The Broken Church

Sunday, June 7, 2026

Church these days loves to remind us that “God is love,” but it is funny how little we hear about when Jesus said, “Do not presume that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill.”  Too often we like to use the former to justify the church looking the other way about some issue.  I thought about this as I read into Graham Platner this week.

Last Monday, Jim Geraghty said:

Democrats want control of the Senate, and they’re not going to let little things like a youthful dalliance with neo-Nazism, horrific statements on Reddit comment boards, or rampant infidelity get in the way of stopping Susan Collins, who they now must insist is “one of the most evil people in public life.” (Not merely in elected office, public life. This would presumably include Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, Hasan Piker, Alex Jones, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Harvey Weinstein, Bob Menendez, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Adam Gase.)

I would note that Susan Collins has never pulled a fire alarm to prevent a vote in Congress.

She’s never abandoned her constituent services after losing a primary. She’s never stolen $5 million in disaster aid funds to finance her campaign, and she’s never pressured a married staffer into having an affair that led to the staffer killing herself by self-immolation.

But to justify overlooking Platner’s flaws, Collins has to become one of history’s greatest monsters.

Indeed, it seems as if morality has been deeply warped in this pursuit of power.  But they are not alone.  Said another commentator:

“The obsession with personal purity has become a luxury belief. And folks, if your house is on fire, you don’t ask whether the firefighter has problematic DMs.”

It’s Thursday, June 4, 2026. I’m allegedly Jim Treacher.

And that was someone named Scott Galloway — whose voice is not at all creepy, by the way — putting forth the exact same argument that Republicans made about voting for Trump.

(Galloway was talking to Abby Phillip on CNN. This is someone she thinks is an expert.)

It’s the same argument. Now, I’m not saying Trump is the same person as Graham Platner. For all my problems with Trump, he doesn’t have a Nazi tattoo. And I would think if he belonged to a child-predator app, we would know about it by now.

I’m saying the argument is the same. Namely: “I don’t like this guy, but if I vote for him, maybe he’ll give me what I want.”

What’s a Christian to do?   “Love” would say you forgive them both.  “The Law” would say both are condemned.  How do we balance the sacred and the secular?  How do we choose between God’s judgement and His reconciliation?

The arc of my blogging life is fascinating.  It began defending Mitt Romney – a man of deeply flawed theology, but extraordinary character – against the slings and arrows of religious purity in light of that flawed theology.  And here I am in my retirement trying to sort out two men in or seeking office of no theology and deeply, deeply flawed character.

The problem, I think, lies in the fact that the church tries to make things entirely too simple.  In pursuit of such simplicity, we have let our theology warp our morality.  And so, “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her,”  has come to us to mean there is no sin, no judgement, no condemnation.  And that may be true in eternal terms.  I don’t know.  I do not know what eternity has to offer – I am not God and it is not mine to decide or to know what happens eternally.

But I do know that Jesus did NOT abolish the law and the ideas of good-and-bad and a scale of good-and-bad still exist and are meant for us to use.  Morality, moral thinking, is not moot.  Somethings (attempted genocide of the Jews, for example) are much worse than others (martial infidelity.)

I also know God is quite pragmatic.  (proof)  He expects us to make judgements in our current reality – to decide between bad and worse – to decide what matters most and what matters less – to know what can be overlooked and what cannot.

Our goal should be to conform our ideas about morality and practicality as closely to God’s as our feeble minds are capable.  Which means those ideas will also incorporate His love.  But too often we conform them to our own desired outcomes.  And so, as we noted on Friday, we form idols of our politics.  The formation of idols of any sort, dear friends, is a sin most difficult to overlook.

This Sunday morning, as we head to church, let’s go with intention – intention to confess our own idol formation, whether Republican or Democrat.  Let us go to seek God’s thinking not our own.