CXXXI. Creating A Capitalist Jesus

Editor’s Note: I had the privilege of speaking over Zoom with several Ukrainian veterans this week. It was an honor. It reminded me of what we’ve lost by taking what we mean to the world for granted. America has always inspired, even when we didn’t live up to the expectations. While the Ukrainians are holding ground and not breaking under Russian attacks, it is us who have broken under the weight of an administration discarding American principles for personal grift.

Keep up the good fight.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how other people think. I sometimes consider I should’ve been a psychiatrist, though managing other people’s troubles is a weight unto itself. We believe we possess our own minds, but environmental and genetic factors shape much of our thinking from a young age. For example, I came out of a very conservative world. It was a steady diet of church and only church on Sunday. Even mowing the lawn or grocery shopping could be considered sinful.

I understand that kind of mindset that believes there are “God-given” rules to follow. Even the wrong thoughts can be sinful. That framework long predates any of us and has been used as a white Anglo-Saxon siren call to Christian soldiers and as reasoning to wipe out entire communities.

If you pause and observe, you can still see it happening in real time. The language of faith became one of not going into all the world but more of a sorting mechanism. Who was in, who was out, who deserved the benefit of the doubt, and who didn't. The people inside the framework, in the club so to speak, mostly didn't notice the drift because the drift was gradual and it was comfortable and it confirmed what they already wanted to believe: that their particular inheritance, their particular culture, their particular aesthetic of life, was not just preferable but ordained. That God had looked at the suburb, the business casual, the 11 a.m. Sunday service, the big trucks, and excessive profit, and found it all good.

The problem is that it is the exact opposite of what a New Testament Christ probably was, and certainly what he ministered for.

Here was a man who came to wake up a much deeper consciousness. To throw out the rule books the Pharisees and Sadducees clung to, the ones designed not for spiritual clarity but for keeping a rank and order in place. Jesus opened the floodgates to the leper, the prostitute, the tax collector, and the Samaritan outsider; to all those the gatekeepers, not Christ, had decided didn't qualify. That is what any competent and real spiritual tradition does at its core. It tears down what we humans try to dictate as sacred.

And since that time, history records one charlatan after another working to capture the power of that movement and turn it into an abomination of what it actually is.

It has always worked this way. The Roman emperor Constantine didn't convert to Christianity out of spiritual awakening. He converted because a unified church was a more efficient administrative tool to run his empire. The Crusades were not a failure of Christianity. They were efforts made exactly as the men in power intended it to work: a foreign enemy to conquer as non-believers and a domestic population to point outward. The prosperity gospel is just the latest update by men preaching wealth as evidence of being in God’s favor.

Every generation struggles with its beliefs and reality, and every generation produces its own version of the charlatan to milk it. We’ve all seen it. The person who says the wrong people are too loud, or taking up too much space, or refusing to blend in and make themselves palatable to the rest of us.

That feeling is not without its own internal logic. It has a framework. It has a tradition. It even has a scripture, selectively read. It makes it easy when a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant sees a Mexican-Black hybrid rapper dropping f-bombs with lyrics full of guns and street swagger, to say we’ve gone too far. Civilization is unraveling. We’ve turned from Jesus. A pox is upon us.

But that reaction, however sincere or ignorant, is the fruit of a poisoned tree. It is what happens when you replace a message of radical love and acceptance with a capitalist Jesus, a Christ who somehow endorses the gated community, the yacht, and the redlined neighborhood.

The Lawrence Welk and Frank Sinatra generation kept America stratified, and people said: fine, we will do our own thing. And they did. Generations of Americans doing their own thing, much of it borne not out of moral failure or lack of ambition, but directly in response to economic sanctioning, racism, and an invitation to join that never came. When you are never invited into the fold, you build your own, and that might be different communities, different music, and different language.

When I see people who say things that unsettle me, dress in ways that are provocative, make music that is questionable, I don't see civilization collapsing. I see a democracy functioning.

Diversity is not the problem.

The problem is what we told them Christianity was, and what we built in its name.

A religion of intolerance.

The message started with the words of a simple carpenter. What came out of it was a theology of separation and wealth; the using of ropes, chains, and fences in the name of a man who sought to tear such things down. That is a betrayal of the gospel, really of any system of spiritual belief.

Which is why you don’t mix religion with politics.

Religion has already been damaging enough.

Since 1970, we have lost 3 billion birds in North America. Birds like the Snowy Owl are at increasing risk of extinction due to climate change. Birds are vital to healthy ecosystems - and their decline affects us all.

With over a century of conservation expertise, the National Audubon Society knows what it takes to protect the birds we love. And with your support today, we can.

Join us in protecting birds with a dependable, annual gift and we’ll send you our quarterly, award-winning magazine every year as our thanks.

Donate Now.

Science fiction is running out of things to imagine that the AI rise can’t realistically address. Right now, anything done on a screen can be enhanced, accelerated, or fully replaced by AI. The worker at the desk included. That part is already happening, even if the org charts haven't caught up.

The next step is moving the intelligence off the screen. Put the chip in a hard plastic suit, give it arms and legs and a face close to human, and you have a robot that can do the work the screen could only describe. China is way out front, but American companies will follow.

The stranger leap is inward. Brain-computer interfaces, for those who choose them, will turn thoughts into actions without a word spoken or a finger lifted. It sounds like a stunt, but the hardware to do this is closer than most people realize.

These tools, used well, could be extraordinary. Used poorly, they will be the defining argumental angst of the next twenty years. We’ve got the same questions that come from every transformative technology: who benefits, who pays, and who decides.

We need to address this like a modern society and not a backwards culture.

| see-zuh-REE-noh | ˌsiː-zəˈriː-noʊ |

noun, plural caesarini | see-zuh-REE-nee |

[Italian, from Latin Caesar (emperor, conqueror) + the diminutive suffix -ino, which reduces a thing to its smaller, often comic, version, as bambino from bambo or violino from viola.]

A man who carries himself as a great leader and visionary, certain that his presence commands the room, while everyone in the room has quietly agreed to let him think so. The caesarino issues directives, narrates his own arrival, and mistakes the courtesy of his entourage for tribute. His friends nod. His hosts smile. None of them are fooled.

Motto: Solus nescit. (He alone does not know.)

Example sentence:

— He fired the people who told him the truth and surrounded himself with people who told him he was right, which is the standard caesarino procurement strategy.

See also: clodmonger; naked-emperor syndrome.

Insurers lost money on homeowners' coverage in 18 states in 2023, up from 8 in 2013. State Farm walked away from California. Florida homeowners now pay an average of $15,000 a year to insure a house. California's FAIR Plan, the insurer of last resort, tripled in five years to over 610,000 policies. I predict that within the next two years, more major carriers will announce withdrawal from a coastal or wildfire state, and at least one red-state governor who has spent a decade calling climate change a hoax will quietly sign onto yet another state-backed, publicly subsidized reinsurance program. The market will force the admission the politics has refused. Premiums will become the carbon tax we never passed. The bill will come due on Americans at home instead of the Senate floor.

Spirit is the canary, not the exception. The trade group representing budget carriers has already asked the Trump administration for $2.5 billion in federal aid. JetBlue is on its sixth straight year without a profit, its credit rating cut and its 2026 losses heading toward a billion dollars. Frontier just took a $50 million fuel hit in a single quarter. All of it traces back to one decision: tearing up the Iran deal and starting an unnecessary war that doubled jet fuel overnight. The White House refused Spirit. I predict the next ask gets a different answer. JetBlue serves New York and Boston, not Fort Lauderdale tourists. When the airline that flies congressional districts walks into the Treasury, the politics flip. The same administration that called bailouts socialism will write the check, and call it patriotism. We are going to see again that the “free market” we currently have only fails upward.

By 2030, one in five Americans will be over 65. The math has been visible for thirty years. What is new is the demolition of the workforce that holds the system together. Immigrants make up nearly 40 percent of home health aides and a quarter of nursing assistants. The country is already projected to be short 4.6 million home care workers by 2032. Now deport the people doing the job and refuse to replace them. I predict that by mid-2027, the first nursing home chains will begin either introducing robots or closing facilities for a lack of staff. There will be legislative proposals to pay families to take care of their own loved ones, a much easier solution than finding anyone willing to bathe them for $14 an hour.

From the beginning

Can towering trees bind the wind

Or the rivers be stilled by light

Will the rolling oceans drain dry

And the land disappear from view?

The orbiting planets will spin

The surf will pound the sandy beach

The streams will flow upon the soil

And the wind will add its whisper.

The balance of activity

Allows a viable place

The mixture allows existence

While creatures complete the sphere.

Certainly an infinite blend

Whose unique parts form the substance

The rotations persist through space

Requiring the eternal blend.

And Now….

We are still here. Every week. All of us. Make each day count. Expect some bad things to happen, but remember you are a force for good.

Always strive to be a good human. That makes all the difference.