I look out from my window at a world that claims to be moving forward at the speed of fiber-optics, yet seems stuck in the mud of ancient greed. We have shiny boxes in our pockets with these “Large Language Models” that can attempt to mimic a soul, and yet the heart of our nation feels like it’s being hollowed out by a cold, calculating hand. They tell us capitalism is basically the air the country breathes. But they’re selling you a bill of goods.
A hammer isn’t the man who owns the factory; it’s just a tool. The sin isn’t in the tool; the sin is in the relation. It’s in the way the man at the top looks at the man at the bottom, not as a brother, but as a decimal point to be rounded down. A line in a spreadsheet.
We see a “Conservative” movement talk of “Christian values” while they build a literal fence towards the south. A fence made of stone, wire and of the mind, to keep out the “other.” They point a finger at the immigrant, the dreamer, the man with a different shade of skin or a different accent, and they say, “There is the thief of your prosperity.” It’s an old trick, a weary dance. The mythology of the Carpenter taught us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. They have traded the Sermon on the Mount for a quarterly earnings report that we then use to justify a system that starves the spirit and strips the workers.
How can you claim to follow the Man of Sorrows while you lobby for laws that make it harder for a father to see his children because he’s stuck in “job lock,” tethered to a corporation just to keep his healthcare? How can you worship a King who had no place to lay His head while you extract “passive income” from those who can barely afford a roof?
The “othering” of the migrant is the ultimate betrayal of the faith they claim. It is a shield used by the powerful to hide the fact that they are the ones moving the goalposts further and further away for all of us. They want us fighting over the crumbs of cultural identity so we don’t notice they’ve walked off with the whole loaf. Greed, hatred, and selfishness aren’t just “politics”, they are the direct antithesis of the Carpenter’s Gospel. You cannot serve both God and the extraction of surplus value.
We are living in a time of information saturation, where KWWA-style “news” keeps us in a state of high anxiety. But look past the doom scroll. The struggle isn’t between you and your neighbor; it’s between the many who produce and the few who own. It’s time we stopped letting them use a distorted faith to divide a common humanity.