Chris Abraham

When someone says “white Christian nationalism is an existential threat to democracy,” I can’t evaluate it without definitions, because two different accusations get blurred into one slogan.

First: what do they mean by white Christian nationalism? Do they mean a specific ideology asserting the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation and should be governed that way, with laws and institutions reflecting Protestant values, often paired with the idea that white Christians should maintain cultural and political dominance? Or do they mean an identity bucket where anyone who is white, Christian, or patriotic/nationalist is treated as inherently suspect? Those are radically different claims. Conflating them turns debate into moral sorting.

Second: what do they mean by democracy? Democracy, as a mechanism, is descriptive. It doesn’t “correct” outcomes, it reports what the electorate chose. If it were prescriptive, we’d just install the “right” result and skip the election. The moral content people are usually defending is not “democracy” by itself, it’s the rights-and-limits framework that constrains what majorities can do.

Call that what it is: the American way of life. Constitutional rights, equal citizenship, due process, free exercise, free speech, and limits on state power. Voting is the mechanism operating inside that framework, not the framework itself. And the framework only holds when there’s cultural buy-in. The process is downstream of civic ethos, trust, restraint, and a shared willingness to keep playing the same game even when you lose.

So if the claim is “white Christian nationalism threatens the American way of life, equal citizenship, and constitutional limits,” say that and name the mechanisms: laws, institutional capture, rights restrictions, election rule changes, violence. If the claim is “a majority voting for illiberal policies is anti-democratic,” then democracy is being redefined as a moral outcome rather than a process. Either way, “democracy” is doing too much work here, and it starts functioning like a shibboleth: a prestige word that signals virtue while staying conveniently undefined.

My admittedly bombastic theory is that Trump’s policy pivots aren’t random. They look like a sequence of economic levers designed to keep the U.S. economy humming long enough to avoid being the president holding the bag when the global slowdown arrives.

Start with tariffs. Tariffs on China, EVs, steel, electronics, and industrial inputs are effectively forced industrial policy. They push supply chains out of China and into North America. Companies start reshoring factories, expanding ports, building warehouses, hiring compliance teams, and retooling production. Even the friction creates economic activity: logistics, lawyers, consultants, subsidies, and construction.

But tariffs run into legal and political obstacles. Courts intervene. Trade partners retaliate. Congress grumbles. The lever gets partially blocked.

So the next lever becomes deportation.

Large-scale deportation isn’t just immigration policy, it’s a gigantic federal spending machine. It requires detention centers, transportation contracts, surveillance systems, immigration courts, federal marshals, border infrastructure, and private contractors. At the same time it tightens the labor market by reducing the low-wage workforce, which pushes wages upward in construction, agriculture, and services. More enforcement spending plus wage pressure equals money circulating domestically.

But deportation also runs into courts, injunctions, and bureaucratic resistance. Judges slow it down. Agencies drag their feet. The lever gets stymied.

So the pivot becomes the one lever that historically moves the fastest and faces the fewest legal obstacles: defense spending.

Modern warfare consumes extraordinarily expensive hardware. Interceptor missiles, cruise missiles, drone systems, naval deployments, precision bombs. Every missile fired has to be replaced. Every depleted stockpile requires replenishment orders. That means immediate procurement contracts for companies like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and hundreds of subcontractors making electronics, metals, explosives, and guidance systems.

In economic terms, it is a rapid procurement cycle that pushes billions of dollars into manufacturing and supply chains.

Viewed through this lens, the pattern is simple. When one economic lever gets blocked, another appears.

Tariffs stimulate reshoring.

Deportation stimulates enforcement spending and wage pressure.

Defense spending stimulates procurement and industrial production.

Different policy arenas, same macro effect: factories running, contracts flowing, and money moving through the system.

The objective, in this theory, isn’t elegance. It’s survival.

Because politically the one thing Trump absolutely cannot be is the president standing at the podium the day the recession officially begins. If the downturn is inevitable, the strategy becomes stretching the American economic engine just long enough to ride out the global turbulence better than Europe or China.

What fascinates me about the last two elections is the perfect symmetry.

After the 2020 election, millions of Republicans were convinced the system had been manipulated. The arguments focused on mail-in ballots, counting procedures, and suspicious activity in places like Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. For those voters, Joe Biden wasn’t just a political opponent. He was an illegitimate president.

Fast-forward to 2024 and now you can watch the mirror image forming on the other side. Suddenly you see arguments that Elon Musk’s influence on X, his political spending, algorithms, or vague “irregularities” must explain Trump’s victory. Threads circulate suggesting something about the numbers feels off, that turnout patterns are strange, or that the result can’t possibly be legitimate. The implication becomes exactly the same one we heard four years earlier.

“Our side couldn’t have lost fairly.”

The cast changes. The argument doesn’t. Which means we now have a strange new political tradition in America: whichever side loses concludes the election must have been rigged.

Republicans say Biden is illegitimate.

Democrats say Trump is illegitimate.

And honestly, there’s a weird logic to it.

If an election is truly competitive, the losing side should feel like they got absolutely crushed by the result. Nobody walks out of a real fight saying, “Well that felt totally fair and satisfying.” They walk out furious, convinced something must have gone wrong.

In that sense, the fact that both sides keep reacting this way might actually be evidence that the system is doing exactly what competitive systems do: producing clear winners and very unhappy losers.

When one side wins and the other side feels robbed, you have politics.

When both sides, at different times, feel robbed… you probably have democracy.

From a purely observational standpoint, it’s almost elegant.

Two elections. Two presidents. Two completely different tribes insisting the other one couldn’t possibly have won legitimately.

American politics has somehow achieved bipartisan election denial.

It appeared as the prayer of the day on the very first day of the Lenten season, and it honestly caught me by surprise. The words are disarmingly direct. Line after line asks to be freed from the desire to be praised, admired, preferred, consulted, or even noticed. Then it goes even further and asks for the grace to genuinely accept the opposite: that others might be praised while you go unnoticed, that others might be preferred, that you might decrease while someone else increases.

The first time I read it, I just sat there for a minute.

Since then I’ve been going back to it once a week, slowly, usually alongside the Serenity Prayer. Not as some dramatic spiritual exercise, just as a quiet check-in. A kind of recalibration.

What makes it feel especially meaningful right now is the environment we’re all living in. The modern information stream is basically a nonstop contest for attention, outrage, loyalty, and tribal identity. Every day there’s another narrative trying to recruit you, another argument demanding you prove you’re on the right side, another chorus telling you who to blame or despise.

The Litany of Humility quietly cuts through all of that.

It reminds me that the real struggle isn’t out there nearly as much as it’s inside the human ego. The desire to be admired. The desire to win arguments. The desire to be seen, validated, or proven right.

Pairing it with the Serenity Prayer has been surprisingly stabilizing. One prayer helps let go of the illusion that I can control the chaos of the world. The other gently challenges the ego’s constant demand to be important inside that chaos.

Taken together, they feel less like religious performance and more like maintenance for the soul. A weekly reset.

Not because I’m especially humble. Honestly, probably the opposite. But because they remind me what direction I’m supposed to be walking.

In a culture that constantly inflames pride, anger, and tribal loyalty, the aspiration becomes something much simpler: a little less ego, a little more patience, a little more charity.

Just trying to keep pointed toward becoming the kind of person I hope to be.

One thing the Lenten readings keep circling back to is pride. Not the cartoon version of pride that shows up as obvious arrogance, but the quieter form that sits underneath so many human problems. According to the tradition, the first sin in Eden wasn’t violence or cruelty. It was the belief that we could decide what is good and evil for ourselves. It was the temptation to step into God’s place.

That same pattern shows up again and again in the Gospel passages we hear during Lent. The disciples are already thinking in terms of rank, position, proximity to power. Who gets to sit at the right hand? Who gets the place of honor? It’s the most human instinct in the world. We want to be close to the throne.

And Christ calmly flips the entire idea over. “The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them… but it shall not be so among you.”

In other words, the normal operating system of human hierarchy is not the one he’s installing.

Greatness, in the kingdom he describes, looks almost inverted. The one who wants to be first becomes the servant. The one who wants to lead becomes the one who carries burdens. Authority is not something to display, but something to spend on behalf of others.

That theme echoes in the other readings too. Don’t perform holiness for applause. Don’t judge so quickly. Reconcile before you worship. Love even your enemies. Measure generously, because the same measure comes back to you.

Taken together, it paints a picture of Christ that is easy to forget. He isn’t a warlord, a crusader, or a mythic king in armor. He moves through the Gospels almost like a quiet countercurrent to human pride. Wherever people try to climb higher, he points lower. Wherever people try to secure honor, he talks about service.

And Lent becomes a kind of mirror. Not a finger pointed at other people’s hypocrisy, but a small examination of our own reflex to climb, to judge, to be right, to be admired. The strange promise of the Gospel is that letting go of that climb isn’t humiliation. It’s freedom.

“Whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”