Unpopular but true opinion: Believing in God doesn’t make one any more American than someone who doesn’t believe in God. There are many Americans who are loyal, hard working Americans and they don’t necessarily believe in God. And that’s ok too. Humans have free will.

This world is a divine simulation, and Jesus Christ is the source code.

Jesus actually walked on water.

The Bible is the most important book in history.

Faith is being marketed as a cure for chaos, and the price is your freedom. I see the pull. I grew up inside it. I remember the warmth, the shared songs, the clean lines between good and evil, the hush that settles when someone says, this is the way. Order feels like oxygen when life crowds you. The current revival reads less like wisdom and more like a hunger for a leash, gilded and blessed, handed over with a reassuring smile. The rise feeds on exhaustion, status fear, and the ache of being unseen. People feel cornered by runaway tech, by markets that grind, by feeds that colonize attention, by leaders who speak in slogans, by communities reduced to icons and merch. When predictability falls apart, minds reach for a parent figure, a story with an ending, a tribe that votes as one. Hand over your uncertainty, receive certainty. Hand over your solitude, receive a crowd. Hand over your responsibility, receive instructions. A theistic frame promises meaning on delivery. It gives you a cosmic job title and a script for grief, sex, death, and power. The script flatters the tribe and straightens the spine. What looks like comfort behaves like ownership. Once your value arrives stamped from heaven, it becomes leverage. Authorities translate the stamp. They decide which desires are holy and which parts of you must be cut for purity. The language of salvation turns fluid people into figurines. You are told this is freedom because someone else has done the thinking for you. Fuse cross and flag, call it destiny, and anxiety becomes a militia for meaning. Christian nationalism packages a myth of return, a promise that the country can be washed clean if the right priests hold the right offices and the rest fall in line. It treats the nation as a body with one soul and one story, then appoints itself the soul’s interpreter. Shame becomes policy. Difference becomes trespass. Sameness is enforced and the threat hides inside the word neighbor. I know why friends walk into that chapel. They want the ache to end. They want sex to stop feeling like a court case. They want family roles that do not dissolve every decade. They want to wake up and know what is required. I have felt the same pull. Certainty felt like relief until I examined the trade. The bargain handed me a prepackaged purpose and took my right to invent one. It offered absolution while keeping me small. Strip away the hymns and you see the engine at work. The managerial instinct of priesthood is control. It praises humility while collecting your will. It condemns pride, then invites pride in submission. It refuels itself with your fear of meaninglessness. A void terrifies, so a story steps in, then criminalizes your urge to test it. Outsource your meaning and you grow brittle, which makes you cling harder, which strengthens the story. Empires thrive on that loop. People disappear inside it. Some will answer that none of this reaches them, that their faith is true in a way analysis cannot touch. I understand that certainty. I once called it revelation. Ask yourself, though: what would count as error for you? If no possible experience could disconfirm your belief, you are guarding identity, not tracking reality. Do you believe because you are convinced, or because you need it to be so? Would you hold the same creed if you were born under a different sky, with different parents and different hymns? What evidence moved you, and what evidence would move you the other way? Who benefits from your conviction and who pays the cost? Even if the story were true, another question waits: does this truth enlarge your agency, deepen your honesty, widen your circle of care, or does it recruit you into obedience and the policing of strangers? Truth that demands the surrender of the self consumes the one who believes it. There is another route, and it begins in silence, not revelation. When every system built on divine authority collapses, what remains is not nothingness but space. The silence that follows the fall of dogma can feel unbearable, because you keep listening for the voice that used to answer everything, and none comes. Yet in that quiet, something else stirs. You begin to hear your own agency taking shape, raw and uncertain but real. People fear that space because it has no map, no border, no promise of return, yet that is its value. The absence of a guide is an invitation to write your own. Existence offers no instruction manual, and that emptiness is precisely where creation begins. Meaning becomes an art. Build it with craft and competence. Build it with friendships that survive honest speech. Build it with a body that can carry its own weight and a mind that respects evidence. Build it with love that grows from consent. Practice being alive instead of asking the sky for permission. The religion of duty sells an exit from nihilism by flooding you with dogma, yet what arrives is a second emptiness, the one that appears when you realize your life has been ventriloquized by a script that never fit. Choose creation over cure. Laugh at the void and then work. Commit to projects that matter even if no one is watching. Write your own rituals. Guard your attention like treasure. Learn skills that leave marks in the world. Choose friends with care. Help strangers because you prefer a world where that happens. This is meaning you can own. Virtue is practice. Honesty is telling the truth when your team boos. Courage is action with fear in the room. Temperance is keeping a schedule. Justice is treating other minds and bodies as sovereign. None of this asks for a throne in the clouds. It asks for discipline, for presence, for carrying your own choices. Community does not require cages. You can love a tradition while denying it jurisdiction over your body. You can honor ancestors without letting them choose your future. Authority that claims divine origin evades the burden of proof. Resist it on sight. Grow communities that you enter by consent. Build social trust from transparency. Treat privacy as a default. Form voluntary associations that cannot be captured by a priest or a party boss. Begin with personhood, then ally with others who insist on the same. Growing up religious gave me a map. Parts of it were precious. The music taught reverence. The stories taught care for the weak. The community taught hospitality. I kept the lessons and changed their source. Reverence for reality. Care for the weak because I remember being weak. Hospitality because we all need doors that open. These commitments survive without metaphysics and strengthen without the threat of hell or the promise of heaven. They become choices, which means they become yours. If you feel the pull toward a revival, ask what you hope it will fix: isolation, compulsive screens, economic precarity, collapsing families, the sense that elites are laughing at you. These are real wounds. Ritual helps, but ritual tied to domination treats symptoms while feeding the disease. The healing looks like sovereign individuals building federated communities, like earned competence, like attention reclaimed, like privacy defended, like responsibility carried without a divine manager. The image of the armored believer walking through fire scratches an itch for purity and conquest. It dazzles, then it blinds. Real courage looks different. Stand without costume, without a book to hide behind, without a tribe to punish doubters. Think for yourself and accept the consequences. Refuse to outsource your desires to a heavenly bureaucracy. I say this without contempt for believers. I loved that world once and I still see its beauty. I love ownness more. I love minds that risk heresy. I love people who craft meaning with their hands and pay for it with sweat. You do not need a sacred bureaucracy to live a worthy life. You need honesty, responsibility, and the will to look into the dark and build a light that belongs to you. And if that light flickers, remember it is still yours. That alone is sacred enough.

NEW: I've issued a legal advisory to ensure school districts display the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are indisputably a cornerstone of America’s moral and legal heritage. Now more than ever, these timeless principles are needed in our classrooms.

Atheists: How do you feel about secular orgs getting involved in these protests? Is it related to the cause, or does it alienate the many atheists with different political views?