Less than a month after the billionaire Elon Musk enthusiastically endorsed the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that motivated the deadliest massacre of Jews in American history, this week, he received a warm welcome to Israel from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Since Musk took over Twitter, which he has renamed X, the sort of hateful content that drives both negative and positive engagement has flourished on the site. But he has also directly promoted some of the most toxic claims on the platform. He endorsed as “the actual truth” the idea that Jews were deliberately supporting the immigration of nonwhite people in an act of “hatred against whites.” The post’s implication was that not restricting immigration to Western countries on the basis of race and religion is racist against white people, who have a racially defined right to political, cultural, and demographic hegemony in those nations.

As my colleague Yair Rosenberg notes, “It wasn’t the first time Musk echoed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories from his social-media bubble.” No conspiracy theory is necessary to explain why people flee poverty and persecution for nations with greater economic opportunity or political freedom; this is a large part of the story of the United States of America. But perhaps Musk finds in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories a useful means of redirecting frustration over social change or economic hardship away from the obscenely wealthy, like himself, who profit from lower marginal tax rates and a more threadbare social safety net.

[Yair Rosenberg: Elon Musk among the anti-Semites]

At a New York Times event yesterday, Musk apologized for the post, which has caused the platform to hemorrhage advertisers. “I’m sorry for that … post,” Musk said. “It was foolish of me. Of the 30,000 it might be literally the worst and dumbest post I’ve ever done. And I’ve tried my best to clarify six ways from Sunday, but you know at least I think it’ll be obvious that in fact far from being anti-Semitic, I’m in fact philo-Semitic.” That self-description is less than reassuring.

Whatever Musk’s motives, the incident has worsened X’s financial situation. The site had already plummeted in value since he turned it into a platform for amplifying the far right. For the prime minister of the Jewish state to host Musk mere weeks later, helping launder Musk’s reputation, may seem strange. In fact, it is part of a larger pattern in which Israeli politicians and pro-Israel advocates have offered to deflect accusations of anti-Semitism from far-right figures in exchange for support for Israel. As Emily Tamkin argues in Slate, Netanyahu himself has long courted far-right leaders in Europe who have strategically deployed anti-Semitism as a political tool. Such illiberal leaders are less likely to oppose Israeli territorial maximalism, and a Europe led by authoritarian right-wing populists is less likely to object to Israel holding Palestinians captive in an occupation that denies them suffrage or national self-determination. This is the same logic that explains Netanyahu’s courtship of American evangelicals at the expense of support from liberal American Jews. Right-wing Christian Zionists are less likely to express tedious pangs of conscience about the Israeli government’s actions.

It is important for non-Jews to understand that the Israeli prime minister is not the pope of the Jews. He is not a religious leader to whom global Jewry looks for guidance. He is a secular politician, in Netanyahu’s case one beholden to a right-wing constituency in a nation that defines itself in explicitly ethnic terms. Netanyahu cannot grant absolution for anti-Semitism to someone who has alleged that a global Jewish conspiracy seeks to destroy white people by allowing nonwhite people to be their neighbors. An anti-Semite cannot make a pilgrimage to Israel, kiss Netanyahu’s ring, bathe in the Jordan, and have the Hitler particles cleansed from his skin like Naaman curing his leprosy.

That Netanyahu’s actions effectively make anti-Semitism against diaspora Jews more respectable is, quite simply, not his problem—it’s not like they can vote for his opposition. Most Jews around the world support Israel as a Jewish state and as a refuge for Jews fleeing persecution, from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Netanyahu, however, is more interested in bolstering his own vision of Israel’s future. Netanyahu views the Israeli national interest as preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state. The particular form of anti-Semitism endorsed by Musk is also consistent with Netanyahu’s own political values in its right-wing ethnonationalism. It is also not a stretch to say that Netanyahu, like Musk, sees those in his own society who advocate for equal rights for all as agents of a global conspiracy.

[Read: Elon Musk’s unrecognizable app]

The outcome of all this is a seedy transactional relationship, in which Netanyahu empowers anti-Semitism against diaspora Jews while shoring up support for Israel. But this approach is hardly unique to him; the right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro once said of the far-right pundit Ann Coulter that he does not “lose sleep” over remarks she made about Jews because she supports Israel. This is more or less the bargain offered: You can be as anti-Semitic as you like as long as you are also a Zionist.

No conspiracism is necessary to understand why American Jews, as a religious and ethnic minority, might prefer that the nations in which they live be liberal democracies. There is also no mystery why such a group would on average oppose racist immigration policies, given that such restrictions prevented Jewish immigration to the U.S. during World War II, thereby exacerbating the Holocaust. It is equally easy to understand why Netanyahu would view right-wing authoritarians, even those who hate Jews—especially left-wing Jews—as more reliable allies than his more universalist coreligionists. But all of this highlights the fact that the interests of the Jewish people and the interests of the state of Israel are not necessarily the same. Indeed, the more the Israeli government sees anti-Semitic Zionism as useful to its cause, the more they diverge.

It was July 29, 2019—the worst day of my life, though I didn’t know that quite yet.

The traffic in downtown Washington, D.C., was inching along. The mid-Atlantic humidity was sweating through the windows of my chauffeured car. I was running late and fighting to stay awake. For two weeks, I’d been sprinting between television and radio studios up and down the East Coast, promoting my new book on the collapse of the post–George W. Bush Republican Party and the ascent of Donald Trump. Now I had one final interview for the day. My publicist had offered to cancel—it wasn’t that important, she said—but I didn’t want to. It was important. After the car pulled over on M Street Northwest, I hustled into the stone-pillared building of the Christian Broadcasting Network.

All in a blur, the producers took my cellphone, mic’d me up, and shoved me onto the set with the news anchor John Jessup. Camera rolling, Jessup skipped past the small talk. He was keen to know, given his audience, what I had learned about the president’s alliance with America’s white evangelicals. Despite being a lecherous, impenitent scoundrel—the 2016 campaign was marked by his mocking of a disabled man, his xenophobic slander of immigrants, his casual calls to violence against political opponents—Trump had won a historic 81 percent of white evangelical voters. Yet that statistic was just a surface-level indicator of the foundational shifts taking place inside the Church. Polling showed that born-again Christian conservatives, once the president’s softest backers, were now his most unflinching advocates. Jessup had the same question as millions of other Americans: Why?

As a believer in Jesus Christ—and as the son of an evangelical minister, raised in a conservative church in a conservative community—I had long struggled with how to answer this question. The truth is, I knew lots of Christians who, to varying degrees, supported the president, and there was no way to summarily describe their diverse attitudes, motivations, and behaviors. They were best understood as points plotted across a spectrum. At one end were the Christians who maintained their dignity while voting for Trump—people who were clear-eyed in understanding that backing a candidate, pragmatically and prudentially, need not lead to unconditionally promoting, empowering, and apologizing for that candidate. At the opposite end were the Christians who had jettisoned their credibility—people who embraced the charge of being reactionary hypocrites, still fuming about Bill Clinton’s character as they jumped at the chance to go slumming with a playboy turned president.

[From the April 2018 issue: Michael Gerson on Trump and the evangelical temptation]

Most of the Christians I knew fell somewhere in the middle. They had to some extent been seduced by the cult of Trumpism, yet to composite all of these people into a caricature was misleading. Something more profound was taking place. Something was happening in the country—something was happening in the Church—that we had never seen before. I had attempted, ever so delicately, to make these points in my book. Now, on the TV set, I was doing a similar dance.

Jessup seemed to sense my reticence. Pivoting from the book, he asked me about a recent flare-up in the evangelical world. In response to the Trump administration’s policy of forcibly separating migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border, Russell Moore, a prominent leader with the Southern Baptist Convention, had tweeted, “Those created in the image of God should be treated with dignity and compassion, especially those seeking refuge from violence back home.” At this, Jerry Falwell Jr.—the son and namesake of the Moral Majority founder, and then-president of Liberty University, one of the world’s largest Christian colleges—took great offense. “Who are you @drmoore?” he replied. “Have you ever made a payroll? Have you ever built an organization of any type from scratch? What gives you authority to speak on any issue?”

This being Twitter and all, I decided to chime in. “There are Russell Moore Christians and Jerry Falwell Jr. Christians,” I wrote, summarizing the back-and-forth. “Choose wisely, brothers and sisters.”

Now Jessup was reading my tweet on-air. “Do you really see evangelicals divided into two camps?” the anchor asked.

I stumbled. Conceding that it might be an “oversimplification,” I warned still of a “fundamental disconnect” between Christians who view issues through the eyes of Jesus and Christians who process everything through a partisan political filter.

[From the June 2022 issue: Tim Alberta on how politics poisoned the evangelical church]

As the interview ended, I knew I’d botched an opportunity to state plainly my qualms about the American evangelical Church. Truth be told, I did see evangelicals divided into two camps—one side faithful to an eternal covenant, the other side bowing to earthly idols of nation and influence and fame—but I was too scared to say so. My own Christian walk had been so badly flawed. And besides, I’m no theologian; Jessup was asking for my journalistic analysis, not my biblical exegesis.

Walking off the set, I wondered if my dad might catch that clip. Surely somebody at our home church would see it and pass it along. I grabbed my phone, then stopped to chat with Jessup and a few of his colleagues. As we said our farewells, I looked down at the phone, which had been silenced. There were multiple missed calls from my wife and oldest brother. Dad had collapsed from a heart attack. There was nothing the surgeons could do. He was gone.

The last time I saw him was nine days earlier. The CEO of Politico, my employer at the time, had thrown a book party for me at his Washington manor, and Mom and Dad weren’t going to miss that. They jumped in their Chevy and drove out from my childhood home in southeast Michigan. When he sauntered into the event, my old man looked out of place—a rumpled midwestern minister, baggy shirt stuffed into his stained khakis—but before long he was holding court with diplomats and Fortune 500 lobbyists, making them howl with irreverent one-liners. It was like a Rodney Dangerfield flick come to life. At one point, catching sight of my agape stare, he gave an exaggerated wink, then delivered a punch line for his captive audience.

It was the high point of my career. The book was getting lots of buzz; already I was being urged to write a sequel. Dad was proud—very proud, he assured me—but he was also uneasy. For months, as the book launch drew closer, he had been urging me to reconsider the focus of my reporting career. Politics, he kept saying, was a “sordid, nasty business,” a waste of my time and God-given talents. Now, in the middle of the book party, he was taking me by the shoulder, asking a congressman to excuse us for just a moment. Dad put his arm around me and leaned in.

“You see all these people?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I nodded, grinning at the validation.

“Most of them won’t care about you in a week,” he said.

The record scratched. My moment of rapture was interrupted. I cocked my head and smirked at him. Neither of us said anything. I was bothered. The longer we stood there in silence, the more bothered I became. Not because he was wrong. But because he was right.

“Remember,” Dad said, smiling. “On this Earth, all glory is fleeting.”

Now, as I raced to Reagan National Airport and boarded the first available flight to Detroit, his words echoed. There was nothing contrived about Dad’s final admonition to me. That is what he believed; that is who he was.

Once a successful New York financier, Richard J. Alberta had become a born-again Christian in 1977. Despite having a nice house, beautiful wife, and healthy firstborn son, he felt a rumbling emptiness. He couldn’t sleep. He developed debilitating anxiety. Religion hardly seemed like the solution; Dad came from a broken and unbelieving home. He had decided, halfway through his undergraduate studies at Rutgers University, that he was an atheist. And yet, one weekend while visiting family in the Hudson Valley, my dad agreed to attend church with his niece, Lynn. He became a new person that day. His angst was quieted. His doubts were overwhelmed. Taking Communion for the first time at Goodwill Church in Montgomery, New York, he prayed to acknowledge Jesus as the son of God and accept him as his personal savior.

Dad became unrecognizable to those who knew him. He rose early, hours before work, to read the Bible, filling a yellow legal pad with verses and annotations. He sat silently for hours in prayer. My mom thought he’d lost his mind. A young journalist who worked under Howard Cosell at ABC Radio in New York, Mom was suspicious of all this Jesus talk. But her maiden name—Pastor—was proof of God’s sense of humor. Soon she accepted Christ too.

When Dad felt he was being called to abandon his finance career and enter the ministry, he met with Pastor Stewart Pohlman at Goodwill. As they prayed in Pastor Stew’s office, Dad said he felt the spirit of the Lord swirling around him, filling up the room. He was not given to phony supernaturalism—in fact, Dad might have been the most intellectually sober, reason-based Christian I’ve ever known—but that day, he felt certain, the Lord anointed him. Soon he and Mom were selling just about every material item they owned, leaving their high-salaried jobs in New York, and moving to Massachusetts so he could study at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

For the next two decades, they worked in small churches here and there, living off food stamps and the generosity of fellow believers. By the time I arrived, in 1986, Dad was Pastor Stew’s associate at Goodwill. We lived in the church parsonage; my nursery was the library, where towers of leather-wrapped books had been collected by the church’s pastors dating back to the mid-18th century. A few years later we moved to Michigan, and Dad eventually put down roots at a start-up, Cornerstone Church, in the Detroit suburb of Brighton. It was part of a minor denomination called the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC), and it was there, for the next 26 years, that he served as senior pastor.

Cornerstone was our home. Because Mom also worked on staff, leading the women’s ministry, I was quite literally raised in the church: playing hide-and-seek in storage areas, doing homework in the office wing, bringing high-school dates to Bible study, working as a janitor during a year of community college. I hung around the church so much that I decided to leave my mark: At 9 years old, I used a pocket knife to etch my initials into the brickwork of the narthex.

The last time I’d been there, 18 months earlier, I’d spoken to a packed sanctuary at Dad’s retirement ceremony, armed with good-natured needling and PG-13 anecdotes. Now I would need to give a very different speech.

Standing in the back of the sanctuary, my three older brothers and I formed a receiving line. Cornerstone had been a small church when we’d arrived as kids. Not anymore. Brighton, once a sleepy town situated at the intersection of two expressways, had become a prized location for commuters to Detroit and Ann Arbor. Meanwhile, Dad, with his baseball allegories and Greek-linguistics lessons, had gained a reputation for his eloquence in the pulpit. By the time I moved away, in 2008, Cornerstone had grown from a couple hundred members to a couple thousand.

Now the crowd swarmed around us, filling the sanctuary and spilling out into the lobby and adjacent hallways, where tables displayed flowers and golf clubs and photos of Dad. I was numb. My brothers too. None of us had slept much that week. So the first time someone made a glancing reference to Rush Limbaugh, it did not compute. But then another person brought him up. And then another. That’s when I connected the dots. Apparently, the king of conservative talk radio had been name-checking me on his program recently—“a guy named Tim Alberta”—and describing the unflattering revelations in my book about Trump. Nothing in that moment could have mattered to me less. I smiled, shrugged, and thanked people for coming to the visitation.

They kept on coming. More than I could count. People from the church—people I’d known my entire life—were greeting me, not primarily with condolences or encouragement or mourning, but with commentary about Limbaugh and Trump. Some of it was playful, guys remarking about how I was the same mischief-maker they’d known since kindergarten. But some of it wasn’t playful. Some of it was angry; some of it was cold and confrontational. One man questioned whether I was truly a Christian. Another asked if I was still on “the right side.” All while Dad was in a box a hundred feet away.

It got to the point where I had to take a walk. Here, in our house of worship, people were taunting me about politics as I tried to mourn my father. I was in the company of certain friends that day who would not claim to know Jesus, yet they shrouded me in peace and comfort. Some of these card-carrying evangelical Christians? Not so much. They didn’t see a hurting son; they saw a vulnerable adversary.

That night, while fine-tuning the eulogy I would give at Dad’s funeral the following afternoon, I still felt the sting. My wife perceived as much. The unflappable one in the family, she encouraged me to be careful with my words and cautioned against mentioning the day’s unpleasantness. I took half of her advice.

In front of an overflow crowd on August 2, 2019, I paid tribute to the man who’d taught me everything—how to throw a baseball, how to be a gentleman, how to trust and love the Lord. Reciting my favorite verse, from Paul’s second letter to the early Church in Corinth, Greece, I told of Dad’s instruction to keep our eyes fixed on what we could not see. Reading from his favorite poem, about a man named Richard Cory, I told of Dad’s warning that we could amass great wealth and still be poor.

Then I recounted all the people who’d approached me the day before, wanting to discuss the Trump wars on AM talk radio. I proposed that their time in the car would be better spent listening to Dad’s old sermons. I spoke of the need for discipleship and spiritual formation. I suggested, with some sarcasm, that if they needed help finding biblical listening for their daily commute, the pastors here on staff could help. “Why are you listening to Rush Limbaugh ?” I asked my father’s congregation. “Garbage in, garbage out.”

There was nervous laughter in the sanctuary. Some people were visibly agitated. Others looked away, pretending not to hear. My dad’s successor, a young pastor named Chris Winans, wore a shell-shocked expression. No matter. I had said my piece. It was finished. Or so I thought.

A few hours later, after we had buried Dad, my brothers and I slumped down onto the couches in our parents’ living room. We opened some beers and turned on a baseball game. Behind us, in the kitchen, a small platoon of church ladies worked to prepare a meal for the family. Here, I thought, is the love of Christ. Watching them hustle about, comforting Mom and catering to her sons, I found myself regretting the Limbaugh remark. Most of the folks at our church were humble, kindhearted Christians like these women. Maybe I’d blown things out of proportion.

Just then, one of them walked over and handed me an envelope. It had been left at the church, she said. My name was scrawled across it. I opened the envelope. Inside was a full-page-long, handwritten screed. It was from a longtime Cornerstone elder, someone my dad had called a friend, a man who’d mentored me in the youth group and had known me for most of my life.

He had composed this note, on the occasion of my father’s death, to express just how disappointed he was in me. I was part of an evil plot, the man wrote, to undermine God’s ordained leader of the United States. My criticisms of President Trump were tantamount to treason—against both God and country—and I should be ashamed of myself.

However, there was still hope. Jesus forgives, and so could this man. If I used my journalism skills to investigate the “deep state,” he wrote, uncovering the shadowy cabal that was supposedly sabotaging Trump’s presidency, then I would be restored. He said he was praying for me.

I felt sick. Silently, I passed the letter to my wife. She scanned it without expression. Then she flung the piece of paper into the air and, with a shriek that made the church ladies jump out of their cardigans, cried out: “What the hell is wrong with these people?”

There has never been consensus on what, exactly, it means to be an evangelical. Competing and overlapping definitions have been offered for generations, some more widely embraced than others. Billy Graham, a man synonymous with the term, once remarked that he himself would like to inquire as to its true meaning. By the 1980s, thanks to the efforts of televangelists and political activists, what was once a religious signifier began transforming into a partisan movement. Evangelical soon became synonymous with conservative Christian, and eventually with white conservative Republican.

[Read: Defining evangelical]

My dad, a serious theologian who held advanced degrees from top seminaries, bristled at reductive analyses of his religious tribe. He would frequently state from the pulpit what he believed an evangelical to be: someone who interprets the Bible as the inspired word of God and who takes seriously the charge to proclaim it to the world.

From a young age, I realized that not all Christians were like my dad. Other adults who went to our church—my teachers, coaches, friends’ parents—didn’t speak about God the way that he did. Theirs was a more casual Christianity, less a lifestyle than a hobby, something that could be picked up and put down and slotted into schedules. Their pastor realized as much. Pushing his people ever harder to engage with questions of canonical authority and trinitarian precepts and Calvinist doctrine, Dad tried his best to run a serious church.

The author and his father in 2019 (Courtesy of Tim Alberta)

But for all his successes, Dad had one great weakness. Pastor Alberta’s kryptonite as a Christian—and I think he knew it, though he never admitted it to me—was his intense love of country.

Once a talented young athlete, Dad came down with tuberculosis at 16 years old. He was hospitalized for four months; at one point, doctors thought he might die. He eventually recovered, and with the Vietnam War escalating, he joined the Marine Corps. But at the Officer Candidates School in Quantico, Virginia, he fell behind in the physical work. His lungs were not healthy. After receiving an honorable discharge, Dad went home saddled with a certain shame. In the ensuing years, he learned that dozens of the second lieutenants he’d trained alongside at Quantico—as well as a bunch of guys he’d grown up with—were killed in action. It burdened him for the rest of his life.

This experience, and his disgust with the hippies and the drug culture and the war protesters, turned Dad into a law-and-order conservative. Marinating in the language of social conservatism during his time in seminary—this was the heyday of the Moral Majority—he emerged a full-spectrum Republican. His biggest political concern was abortion; in 1947, my grandmother, trapped in an emotionally abusive marriage, had almost ended her pregnancy with him. (She had a sudden change of heart at the clinic and walked out, a decision my dad would always attribute to holy intercession.) But he also waded into the culture wars: gay marriage, education curriculum, morality in public life.

Dad always told us that personal integrity was a prerequisite for political leadership. He was so relieved when Bill Clinton’s second term ended that he and Mom hosted a small viewing party in our living room for George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration, to celebrate the return of morality to the White House. Over time, however, his emphasis shifted. One Sunday in early 2010, when I was home visiting, he showed the congregation an ominous video in which Christian leaders warned about the menace of Obamacare. I told him afterward that it felt inappropriate for a worship service; he disagreed. We would butt heads more regularly in the years that followed. It was always loving, always respectful. Yet clearly our philosophical paths were diverging—a reality that became unavoidable during the presidency of Donald Trump.

Dad would have preferred any of the other Republicans who ran in 2016. He knew that Trump was a narcissist and a liar; he knew that he was not a moral man. Ultimately Dad felt he had no choice but to support the Republican ticket, given his concern for the unborn and the Supreme Court majority that hung in the balance. I understood that decision. What I couldn’t understand was how, over the next couple of years, he became an apologist for Trump’s antics, dismissing criticisms of the president’s conduct as little more than an attempt to marginalize his supporters. Dad really did believe this; he believed that the constant attacks on Trump’s character were ipso facto an attack on the character of people like himself, which I think, on some subconscious level, created a permission structure for him to ignore the president’s depravity. All I could do was tell Dad the truth. “Look, you’re the one who taught me to know right from wrong,” I would say. “Don’t be mad at me for acting on it.”

To his credit, Dad was not some lazy, knee-jerk partisan. He was vocal about certain issues—gun violence, poverty, immigration, the trappings of wealth—that did not play to his constituency at Cornerstone.

Dad wasn’t a Christian nationalist; he wanted nothing to do with theocracy. He just believed that God had blessed the United States uniquely—and felt that anyone who fought to preserve those blessings was doing the Lord’s work. This made for an unfortunate scene in 2007, when a young congregant at Cornerstone, a Marine named Mark Kidd, died during a fourth tour of duty in Iraq. Public opinion had swung sharply against the war, and Democrats were demanding that the Bush administration bring the troops home. My dad was devastated by Kidd’s death. They had corresponded while Kidd was overseas and met for prayer in between his deployments. Dad’s grief as a pastor gave way to his grievance as a Republican supporter of the war: He made it known to local Democratic politicians that they weren’t welcome at the funeral.

“I am ashamed, personally, of leaders who say they support the troops but not the commander in chief,” Dad thundered from his pulpit, earning a raucous standing ovation. “Do they not see that discourages the warriors and encourages the terrorists?”

This touched off a firestorm in our community. Most of the church members were all for Dad’s remarks, but even in a conservative town like Brighton, plenty of people felt uneasy about turning a fallen Marine’s church memorial into a partisan political rally. Patriotism in the pulpit is one thing; lots of sanctuaries fly an American flag on the rostrum. This was something else. This was taking the weight and the gravity and the eternal certainty of God and lending it to an ephemeral and questionable cause. This was rebuking people for failing to unconditionally follow the president of the United States when the only authority we’re meant to unconditionally follow—particularly in a setting of stained-glass windows—is Christ himself.

I know Dad regretted it. But he couldn’t help himself. His own personal story—and his broader view of the United States as a godly nation, a source of hope in a despondent world—was impossible to divorce from his pastoral ministry. Every time a member of the military came to church dressed in uniform, Dad would recognize them by name, ask them to stand up, and lead the church in a rapturous round of applause. This was one of the first things his successor changed at Cornerstone.

Eighteen months after Dad’s funeral, in February 2021, I sat down across from that successor, Chris Winans, in a booth at the Brighton Bar & Grill. It’s a comfortable little haunt on Main Street, backing up to a wooden playground and a millpond. But Winans didn’t look comfortable. He looked nervous, even a bit paranoid, glancing around him as we began to speak. Soon, I would understand why.

Dad had spent years looking for an heir apparent. Several associate pastors had come and gone. Cornerstone was his life’s work—he had led the church throughout virtually its entire history—so there would be no settling in his search for a successor. The uncertainty wore him down. Dad worried that he might never find the right guy. And then one day, while attending a denominational meeting, he met Winans, a young associate pastor from Goodwill—the very church where he’d been saved, and where he’d worked his first job out of seminary. Dad hired him away from Goodwill to lead a young-adults ministry at Cornerstone, and from the moment Winans arrived, I could tell that he was the one.

Barely 30 years old, Winans looked to be exactly what Cornerstone needed in its next generation of leadership. He was a brilliant student of the scriptures. He spoke with precision and clarity from the pulpit. He had a humble, easygoing way about him, operating without the outsize ego that often accompanies first-rate preaching. Everything about this pastor—the boyish sweep of brown hair, his delightful young family—seemed to be straight out of central casting.

There was just one problem: Chris Winans was not a conservative Republican. He didn’t like guns. He cared more about funding anti-poverty programs than cutting taxes. He had no appetite for President Trump’s unrepentant antics. Of course, none of this would seem heretical to Christians in other parts of the world; given his staunch anti-abortion position, Winans would in most places be considered the picture of spiritual and intellectual consistency. But in the American evangelical tradition, and at a church like Cornerstone, the whiff of liberalism made him suspect.

Dad knew the guy was different. Winans liked to play piano instead of sports, and had no taste for hunting or fishing. Frankly, Dad thought that was a bonus. Winans wasn’t supposed to simply placate Cornerstone’s aging base of wealthy white congregants. The new pastor’s charge was to evangelize, to cast a vision and expand the mission field, to challenge those inside the church and carry the gospel to those outside it. Dad didn’t think there was undue risk. He felt confident that his hand-chosen successor’s gifts in the pulpit, and his manifest love of Jesus, would smooth over any bumps in the transition.

He was wrong. Almost immediately after Winans moved into the role of senior pastor, at the beginning of 2018, the knives came out. Any errant remark he made about politics or culture, any slight against Trump or the Republican Party—real or perceived—invited a torrent of criticism. Longtime members would demand a meeting with Dad, who had stuck around in a support role, and unload on Winans. Dad would ask if there was any substantive criticism of the theology; almost invariably, the answer was no. A month into the job, when Winans remarked in a sermon that Christians ought to be protective of God’s creation—arguing for congregants to take seriously the threats to the planet—people came to Dad by the dozens, outraged, demanding that Winans be reined in. Dad told them all to get lost. If anyone had a beef with the senior pastor, he said, they needed to take it up with the senior pastor. (Dad did so himself, buying Winans lunch at Chili’s and suggesting that he tone down the tree hugging.)

Winans had a tough first year on the job, but he survived it. The people at Cornerstone were in an adjustment period. He needed to respect that—and he needed to adjust, too. As long as Dad had his back, Winans knew he would be okay.And then Dad died.

Now, Winans told me, he was barely hanging on at Cornerstone. The church had become unruly; his job had become unbearable. Not long after Dad died—making Winans the unquestioned leader of the church—the coronavirus pandemic arrived. And then George Floyd was murdered. All of this as Donald Trump campaigned for reelection. Trump had run in 2016 on a promise that “Christianity will have power” if he won the White House; now he was warning that his opponent in the 2020 election, former Vice President Joe Biden, was going to “hurt God” and target Christians for their religious beliefs. Embracing dark rhetoric and violent conspiracy theories, the president enlisted prominent evangelicals to help frame a cosmic spiritual clash between the God-fearing Republicans who supported Trump and the secular leftists who were plotting their conquest of America’s Judeo-Christian ethos.

People at Cornerstone began confronting their pastor, demanding that he speak out against government mandates and Black Lives Matter and Joe Biden. When Winans declined, people left. The mood soured noticeably after Trump’s defeat in November 2020. A crusade to overturn the election result, led by a group of outspoken Christians—including Trump’s lawyer Jenna Ellis, who later pleaded guilty to a felony charge of aiding and abetting false statements and writings, and the author Eric Metaxas, who suggested to fellow believers that martyrdom might be required to keep Trump in office—roiled the Cornerstone congregation. When a popular church staffer who had been known to proselytize for QAnon was fired after repeated run-ins with Winans, the pastor told me, the departures came in droves. Some of those abandoning Cornerstone were not core congregants. But plenty of them were. They were people who served in leadership roles, people Winans counted as confidants and friends.

By the time Trump supporters invaded the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Winans believed he’d lost control of his church. “It’s an exodus,” he told me a few weeks later, sitting inside Brighton Bar & Grill.

The pastor had felt despair—and a certain liability—watching the attack unfold on television. Christian imagery was ubiquitous: rioters forming prayer circles, singing hymns, carrying Bibles and crosses. The perversion of America’s prevailing religion would forever be associated with this tragedy; as one of the legislative ringleaders, Senator Josh Hawley, explained in a speech the following year, long after the blood had been scrubbed from the Capitol steps, “We are a revolutionary nation precisely because we are the heirs of the revolution of the Bible.”

That sort of thinking, Winans said, represents an even greater threat than the events of January 6.

“A lot of people believe there was a religious conception of this country. A biblical conception of this country,” Winans told me. “And that’s the source of a lot of our problems.”

For much of American history, white Christians have enjoyed tremendous wealth and influence and security. Given that reality—and given the miraculous nature of America’s defeat of Great Britain, its rise to superpower status, and its legacy of spreading freedom and democracy (and, yes, Christianity) across the globe—it’s easy to see why so many evangelicals believe that our country is divinely blessed. The problem is, blessings often become indistinguishable from entitlements. Once we become convinced that God has blessed something, that something can become an object of jealousy, obsession—even worship.

“At its root, we’re talking about idolatry. America has become an idol to some of these people. If you believe that God is in covenant with America, then you believe—and I’ve heard lots of people say this explicitly—that we’re a new Israel,” Winans said, referring to the Old Testament narrative of God’s chosen nation. “You believe the sorts of promises made to Israel are applicable to this country; you view America as a covenant that needs to be protected. You have to fight for America as if salvation itself hangs in the balance. At that point, you understand yourself as an American first and most fundamentally. And that is a terrible misunderstanding of who we’re called to be.”

Plenty of nations are mentioned in the Bible; the United States is not one of them. Most American evangelicals are sophisticated enough to reject the idea of this country as something consecrated in the eyes of God. But many of those same people have chosen to idealize a Christian America that puts them at odds with Christianity. They have allowed their national identity to shape their faith identity instead of the other way around.

Winans chose to be hypervigilant on this front, hence the change of policy regarding Cornerstone’s salute to military personnel. The new pastor would meet soldiers after the service, shaking their hand and individually thanking them for their service. But he refused to stage an ovation in the sanctuary. This wasn’t because he was some bohemian anti-war activist; in fact, his wife had served in the Army. Winans simply felt it was inappropriate.

“I don’t want to dishonor anyone. I think nations have the right to self-defense. I respect the sacrifices these people make in the military,” Winans told me. “But they would come in wearing their dress blues and get this wild standing ovation. And you contrast that to whenever we would host missionaries: They would stand up for recognition, and we give them a golf clap … And you have to wonder: Why? What’s going on inside our hearts?”

This kind of cultural heresy was getting Winans into trouble. More congregants were defecting each week. Many were relocating to one particular congregation down the road, a revival-minded church that was pandering to the whims of the moment, led by a pastor who was preaching a blood-and-soil Christian nationalism that sought to merge two kingdoms into one.As we talked, Winans asked me to keep something between us: He was thinking about leaving Cornerstone.

The “psychological onslaught,” he said, had become too much. Recently, the pastor had developed a form of anxiety disorder and was retreating into a dark room between services to collect himself. Winans had met with several trusted elders and asked them to stick close to him on Sunday mornings so they could catch him if he were to faint and fall over.

I thought about Dad and how heartbroken he would have been. Then I started to wonder if Dad didn’t have some level of culpability in all of this. Clearly, long before COVID-19 or George Floyd or Donald Trump, something had gone wrong at Cornerstone. I had always shrugged off the crude, hysterical, sky-is-falling Facebook posts I would see from people at the church. I found it amusing, if not particularly alarming, that some longtime Cornerstone members were obsessed with trolling me on Twitter. Now I couldn’t help but think these were warnings—bright-red blinking lights—that should have been taken seriously. My dad never had a social-media account. Did he have any idea just how lost some of his sheep really were?

I had never told Winans about the confrontations at my dad’s viewing, or the letter I received after taking Rush Limbaugh’s name in vain at the funeral. Now I was leaning across the table, unloading every detail. He narrowed his eyes and folded his hands and gave a pained exhale, mouthing that he was sorry. He could not even manage the words.

We both kept quiet for a little while. And then I asked him something I’d thought about every day for the previous 18 months—a sanitized version of my wife’s outburst in the living room.

“What’s wrong with American evangelicals?”

Winans thought for a moment.

“America,” he replied. “Too many of them worship America.”

This article was adapted from Tim Alberta’s new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. It appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “The Church of America.”

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Emotions can run high in the skies. Why wouldn’t they?

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Have you listened lately to what Trump is saying? A moral case against the Israeli hostage deal The money always wins. A sort-of-common, very strange cat trick

Fear of Flying

An airplane is an odd environment: You’re buckled into a flying piece of metal hurling through clouds, sitting in very close proximity to strangers, who may need to shuffle into an aisle every time you have to pee. You’re a member of a temporary, placeless mini-society, following both explicit and unwritten rules distinct from those on Earth. No wonder, then, that some people act sort of strange. They cry. They consume gallons of tomato juice. They swear by rituals (ginger ale and a neck pillow, anyone?) to exert a modicum of control in an environment otherwise totally stripped of it. Most flyers are quiet and courteous to their fellow travelers, even if they’re exhausted or cranky, but some—a small but disruptive cohort—use their time in the friendly skies to act out.

Many of the reasons people might act a little snippy on planes are not that deep: They are in a cramped space; they may be hungry or tired or tipsy; they’re trying to squeeze plump bags into limited overhead bins to avoid paying fees. Seats are cramped, and flight cancellations have been frequent. People place a lot of pressure on flights, especially during the holidays, Sheryl Skaggs, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, told me; those who fly rarely, and who “don’t really understand the rules of the road,” may be making a big annual trip, with high expectations in tow. Someone who spent $600 on a flight and waited through three hours of unexplained delays, missing a family dinner as a result, might be a bit cross.

For most people, the inconvenience and indignities of travel mean they act a bit frosty to their seatmate or retreat into noise-canceling headphones. But a small number of airplane miscreants might vape in the bathroom or throw a fit instead. Incidents of “air rage” have gone viral since the pandemic began, with people acting in erratic and sometimes violent ways, often in response to mask mandates. But problematic plane behavior may have deeper roots. Skaggs and a colleague recently published a paper looking at misconduct on planes—including physical violence and verbal conflicts—over a period of 21 years ending in 2020. Even before the pandemic, she told me, reports of bad behavior in the skies ticked up sharply.

Skaggs found that alcohol frequently fueled problems on flights, but the combination of less comfortable conditions for travelers, alongside low transparency from airlines that often cancel or delay flights, also contributed. Flights were historically choreographed to make passengers feel at ease in a strange environment, Alexandra Murphy, the dean of the college of communication at DePaul University, who has studied airline behavior, told me. From its inception, air travel relied on “building in the familiarity of everyday practice,” she said, and airlines soon started serving hot meals and playing movies. (It’s just like being at home, except that after dinner you find yourself in Albuquerque or Charlotte or London.) Flight attendants passed around drinks and spoke in euphemistic language about what could go wrong, helping make the setting feel safer and more normal for passengers.

But in recent years, airlines have cut costs, and it is no longer the norm for domestic flights to serve free hot meals. Increased security measures since 9/11 mean that flight attendants’ role has more visibly morphed into one of surveillance and discipline, in addition to service. Now that planes are more rule-bound, restrictive environments, some of the illusion of normalcy is shattered, Murphy explained. There’s little to distract people from the fact that they are packed in like sardines, hot, and hungry.

Of course, that dynamic doesn’t always lead to bad behavior, nor does it excuse it. Most flights go off with no crises beyond a few tiffs over who gets the armrests. For a lot of people, the worst they might do is burst into tears while watching a movie. (I asked Dr. Albert Rizzo, the chief medical officer for the American Lung Association, about the theory that low cabin-oxygen levels make people more emotional. He said that this explanation is implausible, because “if you have normal lungs, and if you’re just sitting on a plane, the oxygen saturation in your blood should still be at a very normal level.”) Indeed, most people on planes see others behaving politely and gamely follow suit. And those who do take their plane ride as an opportunity to punch someone are likely displaying a continuity in antisocial behavior that might express itself in other settings, too, Robert Sampson, a sociology professor at Harvard, told me.

Air travel has had a bruising few years, and travelers have felt the effects. Flights were a mess last year. Widespread cancellations and delays, coupled with the infamous Southwest fiasco around Christmas, caused major headaches for flyers. Airlines are seeing fewer cancellations this year. But the ongoing perception that air travel is a nightmare may further poison travelers’ moods, Katy Nastro, a spokesperson for the travel company Going, explained to me. “Pack your patience” may not be the coolest truism, she said, but taking everything with a grain of salt—recognizing that your seatmate may be crabby because she missed a connecting flight, or that the person hogging your armrest may have a fear of flying—is a useful approach if you’re looking to have pleasant holiday-week flights. Nastro noted that most people are stressed out and trying to navigate the unwritten rules of air travel. Hopefully, people on your flight won’t pee on other passengers, refuse to stop singing, or have a meltdown in the aisle. But if they do, remember: You won’t be in the air forever.

Related:

There is no good way to travel anywhere in America. There are two types of airport people.

Today’s News

Israel and Hamas agreed to a deal that would release some hostages and include a four-day pause in fighting. North Korea launched a military spy satellite, violating bans by the United Nations. In response, South Korea is planning to resume aerial surveillance on their shared border. Sam Altman has returned to his role as OpenAI’s CEO after a shocking ouster.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: In many ways, OpenAI’s story is just beginning, Damon Beres says. The turmoil at the company will affect the future of AI development. The Weekly Planet: 2023 just notched its most ominous climate record yet, Zoë Schlanger writes. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf gathers reader responses on what international issues matter most to them. Work in Progress: The OpenAI mess is about one big thing, Derek Thompson writes.

Evening Read

Millennium Images / Gallery Stock

Have Yourself an Early Little Christmas

By Elizabeth Bruenig

All of the arguments that chestnuts should not be roasting on an open fire in the month of November make sense to me: the nagging fact that retailers haul out the proverbial holly before Halloween has fully passed for purely commercial reasons, further cheapening an already materialistic mode of celebration; the dilution of a particularly special time of year by stretching it to the point of exhaustion; the infringement upon both Thanksgiving and the traditional Christian season of Advent, which each tend to be swallowed up by premature Christmas cheer; the obnoxious recruitment of Christmas into the culture wars—think malicious wishes for a “merry Christmas”—that can make the entire season feel alienating and isolating. Every position above has its merits, and none of them stops me from rockin’ around my Christmas tree starting November 1.

Maybe there is no good defense of getting into the Christmas spirit as early as I do—though I can’t help but feel a sense of kinship with those other handful of houses already decked out in lights before Thanksgiving. So have some patience with those of us who need a little Christmas right this very minute: a two-and-a-half-month Christmas really does have a few pleasures to recommend it.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Why Americans hate a good economy How Reconstruction created American public education What Hamas promises, Iranians know too well.

Culture Break

Epic Records

Listen. André 3000, the legendary Outkast emcee, is no longer rapping. But his recent flute album is him speaking anew.

Watch. Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (in theaters now) is an enjoyable extravaganza.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

In the 2024 election, candidates will debate U.S. foreign policy toward China, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Iran, Mexico, and beyond. What foreign-policy matters are most important to you and why?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

For and Against a Cease-Fire

In The Washington Post, Shadi Hamid advocates for a cessation of hostilities in the Middle East, pending negotiations:

First, Hamas must agree to release hostages and commit to halting rocket fire into Israel. In exchange, Israel would agree to stop its bombardment of Gaza as well as any ground incursions into Gazan territory.

Once this first step is taken, a cease-fire would allow for further negotiations... These talks should be led by the United States, with the active support of governments in communication with Hamas... These countries should demand that Hamas offload its governing responsibilities in Gaza to the Palestinian Authority … Just as it is unrealistic to ask Israel to accept an unconditional cease-fire, so, too, is the notion that Hamas can be “eradicated”… Truly eliminating the organization—one with hundreds of thousands of supporters and sympathizers—would require mass killing on an unprecedented scale.

In The Atlantic, Hillary Clinton describes a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas that she helped negotiate in 2012, and explains why she opposes calls for a cease-fire in today’s conflict:

In 2014, Hamas violated the cease-fire and started another war by abducting Israeli hostages and launching rocket attacks against civilians. Israel responded forcefully, but Hamas remained in control of Gaza. The terrorists re-armed, and the pattern repeated itself in 2021, with more civilians killed. This all culminated in the horrific massacre of Israeli civilians last month, the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust …

[Hamas has] proved again and again that they will not abide by cease-fires, will sabotage any efforts to forge a lasting peace, and will never stop attacking Israel … Cease-fires freeze conflicts rather than resolve them … In 2012, freezing the conflict in Gaza was an outcome we and the Israelis were willing to accept. But Israel’s policy since 2009 of containing rather than destroying Hamas has failed. A cease-fire now that restored the pre–October 7 status quo ante would leave the people of Gaza living in a besieged enclave under the domination of terrorists and leave Israelis vulnerable to continued attacks. It would also consign hundreds of hostages to continued captivity.

At The Homebound Symphony, Alan Jacobs argues that the cost of things is seldom plainly stated:

Especially in time of war, few political commentators take even the first step towards this vital honesty, which is to admit that someone will be hurt. Significantly fewer still take the next step, which is to acknowledge the extent of [the] pain — they will make their calculations based on the best-case scenario, or indeed something rather better than that … Almost every policy has higher costs than its supporters want to admit, and if readers see the probable consequences, they may well decide that the game isn’t worth the candle.

At Gideon’s Substack, Noah Millman argues that a moral imperative as basic as “stop genocides” compels us to prioritize solutions that are actually effective. He worries that people gravitate toward moralistic but unrealistic stances because doing so “absolves them of the terrible possibility that whatever they do could not only fail, but be counterproductive.”

In his telling, having the right intent is not what’s most important:

Hamas is a group with clear genocidal intent; that’s obvious after October 7th if it wasn’t before. Israel is a country that was born in response to genocide. Does that mean Israel should have carte blanche to do whatever it deems necessary to destroy Hamas? No… because Israel’s proper response is a prudential question, a judgment call. Israel’s goal of destroying Hamas is justified, yes, but that doesn’t mean jus in bello considerations go out the window, nor does it mean that every justified action will lead to good outcomes. And good outcomes are what matters...

Does that mean the world is obliged to put pressure on Israel to end the fighting, given the horrific humanitarian situation unfolding in Gaza, the massive loss of innocent life, and the real potential for ethnic cleansing or even genocide? Again: No. That’s also a prudential question, also a judgment call, one that has to be evaluated based on likely outcomes. Pressure could be counterproductive, prompting no change in Israeli action now and greater Israeli intransigence in the future. If pressure were effective, meanwhile, it could lead to an equivocal outcome in the war that results in worse fighting, and a more terrible vengeance, in the near future. I’m not saying either of those conclusions are certain ... I’m just saying that there’s no moralistic framework to decide these things, no clean-handed policy to apply that is certainly right because it is rightly intended.

A Case for Equality

In a speech to The Federalist Society, Bari Weiss argues that there is peril in the concept of equity as distinct from equality of opportunity:

For Jews, there are obvious and glaring dangers in a worldview that measures fairness by equality of outcome rather than opportunity. If underrepresentation is the inevitable outcome of systemic bias, then overrepresentation—and Jews are 2 percent of the American population—suggests not talent or hard work, but unearned privilege. This conspiratorial conclusion is not that far removed from the hateful portrait of a small group of Jews divvying up the ill-gotten spoils of an exploited world.

But it is not only Jews who suffer from the suggestion that merit and excellence are dirty words. It is every single one of us. It is strivers of every race, ethnicity, and class. That is why Asian American success, for example, is suspicious. The percentages are off. The scores are too high. The starting point, as poor immigrants, is too low. From whom did you steal all that success?

An Unexpected Convert

In UnHerd, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who famously left Islam for atheism, explains her turn to a new religion:

Why do I call myself a Christian now?

Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

We endeavour to fend off these threats with modern, secular tools …And yet, with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground …

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition. ​​That legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity — from the nation state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning.

It seems to me that a belief in the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is a credible answer to what most unites us, or could unite us—to whatever extent hundreds of millions can be united.

Provocation of the Week

Jennifer Burns, a history professor at Stanford, is the author of books on Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand. While being interviewed by the economist Tyler Cowen, this exchange occurred:

Cowen: Many of us observing history have the sense that the intellectual tradition within the American right has been in decline for several decades. (A) Do you agree? (B) If so, what, most fundamentally, is driving that change?

Burns: I think it’s a less vigorously intellectual culture. One thing I sometimes face with undergraduates is, they’re genuinely surprised when I say, “Well, yes, the conservatives had all the ideas in the 20th century. The conservatives really made an impact because they came up with all these ideas that were really powerful and important.” It doesn’t really compute because the conservatism they’ve grown up with is not driven by ideas in any meaningful way … conservatism became an establishment, and then you have a set of greatest hits, and you have a variety of ways you can make your living within this establishment, provided you adhere to the greatest hits. There’s not a ton of incentives to do things differently. I do think there’s a lot of ideological ferment on the right or amid conservatives right now. It’s heavy on ideas. It’s often in internet forms that are not deep engagement with ideas, I would say, in the same way as when you’re reading books and magazines. I think it’s faster and more rapid.

It’s really interesting. There’s much more competition in the realm of ideas than there was. Besides reading a book or going to college, you can get ideas — they’re coming out of everywhere, coming out of the ether. I think that’s going to lend less coherence. You can have a lot of people who are intellectual leaders of smaller tribes rather than having a couple of the big leaders that everyone’s heard of — Friedman, Hayek, this and that.

I just think we’re in a more fragmented place. I tend to attribute it to the media environment we’re in, which probably isn’t going away anytime soon. So the question is, can we live and thrive in this fragmented-attention ecosphere, or are we going to recreate something akin to the three big networks [laughs] to filter and manage all the information we have?

I think we’ll see that evolve, or not, over the next 50 years.

Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note, and may be edited for length and clarity.

All of the arguments that chestnuts should not be roasting on an open fire in the month of November make sense to me: the nagging fact that retailers haul out the proverbial holly before Halloween has fully passed for purely commercial reasons, further cheapening an already materialistic mode of celebration; the dilution of a particularly special time of year by stretching it to the point of exhaustion; the infringement upon both Thanksgiving and the traditional Christian season of Advent, which each tend to be swallowed up by premature Christmas cheer; the obnoxious recruitment of Christmas into the culture wars—think malicious wishes for a “merry Christmas”—that can make the entire season feel alienating and isolating. Every position above has its merits, and none of them stop me from rockin’ around my Christmas tree starting November 1.

Maybe there is no good defense of getting into the Christmas spirit as early as I do—though I can’t help but feel a sense of kinship with those other handful of houses already decked out in lights before Thanksgiving. So have some patience with those of us who need a little Christmas right this very minute: a two-and-a-half-month Christmas really does have a few pleasures to recommend it.

First, there are the practical reasons to deck the halls early. If you adore Christmastime and have spent several years accumulating decorations, you might as well get your money’s worth by enjoying them as long as you like. (So goes my husband’s rationale for draping the house in strings of lights as soon as the last trick-or-treater heads home.) If your decorating regimen involves outdoor work, it’s also pleasant to get it done earlier in autumn, before it’s time to go caroling out in the snow.

[Charlie Warzel: The case for keeping up your Christmas tree until March]

Then there are the more personal explanations. Christmas is beautiful, and not strictly in the religious sense: As the days grow darker and the nights fall longer, spangling one’s dwelling in twinkling lights brings a sense of joy and comfort. The holiday also offers opportunities for engaging with beauty for its own sake. Only during this time of year do we ornament trees, wreaths, and garlands with shining globes and gleaming baubles. There are elegant versions of Christmas décor and kitschy versions; both, to me, are lovely in their own ways. Adorned with light and color, ordinary objects—houses, streetlamps, shop windows—are transformed as if by magic.

Christmas is an enchanted time. It has the power to connect people in ways we don’t normally explore. The season permits us to share the details of our lives with acquaintances and friends in the form of catch-up calls and Christmas cards—I treasure the notes I receive, and all of the adorable pictures. There are few opportunities in the year to give gifts both to beloved friends and near strangers—a mail carrier, a delivery driver, an office custodian—but Christmas serves as grounds to reach out with good tidings and cheer. In a lonely and sometimes cold world, Christmas is an occasion to wish one another happiness and warmth.

[Max Khan Hayward: Eat, drink, and be merry! No really.]

This is one of the many reasons why the abuse of Christmas to exclude or antagonize people is a tragedy and a travesty. In recent years, the greeting “merry Christmas” and with it the whole of the holiday have been marshaled in support of a particular political agenda, one that prizes occasions to hurt feelings. But these efforts have mainly succeeded at making Christmas celebrations feel loaded with unnecessary political content. The point of the holiday has never been to bully or harass, and there is room for all kinds of Christmastide joy—not just the sort that came standard in the mid-century. For this reason, I exclusively wish people “happy holidays”— after all, multiple holidays (including Thanksgiving, New Year’s, and the wintertime celebrations of other cultures and religions) occur in the span of a long Christmas season. Excluding people from the fun isn’t in the spirit of Christmas.

Because Christmas in the fullest sense is about love and peace. Few other seasons are so dedicated to the notion of goodwill among people as this one—there are patriotic holidays for national amity and Valentine’s Day for the celebration of romantic love, but Christmas is about a more universal love that encompasses all nations and all people. Largely because of this sentiment, it’s hard for me to think of a happier time. Why not celebrate Christmas even sooner? I could certainly be tempted to enjoy the season even more—in the Philippines, for example, Christmas cheer arrives in September and lasts until a week after the new year. But the mundanity of the year is perhaps what lends Christmas its special powers, and so I wait for Halloween to pass to put my festive playlist on loop. Still, I keep a little Christmas in my heart all year round.

Christian Concern says eight-month-old Indi Gregory has been moved to a hospice.

Israel's assault on Gaza could spell the end of the Christian community's long history in the enclave.

The centre-right is wary of teaming up with the far right

This is the time to address Israelis in the spirit of mutual respect, hope, and truthfulness; to move beyond the dismissive, derogatory, and threatening words and deeds that define the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis, and between Arabs and Jews.

I was born and raised in Jerusalem. I started out as a Palestinian, then became a Palestinian Jordanian, then an immigrant to America, and then an American, now for more than half a century. But nothing—not time, not distance—has diluted my empathy with the Palestinians and Palestine, and nothing has altered my view that all people have rights and deserve to be treated with respect. During my medical residency in the U.S., I met American Jewish doctors who shared my interests and curiosity, if not necessarily my views. Some of them remain my good friends to this day. I have been fortunate in my work, at the American Task Force on Palestine, to develop treasured and enduring friendships with many Jewish people of different nationalities, including Israelis. It is in this very American spirit that I address Israelis today.

[Graeme Wood: What is Israel trying to accomplish?]

I must start by noting that our family lost everything in Jerusalem in 1948. We survived and even thrived, but this loss is a core truth of my family’s history. Yet even as I have lived Palestinian pain, I have made an effort to study and understand Jewish pain, which is primordial and deep.

Palestinians—almost unanimously—view Zionism not as a triumph, as so many Jews view it, but as a historical tragedy. What is today the nation of Israel began in the late 19th century as a quasi-messianic Western movement to transform historic Palestine into a Jewish state, which had not existed for 2,000 years. The story from our perspective is one of relentless, systematic dispossession of the indigenous Arab population, sponsored by Western colonial powers who were at best cavalier toward Arab rights and aspirations, and at worst brutal and racist.

Viewed this way, one sees that the Zionist project would have faced fierce resistance regardless of whether it comprised Jews, Danes, Samoans, or any other group or sect. And what continues to the present day in Israel/Palestine—an occupation and settlement enterprise that deprives all Palestinians of any form of political or civic rights—would engender hostility in any similar context. The psychology of the prisoner toward his jailer or the subordinate to his master is a far more apposite basis for Palestinian attitudes toward Israel than the paradigm of European-style anti-Semitism, which for centuries otherized Jews as disloyal and untrustworthy, unworthy of equal status with Christian citizens. Despite a common misperception, we Palestinians understand the terrible crimes that were committed against Jews by European Christianity, and we know that, while not nearly so dire, the experience of Jews living as minorities in Muslim-majority countries had its acute challenges and dangers. But this doesn’t change the essential fact that the Palestinians are bystanders to history, and victims of it.

Ultimately, though—no matter what happens in Gaza—two peoples will still have to share the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The Israelis aren’t leaving, and neither are the Palestinians. Israel exists, no matter what Hamas might want. Its regional military supremacy and support from Western superpowers ensure that it is here to stay. The Israelis have a strong national identity and sense of purpose, and that is only reinforced, as we have seen, by brutal attacks against their civilians.

Palestinians are never going to become Zionists or fall in love with Israeli nationalism. That, however, should not be the standard or the goal. Israel and the world should strive to strengthen the very large community of Palestinians who accept Israel but who seek full political rights and equal standing as citizens. If the world values the ethos of human dignity regardless of race or religion, then at some point Palestinians, including Palestinian refugees, will need to have a nation-state of their own, whether in a unified polity consisting of the West Bank and Gaza, or in a single Israel/Palestine state, or in an agreed-upon regional federation where all residents are citizens with full equal rights. Israelis will need an iron-clad guarantee of their security and a comprehensive, binding cessation of all hostilities, as well as a normalization of relations with their Middle Eastern neighbors.

[Read: A war to end all wars between Israel and Palestine]

No one, especially not now, can be deluded into thinking that any of this will be easy. I’ve spent much of my life pursuing the goal of Palestinian independence, to no avail. A reckoning and reconciliation of this magnitude will face implacable foes, including fundamentalist Islamists who reject Israel outright and traffic in the worst sort of anti-Semitism; militant secular Zionists who treat Arabs as strangers in their own land; right-wing religious Zionists who thirst for a “Greater Land of Israel” and eschew Palestinian rights altogether; and Christian evangelicals who view an expansionist Israel as crucial to their end-times theology. Belligerence is mutually reinforcing, and everyone involved must reject this cycle of hostility.

Moreover, both sides will have a lot to put behind them. For Palestinians, the scars of the Nakba of 1948, the humiliating military defeats since then, the occupation, and the pervasive domination of their lives. For Israelis, the refusal of Palestinians to accept their ancient connection to the land, and decades of cruel, fanatical terror campaigns.

But all of this hard work can be done, and obstacles can be overcome if we prioritize our children’s futures over the grievances of our grandparents.

There is nothing mystical about conflicts among human beings. There never has been, nor will there be, a military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian situation. Israel obviously can, in its campaign against Hamas, flatten Gaza. It has the machines and bombs to do so. But it can’t destroy the Palestinian desire to be free. Rather, political strife throughout history has been most durably resolved through dialogue, give-and-take, and mature acceptance of outcomes that do not satisfy all ambitions. Weapons may kill or defend against killing, but human bonds and relations are what will create and then keep the peace. Some might say that now, while we stand at the edge of an abyss, is the worst time to ask for maturity and compromise and a recognition of each other’s humanity. But this is a message that needs to be heard, especially now.

Located close to the border with Israel, the village has already suffered fallout from three weeks of clashes.