:4–5).

But the Bible itself constantly shows God:

• speaking to sinful people,

• living in the middle of sinful communities,

• working through sinful leaders,

• and even directly ordering actions that would be condemned as immoral if anyone else did them.

So the claim doesn’t function as a real principle. It functions like a slogan—often used to justify shame, separation, and fear.

If God “can’t look at sin,” He sure spends a lot of time staring directly at it, interacting with it, and managing it.

THE BIGGER CONTRADICTION: GOD “HATES SIN”… YET COMMANDS IT (OR WHAT WOULD BE CALLED SIN)

Here’s where it gets sharper.

In normal moral language, churches call these things “sin” when humans do them:

1) Killing (including mass killing)

Yet the Old Testament contains conquest and warfare commands with total-destruction language (Deuteronomy 20:16–17; 1 Samuel 15:3). Whatever label you put on it—judgment, holy war, “different era”—it still depicts God commanding actions that would be monstrous if any human leader ordered them.

2) Deception / lying

Many Christians treat lying as sin. But the Bible includes scenes where deception is part of the strategy—like the “lying spirit” narrative (1 Kings 22:19–23). You can spin it as “God allowed it,” but the moral logic is uncomfortable: deception is used as a tool.

3) Hardening hearts / overriding human choice

If humans manipulate or “harden” someone into destruction, we call it abuse or coercion. Yet Exodus repeatedly says God hardens Pharaoh’s heart (Exodus 4:21; 9:12). That raises the obvious ethical question: why punish someone for what you caused them to do?

4) Collective punishment

Church morality usually says it’s wrong to punish children for parents’ wrongdoing. Yet the Bible contains suffering that sweeps through entire populations—including children (Exodus 12). Even if someone argues “Egypt deserved it,” babies and children don’t become morally guilty because a ruler is stubborn.

5) Jealousy, wrath, violence—traits we condemn in humans

The Bible openly calls God “jealous” (Exodus 20:5). Humans being jealous, demanding exclusive loyalty, and threatening consequences is considered controlling and toxic. But when God does it, it gets renamed “holiness.”

That renaming is the key move.

WHY BELIEVERS CAN ALWAYS ESCAPE THE PROBLEM (AND WHY IT STILL MATTERS)

Christians usually respond with one of these:

1. “God can’t sin.”

Because sin is defined as “disobeying God,” and God can’t disobey Himself.

That definition makes God automatically innocent by definition—no matter what He does.

2. “Whatever God commands is good.”

Which means morality becomes “might makes right.”

Goodness isn’t a standard—power is.

3. “It was a different time / different covenant.”

That avoids modern application, but it doesn’t answer the moral question:

Was it good then? If yes, then it’s good somewhere in God’s nature. If no, the Bible contains moral error.

From an atheist perspective, these aren’t satisfying answers. They sound like special pleading—changing the rules so the conclusion (“God is good”) is always protected, no matter the evidence.

A MORE HONEST CONCLUSION

If someone wants to read the Bible as ancient literature shaped by ancient cultures, that’s defensible.

But if someone wants to treat it as a timeless moral authority—and especially if they want to use it to police other people’s bodies, identities, or lives—then they need to deal honestly with what’s in it:

• execution as religious policy

• conquest and collective punishment

• divine “jealousy” and coercion

• a holiness narrative that often looks like control

• and moral logic that shifts depending on who is doing the violence

From where I’m standing now, this doesn’t look like perfect moral revelation. It looks like what you’d expect from human authors in the ancient world: power and survival framed as sacred, violence justified as virtue, and obedience presented as the highest good.

And that’s why the slogan “God hates sin and can’t look at sin” doesn’t clarify anything for me anymore.

It doesn’t explain the text.

It excuses it.

It’s another made up sales pitch and statement 

Is isn’t true 

And that’s why the slogan “God hates sin and can’t look at sin” doesn’t clarify anything for me anymore.

It doesn’t explain the text.

It excuses it.

Because the Bible doesn’t portray a God who “can’t look at sin.” It portrays a God who is constantly around it—speaking to sinners, working through sinners, negotiating with sinners, and—at times—commanding actions that churches would call “sin” if a human did them.

So what’s really happening is this:

“God can’t look at sin” isn’t a biblical principle. It’s a church slogan. A tool. A psychological lever.

It’s used to create a fear-based system where people feel dirty, disqualified, and perpetually in danger—so they stay dependent on the institution for the “solution.”

If you can convince someone that:

God is too holy to be near them, their natural humanity is “sinful,” and they’re one wrong move away from judgment,

then you can control them with guilt and keep them buying the product: more confession, more surrender, more rules, more church, more compliance.

That’s why it gets repeated so confidently—even though it isn’t consistently true in the text.

It functions like a sales pitch:

“You’re the problem. You’re contaminated. You need what we’re selling.”

And once I saw that pattern, I couldn’t unsee it.

BY REV. JERIC YURKANIN

By someone who’s been in the room, heard the hype, and finally started asking the questions

I’ve been there.

I’ve sat under the teaching.

I’ve watched the performances.

And I’ve known pastors — personally — who claimed they healed someone overseas through prayer.

I knew they were lying.

Think about it for a moment.

If people were actually being healed — blind eyes opened, cancer erased, terminal illnesses reversed —

why aren’t those pastors running to the nearest American hospital and going room to room?

Why aren’t they walking into pediatric cancer units, hospice wings, or nursing homes, praying for those diagnosed with death?

You’d think people who claim to be God’s healing vessels would go where the suffering is undeniable and documented.

But they don’t.

Because they know what would happen next:

Hospitals require evidence. Records. Proof. Follow-up.

And they don’t have any.

Because they aren’t healing anyone.

Yet in ministry, telling stories is acceptable — even if they aren’t true. It’s to attract a crown, grow their church or a church and bring in the money.

Meanwhile, according to many of these same preachers, God is outraged over:

Being gay Watching porn Having sex before marriage

But lying from the pulpit?

Fabricating miracles in God’s name?

That’s fine, apparently.

Let’s not forget — according to their own Bible,

lying is called an abomination, and “all liars shall have their part in the lake of fire.”

I don’t believe in any hell anymore.

I now use the Bible as literature, metaphor, and context.

But by their own standards —

these miracle-peddlers are the ones violating their gospel.

Because at the end of the day, it’s all about who controls the story, who owns the platform, and who acts as the gatekeeper of “truth.” Jesus said freely you receive freely you give.

And for many, ministry isn’t about miracles.

It’s a business.

You’ve heard the stories a hundred times…

“I was preaching in Uganda, and a man who was blind from birth suddenly could see!”

“At a revival in rural Texas, a woman jumped out of her wheelchair and started dancing!”

The crowd gasps.

Hands go up.

Worship swells.

And right as emotions peak… the offering bucket goes around.

But something doesn’t sit right.

Because if you’ve been in church culture long enough, you start to notice:

The biggest miracles — the blind seeing, the dead raised, the legs regrown —

always happen somewhere else.

Usually in another country.

Sometimes in another state.

But never right here.

Never where you can verify it.

Never in front of the people actually suffering, sitting in the room.

And definitely not with medical records, clear video, or follow-up a year later.

1. Because Distance Protects the Claim

If a miracle happened 3,000 miles away — in a remote village with no names, no documentation, and no way to follow up —

you can’t verify it.

You can’t interview the person. You can’t check medical scans. You can’t confirm the story ever happened.

It’s the perfect setting for spiritual storytelling.

No accountability.

No paper trail.

No risk.

Just an emotional high dressed up in holy language.

And in many churches, that’s exactly the point.

2. Because Power Is Measured by Performance

In many charismatic and evangelical circles, leaders are taught — directly or indirectly — that:

Miracles prove spiritual authority Spectacle confirms divine favor Doubt is disobedience Questions are rebellion Asking for evidence “quenches the Spirit”

So instead of praying for the chronically ill woman sitting in the third row every Sunday,

they tell dramatic stories from crusades, conferences, or revivals “far away.”

Why?

Because silence — when the miracle doesn’t come — is terrifying.

And silence doesn’t sell books.

Silence isn’t good business and doesn’t bring in more money.

So the stories get recycled.

Exaggerated.

Migrated.

From across oceans to the microphone,

from pulpits to podcasts and from fiction to “faith.”

3. Because the Feeling Matters More Than the Truth

In emotionally hyped worship services:

People are desperate for hope They’ve been taught to suppress doubt They want so badly to believe

And pastors — knowingly or not — exploit that vulnerability.

They repeat secondhand stories.

They spiritualize lack of proof.

They declare what they cannot verify.

Because the story doesn’t need to be true —

It just needs to be felt.

And in the moment, surrounded by raised hands, fog machines, and music,

it’s easier to cry than to question.

4. Meanwhile, Back in the Real World…

While miracle stories are told from distant stages, here’s what’s happening in real life:

Chronically ill believers are told to “believe harder” Parents of sick children are guilted into giving more People with disabilities are blamed for “lacking faith” When nothing happens, the failure is never on the system — it’s on the sufferer

That’s not faith.

That’s manipulation.

Wrapped in scripture.

Backed by power.

Felt as shame.

And it’s everywhere.

5. So Where Are the Real Miracles?

If they exist, they don’t need:

A spotlight A stadium A sermon A passport Or a staged testimony.

Real healing happens:

In trauma survivors finding their voice In people walking away from religious shame In recovering addicts rebuilding their lives In exhausted souls choosing love over fear In those finally saying: “No more guilt. I’m choosing truth.”

That’s sacred.

That’s human.

That’s enough.

Final Word:

If supernatural power is real,

it should show up where people are actually hurting and in hospitals or just where the audience is already gullible— not just in stories no one can check.

If healing is real,

it shouldn’t require hype, fog, and applause.

And if God exists,

they aren’t impressed by emotional manipulation and miracle marketing.

They’re found in truth.

In integrity.

In compassion.

Not in lies that grow a brand.

Me personally I don’t believe these miracle are real.

By: Rev: Jeric Yurkanin

— Justice, Power, and the Heart of God

The Illusion of Equal Justice

We love to believe the phrase,

“No one is above the law.”

But the evidence around us often tells a different story.

A mother stealing food to feed her kids may serve time. A CEO stealing millions through fraud? Just pays a fine. Thousands are imprisoned for low-level drug charges. Politicians accused of ethical violations stay in power.

If justice is blind… why does she keep peeking for the wealthy and powerful?

As followers of Jesus, we can’t ignore injustice — especially when it hides behind legal systems, political tribes, or religious language.

“Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees.” — Isaiah 10:1

Psychology of Power & Tribalism

Why do people still support politicians who have been criminally charged or morally compromised?

Psychological studies show:

People are wired to protect their “tribe” — even when their leaders are flawed. Confirmation bias keeps us from believing negative news about “our side.” Moral licensing lets people excuse their leader’s behavior because of their “greater purpose” (e.g. fighting the other side, fixing the economy, protecting certain values).

This is why:

Some supporters excuse 34 felony charges as a “witch hunt.” Others defended Hillary Clinton over email scandals. Still others overlook past presidential or congressional corruption because “the other side is worse.”

It’s not about truth for most people. It’s about team loyalty — no matter the cost.

📖 “You nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition.” — Matthew 15:6

Historical Pattern of Immunity

In Watergate, it took overwhelming public pressure to hold a president accountable. During Iran-Contra, people in power were shielded. War crimes, segregation laws, and Native American genocide were often legally sanctioned — by people who used religion and patriotism to justify injustice.

Even today, how many high-level politicians truly serve prison time for their crimes?

Almost none.

Because it’s not about laws — it’s about who writes the laws, who enforces them, and who benefits from the system.

🏛️ A History of Two Systems

From ancient Rome to modern America, justice has rarely been fair.

Segregation was legal. Genocide of Native Americans was justified. Corporate theft is barely punished. Yet we criminalize poverty, addiction, and survival.

God’s heart has always broken for the oppressed, the marginalized, the voiceless.

📖 “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves… defend the rights of the poor and needy.” — Proverbs 31:8-9

Jesus flipped tables — not just in temples, but in systems.

He said the last will be first.

He welcomed tax collectors, sex workers, lepers — the outcasts of law-based religion.

So when we see a system that punishes the poor but protects the elite — we are called to say something.

So… What Are These Laws For?

Let’s be real:

Some laws exist just to maintain control — not justice.

“Rules are for those without power. The powerful just rewrite the rules.”

But the Gospel shows us a different kind of Kingdom:

Where mercy triumphs over judgment (James 2:13) Where the law of love is greater than the laws of men (Romans 13:10) Where no one is too small to matter — and no one is too big to escape truth

What Can We Do?

You’re not wrong for noticing injustice.

You’re not “divisive” for calling it out.

You’re being Christ-like.

Here’s how we respond as Jesus-shaped people:

Refuse blind party loyalty. If a politician is corrupt — red, blue, or independent — call it out. Speak truth, not spin. Don’t twist facts to protect your “team.” Educate others. Help people break free from tribal brainwashing. Model integrity. Be the change. Stand for truth even when it’s hard. Support the unseen. The poor. The marginalized. The forgotten. These are the people God sees.

📖 “Let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” — Amos 5:24

🙏 Closing Prayer

God of justice,

Open our eyes to what power tries to hide.

Give us the courage to speak up when systems are broken.

Help us not to be seduced by comfort, silence, or tribal loyalty.

Let us be builders of your Kingdom — where the oppressed are lifted,

the poor are protected, and the powerful are humbled.

Amen.

Have I ever excused injustice because it benefited “my side”? What systems in my life or community seem to protect the powerful but punish the weak?

How can I be a voice for truth and love in a divided world? Am I more loyal to my political identity or my Christ-centered identity?

Where might God be calling me to “flip tables” — like Jesus did?

By: Rev. Jeric Yurkanin

I am going to say this in a very clear and direct way, because the indirect way is not working anymore.

The American church spends years preaching about grown men over 18 watching porn.

But it almost never preaches about the real epidemic happening inside its own buildings:

child molestation grooming rape decades of cover-ups

This is not “rare.”

This is not “shocking.”

This is not “unthinkable.”

And here is the part people avoid because it feels uncomfortable:

👉 Churches buy sexual-abuse insurance now.

Insurance companies only care about data.

They are not emotional.

They are not spiritual.

They are not “anti-Christian.”

They look at numbers.

And the numbers say:

Child sexual abuse in churches is EXPECTED.

If a church buys sexual-abuse insurance, it means:

They know abuse happens. They know it happens often enough to plan for it. They know one lawsuit could bankrupt them. They prepared financially before preparing spiritually.

This is reality.

We need to stop pretending.

Meanwhile, churches focus on the wrong topic.

Every week the sermons attack:

porn modesty purity rings “lust” LGBTQ+ people anything except the thing actually destroying lives

There is a huge disconnect between what churches talk about and what is hurting people.

This is not a theory.

This is research.

Dr. Anna Salter, a leading expert on sexual predators, has been warning us for years:

👉 “Predators don’t just go where the children are.

They go where the adults are trusting,

the rules are weak,

and the accountability is low.”

That is exactly what the American church looks like:

adults assume everyone is “safe” low training zero oversight leaders treated like they can’t be questioned forgiveness used as a weapon silence expected reputation protected more than children victims told “don’t cause problems” or “just forgive”

So when predators walk right through the doors,

why is anyone surprised?

This is not a “bad apple” problem.

This is:

a system problem a culture problem a leadership problem a Gospel problem

Because Jesus never protected institutions.

Jesus never silenced victims.

Jesus never defended religious leaders who harmed people.

But many churches today do the opposite:

They will spend thousands of dollars on sexual-abuse insurance

before:

teaching adults about grooming warning parents about signs reporting offenders to police immediately protecting kids without hesitation

Insurance is not “wisdom.”

It is confession.

Confession that:

the church knows it happens the church knows it has been happening and the church expects it to continue happening unless the system changes

If the American church wants credibility again,

it needs to stop policing consenting adults

and start confronting the harm happening to children.

Protect children.

Tell the truth.

Stop hiding behind insurance and silence.

This is what Jesus would do.

He defended the vulnerable every time.

— Rev. Jeric Yurkanin

Agape Freedom Church

Leaving religion. Finding Jesus. Protecting the vulnerable.

By: Rev. Jeric Yurkanin

The American church has spent decades preaching about grown men over 18 watching porn…
while almost never preaching about the real epidemic happening under its own roof:

child molestation
grooming
rape
and decades of cover-ups.

And here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud:

👉 Churches now buy sexual-abuse insurance.

Let that sink in.

Insurance companies — who only care about data and risk — now treat child sexual abuse in churches as something statistically expected.
Not rare.
Not unthinkable.
Expected.

If a church needs sexual-abuse insurance, it means:
• they know abuse happens,
• they know it happens often,
• they know it could bankrupt them,
• and they’re preparing financially before they’re preparing spiritually.

Meanwhile, sermons still scream about:
• porn
• modesty
• “lust”
• purity rings
• LGBTQ+ people
• and everything except the thing that is actually destroying children inside church walls.

The wrong pandemic has been preached for years.

Real experts like Dr. Anna Salter, one of the world’s leading authorities on sexual predators, have been warning us:

👉 “Predators don’t just go where the children are.
They go where the adults are trusting,
the rules are weak,
and the accountability is low.”

That describes the American church perfectly:

• high trust
• low oversight
• instant access to kids
• unquestioned authority
• theology that demands silence and forgiveness
• leaders who fear scandal more than truth
• parents who assume “church = safe”
• victims who are blamed, shamed, or told to “forgive and move on”

And then we’re surprised when predators walk right through the front door?

No.
This is a system problem.
A culture problem.
A leadership problem.
A Gospel problem.

Jesus never protected institutions.
Jesus never silenced victims.
Jesus never let religious leaders get away with hypocrisy.

But churches today?

They’ll spend thousands on sexual-abuse insurance
before they preach one sermon on grooming,
before they teach adults the warning signs,
before they report a predator to the police,
before they protect a child.

Insurance is not “wisdom.”
It is confession.

Confession that the church knows
this is happening,
has been happening,
and will continue to happen
unless something changes.

If the American church wants credibility again,
it needs to stop policing consenting adults
and start confronting the evil happening to children.

Protect the vulnerable.
Expose the darkness.
Quit worshipping reputation.
Quit hiding behind insurance policies.

Do what Jesus actually did —
defend the ones who can’t defend themselves.

— Rev. Jeric Yurkanin
Agape Freedom Church
“Leaving religion. Finding Jesus. Protecting the vulnerable.”

AUTISTIC VERSION — AGAPE FREEDOM CHURCH

By Rev. Jeric Yurkanin

It’s Thanksgiving —

and for many autistic people, this day feels both meaningful and overwhelming.

The noise.

The smells.

The conversations happening all at once.

The pressure to “be social.”

The sudden changes in routine.

The sensory overload that nobody else seems to notice.

And yet… there is still something beautiful about this day

when we slow down enough to see it the way our brains naturally do:

literally, honestly, deeply, intensely.

We don’t do fake gratitude well.

We don’t do forced small-talk well.

We don’t do sugar-coated versions of anything well.

But we do understand truth.

We understand justice.

We understand noticing the details others ignore.

We understand remembering the parts of the story people try to skip.

So today, we take a breath —

not the social holiday breath everyone expects,

but a breath that helps our nervous system regulate and come back into our body.

We sit with our blessings in a way autistic people often do:

quietly, observantly, gratefully, intensely aware of how fragile life is.

We know we’re only promised this one life.

We know routines can shatter.

We know people come and go.

We know honesty is the most sacred thing we have.

And because of that, our calling —

as Jesus-shaped people and autistic truth-tellers —

is to leave this world a little more healed, a little more kind,

and a lot more honest than how we found it.

But honoring God with gratitude also means telling the truth…

even when everyone else wants the comfortable version.

Because thanksgiving without honesty is just pretending.

And autistic people?

We don’t pretend well.

Thanksgiving with honesty is worship.

🧩 Acknowledging the Land — In the Way Autistic Minds See It

Before Pilgrims.

Before colonial prayers.

Before America romanticized the “first Thanksgiving”…

There were Native families.

Real people.

With routines, traditions, sensory-rich cultures, languages, songs, and stories.

The land wasn’t “empty.”

It wasn’t “waiting for settlers.”

It wasn’t a playground for Christian colonists.

Many Native communities were traumatized, displaced, and killed

by European settlers — including Christian Pilgrims

who believed God gave them the right to take land that wasn’t theirs.

Autistic honesty won’t let us look away from that.

But honesty doesn’t mean shame.

It means responsibility.

Responsibility to remember.

Responsibility to learn truthfully.

Responsibility to live differently and more compassionately.

Jesus said, “The truth will set you free.”

Not the polished version.

Not the patriotic version.

Not the church-approved version.

Just the truth — raw and unaltered.

Because love cannot heal anything we are unwilling to name.

And autistic people?

We name what others avoid.

🧩 Scripture Through an Autistic Lens

📖 1 Timothy 4:4–5

Everything God created is good.

Autistic people take that literally —

which means Native lives, cultures, languages, and histories are good too.

God never labeled anyone “less than.”

📖 Psalm 100:4

Enter His gates with thanksgiving.

For autistic people, thanksgiving often means quiet gratitude,

not loud rooms or forced group prayers.

Gratitude looks like justice.

Honesty.

Respect.

Not performance.

📖 Colossians 2:6–7

Rooted… built up… overflowing with thanksgiving.

Autistic gratitude is rooted and real.

Not shallow.

Not scripted.

Not socially expected.

Real gratitude makes us harder to manipulate

by political narratives or religious systems that harm others.

Thanksgiving isn’t a single day for us.

It’s a way of existing —

seeing beauty in details, truth in history,

and God in the people the world ignores.

🧩 The Agape Freedom Calling — Autistic Edition

So today, as we sit at our tables, manage sensory input,

and navigate family expectations…

Let’s also hold this:

We can love America and still tell the truth about how it was built.

We can celebrate Thanksgiving without celebrating the myths.

We can be grateful and still acknowledge harm.

We can honor Native and Black Native communities

without losing joy or connection.

Autism isn’t a barrier to gratitude.

It’s a lens that makes gratitude clearer —

stripped of social pressure

and rooted in truth, justice, and compassion.

This Thanksgiving, may we practice a gratitude

that feels safe in our bodies,

honest in our minds,

and rooted in love.

Because freedom — real freedom —

is built on truth.

PART 2 — AUTISTIC VERSION OF THE REAL HISTORY

🧩 THE REAL STORY — WITHOUT THE SOCIAL FILTERS

Most autistic people grew up confused by the “Thanksgiving story”

because it didn’t make logical sense.

Why would Native people joyfully hand over land?

Why would everyone sit smiling at a table

with people who carried weapons?

Why did the story feel too clean, too polished, too unrealistic?

Because it was.

Autistic people rely on truth, pattern recognition,

and details — not fairy tales.

So here is the truth, plainly:

🧩 BEFORE THE PILGRIMS — A DEVASTATED LAND

Before the Pilgrims arrived in 1620,

a European-borne plague had already killed up to 90%

of the Wampanoag Nation.

So when the Pilgrims arrived, the land wasn’t “empty.”

It was grieving.

They weren’t entering a “New World.”

They were entering someone else’s home

after most of the family had died.

Autistic honesty refuses to call that “discovery.”

🧩 THE REAL “FIRST THANKSGIVING”

The Wampanoag taught the Pilgrims how to survive.

Not because they wanted to be best friends —

but because survival required alliances.

The “feast” happened because:

• Pilgrims fired guns celebrating

• Wampanoag warriors thought they were under attack

• They came armed

• They stayed to negotiate

• They shared food

It wasn’t unity.

It was tension, diplomacy, and caution.

Kindergarten plays left that part out.

🧩 AFTER THE FEAST — THE TRUTH AMERICA HIDES

Once the Pilgrims gained strength:

• Land was taken

• Treaties were broken

• Violence escalated

By 1675, King Philip’s War shattered the region.

Pilgrim descendants:

• burned Native towns

• enslaved Native families

• murdered communities

• sold survivors to plantations

Autistic minds don’t ignore patterns.

The pattern was colonization → dependence → betrayal → violence.

🧩 RELIGION WAS USED AS JUSTIFICATION

The Pilgrims believed they were God’s chosen people.

When you think God gave you a land,

you stop asking permission.

Religion became:

• the moral shield

• the political tool

• the justification

• the loophole

• the excuse

Same pattern later used for:

• slavery

• segregation

• boarding schools

• cultural erasure

We’re not attacking faith —

we’re telling the truth autistic-clear:

Faith was used to harm.

Truth sets us free.

Lies keep us stuck.

🧩 SO HOW DO WE HOLD THIS AS AUTISTIC BELIEVERS?

We don’t have to cancel Thanksgiving.

We don’t have to sit in guilt.

We don’t have to reject joy.

But autistic people need the truth

to make sense of the world.

Truth increases empathy.

Truth prevents repeated harm.

Truth honors those who suffered.

Real gratitude doesn’t hide history.

It learns from it.

So today, practice the kind of gratitude autistic systems thrive in:

• honest

• calm

• compassionate

• grounded

• unmasked

• unfiltered

• real

That’s the kind of thanksgiving

that actually means something.

THANKSGIVING PRAYER

Agape Freedom Church

God of peace,

God of truth,

God who meets us exactly where we are…

Today we slow our breathing.

We quiet our mind.

We let our body settle into a place that feels safe.

We don’t force ourselves to be “festive.”

We don’t pretend we’re okay if we’re overwhelmed.

We don’t mask how we’re really feeling.

You meet us in truth.

And truth is holy.

Thank You for this moment of stillness.

Thank You for the breath in our lungs.

Thank You for the comfort of familiar routines,

and the courage to handle disruptions when they come.

Today, we ask for gentle things:

✨ Calm in our body.

✨ Clarity in our mind.

✨ Softness in our environment.

✨ Space when we need space.

✨ Understanding from others.

Let this day not be about noise, or pressure, or social expectations—

but about small blessings we can actually hold:

A warm drink.

A quiet corner.

A familiar texture.

A safe person.

A peaceful moment.

A truth that settles instead of overwhelms.

We honor gratitude in a way that feels real to us—

not forced, not showy, not loud.

Just real.

Help us notice the little things:

the steady breath,

the gentle light,

the simplicity of being alive,

the peace that comes when we let ourselves be exactly who we are.

And God…

for anyone who is overloaded, exhausted, or anxious today—

wrap them in calm.

Give them permission to step away.

To rest.

To stim.

To speak up.

To say “I need a break.”

To be human without apology.

Thank You for making us the way we are—

deep feelers, pattern-noticers, truth-tellers,

people who love differently but deeply.

Thank You for freedom.

Thank You for honesty.

Thank You for our breath, our body, and this quiet moment with You.

Amen.

🙏 AGAPE FREEDOM CHURCH — THANKSGIVING DEVOTIONAL

By: Rev. Jeric Yurkanin

“Gratitude, Truth, and the Story We Inherited”

It’s Thanksgiving —

a time when families across America sit down together, say a prayer, pass the food, laugh, cry, and look back on their year.

We pause.

We breathe.

We acknowledge the blessings we’ve been given.

We humble ourselves because none of us earned the air in our lungs, the sunrise in our window, or the people we love.

We’re only promised this one life.

And because of that, we shouldn’t take a second of it for granted.

Not the good.

Not the hard.

Not the parts we’re still trying to understand.

Our calling — as Jesus-shaped people —

is simple:

Leave this world a little more healed, a little more loved, a little more just than how we found it.

But part of honoring God with our gratitude is also telling the truth.

Even the uncomfortable truth.

Even the parts of the story we didn’t learn in elementary school.

Because thanksgiving without honesty

is just a holiday.

Thanksgiving with truth

is worship.

🌾 Acknowledging the Land and the Pain in the Story

Before there was a “Thanksgiving dinner,”

before Pilgrims, before colonial prayers, before our American traditions…

there were Native peoples — vibrant nations, rich cultures, families, children, stories, languages, prayers, dreams, and homes.

Many of them experienced unimaginable violence, displacement, and death at the hands of European settlers — including Christian Pilgrims who believed God had given them the land, even if it meant taking it from those who already lived there.

This doesn’t mean we must carry shame.

But it does mean we carry responsibility.

Responsibility to remember.

Responsibility to learn truthfully.

Responsibility to live differently.

Jesus said, “The truth will set you free.”

Not the sugar-coated version.

Not the patriotic version.

Not the edited-for-comfort version.

The truth.

Because love can’t heal anything we’re unwilling to name.

🌿 Gratitude That Grows Us

Now we return to Scripture — not as a weapon, not as a shield to hide behind, but as an invitation to become more human, more awake, more loving:

📖 1 Timothy 4:4–5

Everything God created is good.

That includes Native lives, Native cultures, Native nations.

To give thanks means acknowledging the image of God in all people — not just the ones history books chose to highlight.

📖 Psalm 100:4

Enter His gates with thanksgiving.

True thanksgiving looks like justice.

True praise looks like compassion.

True gratitude looks like honoring those whose stories were silenced.

📖 Colossians 2:6–7

Rooted… built up… overflowing with thanksgiving.

Gratitude isn’t shallow.

It’s rooted.

It makes us stronger, gentler, and harder to deceive with political or religious narratives that harm others.

Thanksgiving is not a moment —

it’s a lifestyle of healing, truth, and transformation.

🕊️ The Agape Freedom Calling

So today, as we eat and pray and laugh with our loved ones, let’s also hold this:

We can love America and still tell the truth about how it was built.

We can enjoy Thanksgiving and still honor the people who paid the price for its origin story.

We can be grateful and still be honest — because honesty is love.

And love is always our calling.

This Thanksgiving, may we practice gratitude that grows us, compassion that humbles us, and truth that sets us free.

Because freedom — real freedom

———Part 2————-——-

THE REAL STORY — THE PART THEY NEVER TAUGHT US

We all grew up hearing the same Thanksgiving story:

Pilgrims in shiny black hats.

Native Americans smiling, handing over corn.

Everybody sitting down together for a peaceful dinner like one big happy family.

It’s a beautiful story.

It’s also not remotely true.

And if you love history — the real kind, not the Hallmark version — then you know the truth matters. We can’t grow, heal, or become better humans if we’re still clinging to a children’s coloring-book version of America.

So here’s what actually happened, in a way that’s honest, teachable, and still human.

⸻

BEFORE THE PILGRIMS ARRIVED — A STOLEN ADVANTAGE

By the time the Pilgrims landed in 1620, the Wampanoag people had already survived a brutal plague brought by European fishermen years earlier.

It wiped out up to 90% of their communities.

Imagine losing almost everyone you know — and then watching ships full of strangers walk onto your land acting like it’s empty.

That’s the world the Pilgrims walked into.

They weren’t stepping into a “New World.”

They were stepping into someone else’s home after most of the family had died.

⸻

THE “FIRST THANKSGIVING” — WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED

The Wampanoag helped the Pilgrims survive their first winter.

They taught them:

• how to grow corn

• how to fish

• how to stay alive

Not out of some cute holiday spirit, but because alliances meant survival.

The feast we call “Thanksgiving” wasn’t even a planned unity meal.

Pilgrims were shooting guns celebrating a harvest.

Wampanoag warriors showed up because they thought they were under attack —

then stayed and shared food.

It wasn’t a Hallmark dinner.

It was diplomacy, tension, and survival.

But America later turned it into a happy kindergarten play with paper hats, because the real story was too uncomfortable for textbooks.

AFTER THE MEAL — THE PART THEY NEVER TELL YOU

The years that followed weren’t peaceful.

Once the Pilgrims grew stronger, more colonists arrived.

More land was taken.

More treaties were broken.

More violence erupted.

Finally, in 1675, came King Philip’s War — one of the bloodiest conflicts in American history per capita.

The same “Christian Pilgrim descendants” who praised God for survival soon:

• burned Native villages

• enslaved Native people

• murdered entire communities

• sold survivors to plantations in the Caribbean

This is the part that never made it into our elementary school musicals.

The people who helped the Pilgrims survive were almost wiped out within a generation.

⸻

AND YES — RELIGION WAS A TOOL FOR IT

Pilgrims believed they were “chosen by God” to build a new Christian society on this land.

And when you believe God gave you a land…

you stop asking permission from the people already living on it.

Religion became:

• the justification

• the fuel

• the moral loophole

• the excuse to claim innocence

Just like later in American history, when religion was used to justify:

• slavery

• segregation

• residential schools

• cultural erasure

This isn’t about attacking Christianity — it’s about telling the truth.

The truth sets people free, not fairy tales.

⸻

SO WHAT DO WE DO WITH THIS TODAY?

We don’t have to hate Thanksgiving.

We don’t have to cancel family dinners.

We don’t have to sit in guilt.

But we do have to tell the truth.

Because honoring the truth:

• teaches empathy

• prevents history from repeating

• shows respect for the people who suffered

• raises kids who understand both gratitude and justice

We can still enjoy the day.

But we don’t have to pretend the story was peaceful when it wasn’t.

⸻

A HEALTHY, HONEST WAY TO SEE THANKSGIVING

Here’s the version that actually means something:

Be thankful.

Enjoy your people.

Love your family.

But don’t erase the people who were here first.

Remember the Wampanoag.

Remember the Native and Black Native communities whose land was taken.

Remember the truth that textbooks softened to protect feelings instead of honoring reality.

Real gratitude doesn’t hide history.

It learns from it.