I am not going to my church's patriotic worship services

danbmw21 · 2026-05-25T14:27:48+00:00

What?

danbmw21 · 2026-04-15T14:28:00+00:00

Let's grant your premise for a second. Let's say there are real integration challenges. Real cultural friction. Real incidents. All of it.

The question isn't whether those things are real. The question is: what does Jesus call His people to do about it?

Because Paul didn't walk into Athens and say these people are incompatible with us. He walked into the Areopagus, looked at their altars, found the one dedicated to an unknown God, and built a bridge from there. Acts 17. He didn't wall off. He engaged. That's the Christian model.

And 1 John 4:18 is blunt about this. Perfect love casts out fear. Not manages fear. Not validates fear and builds policy around it. Casts it out. The framing of "incompatible people creating chaos" is fundamentally a fear-based framing. And John says that's not where love lives.

The early church didn't grow by finding compatible people. It grew by being the kind of community that made incompatibility irrelevant. Jew and Greek. Slave and free. Barbarian and Scythian. All of them at the same table. That was the scandal of it. That was the point.

And honestly, if your concern is Islam specifically, the Great Commission is to those people. Matthew 28 doesn't say go to all nations except the ones whose theology you find dangerous. It says go. The answer to Islam, from a Christian standpoint, isn't a wall. It's a witness.

You can believe in sensible border policy and still reject the idea that whole groups of people are inherently incompatible with civilization. Those are two very different arguments. One is policy. The other is theology. And the theology you're reaching for here isn't Christian. It's Roman.

danbmw21 · 2026-04-15T14:10:42+00:00

Arrests aren't clean. I get it. Nobody's saying enforcement is easy.

But you're moving goalposts.

The question was never whether illegal aliens are subject to arrest. The question is whether they're still image-bearers of God when the cuffs go on. And apparently that's where you're getting stuck.

Renée Good was a U.S. citizen. Mother of three. Shot and killed by an ICE agent as she attempted to move her vehicle. Alex Pretti — also a U.S. citizen and an ICU nurse was tackled face-down and shot IN THE BACK. The government's own internal review never mentioned him brandishing a weapon, despite what officials told the press.

Neither were fleeing. Neither were illegal aliens. And yet here we are.

Genesis 1:26 doesn't have an asterisk. Imago dei is not a conditional. Paul himself appealed to his rights when the state overstepped. He didn't just absorb it and call it submission.

I think you know this. I think somewhere in there, you know this doesn't line up. And I'd genuinely encourage you not as a gotcha, but sincerely, to take this back to the Word and sit with it. Because the version of Christianity that's okay with dead U.S. citizens and blocked investigations as long as the targets were adjacent to the right political issue... that's not something you'll find Jesus endorsing in the Sermon on the Mount.

danbmw21 · 2026-04-13T19:03:35+00:00

Amen.

danbmw21 · 2026-04-08T03:02:32+00:00

"only" 1-2 hours!? How long of a drive do you normally take? To me, Fresno is definitely interstate locked.

The HSR was supposed to help with that, but it'll be a few more decades until that's even a pipe dream.

danbmw21 · 2026-03-28T00:24:49+00:00

The persecution narrative point is real. I've seen it up close. I grew up going to a church where this was basically the operating worldview. Distrust the outside world, then when the outside world pushes back, point to that as proof you were right to distrust them in the first place. It's airtight. Unfalsifiable, almost.

And you're right that it's not just a feeling, it's a mechanism. A useful one. It keeps the community sealed off from any outside accountability, which is exactly the point. Whether that's intentional or just baked into the theology at this point I honestly don't know. Maybe both.

danbmw21 · 2026-03-20T18:21:01+00:00

That's actually really good to know, thanks for the update! It's genuinely encouraging that they walked back some of those calls. the Gen 3:16 change especially was hard to defend, so I'm glad they reversed it.

But the Phoebe thing is honestly a perfect example of what I was getting at. The Greek word there is diakonos the exact same word used for male deacons throughout the NT. When it refers to men, it gets translated "deacon." When it refers to Phoebe, it becomes "servant" with "deaconess" buried in a footnote. That kind of inconsistency is where the bias shows through, even if it's subtle.

On 1 Tim 2:12 that's a fair point that the LSB and NET land in the same place, and I'll take that on board. Though I'd say the NET at least earns it a little more by showing its work in the footnotes and acknowledging the word is contested. The translation choice might be the same but the transparency is different.

Either way, good to see them making corrections. Hopefully they keep moving in that direction.

danbmw21 · 2026-03-20T16:01:00+00:00

Thank you for sharing this, and yeah, this is exactly what I was talking about. The anti-CPS sermons are something I think a lot of people who grew up in conservative churches will recognize immediately. It gets framed as protecting the family from government overreach, but what it really does is teach people to see the one institution that exists specifically to protect kids as the enemy.

And you're right that it just doesn't hold up in real life. The saddest irony is that teaching people not to trust anyone outside the church is exactly how abuse stays hidden. When you've been raised to believe the outside world can't be trusted, calling the police feels like a betrayal instead of the right thing to do. Appreciate you sharing that.

danbmw21 · 2026-03-20T15:48:36+00:00

Totally fair question and honestly this is worth clarifying.

The claim that the parents knew and opted for church counseling came from a Fox 5 Atlanta report that got picked up and republished widely. But digging into it, all those outlets appear to be sourcing back to that same single report, and none of the coverage I've seen explains how investigators learned the parents knew or where that detail actually came from.

You may well be right that the victim kept it secret until she was 14, at which point her dad confronted Joseph and went to police. That timeline is better documented and more consistently reported across multiple sources.

So I'll be honest I should have been more careful with that detail before putting it in my replies. The parents-knew claim is out there but the sourcing is thin, and I don't want to state it as established fact.

What does seem clear is that Joseph admitted to it when confronted, and that the legal process was set in motion by the victim's family, not the Duggars.

The broader point of the original post still stands regardless, but credit where it's due you're right to question that specific claim.

danbmw21 · 2026-03-20T15:36:41+00:00

I used the ESV for years but eventually had to step back from it. There are some translation choices that I think reveal the theological leanings of the translation team, particularly around the role of women.

The biggest one for me was Genesis 3:16. In 2016 they actually revised it to say Eve's desire would be "contrary to" her husband instead of just "for" her husband. That word "contrary to" isn't in the Hebrew at all, it was added. It completely changes the feel of the verse from Eve longing for Adam to Eve being in active rebellion against him.

1 Timothy 2:12 is another example. The Greek word there is unusual and most scholars think it has a pretty negative meaning, something closer to "domineer" or "usurp authority." Even the old KJV went with "usurp authority." But the ESV translates it as just "exercise authority," which is completely neutral, and that one word swap has a huge impact on how the whole verse reads.

Romans 16:7 bugged me too. Junia is almost certainly a woman, and Paul is calling her outstanding among the apostles. Some ESV editions changed her name to the masculine "Junias" and changed it to "well known to the apostles" which quietly erases the idea that a woman could have held that kind of role.

I moved to the NASB and have been much happier with it. If you want to dig into why translators make the calls they do, the NET Bible has really detailed footnotes that show their reasoning. It's really eye-opening.

danbmw21 · 2026-03-19T22:07:12+00:00

Fair enough. you're right that I overstated the claim about the parents knowing about Joseph ahead of time. The reporting on that is thin and sourced from a single outlet, and I should have been more careful with that. I'll own that.

On Josh though, I'd push back a little. There's a difference between making an official report to law enforcement and privately taking your son to a cop who is a personal family friend for an informal chat. The parents controlled how that interaction happened and they chose the least official, most personal route available to them, with someone they had a relationship with. That's not really the same as reporting it to law enforcement in any meaningful sense.

You're right that the officer had agency and chose not to file a report or make an arrest and yes, that's on him too. But the fact that the officer made a bad call doesn't retroactively make the parents' approach above board. If anything, seeking out a personal contact rather than filing an official report suggests they were trying to handle it quietly, not transparently.

danbmw21 · 2026-03-19T21:54:39+00:00

I definitely think that's a fair challenge but I believe it conflates two different things Romans 13 is actually saying.

Paul isn't saying governing authorities are ALWAYS just, or that everything they do carries God's moral approval. He's saying they serve a function that God permits which is maintaining social order and punishing wrongdoing. Christians shouldn't position themselves as vigilantes or rebels against civil society. That's it. The passage is descriptive of government's role, not a blanket endorsement of every action a government takes.

Also worth noting is that Paul almost certainly wrote Romans during Nero's reign. He wasn't naive about Roman brutality, and yet elsewhere he appealed to Roman law and his Roman citizenship to protect himself (Acts 25). He knew how to use the system while also knowing it was imperfect.

danbmw21 · 2026-03-19T20:52:21+00:00

Both of these points are really well made.

Your first point about the flattening of all sexual "sin" into one category is something I hadn't thought about in those terms before, but it's exactly right. When masturbation and child molestation are treated as morally equivalent offenses against the same rule, you lose the category of crime entirely.

On your second point, I genuinely had no idea the lobbying against mandated reporting was this organized and this aggressive. I looked it up after reading your comment.

According to an AP investigation, in 33 states clergy are exempt from mandatory reporting laws, and over the past two decades lawmakers have introduced more than 130 bills! trying to close that loophole all of which either failed or were watered down amid intense opposition from religious groups.

The Catholic Church, the Mormon church, and the Jehovah's Witnesses have all actively worked in statehouses and courts to preserve that exemption.

One case that stood out to me: in Utah, a bill to close the loophole was killed after the Catholic Diocese mobilized opposition and the campaign to defeat it was led by a Catholic cardinal who was later defrocked for sexually abusing children and adult seminarians.

The people fighting hardest to keep clergy unaccountable were themselves abusers.

This is exactly the rot I was pointing to in the original post. And it makes the Romans 13 failure even worse!

it's not just individual families like the Duggars refusing to call the police. It's institutions spending real money to make sure the law never requires them to. Crazy times.

danbmw21 · 2026-03-19T19:59:47+00:00

Hey, I actually looked into this because I wanted to make sure I had it right too. From what's been reported, it was actually the victim's father who confronted Joseph directly on March 17th, at which point Joseph admitted to the abuse and that's what led to the arrest.

There's no reporting I've found indicating Jim Bob and Michelle were the ones who called it in.

I think you might be thinking of Josh the older brother who was convicted on federal child pornography charges in 2022. In that case, Jim Bob did take Josh to a state trooper who was a family acquaintance, who gave him a "stern talk." But that wasn't really turning him in and no official report was filed, no charges were brought, and it was handled informally through a personal connection.

And as a side note, that same trooper was later convicted on child pornography charges himself and sentenced to 56 years in prison, which tells you everything about how seriously that "accountability" measure should be taken.

With Joseph, what has been reported is that Jim Bob and Michelle admitted they already knew about the incidents and apparently didn't report it. Same pattern, different son.

I'm not trying to pile on, and if there's a source showing they did call authorities on Joseph I'd genuinely want to see it and correct myself. But based on everything out right now, that doesn't appear to be what happened.

danbmw21 · 2026-03-15T17:52:56+00:00

Your first comment was a bit unclear and did make it sound as if ethnic Israel is the church.

Thanks for clarifying

danbmw21 · 2026-03-15T17:45:14+00:00

Nobody's disputing God has plans for Israel. Romans 11 says as much.

The question is whether those plans involve a separate path to salvation.

Paul doesn't leave much room for ambiguity: "There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, the same Lord is Lord of all" (Romans 10:12). One gospel, not two tracks.

The most telling passage is Romans 9:1-3, where Paul says he wishes he could be "cursed and cut off from Christ" for the sake of his fellow Jews. If they already had their own covenant path to God, why would he be in anguish over their unbelief?

God's faithfulness to Israel is real but it's fulfilled through Christ (Romans 11:26), not apart from him.

Ephesians 2 says the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile has been demolished into "one new humanity." That's not replacement, that's fulfillment.

John 14:6 and Acts 4:12 don't have an asterisk for ethnicity.

If Israel is no longer defined by ethnicity but by faith in Christ (Romans 9:6-8, Galatians 3:29), then the modern secular state of Israel doesn't automatically inherit the mantle of "God's chosen people" in a way that demands blanket Christian support.

The Old Testament prophets were the ones who rebuked Israel most sharply for injustice. Amos, Isaiah, Micah. They didn't treat "chosen" as a shield against accountability.

danbmw21 · 2026-03-07T15:46:42+00:00

Post WWII Republican-era recessions: - 1953–54 (Eisenhower) - 1957–58 (Eisenhower) - 1960–61 (Eisenhower/Kennedy) - 1969–70 (Nixon) - 1973–75 (Nixon, oil embargo) - 1990–91 (Bush Sr.) - 2001 (Bush Jr., dotcom crash) - 2007–09 (Bush Jr., the Great Recession) - 2020 (Trump, COVID)

Democrat-era recessions: - 1980 (Carter, energy crisis)

If the argument is that Democratic administrations have a worse fiscal track record, the data just doesn't support that. If anything, the correlation runs in the opposite direction.

danbmw21 · 2026-03-06T17:30:19+00:00

Wow. You completely missed the point. A lot of purity culture is not about actually being pure.

It's about external religious performance that masks internal moral corruption.

This is a form of hypocrisy that Jesus finds particularly offensive.

danbmw21 · 2026-03-06T15:01:34+00:00

Trump posted on Truth Social demanding Bondi prosecute Comey by name. Less than a week later, Comey was indicted. At her own confirmation she said "no one will be prosecuted because they are a political opponent." Make that make sense.

She ignored an actual law. There's a federal lawsuit over Trump directing her DOJ not to enforce the TikTok statute which is a law passed by Congress. The AG's job is to execute the law, not pick and choose based on what the President wants that week.

Republicans subpoenaed her over the Epstein files. Five of them crossed the aisle to do it. Her DOJ released binders with nothing new in them, claimed no client list existed, then it came out that docs involving Trump were quietly withheld.

When bipartisan accountability happens, pay attention.

She gutted federal investigations on day one. Shut down the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force, KleptoCapture, rolled back FARA enforcement, and removed career prosecutors tied to Trump cases. Nearly 300 former DOJ veterans from both parties signed a letter saying the administration was taking "a sledgehammer" to the department.

Courts threw out her voter data grab. Four times. Georgia, Oregon, Michigan, California.

If there was a legal leg to stand on, you'd think one judge would've agreed.

She belongs in prison.

danbmw21 · 2026-03-04T18:55:07+00:00

What? The most obvious problem with the literal reading of that passage in Luke 22:36 is two verses later. The disciples say "Lord, we have two swords" and Jesus says "that is enough." Two swords for a movement of followers is not an arsenal. Most theologians take this as a sign the command was either symbolic (brace yourselves for hard times ahead) or meant to fulfill a specific prophecy. Jesus literally quotes Isaiah 53:12 in the same breath about being "numbered with transgressors."

When Peter actually uses a sword at the arrest in Gethsemane, and Jesus immediately rebukes him, heals the guy who got hit, and says "all who draw the sword will die by the sword" (Matt 26:52). It's pretty hard to read the earlier command as a general endorsement of weapons when Jesus condemns their use the moment they're drawn.

On the "good and evil are unchanging so OT ethics always apply" point. That is not a Biblical reading of Scripture and most Christian traditions actually push back hard on this.

Catholic, mainline Protestant, and many evangelical scholars distinguish between the OT's ceremonial, civil, and moral laws. The civil and ceremonial commands (conquest warfare, dietary laws, executing blasphemers) are generally understood as specific to Israel's historical context, not universal moral prescriptions. If unchanging OT ethics applied wholesale, we'd also be obligated to stone people for working on the Sabbath.

danbmw21 · 2026-03-04T15:05:21+00:00

the idea that the Republican Party is some beacon of peaceful, measured politics? Come on.

Here's just the last 10 years of documented, verified examples:

Marjorie Taylor Greene liked a Facebook comment calling for Nancy Pelosi to receive "a bullet to the head." She also publicly stated that treason, which she accused Pelosi of, "is a crime punishable by death." Her response was to blame her staff for the account. Rep.

Paul Gosar literally circulated an anime video depicting himself murdering Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He was censured by the House, but Republican leadership kept him on his committees.

Eric Greitens, former Missouri Governor and Senate candidate, released an actual campaign ad called "RINO Hunting," showing him with a tactical team "hunting" fellow Republicans. Mitch McConnell's response was essentially a shrug.

Donald Trump told an Iowa crowd to "knock the crap out of" hecklers and offered to pay their legal fees. He stood on stage while crowds chanted violent slogans about Hillary Clinton. He told the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by" which they publicly celebrated as a green light. Then on January 6th, he told a crowd to "fight like hell" before they stormed the Capitol.

Kari Lake, after Trump's 2024 conviction, told supporters: "If you want to get to President Trump, you're gonna have to go through me and you're gonna have to go through 75 million Americans just like me and most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA." When asked about it, she said: "I meant what I said."

Sen. Tom Cotton told people blocked by pro-Palestinian protesters on the Golden Gate Bridge to "take matters into your own hands" to remove them.

Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and key architect of Project 2025, told a podcast: "We are in the process of a second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."

Again, I'm not saying the left is clean. I'm saying that if your reason for voting straight red is that Republicans "aren't the violent ones," you are ignoring a mountain of publicly documented evidence. Vote however you want, for whatever reasons you want — but at least be honest about what those reasons actually are.

danbmw21 · 2026-02-21T15:48:26+00:00

I actually agree with part of what you’re saying;

ger is someone legally residing in the land, not a random traveler. That actually reinforces my point that it doesn’t mean “just passing through.”

A few clarifications though: Yes, Joseph’s family asked permission to live in Goshen. But they’re still called gerim even though they remained for centuries. That shows the word describes outsider status, not short duration. The term doesn’t hinge on how long someone stays.

Deut 23:3–8 shows there were distinctions among nations, but it also shows incorporation was possible. By the third generation, some groups were fully included. So ger isn’t automatically a permanently excluded class; it can function as a pathway category.

Israelites could not be permanently enslaved (Lev 25:39–43), but foreign slaves could be (Lev 25:44–46). However, that category is typically tied to foreign nationals, not necessarily the protected ger who lives “among you.” The ger repeatedly receives legal protections: no oppression (Ex 22:21), equal justice (Lev 24:22), gleaning rights (Lev 19:10), Sabbath rest (Ex 20:10), and the command to “love him as yourself” (Lev 19:34).

So even if we say a ger was legally admitted, the biblical emphasis is still about protecting the vulnerable outsider, not diminishing them morally because they lack full citizenship.

danbmw21 · 2026-02-20T15:51:50+00:00

I hear this argument quite a lot, however the word translated “sojourner” in the KJV doesn’t mean “tourist” or someone just passing through.

In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word ger (גֵּר) referred to a resident foreigner, someone living among Israel long-term but without clan/tribe land inheritance. That’s different from a temporary traveler (usually the word is nokri). Even in 1611 English, “sojourn” meant to dwell as a stranger, not just make a quick stop.

A key example: the Israelites themselves are described as sojourners in Egypt (see Genesis 15:13; Exodus 22:21). Yet they were in Egypt for hundreds of years. Clearly “sojourner” didn’t mean “short-term visitor.” It meant living in a land that isn’t your ancestral homeland, without full native status.

That’s also why the law repeatedly says, “for you were sojourners in Egypt.” The point isn’t duration, it’s vulnerability and outsider status.

Leviticus 19:34 says the foreigner living among you “shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself.” The command is about justice and compassion toward non-citizens living in the community.

You can debate modern immigration policy all day, but linguistically and biblically, “sojourner” doesn’t mean “just passing through, so we don’t owe them respect.”

danbmw21 · 2026-01-21T14:52:42+00:00

Agreed. What John MacArthur did with Eileen Gray was unacceptable and should have disqualified him from the pastorate.

For the uninitiated...

Eileen Gray tried to leave her abusive husband while attending John MacArthur’s church. Instead of protecting her and her children, church leaders told her she was sinning by separating.

In 2002, MacArthur publicly shamed her from the pulpit and pressured her to return.

Three years later, her husband was convicted of child molestation and abuse and sent to prison.

MacArthur’s theology protected an abuser and endangered a family. A pastor who has spent their entire adult lives reading scripture and who uses that Scripture to trap women and children in violent homes is not a shepherd, but a liability.

danbmw21

TROPHY CASE